Swift: Not quite there, but too far gone too - <AUTHOR> http://studentf.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/swift-not-quite-there-but-too-far-gone-too/

<comment><USER2> I start writing a ORM (that is how I learn a new language). Very fast I hit problems. The keynote and the state of union say swift is ready for production, but is not there yet. The coding experience is buggy, the repl violate the language (is possible to change a constant to another type!), the importing of other obj-c code is sometimes broken (ie: Not work at all, or yes). A lot of things are not documented (For example, how do a generator?), etc

Still, I hope this lang mature and be popular, because I want badly to not use obj-c

<comment><USER2> Why the downvote?

<comment><USER3> Maybe because neither the keynote not the state of union said swift is ready for production.

<comment><USER2> Do you see the videos? They expect to get apps made with swift on launch of iOS 8, and have rewrite at least the WWDC videos app as showcase.

P.D: This remark was about 32 min in the state of union video

<comment><USER3> The launch of iOS is several months in the future.

Swift, as XCode 6, is still beta.

<comment><USER2> Yep, but in terms of languages, that is around the corner!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The article suffers from a bit from looking at things from a strictly theoretical knowledge (i.e. the first example is not valid Swift code), but it does bring up a few interesting points.

</comment><comment><USER4> I agree that instances being pass-by-reference is weird, with everything else having copy semantics. It seems as yet another odd artifact of the design constraint that Swift must be ObjC-runtime compatible.

I sort of wish they had created a special type annotation to support legacy ObjC classes, and gone for Go-style structs for the non-legacy OO.

<comment><USER5> It's more than that. I don't think having non-reference objects is _entirely_ impossible (e.g. Objective-C blocks are already stack-based objects until they are copied), but it doesn't work for Swift's design goals. Objects have to be reference types because Swift needs to interact with Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, which assume reference-sharing in many places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Except that you can still make changes that don't affect length > (immutArray[3] = "Whoopsie")

That sounds like a bug to me. I would expect the compiler to detect it as an error (it doesn't). Can anyone point me to the relevant bit of the spec that says you can do that?

<comment><USER7> "Immutability has a slightly different meaning for arrays, however. You are still not allowed to perform any action that has the potential to change the size of an immutable array, but you are allowed to set a new value for an existing index in the array. This enables Swift's Array type to provide optimal performance for array operations when the size of an array is fixed."

[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/CollectionTypes.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014097-CH8-XID_151)

<comment><USER8> So immutability is a code safety feature, except in the case of arrays, where it's a performance optimization. That seems counterintuitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Optional types are not the only use of algebraic data types. I agree that it's weird to have them and optional operators in the same language, but I don't see it as a big issue.

</comment><comment><USER10> "... but this language, once released, will be fixed for a decade at least. Something with that lifespan should be great from day one."

I'm not sure why the author believes that once the language ships it cannot change. Surely all languages evolve and change over time, it would be foolish to think Swift as it ships in September will not change for a decade after that.

<comment><USER5> A language that is constantly changing in fundamental ways is not usable for serious software. Languages are largely constrained by the choices that were made when they were released. See Python 3 for an example of what happens when a language tries to make breaking changes — and Python's were relatively minor! No language could thrive while going through that sort of strife constantly.

<comment><USER8> Objective-C has added several features in recent years; things like bindings, dot notation, etc. are relatively new, but pretty substantial changes in terms of code clarity.

As for Python 3, the Python community never intended for people to move over to Python 3 immediately, nor was it intended for people to move their Python projects from Python 2 to Python 3 unless they had some reason to (e.g. Django, public libraries, etc).

<comment><USER5> Objective-C has _added_ things, but it has largely not _changed_ existing things. As I said in another comment, languages generally do not change — they just accrete.

If you feel like a language is missing something, that might be fixable — but if you feel like a language either added the wrong thing or did something the wrong way (which is the OP's concern), that is a much more difficult problem, because after release you can't take away what's already there without making people angry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand the obsession with mutability. When is it a problem that a variable is mutable?

<comment><USER12> It is a very different way of thinking about programming, but immutable inputs remove a whole class of bugs that can happen.

It is analogous to global variables. We know they are bad, because any other piece of code can change them and break our code.

A variable having state is similar. When you think about what a function does or write tests... having the variable be able to have many unknown states increases the complexity.

In code we write everyday, a variable might be undefined, null, a valid phone number as a string, etc. But in immutable code, if your input comes from a function that returns either None or a valid phone number as a string and no other code can tweak this... then your code becomes much easier to think about and write tests for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > So this is a list of things I don't like about Swift based on things I've > read in the book, without having experimented with the language myself.

I stopped reading about here.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, this immediately made me picture Steve Carrell's character from "40-Year-Old Virgin" trying to describe what sex must be like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The good part is that the following smooth transition is now possible for the core iOS developers:

ObjectiveC -> Swift -> C#: iOS, Android, Windows Phone etc.

</comment><comment><USER16> FTFA;

> _" So this is a list of things I don't like about Swift based on things I've > read in the book, without having experimented with the language myself..."_

Question; why post this then?

<comment><USER5> Because one would hope that the official Swift book does a sufficient job of describing the language?

<comment><USER16> Drop the snark. I doubt that it does a sufficient enough job to write a critique of a language that the OP admits they have they haven't tried! This article is nothing but here-say and as such is worthless.

<comment><USER5> That wasn't snark; it was an answer. The fact that you have some unexplained "doubt" about whether it is correct does not make it snark.

But let's delve in. Why is it impossible to analyze a language from a programming language theory perspective without having used it? Obviously having used it will give a fuller perspective, but I don't see what you think is so deficient about the extensive documentation Apple has put out that it's impossible to comment from a theoretical standpoint on that basis.

To put it another way, I think _you_ should drop the snark. If you have an actual problem with the critique or with the Swift documentation, you can bring it up. A snarky dismissal like "Question; why post this then?" does not add anything.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Windows, Mac, or Linux for Programming PC? - gjsman-1000 <comment><AUTHOR> Mac. Jamf provides the device management enterprises typically require and Brew is a good package manager. Enterprises also like the regular cadence of OS security fixes. Linux desktops struggle in the enterprise (they're setup for Linux being on the server) and Windows, well, I don't like the Windows toolset for programming and the Windows Subsystem for Linux doesn't make things much better - though that of course is subject to change. So I'd go with Mac.

</comment><comment> gjsman-1000 I prefer Linux the most, but Mac is my current laptop because I can build for iOS.

</comment><comment><USER2> Depends what you are programming, but I have to say linux. Mac is not bad either.</comment>


Zynga Closes $180MM VC Round - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/15/zynga-takes-180-million-venture-round-cue-russian-mafia-jokes/

<comment><USER2> (Bias disclaimer - speaking as a native Russian.)

What I think is not so obvious to many commentators is that this sort of juggling of outsized investments is an ego / megalomania play on the part of New Russian oligarch backers & small-time industrialists and financiers. The $180m figure has little to no imaginable correlation to any measurable marketability potential, generalised ROI, or anything else that would be deemed a competent valuation process institutionally in the West on something like Farmville. What matters is that the amount be sensational. I think we can all agree $180m is certainly sensational.

This is not news to anyone who remembers the Yeltsin era and understands how wealth was concentrated^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdistributed in Russia after privatisation and how it is intertwined with state interests. But despite the numerous outlandish personally flavoured investments Russian wealth barons have made in things UK football clubs, lavish yachts, full-service private jets, summer homes on the French Riviera and in southern Spain, etc. this point still eludes most Western observers.

Example: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/jun/15/chelsea- owner...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/jun/15/chelsea-owner-roman- abramovich-yacht)

Among numerous others, a key difference between Russia and the US is that in the US, an Anglo-American capitalistic country by heritage, contemporary super-wealth comes from many sources of varying degrees of legitimacy, depending on one's perspective. Certainly among them includes honest entrepreneurial ambition, innovation and professionalism in the transaction of commerce. In Russia there is only one kind of mega-wealth - politically- connected 90s wealth. It is all one big "family," though the term is more meant to emphasise the narrow exclusivity and extreme statistical lopsidedness of the club than to insinuate congenital relation among the actors.

This sort of "investment" is not very different from the sort of tribalistic "make it rain" spectacle you saw blowhard masters of local fiefdoms in Dubai pull, or continue to see in other Gulf Arab states, just to point to one widely-recognised example. The constellation of facts inherent in these examples is one of the inescapable cultural idiosyncrasies of the "backward" East from the perspective of free-market development and/or the capitalistically-themed conception of modernity.

The all-around point of this seemingly disorganised rant is that all talk of what Zynga did "right" or attempts to "learn" from its "strategy" in relation to the _particular size_ of this investment is pointless sophistry. Yes, FarmVille - what do the kids say these days, "went viral?" - but rational speculation about how this merits a $180m capital infusion will turn you prematurely grey and bald on account of its futility.

If you are laying awake wondering how enough value and potential was created to legitimately absorb $180m, you're missing the point entirely -- your thinking is too West Coast, and not enough Near and Middle East. Check these projects out and it will help you get the picture, although my picking on Dubai is purely out of desire to make an analogy with something recently in the news and discussed here:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Dubai>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Al_Arab>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_Islands>

The symbolic significance of investing a headline-worthy sum of sovereign wealth in a "key" American "new economy" property as a geopolitical move for domestic consumption cannot be overstated either. It is likely, in fact, to be the far more substantial theme here, as there are more efficient ways to flagrantly and gratuitously display opulence and excess, usually involving something tangible, like a personal resort flotilla mounted on a military destroyer frame. You know, Deliverables 1.0 - bricks and mortar, not clicks and mortar. Now, I know Digital Sky did not put up the $180m by itself; what does that matter? They "led the round" -- you see, they showed "leadership" here, they "took the lead" while Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz "participated." I acknowledge that the enormous importance of this may be difficult to appreciate if you're not a semi-feudal politician, but work with me.

The bottom line here is that Zynga is the unwitting beneficiary of bread and circus games in faraway places that otherwise have no substantive relevance to them intrinsically. There are no valuable business lessons to be learned here and there is no reason for them to be featured in the next Startup School or anything like that, unless the lesson is "get on the radar of Turkmenbashi and see what falls on your lap next time he goes to exercise his golden systems of elimination in his golden commode." [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%BCrkmenba%C5%9Fy>]

<comment><USER3> Every once in a while, a comment comes on HN which just reaffirms my faith in the community. Thanks for taking the time to write this out.

<comment><USER4> I don't comment here very often but when I see something so off the mark I have to speak up. This is a short investment for Zynga. They were probably on the cusp of raising more than this amount before the whole "Scamville" story gave them such a headache. They are taking in millions in revenue every day; who knows what the bottom line is, but the investors must have seen it. It really doesn't matter much where the money is from. Trust me, their lawyers ensured this money is clean.

I'm really frustrated that the OP has so many upvotes. All you have to do here anymore is sound intelligent? This is a story about Zynga, not geopolitics. Russian, American, Middle Eastern, European, whatever -- Zynga is on fire.

<comment><USER2> _They were probably on the cusp of raising more than this amount before the whole "Scamville" story gave them such a headache._

What is your basis for this assumption? I do not necessarily disagree, by the way - the glut of dull-witted prize bulls in command of large funds jumping at the first sight of anything "viral" is a pretty open secret. Still, I wonder.

 _They are taking in millions in revenue every day; who knows what the bottom line is, but the investors must have seen it._

If they are taking in _millions_ in revenue daily at anything resembling a high margin, why would they need anyone's ~$180m? As you suggest, such a condition would afford them the dubious distinction of being "on fire"; do you think the lack of ~$180m is all that stood between the incipient, fledgling status quo of Zynga's ramen-profitable basement company and Facebook games "going supernova?"

Do you think $180m can be reasonably dimensioned, at a high return, in a late round, to a company grossing _millions_ a day? Far it be from me to claim authority in this area; my latest capital-intensive, web-savvy proposal - Social VPN over Twitter using base64/uuencode - was a complete flop.

 _This is a story about Zynga, not geopolitics._

As far as Zynga and as far as Americans should be concerned, you are entirely correct. But it is simply naive to dismiss the enormous role played by considerations of "domestic consumption."

For example, do you think Putin is really a sworn enemy of the West, or do you think public sabre-rattling is an indispensable element of his popularity and interminable hold on power, despite private cooperation and appeasement on a variety of global objectives with the Bush administration and presumably its successor?

 _Trust me, their lawyers ensured this money is clean._

The pristine crispness of the tender - or the bits that represent it - is not in dispute.

<comment><USER5> This is complete conjecture, but one of the key reasons may be to cash-out the founders/employees. Companies don't usually cash out their own founders, but investors sure as hell have the right to buy the founder's shares if they want. If they're making so much money but don't have a sale in the near future, the founders might have decided to take a significant stake off the table...

<comment><USER6> Mark Pincus, for his part, made it very clear that he wasn't in this one to cash out. (Watch his talk from Startup School). He wants to lead the next mega-company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a perfect demonstration that you don't need a sophisticated or compelling idea to build a successful start up.

<comment><USER8> Sophisticated idea, no.

Sophisticated execution, absolutely. Zynga are _extremely_ smart and dedicated about honing every single aspect of their games to enhance their addictiveness and virality. They didn't beat everyone else who wants their spot by being lucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _That won't stop people making cracks about the Russian Mafia investing in Mafia Wars, one of Zynga's popular social games, though._

Look, this is just unprofessional and racist. I don't know this Usmanov character, but "fraud" charges were routinely levied against dissidents throughout the USSR history.

</comment><comment><USER10> Someone please pinch me! Is it for real?

<comment><USER11> Why are you so surprised? They're profitable and they've shown they can scale (i.e. they can earn a return on each dollar they invest in customer acquisition).

<comment><USER10> But 180 MM is a _lot_ of money. This means that the exit they are expecting would need be at least 10-30x of it, that is 1.8 to 5 billion.

<comment><USER5> investors in later rounds are not looking for 10-30x, they are oftentimes happy with a 2-3x return

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone know what the valuation was?

<comment><USER13> mark has all kinds of weird stock with extra voting rights, so this is purely an economic purchase. not sure how much though

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> perfect example of "crime pays"

<comment><USER11> Zynga did have some scammy offers but they only accounted for a minority of their revenue. As of right now they've removed all of their CPA offers and the VCs are surely aware of the ruckus they caused. So while "crime" may have helped Zynga get to where they are now, I don't think it will be a large factor in determining their success going forward.

<comment><USER15> The problem is not that Zynga won't be scamming anymore.

The problem is that they wouldn't have gotten this far without scams.

Is it now acceptable to scam your way into profitability now? Zynga is now telling every startup a resounding Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When Zynga fails, will Mark Pincus need to go into witness protection while hiding from angry Russians?

</comment><comment><USER17> wow thats insane!</comment>


Can we admit that customers will never pay for your app? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@posttweetism/can-we-admit-that-customers-will-never-pay-for-your-product-19358ea57aeb#.ea2vmc9w5 <comment><USER2> I've built my startup charging premium rates, even for customer #1. I won't admit they won't pay. In fact, turning a profit mo/mo seems they will.

Article seems more like a rant rather than advice on building success.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm just saying it it's very uncommon for customers to blindly think of software as something to pay for.

Congratulations, you are in the extreme minority. But the truth is that this isn't normal, and I'd like us put our collective brains together and see what we can do to fix it.

Were you building for the enterprise? How many connections did you have? How much of an existing customer base / following did you have? These things matter in the minority of cases where customers pay for software as easily as coffee.</comment></comment>


British Sitcom 'Detectorists' Is TV's Buried Treasure - open-source-ux https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/1/15/16890616/detectorists-mackenzie-crook <comment><AUTHOR> Watching The Detectorists is a calm and charming experience.</comment>


New Megaupload Will Change the World - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/new-megaupload-will-be-massive-global-network-to-change-the-world-120828/

<comment><USER2> As weird as Kim is, I truly wish him to be successful on this, just to shake things up.

Nowadays there's a monopoly on culture, if you're not in USA you can't buy software in AppStore, you can't listen to music on Spotify, you can't stream a movie on Netflix. DRM is a load of bullshit, country restrictions idem, and companies adopting it are in a comfortable position because while they have the government enforcing it on them, they also have no real competitors (torrent sites can't be considered competition - downloading a lot of stuff with dubious quality is simply not a convenient way to consume media).

How long would country restrictions and DRM last if there was a global, non- restrictive and convenient source of content?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm still not sure how illegally copying content that you do not own is "changing the world".

Anyone with money can do what he is doing. I'm really not impressed.

Create your own content? Now you are changing the world.

</comment><comment><USER4> Being that Dot-com is an online entrepreneur starting a startup and ironically this community is "hacker" news. I wonder how many of the HN members actually support him here.

</comment><comment><USER5> Besides apparently being written by a fifth grader, the article is as plump with hyperbole as Mr. "Dotcom" himself.</comment>


Show HN: Build Your Own Testing Framework. Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tddfellow.com/blog/2016/07/23/build-your-own-testing-framework-part-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Feedback is warmly welcome! Thanks!</comment>


Indie Fever - <AUTHOR> http://www.madebysofa.com/indiefever

<comment><USER2> I submitted this almost 3 months ago. ;)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=254256>

<comment><AUTHOR> I obviously missed it, sorry about that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really wish I had more time to learn Objective-C, Cocoa and the like.

I wrote an FxPlug plugin for Final Cut and found the language to be quite a bit different to C++.

I would write more but my ride is here already damn it!

<comment><USER4> The learning curve is quite steep. The best advice I can give you is to unlearn what you know about imperative programming and make a concerted effort to understand Delegates and Notifications.

The classic example is when people try to use a NSTableView and ask "how do I send it the data?" This is the wrong question. The view will _ask_ its delegate for the data in a cell by calling a method you implement in your own class when it is ready to display it. It's a really elegant way to do it, but it runs so counterintuitive to the typical pattern of bossing around a bunch of objects like you're the supreme object master or something.

<comment><USER5> > The classic example is when people try to use a NSTableView and ask "how do > I send it the data?" This is the wrong question.

If this is what makes Cocoa "hard," then it's not unique to Cocoa. I'm seeing the same design patterns and philosophies of event-driven programming in recent toolkits and frameworks, even in places where languages like Java and C# are dominant. The drift away from imperative programming to more object- oriented and functional paradigms (sorry) is even showing up in unexpected places, like how jQuery made JavaScript take on OOP and functional aspects in coding style.

It's a learning curve _everyone_ will have to traverse, since, in the future, heavy parallelism and capped clock speeds of future computer systems will more heavily favor such "modern" design techniques (a misnomer, since the concepts have been around for decades). Like many, the first languages I learned were stuff like BASIC, COBOL and Pascal, and I spent most of my college career unlearning stuff to program the "correct way."

(Just for the record, to the grandparent poster, Objective-C should only take you a day to learn. It's a strict superset of vanilla C, so much so that the first ObjC "compiler" was a set of pre-processor macros for a C compiler. All the real work is in learning the coding conventions in Cocoa; the language enforces surprisingly little.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wish I had more time as well. I love madebysofa though.</comment>


Houston - Apple Push Notifications; No Dirigible Required - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mattt/houston <comment><USER2> This seems to be really similar to <https://github.com/highgroove/grocer> ... but grocer may even do more as far as I can tell (feedback API and fake test server).

<comment><USER3> Houston is still early in development. It will soon be adding an extensible, Rack-mountable webservice to manage device registration, and perhaps eventually support for Android or other platforms.

<comment><USER2> Cool! I'm intrigued to see what happens with the Rack-mountable web service especially.</comment></comment></comment>


How 7 Cups of Tea (YC S13) Accidentally Grew a Community of 17,000 Listeners - <AUTHOR> http://cmxhub.com/stumbling-on-community-how-7-cups-of-tea-accidentally-grew-a-community-of-17000-listeners/ <comment><USER2> I tried out Seven Cups of Tea after reading this article, and I have a few points of feedback.

From what I make of it, it's apparent that the business model is that of "professional listeners" i.e. a few listeners charge for their service and essentially become an online version of therapists without being therapists. (although a few do appear to be trained as such and they charge their usual rates, most of the people on the roster don't appear to be professional psychologists)

This all fine and good, but the problem within the model though is that there's a tension between the positive side vs. the revenue side: we volunteer and help people who need a listener, but we try to nudge people towards paying for these sessions. This manifests itself through these constant popup windows while the listener is engaged in a heavy emotional conversation. Imagine you're pouring your heart out to someone and things are at an emotional juncture, and a sickly cheerful popup comes up on the screen cajoling you to sign up or rate the listener. It feels horridly out of context and it takes away the experience of the person within that moment. And this has happened to me 4 times so far in around 25 minutes.

Of course, the thing is that 7 Cups of Tea needs to convert its users and it needs to make that happen relentlessly, but the key over here is subtlety and I feel that this design iteration, sadly, misses that. However - from an outside perspective - it doesn't have to be this way. You see, anyone who visits this website and connects emotionally with a listener experiences the purest form of engagement - emotional engagement and a genuine empathic bond with someone. If the person or the bond is strong, then there is no reason why they won't sign up, after all the product has touched the very core of their being. Of course they will sign up, if there isn't any friction! They're hooked and they want to maintain that bond. They want to connect with this person again and they want to feel that sense of connectedness again and again. They want to feel okay again and again. So really the best thing 7 Cups of Tea could possibly do is get out of the way and let people connect with one another and let things flow from there.

In other words, this can be so much more. It has the ingredients of being so much more. It just needs the right touch. A light touch.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for trying out the service and giving us your careful feedback. I agree that we have lots to learn here. Some of this still feels clumsy. We are constantly iterating on things and hope to get the right balance sooner rather than later. I also agree that it can be so much more. It sounds like you have some real insights here. If you are open, then please shoot me an email (firstname.lastname@example.com) so I can better understand your thinking.

<comment><USER2> Of course! I'd love to help. I've sent you an email with the subject: How can I help?

<comment><USER3> Thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The success of this venture leaves me asking some questions.

Have we become so isolated in our tech-centered world that we no longer have friends/family/neighbors that we can talk to?

Does everything have to be done on the internet, where we can happily pull the plug if we just don't feel like continuing?

I'm speaking as an American, and don't pretend to know much about other cultures, so keep that context in mind. But it seems to me that over the past 20 years especially there has been a drastic increase in the isolation most Americans have from the outside world. Many of us could not even tell you the names of our next-door neighbors -- many not even the _last_ names of the families.

Now, I'm a technical guy, and have been pretty much my whole life. Like most people who read Hacker News (I would presume) I make my living working with computers, and spend a great deal of my free time doing things with computers also. I was the first in my family to even know about the internet, and I'm the first one they call when they need help with anything computer-related.

I'm _not_ saying that computers are bad. I'm also not saying that "7 Cups of Tea" is necessarily bad. I just think that a lot of us who spend so much of our time using these remarkable tools (computers and the internet) should take care to make sure we don't overuse them. Many things in life should be done in person. The internet provides a filter to many experiences which can be _very_ useful, but I think in many cases it can also be a barrier to real interaction.

I'd be happy to hear what others think about the subject.

<comment><USER3> This is a good point. In short, the answer to your question is yes. Many people in America, and other countries, do not have friends/family/neighbors that they feel like they can have an honest and open conversation with in order to feel heard and understood. This trend has been happening for quite a while and it seems to be accelerating rather than reversing. The question then becomes what is the best solution for this problem? We think 7 Cups of Tea provides a very good solution to this problem. Yes, it uses the medium of the Internet, but it also provides people with a sense of real intimacy and support that can be hard to come by in their immediate surroundings.

<comment><USER5> Having a "company name" as a username on HN just feels so impersonal when you're talking to us.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, not trying to be impersonal. It was just the name I signed up with when getting accepted into YC.

<comment><USER6> Glenn (I presume?) - may be worth putting your name and an intro / overview in your HN profile, to personalise it somewhat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Getting people to volunteer can be one of the most difficult challenges a community builder can face_

The word "volunteer" appears in the first two paragraphs but not elsewhere, but I don't think it's the right word: most people in Internet communities don't think of themselves as "volunteers" per se.

In the context of nonprofit and public agencies, which is orthogonal to the main article but still important, many don't actually want volunteers—they want money: [http://blog.seliger.com/2014/04/20/volunteers-nonprofits- rea...](http://blog.seliger.com/2014/04/20/volunteers-nonprofits-really-want- their-money-not-their-bodies/) .

<comment><USER8> Hey there, I'm the author. I agree with you. These terms need to be clarified. We decided to use volunteers in the intro to introduce the idea of what 7 Cups is doing. While the members do technically "volunteer" their time, you wouldn't usually use that terminology. Technically, they're just giving their time to the community.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the reply—that makes sense. I think you should change the language in the post itself, however.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been following the author (@caremjo) for a while now. She's got some really great insights on community that I think come very naturally.

She knows how to dissect and grow what your community needs. Definitely a resource people interested in this subject should follow and tap into.

<comment><USER3> I couldn't agree more. She had a couple of great recommendations for us that were really helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Elated to see Glenn & team grow this amazing and much needed community to 17,000+. I definitely see this filling an important gap in our society for years to come.

<comment><USER3> Thanks Bryant! I appreciate the support!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It does annoy me that they have a large picture of a young woman with her head not in the frame. Unprofessional and looks like a bad stock picture.

<comment><USER11> Looks like we were thinking the same thing within a minute of each other. I lost interest in the article immediately after seeing that.

<comment><USER12> Then I guess you didn't read about anonymous conversations?

For an article about conversations with people you never see a person without a face doesn't seem to weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> how do they make money?

</comment><comment><USER11> Why does the article start with a headless woman?

<comment><USER12> I think it is because it is an article about a community for anonymous conversations.

In that case it is a good choice.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Contentify – A real-time, collaborative content manager over GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://thyb.github.io/contentify/#/learn-more

<comment><USER2> Content area is just blank in Firefox 24 ESR on Windows 7. Menu shows up, no content though.

<comment><USER3> Looks like a few things need to be served over https:

        Blocked loading mixed active content "http://yandex.st/highlightjs/8.0/styles/default.min.css"
        Blocked loading mixed active content "http://yandex.st/highlightjs/8.0/highlight.min.js"
        Blocked loading mixed active content "http://builds.handlebarsjs.com.s3.amazonaws.com/handlebars-v1.1.2.js"
        Blocked loading mixed active content "http://netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.1.1/js/bootstrap.min.js"
        Blocked loading mixed active content "http://netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.1.1/css/bootstrap.min.css"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Realtime _edition_ with Github collaborators

editing?

<comment><USER5> Thanks, fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does this compare to Prose?

<comment><USER7> I think the difference comes in the deployment story. Prose seems targeted to a developer who would need to manage a site on their own or that's hosted on Github pages.

Instead imagine you have a Rails app on Heroku that has some marketing pages on it (homepage, faq, etc.)

Contextify seems like it could let you give a non-developer person access to modify those pages in Markdown and get the changes 'deployed' without having to do a separate loop of checking them in, and pushing the whole app back to the server.

If it's on node - it does some things to get+render markdown on the pages within the server. With their jQuery plugin, I _think_ they are loading everything in from the repo after the fact (which brings up a bunch of other issues ranging from screwing with your SEO to being down if Github is down to being perceivably slow to load).

<comment><USER5> That't it :) well explained

SDKs stores the content from Github in a cache so that it doesn't need to be loaded everytime. Refreshing a page with the JS SDK can indeed be a bit slow. However, with the Node.js SDK, with the cache, it becomes really smooth. You can manually load all files and all the following users will receive a cached version.</comment></comment></comment>


Fake WhatsApp update from "WhatsApp Inc." with Unicode whitespace: 1M downloads - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/virqdroid/status/926437790140772362 <comment><USER2> Several years ago I read [1] a proposal for internationalized domain names from DJ Bernstein from before puny-code took hold. The key observation was that there's nothing stopping you from just using UTF-8 in the existing DNS protocols, but it included a discussion of how to treat visually indistinguishable unicode characters to prevent fraud, which is why I bring it up now:

The proposal was that the TLD administrators should whitelist in non-ASCII characters and generally require that domains are either entirely ASCII or entirely in a subset of Unicode that made sense for their native languages - .ru could allow all-ASCII or all-Cyrillic, .gr could require all-ASCII or all- Greek, .de could allow ASCII plus eszett and the umlauts, and could further require normalized encoding (ü must be FC and not CC 88 75) and consider ö.de and oe.de to be collisions [2], and so on. Weird varieties of spaces, dashes, non-printing characters, accents that are only needed to type Klingon, and so on would never get whitelisted in.

I've always thought that was a great idea, and its a general principal App stores could use too. (Although I realize that app stores don't have as strong a concept of a native language as most TLDs do, which makes it a bit harder)

[1]: Its possible it was [https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/idn.html](https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/idn.html), but I'm not convinced. Maybe it was an earlier revision.

[2]: In German, you spell "ö" as "oe" if you don't have an ö key. German speakers wouldn't necessarily need "ö" and "o" to be collisions.

<comment><USER3> This is an awful idea that conflates country and language and adds another place where governments can marginalise minorities. Should administrators of north African tlds be empowered to forbid Tifinagh characters?

Which character sets should be permitted in the .US tld?

The general principal of all ascii or all something else is not bad though. It would prevent certain homograph spoofs.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure it would help that much. For example pop.ru and рор.ru look identical to my eyes in my current font.

<comment><USER3> Yes it's not bad but not great either. It would only help in certain situations (hello vs Ꮒello). It also becomes tricky if you permit Turkish, as you would have to allow mixing of ascii and the dotted vs dotless i.

There are also good reasons to mix language in a name. US state abbreviations might be used to distinguish (e.g.) a diaspora community in Texas from their equivalent in Alaska.

<comment><USER5> Dotted and dotless i is a different issue, related to capitalization. Those are still Latin letters. Of course to support most European languages you have to be able to use ASCII and non-ASCII Latin letters together. That's not unique to Turkish.

Think of the Spanish word "cañon", for example. It's not four English letters and one Spanish letter, it's just five Latin letters (four of which are in ASCII).

<comment><USER3> There is a difference between ı and i in both cases. I don't know what you mean by 'related to capitalisation'

The reason I raise Turkish specifically is that the similarity between the characters presents a potential homograph for a phishing attack in non-Turkish domains. (e.g. mıcrosoft.com). Characters with apparent diacritics are less vulnerable (e.g. öracle.com).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here are three fake uBlock Origins that have over 4 million users between them

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- plus/kjagjn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- plus/kjagjnchnnlgiafjjlahaedeagnmhefi?hl=en-US)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-adblock- plu...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-adblock- plus/fdecnmmdccnkogcidionikojplkjfgie?hl=en-US)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- adblocker-p...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock-adblocker- plus/pnhflmgomffaphmnbcogleagmloijbkd?hl=en-US)

The last two are exploiting the fact that uBlock Origin doesn't come up when you search "adblock".

There's tons more, just look through the search results for "adblock" [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/adblock?hl=en- US&_...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/adblock?hl=en- US&_category=extensions) and results for "ublock" [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/ublock?hl=en- US&_c...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/ublock?hl=en- US&_category=extensions)

Note that firefox doesn't have this problem (tons of adblockers, maybe some are fake, but none pretending to be uBlock Origin) [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/search/?platform=ma...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/search/?platform=mac&q=ublock) maybe has something to do with the fact that they show usage numbers on the results page.

<comment><USER7> > Note that firefox doesn't have this problem [...] maybe has something to do > with the fact that they show usage numbers on the results page.

Mozilla does a manual code review of newly submitted or updated extensions. So, an actual human being sits down and looks at the code. They'll notice when a fake uBlock Origin is submitted.

With that, they also enforce a rule which Google does not have, that any connection to the internet which is not necessary for the add-on to function (ads, telemetry) have to be opt-in.

This isn't perfect protection, for example the extension Web Of Trust required sending browsing data back home in order to function, which they then sold in anonymized form, which was proven to be deanonymizable last year. But it does take out the incentive to spread fake versions in a lot of cases, as you just can't publish an ad-ridden or trojan uBlock Origin clone.

<comment><USER8> > With that, they also enforce a rule which Google does not have, that any > connection to the internet which is not necessary for the add-on to function > (ads, telemetry) have to be opt-in.

This sounds pretty cool and reasonable. But extensions still can modify the currently displayed website, right? Doesn't that make it trivial to submit data somewhere? E.g. <img> tag with GET params, as the most basic form of this.

<comment><USER7> It does, but it also makes it trivial for Mozilla to notice that this is happening and then they can weed that extension out before it gets published.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google. A search giant. A machine learning leader. They can save me from a typo in the web search, but can't in the Play store.

That's another reason to switch to F-Droid.

<comment><USER10> What keeps someone from doing the same thing to f-droid?

<comment><USER11> Fewer people run it so it's not as desirable a target.

"Security via unpopularity"

<comment><USER12> Aka, the Linux anti-virus.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes it certainly seems that way, but there was also period of time when Apache dominated the web and yet Microsoft's IIS was having a lot more exploits despite Apache having more market share. Marketshare isn't the only factor, but it probably is _a_ factor.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if that might have been due to Windows market share? Windows was everywhere on the desktop, and those Windows desktops provide a good intermediary vector for attacking instances of IIS on Windows Servers.

Also, thinking back to the bad old days and the script-kiddie-eseque of many viruses of the early 2000s (iloveyou, et al), I suspect it may come down to attacking what you know: Windows was more prevalent and better understood so that's what people tried to break.

Not my field though, so all just speculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Take the top apps and automatically raise a list of apps with similar names each week. Pay someone to investigate and flag if necessary.

I feel like there's a general unwillingness in some realms to do anything at all if the solution is "manual labor until a better tool is available."

<comment><USER16> There might be legal concerns as well. I know under the DCMA safe harbor provisions that basically as soon as you start doing manual moderation you are now liable for anything that gets through.

<comment><USER17> Could you expand on that?

<comment><USER18> Not an expert, but the only part I see like this is section 512(a) here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act)

This seems to apply to network traffic, whereas I'd guess what to host on the Play Store would be covered by 512(c) instead. If so, the "red flags" test would seem to require at least some automated content checking.

But all the above refers to copyright, rather than the trademark violation and fraud in the WhatsApp clones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For anyone curious, the name for this type of deception (using Unicode to pretend to be a known domain) is called a homoglyph attack: [https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/security/email- se...](https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/security/email-security- appliance/200146-Homoglyph-Advanced-Phishing-Attacks.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> Why don't they have a normalized slug to ensure name uniqueness? Or if so why would it consider whitespace differences unique?

<comment><USER21> What is a "normalized slug"?

<comment><USER22> All names get reduced using Unicode normalization.

<comment><USER5> Recently, thousands of users were duped into installing "АdВIосk РIuѕ" in Chrome. Every one of those letters is Unicode normalized.

(Hint: it's not just the I's masquerading as l's.)

<comment><USER22> Fair enough. I'm a little surprised that those hold up under NFK normalization. А sure as heck seems compatible with A.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hang on, don't Google supposedly review apps before accepting them into the store? I mean, they apparently have both an automated system checking for rule violations and actual human staff checking every now and then:

[https://www.recode.net/2015/3/17/11560334/google-is- adding-m...](https://www.recode.net/2015/3/17/11560334/google-is-adding- manual-review-to-android-app-submission-process)

So how is this stuff just waltzing past their quality control setup? That one unicode character can't really be messing up the whole system, right?

If this stuff is supposedly moderated, who's actually doing the moderation here?

</comment><comment><USER24> I assume the downloads were fake, thus giving Google an easy excuse to get rid of it (it's gone now). Although probably all they needed was the obvious impersonation.

Unicode has a boat load of security issues. [http://unicode.org/reports/tr36/](http://unicode.org/reports/tr36/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Recently, I went to install the Amazon Kindle app onto my new phone. From the Google Play store. It all looked good, except for the strangeness of an individual's name listed as the name for the street address and contact information for the app. That was something I did not recall from previous visits to the app in the Google app store.

So, the Kindle app's not on my new phone. Because the validation portion of curation is, ultimately, left up to the individual. And I didn't have time to go chasing around the Web making sure I was hitting the correct/official app store page. I _probably_ was. But I've been well-trained to "pause and check" on such details.

P.S. I now recall, causing further hesitation, the "other apps" sections of the search results and/or Kindle app page, included an Amazon Video app. And that app had the same name listed in its details.

Now, the last I recall, Amazon Video was specifically NOT available in the Google app store. Forcing people on non-Amazon devices who wanted to use it, to have to add the Amazon app store and adjust permissions to allow installing apps from it. At least, temporarily; once you had that or whatever app you wanted from Amazon, you could then adjust your devices settings back to their defaults. Unless/until you wanted to pull an update to such an app -- then, rinse and repeat.

So... I see a weird bit of contact information. And I see it also for an app that prior experience taught me was not available in the Google app store...

And, with repeated stories like the OP, I can't trust the Google app store to be well-curated.

What else can I say? Meh...

<comment><USER26> Amazon prime video is available on play store.

<comment><USER25> It appears to be, now. It did not used to be.

The Kindle listing I was looking at shared details with the Video listing.

Despite a fair amount of news browsing, apparently I missed the information that the Video app had made its way into the Play store. Actually, I seem to recall some news of same but also follow-up news that it had been pulled, again, within a few days. (The eternal Google/Amazon competition/strife/"user, you are the product" situation.) This would have been months ago.

So, I'm left uncertain whether I'm looking at the real thing, or an imposter. I'm fairly certain I'm not. But "fairly certain" is not "secure".

At the time, I didn't have a lot of time to delve into this. And I only had my phone in hand, making such an investigation more cumbersome.

I didn't install the Kindle app, then. The moment and immediate need passed, and following up on this dropped down my list of priorities.

<comment><USER27> When I see an app has over 100 million installs, half a million 5 star reviews, and a support email address ending in @amazon.com it seems pretty sure to be the real deal.

<comment><USER25> After some more checking, when I had a bit of time, I installed it.

Those are also things I look for.

Still seems to be in line with my basic point: On Google Play, it's up to the user to assess the item's legitimacy. At least, so far, Google continues to provide these data points to the user; as long as the Play Store itself isn't compromised.

Keep in mind, some of the items recently in question in the news are reported to have had a million plus installs. Separately, fairly recent news stories have described ways in which third parties have managed to glom onto prominent domains -- particularly those providing extensive user services -- to gain the addressing of that major domain for their own functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Trust is hard. It cannot be automated, it's inherently social and demands vigilance. This is as true IRL as it is online and on "curated" federations (of software, news, contacts etc). The "killer app" for trust is one that extends our natural skepticism and social awareness, and this will _never_ be easier online than in meatspace. This is obvious when we raise our perspective from the purely technological (the "means") to the fundamentally social (the "ends").

All the automated or manual safeguards that Google could enact would never prevent people from pulling a fast one, the old switcheroo, a kansas shuffle on each other because it's just something that we do. And we will use whichever means (technology) available, in whatever way feasible. This particular example looks egregious (or ingenious, depending) for cosmetic reasons, but it's fundamentally an interaction between people however fraudulent. Google is in the business of interactions between people.

<comment><USER29> Solving trust 100% is hard. Having people review apps that have names which are within a short Levenshtein distance (accounting for Unicode tricks etc.) of a popular apps' names and banning those apps, the accounts that created them and their suppliers of fake votes is not _that_ hard, especially for a company like Google. And look at those apps' descriptions, they are complete baloney, and any two-bit text classifier which a capable intern can mock up together in a weekend from off-the-shelf components can recognize that. These guys aren't even trying, and still aren't getting caught.

Yes, it may require some monetary investment, but we're talking about $700bn company. They could afford it if they wanted to. If they are not doing it, that means they do not want to.

<comment><USER28> Of course, in hindsight you "only" have to calculate the Levehnstein distance between any product name and _all other_ product names on the store. That scales well. In order to close one single avenue for fraudulent advertisement. Maybe it's a big one, and maybe the cost is recouped through improved customer relations. Maybe.

And maybe they implement this, and calculate hundreds of millions (billions?) of Levehnstein distances every day, but the next day someone publishes the same app but with a germanized name ("Was ist App Update") and fools a couple'o hundred thousand germans. Now the solution is obvious, run the names through Google Translate for ALL languages and calculate the respective levehnstein distances! I'ts foolproof! Shame on you google for not doing it already! Simply irresponsible.

<comment><USER29> > and _all other_ product names on the store

Not true. Nobody fakes random products. It's the top scoring ones that are getting faked - for the obvious reason that this is what people are looking for. If you're not in top N (100, 200, whatever), faking you is useless, you just replacing nobody with nobody (exception may be bank apps, where even faking relatively obscure ones can be lucrative, but let's not get into niches for now). Just scanning against the top ones would kick the floor from under the most current fakers.

And of course you don't need to continuously re-scan the data - you need to scan only once, when the app is submitted or the name is changed. So, in summary, when adding app or release to the store, you need to check its name and description against a list - let's be generous - of 1000 strings and maybe run a basic text classifier if you are feel in very AI mood today. Is that impossible to scale? Nope, it's fairly easy.

> but the next day someone publishes the same app

So your argument is because simple checks are not perfect and do not cover 100% of possible fakery, let's not do anything and allow even the dumbest fakers to run free and fill the store with trash. Does it make sense to you? Because it doesn't make sense to me. Probably you decided since your argument won't be perfect anyway, there's no point to even try for it to make minimal sense?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Unicode whitespace" apparently means non-breaking space (U+00A0).

<comment><USER31> To which the term "Unicode whitespace" applies as equally well as it does to plain old U+0020 :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I seriously don't understand how people let their aging parents or young children or friends use Android phones.

<comment><USER33> Should they also be forbidden from using Linux, Windows, macOS because it allows for the same exploit? Should everyone on the world be limited to iOS and ONLY iOS which is limited to ONLY apps (and soon media content) Apple allows you to use?

<comment><USER34> You joke, but this is exactly why I recommend Macs or iPads to all of my elderly friends and family. Trying to run Windows safely turns into a level of knowledge that my 75 year old mom isn't able to do.

I don't yet know of a good alternative. I desperately want one because Apple kit is expensive. But for now "$500 for an iPad" is the advice that gets me the fewest calls for support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I have personally and purposefully caused a lot of confusion on some sites by using Cyrillic letters that look exactly like English letters to impersonate other people. This was mainly for fun and for harmless trolling, but it's very easy to see that this could be used on any site that uses Unicode for usernames, etc. Phishing is extremely easy with this and something needs to be done otherwise no one will trust the Internet ever again, especially if someone can just "steal" Whatsapp so easily.

</comment><comment><USER36> At least now it's easier to explain to customers why they have to get a DUNS to have apps under their company name in the App Store while the Play Store just allows it.

</comment><comment><USER37> Apparently a-z0-9 usernames work better than these full business names.

It would be much harder to fake a github.com/whatsapp account than it is to fake "WhatsApp Inc.". Besides the invisible codepoints, one would easily do "WhatsApp Inc", "WhatsApp Messenger Inc.", "WhatsApp IM" and so on.

</comment><comment><USER38> I wish for security and simplicity there was a way to disable everything but 7-bit ASCII. Like, who actually thought that having identical characters for different things made any sense ??

</comment><comment><USER39> How is any end user to know what is the original whatsapp?

</comment><comment><USER40> I hope there are no fake banking apps like that...

</comment><comment><USER41> Unicode strikes again!

</comment><comment><USER42> When people bitch about "walled gardens" I like to remind them just why people build walls. This... is why. Sure, a world without walls and locks would be ideal, but only if it's also a world without thieves, saboteurs, and jerks.

<comment><USER43> The irony is strong here. You need walled gardena because walled gardena protect people from dangerous software. Posted as a comment in a news about dangerous software found in a walled garden.

<comment><USER44> The argument would be that this suggests that Google's garden should have higher and better-guarded walls to prevent such things, while many seem to argue that our gardens' walls are too high. Apple gets criticized for having slower and more arbitrary manual reviews of all app updates, but they don't seem to get malicious apps like this in their app store nearly as much.

<comment><USER45> They also don't have decent free mail clients with OpenPGP support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is why even some of ASCII is a mistake, maybe we shouldn't even bother with case.

Every time something like this comes about I just get more cynical about the complexity of multilingual systems, or systems with interesting typesetting routines.

<comment><USER47> What ASCII characters are a mistake? If we required all apps to only use characters in the ASCII charset (the 127 codepoint one, not the Windows-1291 "ASCII" garbage), these tricks wouldn't work.

<comment><USER48> The poster said some ascii is a mistake. I'm assuming those chars that don't translate to much/anything.

<comment><USER47> Like basically anything in the 0x1 to 0x1F range?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Bullshit. Just like punycode TLDs. And I say this as a guy from a cyrillic country. We invented a footgun and then promptly shot themselves with it.

Instead of making everyone use safe ascii charset for IDs (domains, names like the one in the article, etc.), we go for stupid fuckton of language charsets that cause such problems. All in the name of accessiblity or whatever. And all this does it let people continue living in their language-specific bubble instead of just learning the main international language: english and living happily ever after.

And now people suggest some crutches like restricting the data to some subset of unicode. Never learn.

<comment><USER50> I don't think it's fair to force English upon people. It's not even the most spoken language on the planet. (There is more people speaking Chinese. And also more people speaking Spanish than English.)

<comment><USER49> Of course it's fair. Tech dominates the world, it's not about numbers, it's about being able to understand everyone using modern communication methods.

Regarding china, they chose isolationist politics (just like russia lol), it's everyone else's duty to pull the blanket over to the 'everyone' side from 'china' side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> But gmail doesn't make any differences between _user.name_ and _username_.

<comment><USER52> Why would this be relevant? What I do with one field in one of my product for one set of reasons has very little to do with what I do with another field entirely, in another product entirely, for a whole other set of reasons...

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is so typical of Google's policies. They will not fix something just because users report it.

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=147](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=147)

<comment><USER54> I wouldn't fix that "bug" either. I don't want confirmation dialogs all over the place. They are annoying when I try to close or delete. Yes, I clicked close on purpose.

Google has done a good job with some of their "undo" notifications; these work much better imho.

<comment><USER55> Especially considering there's a chrome option to have the startup tabs be the tabs that were last open. No dialogs necessary, just take me back to where I was.

<comment><USER7> That's hardly going to help average users.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Handling the try/catch and if/else hell - <AUTHOR> https://www.hackdoor.io/articles/E1N4qpVP/handling-the-trycatch-and-ifelse-hell <comment><USER2> I hope that is satire. That "cleaned" result is barely readable and certainly poorly maintainable.</comment>


3 Things to Learn from Comic Book Super Villains - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wasabiventures.com/3-things-to-learn-from-comic-book-super-villains/

<comment><USER2> Hope you all enjoy the read! Thanks! \-- John J. Walters</comment>


Pac-Man joins Github's DMCA list - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2012-09-25-namco.markdown

<comment><USER2> Which kind of project was that? Was it just an experimentation, like the WebGL one?</comment>


Ask HN: How much r u willing 2 pay/ month 4 replacing free products from Google? - <AUTHOR> Now that we are all aware that few google products which we thought are free are not actually free, instead of loosing some money over them we are loosing lot more critical stuff over them. Only in terms of money it is free and in terms of everything else its insanely over priced.
Instead of compromising on everything and then lot of unknown factors which we don't even know why not just compromise on some money and then save everything else.
So how much are you willing to pay for a good gmail and how much would it cost to build a good gmail? <comment><USER2> 1€/month

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing</comment>


Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind - <AUTHOR> http://www.bemyeyes.org/ <comment><USER2> Nice idea, but I think it would be better if it were commercial, with the blind user paying, the sighted helper getting paid, and the app developers getting a cut. The payment could be by the minute. I think the general public will be more inclined to treat blind people as equals if we demolish the notion that blind people require charity.

Addendum: Lest anyone think I'm talking out of my ass, here's a blog post from a blind programmer who previously had the idea of doing something like this as a business. Unfortunately, it looks like he abandoned that project, since the home page now redirects to something else.

[https://thewordnerd.info/2014/04/01/perceptron-the-first- rea...](https://thewordnerd.info/2014/04/01/perceptron-the-first-real-time- marketplace-for-independent-living-help/)

<comment><USER3> Actually, I haven't abandoned it--literally working on it this very minute, in fact. :)

The problem is that multi-platform video interchange is a hard problem. Very hard. SIP only gets you so far even with web RTC, then you hit issues where server X doesn't like delegating authentication to anything else, Y does but requires super-indepth knowledge of the protocol, and Z may or may not but it's got so many modules it's hard to tell. Then there's the issue of needing some degree of call control so connections can be terminated for using too much time, which the hosted SIP services I looked at don't seem to allow. And, unfortunately, the hardest problem of the launch list is the one I need to get right, meaning I've spent months looking for a good, low-cost, cross-platform (desktop, Android and IOS) video exchange solution and have only recently found something that may work. It's possible that I've just used bad Google keywords or something, but none of the legacy SIP servers seem to like being plugged into a web app as opposed to managing everything themselves.

So, yeah, definitely not abandoned, I've just spent way more time than I liked finding a possibly good media server, plus continuing to earn money so I can keep the lights on and pay the rent. :) Hoping for a launch in the next couple months, assuming my current path pays off.

BTW, how the hell do you accessibly (I.e. via the keyboard) click the button to submit comments here? :P I have to poke around on my touchscreen until I find it, then double-tap. Surely there's a better way?

<comment><USER3> Also, something else that bothers me a bit about lots of the comments in this thread:

It's nice that people want to keep things free and to avoid the influence that money might bring to a thing. But the unfortunate reality is that we live in a society that doesn't let me buy groceries, beer or housing with goodwill. Sure, help is a good thing, and I'm the last person who wants to live in a society where our interactions are commoditized. But there's a cost for the convenience of near-instantly beaming that help to your phone/desktop/smart glasses. Put simply, I'm just as much a consumer as are you, and I think that regarding services like these as something that should be given away for free is a big reason there's next to zero innovation in how I as a blind person interact with my world.

Put more practically, I've probably spent ~$100 on audio-only games in the course of my lifetime (would likely be more, I'm just not a huge gamer.) Additionally, I've purchased Twitter clients, book readers and other apps specifically designed to be highly accessible because their mainstream equivalents aren't, or their accessibility implementations are laughably bad (see Kindle for PC, which I'd rather crack Kindle content than use.) We're here, we're buying things, and while there's certainly a large segment of the community that will vocally complain if things aren't free, we're happy to fund new innovation for folks who can deliver something beyond another currency/color identifier or minor screen reader iteration.

<comment><USER4> There are various ways to segment customers to extract money from those who can afford it, while offering low-cost or free services to those who cannot.

We need companies like this to have high cash flow, so they can hire top developers and create jobs where an engineer's daily work goes directly to improve human quality of life.

<comment><USER5> I'd like it if this would force you to pay based on how long something was going to take. I want to install freenas in a virtual machine so I can test the web interface accessibility before spending the money on a server to run it. I'd gladly pay $10 or $15 to have someone walk me through the install by me pointing my phone at my laptop screen if that were possible but don't want to ask someone who's expecting to spend 30 seconds reading a label spend 30 minutes walking me through an OS install instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oddly relevant - a This American Life episode recently explored whether cultural expectations of blind individuals' abilities have been detrimental[1].

1\. [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/544/b...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/544/batman)

<comment><USER7> That is the first thought I had. The expectation here is that the blind need help, which may not be the case. The interesting thing to me was that the blind can "see" through echo location. Very cool stuff.

<comment><USER8> SOME blind people can see using echo location. From what I understand, children can learn faster in detecting objects with sound vs someone much older where it may take much longer. There is a pretty good Wiki on it that explains more and includes some people from the show[1].

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation)

<comment><USER9> There are also various auditory vision substitution systems ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_substitution#Auditory_v...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_substitution#Auditory_vision_substitution)). The vOICe creators claim that blind individuals can achieve the equivalent 20/250 vision with a week of training ([http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/07/voice- soundsc...](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/07/voice-soundscape- headsets-allow-blind-see)).

<comment><USER10> 20/250 vision is... really good. Able to use a full 80x24 terminal with ease. Able to drive as long as you're not too picky about legality or reading signs. Able to read facial expressions in a conversation. I'm very curious about the details of 'equivalent'.

<comment><USER11> Wow, yeah. I'm 20/400ish without my contacts in (nearsighted, -3.75/-4.0, plus some mild astigmatism), and while I couldn't drive a vehicle like that (or rather, wouldn't - I could probably stay in the lane okay during the day, but wouldn't be able to read any signs, and after dark the whole experience would be terrifying), I can certainly interact fine with others, read facial expressions as long as a person isn't on the complete other side of the room, can easily navigate unfamiliar rooms, and use a book or a screen as long as I hold it within a foot of my face.

<comment><USER9> With nearsightedness, you can have nearly normal vision 1 foot away even if you have much worse vision 20 feet away. With this system I suspect you can see things better when they're closer just because they encompass more of the visual field, but you probably can't see something 1 foot away nearly as well as a myopic person with 20/250 vision.

On the other hand, you might still be able to read. The vOICe people published a paper ([http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627312...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627312007635)) that shows that regions of the brain that are activated by letters/words in normal individuals and by Braille reading in the blind are activated by vOICe after training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My only question is how do you handle trolls, idiots, abuse etc?

What happens if for example 4chan decides to 'raid' your app and direct blind people into unfortunate situations. I must admit it's a very low act but that's my only real thought about this.

If abuse wasn't a possibility I think the app is 100% amazing.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have abuse handling

<comment><USER13> Not only intentional abuse, but what about lag? Especially when say, crossing the road!

<comment><USER14> I will only assume that crossing the road is not a huge problem for blind people. I am sure most know how to do it safely, traffic light sounds or simply asking someone to help. I doubt anyone would rely on internet/videochat for something as high precision as that.

I don't know anyone blind, so I might be wrong on some part(s).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What the industry needs is OPEN _training data_ for image and voice recognition, which can be annotated by human volunteers and used to improve new algos. This data can be hosted by archive.org under a permissive license.

For example, there is a commercial service in the "visual search" space which has been around for a few years, which uses a combination of algos and human employees. It is available as an API and app (8 cents per picture, or $10 per month unlimited).

 _" Besides CamFind, the Image Searcher, Inc. team also created TapTapSee, which is a similar app for the blind and visually impaired. It uses image recognition technology with photos taken on your smartphone and then a voice actually speaks the results. This earned the team an Access Award just one week ago from the American Foundation for the Blind"_, [http://www.builtinla.com/blog/camfind-brings-visual- search-y...](http://www.builtinla.com/blog/camfind-brings-visual-search-your- smartphone-putting-google-goggles-test)

An AFB review from 2013 (at that time the app was free), [http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw140704](http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw140704)

How much faster could this research area have moved if the collected data was open? What if Facebook/Instagram decided to contribute in some manner, given their large database of photos and tags?

</comment><comment><USER15> I find the thought of communicating directly with someone a bit anxiety- inducing, but I would really love to volunteer for something like this.

I would be happy to transcribe a letter, or product expiry date so that I could be read back to the user with text-to-speech in real-time.

I suspect that I'm in the minority and this is likely a non-issue.

<comment><USER3> That's actually an interesting bit of feedback. Thanks. I'm using SIP/web RTC for my for-profit version of this and had considered adding text chat, but I couldn't come up with a good use case so left it out. It'd probably also be useful when the text of something is important and you'd like a record after the call ended. I'll add that to the features list.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I was about to use the Be My Eyes app to help and as soon as I realized I'd have to actually have a video/audio chat with a person, I admittedly chickened-out.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is very interesting feedback. I am a developer from Be My Eyes. What could be done to make it less intimidating?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From the little I talked with blind people, I think this could be a great solution for shopping. People I talked with said that crossing streets or moving around ain't big problem for them, but one of their biggest pain points are grocery stores. More and more, Mom&Pop stores are replaced by network supermarkets, in which you need to search for the product yourself instead of asking for it, and employees are often not prepared/willing to help a blind customer. This app could help a lot here.

</comment><comment><USER18> Are there any legal consequences if a blind person is helped crossing the street and gets hit by a car?

<comment><USER19> It wouldn't be any different than the passenger in your car telling you, like "clear right". Any resulting accident is still the driver's fault afaik.

<comment><USER20> there isn't network delay when your passenger tells you its "clear right"

<comment><USER21> Yes; also, if the person is in the car, they're risking their own life -- not so if they're hundreds of miles away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If only there was an Android version I'd be on it right now. In fact I think it would actually be quite an enjoyable past time answering requests, especially for lonely people.

Think about how interesting it would be to help out a complete stranger from anywhere in the world. I think it would become quite addicting.

<comment><USER23> Not only lonely. Just bored.

I also hope for a release on Android soon.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am part of the team who created the app and api.

Many blind users use the voice over feature built into ios as @rgoodwintx mentioned.

<comment><USER24> One problem that I see (you guys might already address this) but if I'm a helper and I get a call from a blind person and I have just a couple minutes to help but the blind person needs 10 minutes of help it would be inefficient to connect me with them. One way to solve this would be for the blind to select a time range of how much help they need (1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc...) and then when it calls the helper it will show how much help is needed, so they can either decline or go into the call knowing how long they will be busy for.

Also you may be able to introduce pricing in this way, where anything under 5 minutes is free, but over 5 minutes you charge however much per minute and then split the cost with the helper.

<comment><AUTHOR> We didn't think about that but will take it into consideration. The app will probably stay free as that is the whole base of this. But the expected timespan is very usable. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is my lack of experience, but how does a blind person launch the app and find the correct button to push? I have toyed around with the Accessibility Features on the iPhone, is there a mode that will speak out what you are tapping on?

<comment><USER19> You should try VoiceOver and the gestures that come with it, it's mind blowing how well it works. I've found plenty of usability improvements that are really easy to make so that VoiceOver works flawlessly in apps I've worked on.

<comment><USER26> Let me know if you find any ways to improve Be My Eyes related to Voice Over. Or help out here [https://github.com/bemyeyes/bemyeyes- ios](https://github.com/bemyeyes/bemyeyes-ios)!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Could someone who has used the app tell us about the real-life experience please?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I have used the app as both blind and sighted. A blind person simply presses a button which sends requests to a helper. If the helper does not have time, the api sends a request to another helper. When a helper takes the call, he/she gets a video and audio stream from the blind persons phone. The blind person gets an audio stream from the sighted person.

A conversion about the problem to be solved can now take place. Whenever the blind or sighted person wishes to disconnect, they press a button and the call is finished.

Is that what you were asking for?

<comment><USER27> Yes, thank you. I was also wondering what kind of problems this app is solving. I'm not visually impaired so I'm probably not good at imagining real- world scenarios where this app can be useful. It sounds like a great idea and very promising.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well: "Does my socks match" "Is this milk too old" "which of the three cans in front of me is the coconut milk" Only the imagination of the users sets the limit...

<comment><USER27> I'm assuming (maybe wrongly and naively) that those are already solved problems. I'm assuming a visually impaired person already has his/her routines to avoid those problems. That's why I wanted to hear from the users of the app. For example, a volunteer who helped someone.

<comment><USER28> Here's an example from real life (in person, not via this app).

I have a buddy who is blind. In the US, paper currency is all the same size and shape, so it's impossible to distinguish them by feel alone. He uses a system of folds to remember which bill is which, but if he drops one, or the cashier doesn't tell him what the denominations are, etc..., he ends up not know which bill is which. Occasionally that means he has to ask someone, despite having a 'routine' that is generally very effective.

<comment><USER29> There are scanners that a blind person can keep in their pocket or on a keychain that will scan currency and speak the denomination.

[http://www.orbitresearch.com/ibill_details.php](http://www.orbitresearch.com/ibill_details.php)

<comment><USER30> iBill® Talking Banknote Identifier, $119 with free shipping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Reminds me of [http://pornfortheblind.org/](http://pornfortheblind.org/) (nsfw) which is a service where people watch and narrate videos for blind people.

</comment><comment><USER32> After listening to the latest This American Life the first thing that occurs to me is though the intentions of this are good and their are some good uses for it this might have unintended consequences

The EP of This American Life is that basically with a little practice most blind people can learn to see with echolocation. Yes I know it sounds incredible but listen to the episode. The TL;DL version would be

(1) blind people can learn to echolocate

(2) MRI scans prove they are actually seeing, no colors but shapes

(3) People that could see but then went blind and learned to echolocate confirm they can see.

(4) The fact that most people think blind people can't do anything and need and then offer so much help prevents most blind people from learning to echolocate and start seeing.

don't shoot the messenger.

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/544/b...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/544/batman)

</comment><comment><USER33> It might be nice if your SO/parent/etc could get first priority, and then outsource if they are not available. That way couples could use the app for their own convenience too.

</comment><comment><USER34> I watched Charlie Brooker's new Black Mirror episode 'White Christmas' recently, and it deals with technology not entirely dissimilar to this. Well worth a watch.

</comment><comment><USER35> There's a similar market to connect students with tutors, e.g. "I'm stuck on this physics homework problem, can you help me right now?"

Examples:

[http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2014/12/15/quickhelp...](http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2014/12/15/quickhelp- quickteach-apps-harvard/)

[http://www.astutetutoring.com/](http://www.astutetutoring.com/)

</comment><comment><USER26> The entire project is Open Source – check it out on [http://github.com/bemyeyes/](http://github.com/bemyeyes/) !

</comment><comment><USER36> Why would a blind person carry a touch screen phone??

<comment><USER37> Both iOS and Android now have pretty good accessibility features for the blind. I think iOS is still slightly ahead though. Basically the phone reads out the button or action when you put your finger over it and you have to double tap to click. When you go to a new screen, it reads out the contents.

You can try it yourself if you have an iOS or Android phone by enabling the feature. But I've met blind people who use their touch screen smart phones every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great application of remote crowdsourced guidance.

Of course the end game is to allow remote "workers" to take control of appliances in your home to do certain tasks that aren't easy to automate yet, ie clear the dinner table, wash the dishes, clean up after the dog, etc.

Another lucrative application would be remote operation of heavy machinery. Imagine road work with no "Men at Work" signs.

</comment><comment><USER39> I have installed the app on my iPhone 6, tried to use my Facebook account (but I prefer OAuth to setting up a Facebook account on my device), so I have created an account (through email address) and now the application just crashes every time I launch it.

I have uninstalled it and logged in again, but the crash loop is coming back.

Otherwise your concept is great, but the app needs improvements from here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you please send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com with the details, as we are very interested in fixing this issue

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Looks like a novel idea! I'm wondering what's the purpose of giving "points" to the helpers? I can't find anywhere in the website mentioning the points' purpose.

It's a non-profit/charity, and (I think) people understand they won't get anything in return (other than good feeling), what's with the points? (pure curiosity)

<comment><USER17> Gamification. "Internet points" have a way to boost one's self-esteem while not perverting as much as monetary rewards do. Even though I totally want to help for free, I'd personally like to look every now and then and see how many people I've helped over time, just to boost my feelings of self-worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Curious: a couple of the images of "blind" eyes show eyes with no pupils. Forgive my ignorance, but is this common among blind people, or is it a Photoshopism? If a Photoshopism, then is it wise for a website offering services for the blind to misrepresent the physiology of blindness?

<comment><USER42> They are all pictures of actual blind people. There are no "Photoshopism" involved other than the usual enhancing brightness or contrast etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This would not work in Brazil, at least currently, where our 3G/4G are laughable... But it's a good start. The machine learning applicability could be awesome. Maybe one day we can have a smartphone guiding the blind without the need for an actual human to be on the other side.

</comment><comment><USER44> Sounds like a prime candidate for Amazon's Mechanical Turks. Vet & train a core group, and pay them to narrate pictures/video. Not hard work, not high pay, but (as a friend has found) there are competent people willing to do such work for humble pay.

</comment><comment><USER45> Yet another iPhone-only application. I guess I won't be helping blind people as an Android peasant ;)

Great concept, though, and it being FOSS is a huge plus in my book (and will probably help with developing more applications around this for non-iOS platforms).

</comment><comment><USER46> Great idea guys, this will benefit the visual impairment community greatly :). I had a similar idea several years ago but for the web. Where you could use a sighted person's eyes to navigate a webpage.

</comment><comment><USER47> I just downloaded it, and I'm stuck at the "please enable the following to fully join the Be My Eyes network". I approved all the permissions. Nothing's happening.

iOS 8.something on an iPhone5.

<comment><USER48> iOS 7 here, had same problem.

just switch between apps, it goes normal but there's no direct transition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Now that's one of those ideas that are so ingenious that it's actually giving me chills. Also, it's always great when IT improves people health condition.

</comment><comment><USER50> Watch out for 4chan. They posted a bunch of strobing GIFs in a epilepsy forum a while back. I wouldn't put it past them to find exploiting this app hilarious...

<comment><USER26> Currently we have builtin abuse reports in the app, if either end of a call thinks something is odd. Hopefully we can catch abuse through this mechanism.

Please let us know if you hear about anything like this in relation to Be My Eyes – sounds horrible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This seems amazing and world changing. Would love to see more apps like this. Downloading now...

</comment><comment><USER52> Great idea, very pleased to see app with this passion to help and change. Great work

</comment><comment><USER53> Crossing the street? Really??

</comment><comment><USER54> Am I the only person that saw this app and immediately thought of google glass?

</comment><comment><USER55> Mostly sighted users on this app.. when will I be able to see for someone?

</comment><comment><USER56> Now my eyes are watering. Good job on the introduction video.

</comment><comment><USER57> Any chance of an Android version?

Edit: Sorry, should have looked at the FAQ.

</comment><comment><USER58> Thanks, really, for showing hope for humanity.

</comment><comment><USER59> Does the app keep in mind that it's nearly impossible for blind people to operate a smartphone? There's no keyboard or braille on such a device.

<comment><USER60> The iPhone has VoiceOver, and there are bluetooth Braille keyboards/displays for typing.

This page goes into a bit more detail: [https://andreashead.wikispaces.com/How+Do+Blind+People+Use+a...](https://andreashead.wikispaces.com/How+Do+Blind+People+Use+an+iPad,+iPod,+or+iPhone)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> The small heading "Blind Requests Assistance" should probably be rephrased. You don't wanna use a disability as a noun like that.

</comment><comment><USER62> Ok...that is just cool.

</comment><comment><USER63> Oh what happens if a serial killer uses it to lure blind people in?</comment>


Orlando shooting discussion censored on Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://reddit.com/r/news/comments/4nql8f/orlando_nightclub_shooting_megathread/ <comment><AUTHOR> The uncensored version can be seen at [https://r.go1dfish.me/r/news/comments/4nql8f/_](https://r.go1dfish.me/r/news/comments/4nql8f/_)

</comment><comment><USER2> Discussed (and flagged into oblivion) on HN at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11888870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11888870)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh interesting. Any idea why it was flagged?

<comment><USER2> I think people flagged it as outside of "what is interesting to HN".

My belief is that the shooting event itself should be flagged, but the knock- on impact of the event in the tech world (how do Reddit executives and mods behave?) is absolutely an important point of conversation here.

It is just as important as the ongoing drumbeat of accusations of Facebook manipulation of the newsfeed against conservative topics.</comment></comment></comment>


Reddit 'Shadowbans' Posts with Openload URLs - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/reddit-shadowbans-posts-with-openload-urls/ <comment><USER2> FWIW, Openload is a great service. I've only used it a couple times, but it works really well.</comment>


Why AWS Support for FreeRTOS Is Good for Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/why-aws-support-for-freertos-is-good-for-open-source/ <comment><USER2> Very advertisement like. Hope all claim true. Best wish.</comment>


Why is it so hard to form startup teams? - <AUTHOR>

I am organizing some material on the subject of "venture acceleration for solopreneurs" and understanding this from different perspectives might help.  There are an awful lot of us who have tried but never succeeded in forming teams.  Others in the same boat out there?  Any theories as to why? <comment><AUTHOR> Darn - no one? I guess this is too buried to get an answer now, but the issue still is important to me - I guess I will try Quora or something, or maybe even my entrepreneurs community.</comment>


Increase in Head and Neck Injuries Associated with Cell Phone Use over 2 Decades - <AUTHOR> https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaotolaryngology/fullarticle/2756314?guestAccessKey=7365d177-20a7-4233-aa3f-75181d35d038&utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=120519 <comment><USER2> I don't know that we've sufficiently evolved to walk and chew gum at the same time, yet here we are, walking and texting at the same time. The answer is obvious: there's going to come a day when we're going to be walking around in exoskeletons that save us from ourselves. Because walking where we're going and texting as we're going are both vital processes that can't wait a moment for us to attend to one or the other.</comment>