NetHack: The Greatest Game You Will Ever Play - <AUTHOR> http://thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com/ <comment><USER3> Nethack shows (to me) one of the greatest strengths, and weaknesses of open source -- the tendancy to reach high-quality local minima.

With commercial products it is more common for products to die, not be upgraded, or have significant major upgrades. With open source instead the same products (nethack, vim, emacs and bash come to mind) can live in forever, gaining small improvements over time.

On one hand, this is great! You have a long-lasting product you can learn and use for years and years. On the other hand, I don't think nethack is the perfect game, vim the perfect editor or bash the perfect shell, they are very hard to displace.

<comment><AUTHOR> Development of Nethack was somewhat closed until recently.

The public git repository was created this year I think and it is announced in red on [http://www.nethack.org/](http://www.nethack.org/) with two links to [http://www.nethack.org/common/git.html](http://www.nethack.org/common/git.html)

<comment><USER4> I think it's funny how kids these days think it's too hard to access the source code of a project of it's not on GitHub. Self hosting used to be how it was done. Open source software has been popular at least since the 80s. GitHub is just a baby really.

<comment><USER5> that's not really got anything to do with how nethack development was 'closed'. Previously, while nethack releases were available under an open- source license, there were only a small number of developers which did not discuss nor release in-progress development publically.

<comment><USER6> Why are they obligated to? The software is still open source. Fork it if you want to.

<comment><USER5> They're clearly not obligated to do anything. And there were many forks, especially when the dev team went silent for about 12 years, and were basically presumed dead by some.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love Nethack, but ultimately, I think it's a bad game. I decided to make my own game inspired by Nethack that fixes Nethack's mistakes: [http://wolfesoftware.com/legend-of- swarkland/](http://wolfesoftware.com/legend-of-swarkland/)

I was greatly disappointed by Nethack's codebase, mostly by how inelegant and special-casey it is. (For example, the fact that mind flayers turn to stone when attacking a cockatrice is programmed in three separate places depending on who's the mind flayer and who's the cockatrice: uhitm.c, mhitu.c, and mhitm.c).

There are also fundamental flaws with the game's design, like as clever as it is to implement Sokoban with boulders and pits, it doesn't belong in a dungeon crawler, because random monster spawns can cheat you of a fair solution. The mazes of Gehenom are too long and boring. The plane of water makes no sense. The list goes on.

Another problem with nethack is how it punishes you for playing the game without spoilers. If you don't read a wiki (or the source), you're going to lose all your hours of progress to a bit of trivia you didn't know, like Medusa instakills you unless you're wearing X, Y, or Z. Trial and error can be good game design, but the retry period has to be short. In Nethack, it takes hours to recover from a line of code you couldn't possibly predict. (Wouldn't it be nice if fortune cookies or the Oracle were a reliable source of information? Really, you need to just read the wiki.)

As great as nethack is for its complexity and immersion, there are too many flaws for me to recommend it as a good game. That's why I'm trying to make my own game that's as complex as nethack, but doesn't have all the flaws, large and small.

<comment><USER8> I agree with most of what you wrote here but, to be fair, the Oracle is a pretty reliable source of information. If you pay her a large amount of money for a "major consultation" she will explain one of the main game mechanics in detail. If you focus on gathering a lot of money by selling things to shops, you can pay for multiple major consultations in a single game and create an extensive set of notes to work from. Here's an example of one those major consultations:

        Behold the cockatrice, whose diminutive stature belies its hidden might.  The
        cockatrice can petrify any ordinary being it contacts--save those wise
        adventurers who eat a dead lizard or blob of acid when they feel themselves
        slowly turning to stone.

There are stories of purported unspoiled ascensions[0]. Whether or not you believe them is up to you. It all does seem plausible though.

[0] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.roguelike....](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/wci4E96iKc4)

<comment><USER9> The Oracle does seem to have been devised to make unspoiled ascensions possible, even describing the invocation ritual in detail. The Quest leader also tells confused players what to do after retrieving the Amulet (interestingly, with widely varying levels of specificity depending on the player's role).

Still, I've never seen any specific unspoiled ascension stories apart from Timothy Nodine's, so I wonder if that's the only one in history, or at least if it's happened fewer than half a dozen times ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am in the non-vocal minority that doesn't like nethack. I love games but I am in for the narration, the stories. I fondly remember the narratology vs. ludology debate from 10 years back.

I prefer things like Knytt (from nifflas) for example (the story is rather weak but the ambiance it gives out and the feelings I get from it entertains me more).

edit: For instance I really dig adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/ and played through it two times because of the mood, the theme and the slight hints of a story behind it. I could never play nethack for more than 5 minutes. On a side note, I used to play role-playing games and now all my friends are into strategy board games with 72 pages or rules. It's okay, I just sit in the couch reading the background of the world and its characters while they compute ranges and the spawn ratio of monsters for the next round of the game.

<comment><USER11> In that case, may I suggest ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery) [http://www.ancardia.com/](http://www.ancardia.com/)

It has a very absorbing storyline + high replay value.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I tried it yesterday for 10 minutes, without reading the manual and didn't get very far. I couldn't enter towns and caverns and the bottom UI right half was off screen so I couldn't exit the game (and the top right close button of the window didn't work so I had to kill the process). I died in the plains, killed by a barbarian. I might give it a shot later but I doubt I'll play it for long. It's not the killing, it's the UI. The music is really nice though.

<comment> guard-of-terra ADOM has one of the nicest UIs between roguelikes, I guess you just got very unlucky with your terminal.

There is SSH server with ADOM - [http://ancardia.us.to/](http://ancardia.us.to/) might be more convenient.

Entering anything is '>'.

<comment><USER10> Terminal ? I was playing under Windows (I followed the links and the latest `free' version is 0.60 [http://www.adom.de/home/downloads.html](http://www.adom.de/home/downloads.html) ?).

Here's my main screen [https://lut.im/lQnALEHivJ/FppL5O9xxlpZVf2z.png](https://lut.im/lQnALEHivJ/FppL5O9xxlpZVf2z.png)

And here's how it usually ends [https://lut.im/vVKKqfc2ug/Bfk8uNV1tml17Zbe.png](https://lut.im/vVKKqfc2ug/Bfk8uNV1tml17Zbe.png)

It was a mix of mouse clicking and keyboard typing.

Edit: thanks. I tried the public server. I now know I definitely don't like unix rogue-like game :].

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The contrast between viewing that website (all fade-ins and exciting fonts) and actually playing Nethack itself is... stark. But I enjoy assuming that the irony is intentional!

Edit: Also, not to be that guy, but there are few boasts on that site that don't apply twice as hard to Dwarf Fortress...

<comment><USER13> No irony intended, I'm afraid! The goal of the site, which was a weekend project back in 2010, was to make a compelling advertisement for Nethack without relying on lots of illustrations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hey, I made this! Love to see it pop up on HN every couple of years.

I hope it helps at least a few people discover the all-consuming joy of defeat that Nethack has provided me over the years.

<comment><USER14> It's great design work, and you should be proud of it. However, the reasons for why I play games are not well served by Nethack, I'm afraid, so the advertisement doesn't work on me.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, bovermyer!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am a big fan of Angband in addition to NetHack. It's sort of like NetHack (at least superficially) but more deterministic/less "have to learn random shit to get past new obstacle", more of a straightforward action RPG I guess, but also with interesting mechanics.

[http://rephial.org/](http://rephial.org/)

Not necessarily related- Has anyone attempted a game like this in a purely functional style? It's a side project idea I've been putting off for a while.

<comment> dan-g Steve Losh wrote a series of articles on writing a roguelike in Clojure: [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/07/caves-of- clojure-01/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/07/caves-of-clojure-01/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I... don't like NetHack. I've played it off and on for, I donnow, 20 years now and I have yet to get beyond level 5 or something. I don't quite understand how anybody is able to finish the game without reading spoilers and looking at the source code. Can anybody who as ascended explain to me how you're supposed to play this game?

<comment><USER9> I think almost everyone who has ascended has read at least some spoilers; there seems to be only one (?) counterexample.

Other suggestions: Consult the Oracle (her advice is concrete and essential), read the Guidebook ([http://www.nethack.org/v360/Guidebook.html;](http://www.nethack.org/v360/Guidebook.html;) not generally considered spoilers), and watch other people play on a public server (like nethack.alt.org).

The last one could be considered a spoiler because other players will rely on and demonstrate knowledge that you didn't acquire from playing by yourself, but it can be considered a much weaker or much different form of spoiler than reading the detailed explanation documents. Your gameplay is likely to improve a lot if you watch other expert players for a while, although bear in mind that different players have different play styles and agendas and some may be trying to do things that are unnecessarily boring, complex, or difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Rolling your own NetHack is also a fantastic way to get started in gamedev :)

Check out RogueBasin for (mind-bogglingly comprehensive) details:

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

</comment><comment><USER18> Back in the day, I played a lot in Angband clone called TOME (Troubles of Middle Earth) because I am a Tolkien lore fan and this flavor was amazing to me. Unfortunately, TOME devs turned it into some-another-generic-fantasy-realm that took away all the pleasure, and I havent been playing these games since.

<comment><USER19> You might check out Sil, which is set in Middle Earth and is supposed to be truer to the spirit of Tolkien. I've also heard it is good as a game. Haven't played it myself.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for the tip, I've downloaded it and for sure will give it a try, but it seems like the game is abandoned, which, again, is a shame, because I love them Tolkien based roguelikes. Also, note, that TOME had quite different gameplay, with quests, world underground and above and many, many more feats.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Sil is not abandoned AFAIK. The latest version is from just three months ago. Did you find the right URL? [http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/sil/](http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/sil/)

It is indeed one of the minimalistic roguelikes, like Brogue, rather than one of the kitchen-sink roguelikes, like ADOM, Nethack or ToME. But do give it a try, it's really a quality game! I have played several dozens of roguelikes and it's in my top 3, right near ADOM and Brogue.

Some of its merits are intelligent enemies that are actually able to follow group strategies rather than charging blindly, an original song system, really great atmosphere and immersion (even better if you're a fan of Tolkien), and probably the only roguelike I've seen with a crafting system that doesn't suck.

<comment><USER18> Yep, that's the one. Already played a quick game, dead on arrival, as you can imagine ;) Are you aware of any iOS/UNIX clones of it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've played most roguelikes under the sun, but I'd have to say to this day my two favorites are Ragnaraok/Valhalla and Brogue. They're the ones I'll still dive in and get addicted to regularly.

Past that, the classics are right at the top: ADOM, Angband, Moria, DCSS, NetHack.

If you want a laugh, try IVAN.

</comment><comment><USER21> Really warms my heart to see this. I first played Nethack around 1989 or so, on an ANSI terminal. (I remember thinking that the ANSI color was really cool.) Haven't even thought of it in at least a decade and had no idea folks were still working on it. Trying it again on the iPhone sounds like a riot.

I've never ascended, by the way.

</comment><comment><USER22> Did anyone mention the emacs interface yet?

        http://www.nongnu.org/nethack-el/

<comment><USER12> Looks like development stopped in 2005, does it still work? Would be nice to have on ELPA, if so...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can remember the day in the 1980's when I was 10 or so and the 5¼-inch disk came in the mail because my dad had mail ordered the game Hack for me because he thought I might like it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_\(video_game\))

My friends came over and we printed the manual on our dot matrix printer - <USER2> was like 60 pages and seemed to take an hour to print. We started reading it before it finished, and it was incredibly exciting. Oh man, we loved that game. I remember staying up all night playing it. I got my first hard drive just so that I could install and play Nethack (you couldn't play it without a hard drive).

</comment><comment><USER24> Still prefer Avatar, Moria, Krozair, Oubliette, DND, and pedit5, all developed years before Nethack. And all have graphics.

</comment><comment> Al-Khwarizmi I wish the FOSS community wouldn't give Nethack so much publicity.

Don't get me wrong, it's a really good game and I had really fun times with it, but it shows its age and has been overcome in lots of ways. Current players are more likely to find fun in ADOM, Brogue, DCSS, ToME, Sil, Powder, Legerdemain, etc. than they are in Nethack. Modern roguelikes (or those that are not that modern but have gone through recent extensive overhauls, like ToME and ADOM) tend to be more balanced, and especially require fewer spoilers to progress. And many of them (if not most) are FOSS too.

tl;dr: if you have never tried roguelikes, you probably shouldn't start with Nethack. Nethack is a very good game but its design is dated, and its heavily spoiler-based gameplay is not for everyone. There are more modern roguelikes that are typically a better bet for new players.

<comment><USER25> Which one do you recommend the most? I've played a little bit of Nethack and I thought it was fun but not something I wanted to sink a huge amount of time into.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Personally I recommend ADOM or Brogue, but any in the above list is great, depending on personal taste.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Continuing development is great in most ways, but it does have one drawback: it prevents the existence of a stable canonical version. This becomes relevant when you get into things like speedrunning, or just researching strategies in general. There's no knowing whether the next update will change everything.

<comment><USER27> Stability is more about the intentions and skills of the developers rather than about their development methodology. Nothing about CI/CD forces devs to break backwards compatibility, and nothing prevents them on focusing on bugfixes and improving stability.

When big changes are necessary, developers can plan for them and let the users know well in advance as to what to expect and when to expect it. This, again, has nothing to do with development methodology, but is more about communication and consideration for your users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> And if you download it, be fully prepared to shut down your startup and/or get fired.

<comment><USER15> Depends on the personality of the person in question, and whether or not they would have passed the Marshmallow Test

[http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/06/the-secrets-of-self- co...](http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/06/the-secrets-of-self-control-the- marshmallow-test-40-years-later/)

<comment><USER28> I dunno, I tend to think that deferring gratification and avoiding addictive patterns of behavior are largely orthogonal. E.g. I'm pretty good at getting work done and optimizing for NPV, but that doesn't mean I'm going to take up smoking crack on the weekends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In the 70's a friend of a friend of mine developed Adventure which I'm sure you all know as the original text adventure game. It was a giant step in computer games. I worked at HP and someone ported it to the HP minicomputer. It got so popular they had to run a script to block it during work hours.

My wife and I came in every night after dinner for weeks and played it. When we weren't playing it we discussed ideas to get past the block. The word play was awesome.

</comment><comment><USER30> Roguelike geeks will also love Cogmind. Definitely the most polished and interesting roguelike I've played in years.

</comment><comment><USER31> Check out [http://7drl.roguetemple.com/](http://7drl.roguetemple.com/) for lots (and lots of lots) of other RL games of all types. There are some real gems on there. Lots of very fun games.

</comment><comment><USER32> I like another survival roguelike better, Cataclysm - uses SDL: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFRKNaKJCs8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFRKNaKJCs8)

</comment><comment><USER33> NetHack: The Greatest Game You Will Never Play

</comment><comment><USER34> I tried NetHack several times. Still cannot like it.

Programming games like Robocode or Core War are way more interesting to me :D

</comment><comment><USER22> I can confirm nethack is a very nice game.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've been playing hack/nethack regularly since 1985. It's truly the greatest game ever. The best thing about it is how it has evolved over the years tastefully, unlike every other game.

</comment><comment><USER36> ADOM is far better-executed ;). [see username]

</comment><comment><USER37> Hands out the Yellow Mold

</comment><comment><USER38> Has anybody ever beat NetHack without patching the source code or running it in the debugger?

<comment><USER39> It's so easy, even a computer can do it [1]

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/nethack/comments/2tluxv/yaap_fullau...](https://www.reddit.com/r/nethack/comments/2tluxv/yaap_fullauto_bot_ascension_bothack)

<comment><USER9> Since I'm not a Go player but am a NetHack player, I got more personal appreciation out of BotHack's achievement from last year than from AlphaGo's victory. That was also something that I hadn't expected to see for years to come; you can see from the bot comparison page

[https://taeb.github.io/bots.html](https://taeb.github.io/bots.html)

that no other bot had really come anywhere close to ascending before BotHack pulled it off.

It's interesting to see that the winning approach was GOFAI

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligen...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_artificial_intelligence)

\-- that is, the author taught the bot human-level rules and concepts based on human knowledge about the game. It wasn't a deep learning or neural net system; there is specific code about what altars do, how to fight mind flayers, or whatever.

For instance, here's a hard-coded list of corpses to avoid eating.

[https://github.com/krajj7/BotHack/blob/master/src/bothack/pl...](https://github.com/krajj7/BotHack/blob/master/src/bothack/player.clj#L359)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There is no "greatest game", the same way there is no greatest programming language, operating system, movie, song, car, pizza, _etc._

If i didn't already feel Nethack was kind of weak compared to other rogue- likes i've played, the hubris on display here would put me off against it.

<comment><USER41> Sure, but might as well reach for it. Especially in light of

* being playable entirely on a terminal * no "AAA" budget.. all text, all ASCII instead of fancy 3D graphics

It's a bit mocking of the AAA industry to call it "the greatest game".

Also, this site was not made by the devteam, but a fan. So the Hubris isn't coming from the developers :)

<comment><USER42> The things you listed is downsides, not something to be proud about. To play on terminal you still need large screen, and colored, since NetHack utilizes colors. This makes an obvious downside of not using any kind of images or cursor. This makes the game unplayable for all people except few old programmers and system admins used to do everything with commands.

In my eyes this game along with many other terminal games are "toys of old unix admins". It's really mind-boggling how anyone can think that a game with worst possible production quality can have a word as "greatest" associated with it.

Just because you feel nostalgia, it doesn't make the game good.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Maps Gets a New Look - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/products/maps/google-maps-gets-new-look/ <comment><USER2> I hope it actually starts showing street names when zooming in. When using Google Maps for pedestrian navigation, having street names show up rather arbitrarily can be a huge problem, I've had times when I was unable to find out what street I was on due to visual design overriding usability concerns.

This is most applicable in cities that don't feel the need to place street signs all that often, which is another issue altogether!

<comment><USER3> All electronic maps use heuristics to show street names because otherwise the map would be too visually cluttered. They tend to show the major streets and a few non major ones and change based on zoom level.

I mean for you use case they should perhaps have a subtitle which is "currently on street X" but I definitely don't want my maps cluttered with overfitting this concern and jam packing it.

<comment><USER2> > All electronic maps use heuristics to show street names because otherwise > the map would be too visually cluttered. They tend to show the major streets > and a few non major ones and change based on zoom level.

There are situations (not that uncommon in my experience) where you can zoom in all the way and Google maps will not show some street names.

It gets really infuriating, I am using a map, I want to know where I am at! That is one of the primary value props of having a map. I get that a lot of people can't even read maps now days, and that turn by turn directions are the norm, but in cities where people actually walk, being able to look at a map is very useful.

I've had times where I'd ask friends where they are at, and they could NOT get Google maps to tell them! Instead they had to resort to giving me a nearby store, and I'd use Google maps to navigate to that store. A serious design fail in grid based cities, where if I just knew they were on 73rd st and 142nd ave, I could just walk a few blocks over and find them instantly.

Once I see the route on Google maps I can close it down and just walk there, but I shouldn't have to cajole my maps app into being a map.

<comment><USER4> Or the other annoying case: street name will be shown (underneath route information if you're going somewhere) at one level, but then disappears when you zoom in further to make it actually readable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The colorblind community is not impressed with the new set of colors. They appear to be coupling the colors with reasonably clear symbols, so it might not be too bad. Still, if you're trying to communicate data through color, you can't use that many of them and they really shouldn't be pastel.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ColorBlind/comments/7d8gc0/new_goog...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ColorBlind/comments/7d8gc0/new_google_maps_colors/)

<comment><USER6> There's only so much you can do, though. With eight colors, you're already into difficult territory (as far as distinguishability goes) and color cues need to be supplemented by other visual elements.

<comment><USER7> Google has the resources to deploy a second visual style.

They are rendering on the client anyway, so it is some combination of not giving a shit and an obsession with not having options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any chance Google Maps for iOS/Android will include a "driving mode" like regular GPS devices have?

What I mean by that is a mode for when you don't have an obvious destination entered into the app, but it should still show the street you're driving on, the speedlimit (if enabled) for that street, upcoming cross streets, and maybe possible places of interest?

I'd love to have this since sometimes I don't necessarily have a destination set but want to see on a map where I am.

<comment><USER9> The current (L) Android one has it. Go to the side hamburger menu and choose "Start Driving".

<comment><USER10> Second this, it's been here for a long time already. And I have an "old" moto g3.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, it's been there for about two years.

<comment><USER12> It's actually been around even longer, just even more inaccessible. :-) See this video from 2009: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni4FU8D1-DU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni4FU8D1-DU) and [http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/10/car-home-for- androi...](http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/10/car-home-for-android-gets- personal.html)

It's the View Maps option. It was only enabled in Car (dock) mode and it went away along with several other features at the time of the GMM 5.0 (vector/3D) rewrite, unless you had an internal build.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There was an excellent article on how the designs of Google Maps has dramatically changed from 2016 to 2017. Screenshots were gathered every month, and the trend across months was pretty telling of a shifting emphasis from roads to places. The same was done for Apple Maps, which, for the most part, hadn't changed.

[https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and- appl...](https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps)

</comment><comment><USER14> Curious is the representation of a lot of religions but not a cross present?

[https://imgur.com/a/kJzG4](https://imgur.com/a/kJzG4)

<comment><USER15> I'm surprised more ignorant folks aren't outraged at Buddhist temples being a "hate symbol"

<comment><USER16> That symbol's history _far predates_ its quite recent re-definition as a hate symbol in the western world.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika) (a wee bit of emphasis added below):

> The swastika is an ancient religious icon used in the Indian subcontinent, > East Asia and Southeast Asia, where it has been and _remains a sacred > symbol_ of spiritual principles in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. In the > Western world, it was historically a symbol of auspiciousness and good > luck,[5] but in the 1930s, it became the main feature of Nazi symbolism as > an emblem of Aryan race identity, and as a result, it has become stigmatized > in the West by association with ideas of racism, hatred, and mass murder.

> Some of the earliest archaeological evidence of the swastika in the Indian > subcontinent can be dated to 3,000 BCE.

3000 BCE by far predates the last ~85-90 years of its redefinition.

<comment><USER17> Yes. That's exactly your comment parent's point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it just me, or does the new version look closer to Apple Maps? For example, the color coded icons for different places is something Apple Maps has had for awhile.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing -- obviously Apple Maps would never have existed without taking a lot of ideas from Google Maps. I'm just surprised that it's going the other way too now (which is a win for users).

</comment><comment><USER19> For the love of god, PLEASE include a scale. It's not a map if it doesn't have a scale (and not just when zooming).

Looks nice otherwise!

<comment><USER11> Go to Settings and change "Show scale on map" to Always.

<comment><USER19> You're my hero!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I struggle to read the names of streets and roads once the route with the blue dots overlays them. I hope this change makes those readable.

<comment><USER21> I disagree. Once I am routing somewhere, I only want to see major things that I want to focus on. Like the next exit/turn.

<comment><USER20> My requirement doesn't take away from your needs in any way because my problem is with the color choices, contrast, etc. A good choice of colors, contrast and font sizes can provide for both needs (which it certainly hasn't all this while).

When I go around, I usually don't keep the phone on hand or use any navigational aids (for various reasons, including not letting Google know where I am at what times and dates). There are times when I want to map out a walking route or a driving route and just need to memorize some of the street/road names to know how I'm headed. That also helps me later so that I'm not always dependent on a map that's not in my head. There are also many turns around the world's streets where there are no distinguishing landmarks as such. For people who follow the navigation aid all the time, these things don't matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wish we could change how often it talks to you. Seriously sometimes it speaks to me 7 times for the same upcoming turn. Ends up being like 15 -20 seconds of straight talking.

      If I could turn down verbosity to once every direction change I'd be very happy.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is it just me or are the changes really only miniscule, compared to other stuff the just added via updates over the last year? I don't really see how this warrants a blog post with such an important sounding title.

</comment><comment><USER24> Localization of the iconography is pretty neat -- the Entertainment / Leisure category has a castle for "Historic" but a gateway-templey thing for the "Historic (China)". A whole bunch of Japan-specific ones too. The Buddhist temple is a swastica, but the thousand-year-old unity-of-life kind, not the rotated-45-degrees hitler kind.

</comment><comment><USER25> They would really benefit by reading "Visualization Analysis & Design" by Munzer. If they had they would not have picked that set of colors :-). But poor color choices aside there is a lot to be said for 'modes'.

</comment><comment><USER26> While in Paris, I noticed that Google Maps translates metro stop names. At one point it was suggesting I take a train from Vincennes Castle to Town Hall. Given that these names are not what are shown on station signs, metro maps, stop indicators, or anything else, this is entirely unhelpful, and is a frankly bizarre feature to have added.

</comment><comment><USER27> IM on mobile and can't for the world of me see the images on that blog in a reasonable size. They ought to hire a web design consultant to help them out.

<comment><USER20> I had the same issue. Tried zooming in and tapping the images to see a larger view, but there was no way to see things clearly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am riding motobike in mountains in Thailand. Right now like every year in winter. When I stop to check the road I am blinded by the sun, I take off my raybans, my iPhone screen brightness is at full and in Google Maps the country road are thin white on bright yellow. Impossible to see anything.

Why don't they offer alternative color pallete?

I also hate that you cannot lock the screen orientation and it turns accidentally like living snake. And when I am looking at something on the other side of the world and suddenly the map jumps right back to my current location. Again no option to switch off these annoying features.

I wonder if they ever field test Maps or are they making those dumb user interface decisions in nice, dark, AC meeting rooms in an office in California?

<comment><USER7> There's a variety of apps that use OpenStreetMap data that you could take a look at. They tend to have more options than mainstream apps.

I think on i-devices Maps.Me is the most popular, but there are others, some aimed at niche uses.

I guess the first thing would be to check how OpenStreetMap does in the areas you need a map. In many areas it is less complete than Google, but there are also areas where Google doesn't care and there are people actively working on OSM.

<comment><USER28> Thank you but in foreign country Google Maps with their rich content, recommendations etc. is indispensable. My point was rather that I would expect more then armchair design from them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder which features were eliminated in this round of redesign. That seems to be the theme lately.

<comment><USER30> Came here to post this. Every new overhaul of every product for the past two years seems to have removed useful features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It almost looks like they've gotten rid of that annoying rotate feature, where you get out of having up be north, the way it's supposed to be, when it misinterprets your pinching zoom-in gestures.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd love to be able to make a phone call to the destination when I'm inside navigation mode. That'd be really handy.

<comment><USER33> only when walking right?

<comment><USER34> No, when I judge that it's safe and appropriate to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The latest changes are a bit crufty on normal screen sizes. Vertical panning on a bottom menu is meh.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think Google should change the Swastika that represents Buddhist Temples to face right instead of left. Its a small change that would go a long way.

They are both correct, but the right facing one is more politically correct, and arguably more correct generally.

<comment><USER36> I think you have that backwards. It's correct the way they have it now. The Nazis showed it the other way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Pretty please add support for Apple Carplay!

<comment><USER38> Did Apple ever make the CarPlay API public? If not, Google is very unlikely to gain access.

<comment><USER39> Yes:

[https://developer.apple.com/carplay/](https://developer.apple.com/carplay/)

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit/carplay](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit/carplay)

<comment><USER38> Looks like that's limited to a few categories; as far as I can tell through that document, only "automaker" apps can even build custom UI, and Google's not an automaker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> When will it come to Car Play?

</comment><comment><USER33> All that Japan love!</comment>


Texiwebjr: A literate programming system implemented in awk - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/texiwebjr <comment><USER2> Announcement in 2014: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.programming.lit...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.programming.literate/PRNwMJOoByo)

More on TexiWEB: [http://benpfaff.org/uniformity/uniformity-2001.04.27.text](http://benpfaff.org/uniformity/uniformity-2001.04.27.text)</comment>


Show HN: I self learned to code and built a Slack app for team feedback - Kaapi - <AUTHOR> https://www.kaapi.team <comment><USER2> My mood would definitely drop if I have to answer questions about my mood while I am coding. I see this tool as more _corporate-jerkery oriented_ instead of helping to be more productive. And I can't stop thinking this HN entry was kind of forged since the 3 out of 5 cheerful comments here were done by green created-1-hour ago users. But of course, I can be wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point on the distraction bit, and I hate it too! Kaapi sends two notifications a week and if your Slack notifications are off, you wont get any notification from app too :) Maybe we have some improvement areas on this topic. Will think about it more!

I do disagree on the _corporate-jerkery_ bit. 100% of current users ( _454 active this week_ ) work in tech startups. Most managers use us to get agenda points for their upcoming 1-on-1s..

On the last bit --> Yup, I sent my weekly newsletter a few minutes ago and did tell users to give us HN feedback on how we can do better! :)

<comment><USER2> I think that to succeed in your business you should poll on management, because I think every developer on earth would roll eyes (and probably hate you) when _proposed insistently_ * into participating on giving such feedback by some wanky manager.

*should read: "participate or it will impact negatively in your performance review".

> did tell users to give us HN feedback

I am not an admin or police of this place, but be careful because it might be against the guidelines[0].

>> Can I ask people to upvote my submission? >> No...

>> Can I ask people to comment on my submission? >> No....

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh this certainly sucks. I disagree with the rule that you can't ask for feedback on your product! But fair I guess, considering that it has lots of potentials of misuse.

Will remember this next time. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction

<comment><USER3> Posting it is asking for feedback. You can't invite other users to create an account and give feedback here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey, I produced a detailed feedback for your website (incl. video and breakdown). You can see it here:

[https://firstimpressions.link/result/kaapi- team](https://firstimpressions.link/result/kaapi-team)

I hope this helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dang this is nice Elviz!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Creator here. I have spent a decade in startups now. Almost always, the best teams had fantastic feedback culture & systems.

So when I learned to code last year, I really wanted to build an app for this :) The Slack app checkins with your team once a week, and collects the answers for you in a simple format. You can even run daily standups! All within Slack.

Had to do some interesting hacks to make a Slack UI - it even has a bar graph using Slack formatting tips :) We have a serverless stack ( _AWS Lambda_ ) and Python on backend, and Aurora database with a Psql engine for autoscaling.

I really believe that the answer to a good remote culture is surprisingly simple - listen to your people, and take action on the feedback. Trivia nights and Zoom parties come later.

[1] [Our story of bootstrapping Kaap to $1000 MRR]([https://www.kaapi.team/blog/hardcore-year-learning-to- code-b...](https://www.kaapi.team/blog/hardcore-year-learning-to-code- bootstrapping-my-saas-to-1000-mrr))

[2] [Why we went serverless from the beginning]([https://www.kaapi.team/blog/this-is-why-we-went-server- less-...](https://www.kaapi.team/blog/this-is-why-we-went-server-less-and-you- should-probably-too))

[3] [Goal setting in remote teams]([https://www.kaapi.team/blog/a-simple- idiot-proof-guide-to-go...](https://www.kaapi.team/blog/a-simple-idiot-proof- guide-to-goal-setting))

[4] Why everyone should code([https://www.kaapi.team/blog/everyone-should- learn-code](https://www.kaapi.team/blog/everyone-should-learn-code))

<comment><USER5> Congrats on the launch! Curious about your coding journey. You mentioned that it took you 1.5 years of coding on weekends, but would you also share the courses/tools/communities you used?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey Aditya, Congratulations for the launch. Glad to see you here. Been using Kaapi for a two weeks and have already filled the feedback loop I wasn't able to do for some time. Dead simple to use and works better than calls.

Would love to add custom questions as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> nice! Yeah we are going to add that ability soon hopefully

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I see that you only have a Slack app - I am curious why did you start with that platform first?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was a good MVP to begin with. Slack abstracts away a lot of other head ache for us e.g. we dont have any frontend UI - we just give formatted JSON outputs to Slack API and they parse it for us!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Been using Kaapi for my team for the past few weeks. Great results so far! Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great stuff! Signed up for my team.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is an incredible achievement. Been using for a few weeks, and it doesn't feel like the work of a newly minted developer. More power to you!</comment>


Ask HN: Do we have a metrics store? - <AUTHOR> For data scientists, we spent much of the time creating and optimizing features - thus, there're multiple feature stores at tech companies to build on previous/crowdsourcing experience.
When it comes to metrics design, especially with data coming from different areas like ads and content in a video, how to measure a "success" is no longer simple as CTR etc.
Ask: do we also have a metrics store to pick up brains from different data scientists/companies? Would love to hear if there's one. <comment><USER2> Take a look at ClickHouse [1] and VictoriaMetrics [2]. Both solutions share architecture details and are optimized for high performance and low resource usage. They can handle trillons of rows (i.e. more than 10^12 rows) on a single node and can scale to multiple nodes.

[1] [https://clickhouse.tech/](https://clickhouse.tech/)

[2] [https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics](https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is Prometheus [1]. It has bindings for pretty much all languages and integrates nicely with Grafana [2], which is used to plot Prometheus queries onto nice-looking dashboards. I have been using Prometheus for many projects and couldn't be happier with it. It's incredibly small, fast, reliable, and memory-efficient. On one of my clusters, it has been 2 years without any prometheus downtime.

Most commonly used infra services, e.g. databases like postgres, Minio, Kafka, Docker, or k8s, ship with Prometheus metrics out of the box, so you don't need to setup anything to monitor these. Just enable the metrics endpoint. It also integrates with long-term storage (like timescaledb) for more advanced queries on historical data.

Alternatively, there is InfluxDB. I haven't used it, so I can't speak to the differences. These seem to be the two big ones, I'm sure there is a whole range of smaller "startup-ish" competitors/projects as well. Splunk or other log analysis systems are another option I see commonly used. They are not a metrics store, but many companies seem to "abuse" their logs extract metrics. IMO not a good idea.

[1] [https://prometheus.io/](https://prometheus.io/)

[2] [https://grafana.com/](https://grafana.com/)</comment>


Silicon is Just Sand - <AUTHOR> http://epicmagazine.com/silicon-is-just-sand/ <comment><AUTHOR> Note Section 8 and 9 are about uBeam.</comment>


Next-generation Subversion   unveiled - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jacek_39594/next-generation-subversion-unveiled-7c61e8b71797 <comment><USER2> Well... I haven't missed SVN since roughly month 3 of git, but for nostalgia's sake... Looks like this post is about adding local commits as a feature to subversion. It's about 10 years too late to save the project, but does fill a major gap.</comment>


How I Replaced SSH with ZeroMQ and Salt - <AUTHOR> https://www.amon.cx/blog/how-i-replaced-ssh/

<comment><USER2> This is a fantastic article.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really interesting application of Salt!</comment>


Finnish drug charity to provide Tor-based harm reduction, DB of dark web drugs - <AUTHOR> http://yle.fi/uutiset/drugs_charity_to_provide_support_via_the_dark_web/9052274 <comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this article from Finland's national public service broadcaster. A side note:

Finland remains all in on prohibition. Ideas such as harm reduction and decriminalization are relatively slowly approaching a status where they can be discussed in serious political contexts.</comment>


Microsoft Mugged over VC-1 licensing terms (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mediacoderhq.com/microsoft-mugged-over-vc-1-codec-patent-terms/

<comment><USER2> Looks like badly formatted blog spam taken word-for-word from:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/14/microsoft_vc-1_codec...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/14/microsoft_vc-1_codec_analysis/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the half-remembered article I was looking for, but Google offered this up first. Can someone edit the link?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> An old story but submitted for those who might be wondering why Microsoft isn't using their own codec for HTML5 video in IE9.</comment>


How Britain fell for a delusion - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/14/appeasing-hitler-chamberlain-churchill-road-to-war-tim-bouverie-review <comment><USER2> Neville Chamberlain was a Unitarian and he was surrounded by Unitarians providing him advice. Unitarians believe that people are basically good, but sometimes you just need to find the right incentives.

Exactly the wrong worldview to deal with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Tojo.</comment>


Published Manuscript Submissions Tracker Mac App - <AUTHOR> http://publishedsubmissionstracker.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Published! is a Mac App for authors, writers, painters...that allows them to keep track of their works, submissions, markets, contacts, revisions and income/expenses.</comment>


Looking to build side projects with engineers - <AUTHOR> Seasoned product/marketing gal (experience at FAANG, startups, etc.) in her 30s looking to partner with an engineer to launch businesses together. Remote partnership, 50/50 share of responsibilities and equity.<p>If interested, email to: email@example.com <comment><USER2> Sent you an email.

<comment><USER3> Im interested as well can you shoot me an email? laksman [at] gmail

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Equity" lmao

<comment><USER5> Posting like this will get you banned here. Please stop.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679557) isn't much better. Would you please review the site guidelines and take the spirit of this site more to heart? We'd be grateful.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has Anyone Here Ever Built Financial Trading Models? - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone! I want to build financial trading models for stocks, options etc. I would like to know how to go about it, I can build the algorithms I just want to get directed by someone who has exp in this field.
Any advice will be awesome, thanks :) <comment><USER2> Many trading platforms come with some sort of API, like Interactive Brokers, Amibroker, eSignal, TradeStation etc. The language used and types of scripts available (price based, level 1, level 2, etc.) depend on the platform, you'll have to figure out what you want in a script and then choose a platform based on that.

As far as strategies go, traders tend to be very secretive about their models since common knowledge of models usually means they lose their profitability. As far as coaching goes it is best to work with somebody who has done this a lot as a sort of apprenticeship just to get some wisdom about what might work, what doesn't, what is more risky, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> "common knowledge of models usually means they lose their profitability" what do you mean by that?

<comment><USER3> If you have a model that beats the market it some way, you'll profit by making deals that are only available because the market does not understand them as well as your model.

If the market understands your model, you may as well throw it into an index; all opportunity for such deals will be absorbed by the market if it knows of them.

Your aim is to be better than the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've done this in the past.

Are you talking a grey/black box system?

The best place to start as a programmer is probably with Tradestation easy language.

[https://www.tradestation.com/trading- technology/tradestation...](https://www.tradestation.com/trading- technology/tradestation-platform/extend/easylanguage)

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

It all depends on how complex your algorithms are.

</comment><comment><USER5> You might find this interesting:

[http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/2009/11/luck-versus- sk...](http://www.dimensional.com/famafrench/2009/11/luck-versus-skill-in- mutual-fund-performance-1.html)</comment>


Frustrated Musk Shakes Up Autopilot Team [Unlocked for HN] - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/articles/frustrated-musk-shakes-up-autopilot-team?pu=hacker39uvpw&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock&utm_content=autopilot-shake-up <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, this is Jay from The Information. We're big fans of HN and we're trying out an experiment to unlock our paywalled articles specifically for HN users to read. Hope you enjoy!

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is great! If only you could unlock the org charts for HN users, that would be great! $400 a year (no monthly option) for the org charts is a tough sell!</comment></comment>


Robots and psychology... - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21559316

<comment><AUTHOR> the link is sometimes down, you have to reload it a few times, then it will work.</comment>


Traction with Steve Barsh (new interview series) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/08/traction-with-steve-barsh.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I would love to interview some HN people for this series. If you have any interviewee suggestions (including yourself!) please let me know. As I said in the post, I'm looking to demystify the process of getting traction. So anyone who has had traction on anything before is fair game. I want to get into the gritty details of those stories, i.e. what exactly happened at inflection points.

<comment><USER2> Can you post this on your startup wiki, so that folks could add the founders they would like to see interviewed on Traction?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I set up a page: <http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Traction>

I've been having spam problems with this wiki lately, so it had been locked. I unlocked it and am looking into how to fix those now...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is great - I'm looking forward to the series.</comment>


Ask HN: What do some VC firms hire engineers for? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Investors are not necessarily people with a grasp of technical knowledge. Without help, they have a hard time distinguishing PowerPoint bullshit from technically conceivable, viable ideas.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most of VCs hire engineers for building their inner application.

</comment><comment><USER4> probably to easily weed out the ideas that won't work or are not worth investing in.</comment>


Quiche – An implementation of the QUIC transport protocol in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche <comment><USER2> I still don't quite understand why Cloudflare is going their own way rather than joining our Rust implementation ([https://github.com/djc/quinn](https://github.com/djc/quinn)). So far the primary maintainer told me "I quite like how quiche has turned out, and we already started integrating into internal stuff", which I haven't found very satisfying.

Perhaps they just want to strategically own their own stack, but it seems to me aligning with the broader Rust ecosystem and getting features for free from the community would also bring some value.

Initially I thought it was mainly about integrating with BoringSSL rather than _ring_ and rustls, but even the promise of pluggable crypto didn't seem to affect their decision.

Would be nice to have more clarity on this.

(Previously they were happy enough to use Quinn for their Noise experiment, although without crediting our project explicitly in the resulting paper.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fundamentally, we wanted an interface to QUIC that we could integrate with our existing server systems. Our servers, naturally, have their own methods of handling a wide range of things like: socket addressing; events state; memory management; TLS handshake processing; request and response processing; and we needed our QUIC implementation to be as independent of these notions as possible. Looking at a library like quinn and some other QUIC implementations, we see that these APIs are tied to many of these external notions, and specific implementations of these notions for that matter, one example being the core protocol objects in quinn that directly link to specific socket and address and even event loop reactor objects - and these objects strictly in Rust to boot.

It was obvious from our experience with our first QUIC proof of concept, and from our evaluation of options for our continued QUIC offerings, that existing solutions available right now would not be able to offer the level of flexibility and abstraction we need, nor would they likely be able to add the interfaces we need in a reasonable timescale, nor would they likely tolerate our requests to do so.

<comment><USER3> I'm one of the engineers working on QUIC projects at Cloudflare.

This response from jgrahamc just came to my attention. His comments are based on a discussion I had with him about our first QUIC project and then additionally what I knew of quinn. I described how quinn was arranged and that it provided an interface that was oriented towards the tokio IO library. What I seem to have failed to communicate was the IO specific interfaces were not the only interfaces provided by quinn, and that more abstract interfaces do exist. This mistaken impression seems to have been bundled with the multitude of reasons that we did not choose various other QUIC implementations.

I'm sorry that this this mischaracterisation was made against your work, and hope anyone reading this thread does not take away the same impression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why use BoringSSL? I was under the impression that it was not recommended for third-party use.

<comment><USER5> Extended opinion on this by someone formerly Google and currently Cloudflare: [https://github.com/sandstorm- io/sandstorm/issues/3036#issuec...](https://github.com/sandstorm- io/sandstorm/issues/3036#issuecomment-366792583)

tl;dr is that Google is not supporting features in BoringSSL that Google doesn't need, but it's probably adequate for a lot of other projects.

<comment><USER6> Really we should learn to expect that "I don't support that" is the default unless somebody's _actual_ business is supporting you doing whatever it is. Which it rarely is these days. This obviously matters most for security, but it's true everywhere.

Another security example is that a tremendous amount of stuff ultimately decides whether to trust a certificate based on Mozilla's root trust programme.

That seems fine right? Well, kinda. It's definitely better than "I found this file named CA_TRUST.Z on an old Solaris machine in 1997 and so that'll have to do" as a policy.

But it's different from two things you or end users might expect you're achieving.

1\. This isn't "You know, the same Certificate Authorities trusted everywhere". There is no such thing. The big root trust programmes have a fair amount of commonality, which is fine if you're out to obtain a certificate for a web site (pick anyone in the common set) but they aren't even close to mirrors. Mozilla's list is significantly different from Apple's which is likewise different from Microsoft's.

2\. This also isn't "Like in Firefox". This problem is more subtle, after all the Firefox build process consumes the same file, ultimately, as your code does. But, Firefox has a long list of extra rules beyond whether or not something is in Mozilla's published trust store and your application would need lots of extra work to implement all those rules and track updates to them. Did you do that work? No you did not.

This probably won't bite you, and likewise relying on bits of BoringSSL that Google doesn't care about probably won't cause massive security problems in your code. But only probably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought they were doing Go whenever possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have a lot of Go but we are not religious about languages as that would be silly. Rust has some interesting properties and compiles readily to WebAssembly. We'll continue to use Go and Rust for projects. We also have lots of Lua, PHP and C++ in production. Plus lots of Python and other languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope rust becomes more mainstream in companies. At the moment it seems like a lot of smaller components are implemented in rust, to allow employees to get familiar with it.

<comment><USER9> Rust is mainstream at Cloudflare. It's used for many new projects. New projects naturally start small.

There are millions of lines of existing production code in other languages, but they won't get rewritten. Even if they would be better in Rust, there's a high opportunity cost of rewriting existing code that works, instead of spending the effort on adding value elsewhere.</comment></comment>


Exit polls aren't what you think they are - <AUTHOR> https://nuttersandnuttier.com/exit-polls-arent-what-you-think-they-are-e93d031726fb#.z8cow174n <comment><USER2> He didn't choose Springfield at random for his example, this particular bit of counter-intuitive statistic is called the Simpson's Paradox.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox)

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is really Simpson's paradox (which is named after Edward Simpson, from 1951). In Simpson's paradox, you have a statistic X that is lower than Y in both of cases, but overall, Y is higher than X.

It _would_ sound like Simpson's paradox if one candidate won a higher percentage of the vote in both East and West springfield, yet lost the election. But this is of course impossible.

Simpson's paradox arises when you compare two different percentages, say belonging to Candidate A and B, across two different treatments, say East and West Springfield, but you don't compare the sample sizes. It doesn't apply here because everyone who votes is assumed to vote for either A or B.

An example of Simpson's paradox would be like this. We look at the percentage of _their own party_ that a candidate wins. Then it could be that Candidate A wins 90% of the Democrats in East Springfield while B wins only 80% of the Republicans; and in West Springfield, A wins 60% of the Democrats while B wins 50% of the Republicans. Yet, due to differences in population between East and West, A overall only wins 65% of the Democrats while B wins 75% of the Republicans.

<comment><USER4> The problem described by the article seems like a case of violating dimensional analysis, rather than Simpson's paradox. It might be more obvious if we use clear units: 50 scores voted for A in West, and 80 dozens voted in East.

The article talks about "weighting" the results, which is exactly figuring out the conversion from "democrats in West" to a common unit, "single person", to allow proper arithmetic operations on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I rarely see brought up is that people lie to exit poll takers. Maybe I'm just stupid, or politics are too far above my understanding, but I don't understand why exit polling is taken as gospel (see 2000 shrub vs bore, or brexit if you prefer an international flavor), given there's absolutely zero requirement that responses be truthful.

I know I wasn't good with my statistics classes (I managed low to mid "A"s, but I never really understood the steps I was reproducing, or the why behind the process), but how do you correct for that type of uncertainty?

Is there a good, basic statistics reference that HN would recommend? We used Devore's "Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences", and it didn't "click" with me. I'd love to find a good textbook on the subject.

</comment><comment><USER6> > The reason for the initial error in the 2016 primary is obvious: the > rural/urban split caught exit pollsters — who probably assumed things would > look a lot like 2012 — completely by surprise.

Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to use the 2012 dem primary as a basis instead?

> And if you hear anyone say the exit polls are a sign of a rigged election, > please do tell them that I told you to tell them that I said to say that > they're not very knowledgeable about the subject.

Yeah, it's too bad. Now that I know this info about exit poll results it would be nice if they could qualify the numbers a little when reporting them.

<comment><USER7> There wasn't a 2012 Democratic primary. Not a meaningfully contested one anyway.

In New York State in 2008, Clinton beat Obama with support coming from both urban and rural areas (with Clinton perhaps doing better in rural areas than Obama):

[http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2008&fips=...](http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=2008&fips=36&f=0&off=0&elect=1)

It's also not necessarily the case that the turnout for past elections will be a sound guide to the turnout for the next election. A lot of people vote as a result of affinity for a particular candidate or because of a motivating issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So obviously, early results from exit polls aren't reliable because we don't know turnout numbers.

But after the election, we know exactly who voted, so it seems we _could_ use exit polls at that point to sanity-check the results. Given a paper trail, a significant discrepancy could trigger a recount.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Unfortunately, everyone (you, your family, that egg on Twitter, most > pundits, and at least one organization purporting to be doing exit polling) > has no fucking idea how exit polls are conducted and why those initial > figures are a steaming pile of crap until real figures on turnout (i.e. the > votes themselves) have been tabulated.

We do, don't be so condescending and expletive. The popular press just wants some cheap sound bites to get more views / clicks. They do the same with academic research, in which they mistake economic significance for statistical significance, ignore any shortcomings, ignore non-rejected hypotheses, and project the findings outside of the (often very limited) scope.

<comment><USER10> This whole article uses condescension as a comedic device, it works for some and not others. But he wasn't actually condescending, he was just trying to entertain.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What elements can I add to my website to make it more social? - <AUTHOR>

I launched a website a few weeks ago that allows you to search socially shared photos across various sharing services (like Instagram, PicPlz, Snapr and Steply) and also gives you a combined timeline if you signup and link your accounts.
Traffic to the site has been good, but it seems to have gone flat over the past couple of days. I suspect one of the reasons is that people visit the site and then don't have an easy way of participating or sharing the experience (or maybe that's just what I'm hoping the issue is).
Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?
PS. The link to the website is: http://snapfinch.com if you want to check it out. <comment><USER2> Your site is beautiful, the kind of site I would share with my friends because I want to.

But a lot of the things I tried don't work properly. For example, I tried to heart a photo but clicking on the heart icon didn't do anything. So, I realised maybe I need to sign in first. I connected with my Twitter account, but then instead of taking me back to the photo I was looking at, I got a page asking me to share the site with my friends. Anyway I went back to the photo, but I still could not heart it.

Then I saw a few comments on a photo and wanted to add mine. But it said sign in to comment. But I thought I just signed in with Twitter. So I click on sign in anyway. And it turns out just connecting to Twitter does not sign me in. There's another step involved. Why is that?

I think you need to focus on the user experience and make it smoonth, simple and enjoyable. Then people will share it automatically.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

The first sign in is just to sign you into Snapfinch. From here you need to link your Instagram, PicPlz, etc. accounts to be able to comment and like the photos. So if you haven't linked an Instagram account, you won't be able to comment on Instagram photos for example.

But I agree with you, I think I need to make that clearer so people understand exactly how it works.

And maybe allow people to add "snapfinch only" type comments to photos that won't show up in the sharing apps, but only on the website?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, you should post the comments on snapfinch itself by default and then ask the user if they want to share the same comment on other services. So, if I logged in with Twitter, let me post a comment first and then ask me if I want to tweet it with a link back to the snapfinch page. So, you make it more social without making me jump through extra hoops.

Social is not about all these services; there will be ten new photo sharing apps tomorrow. It's about the people. Make it fun for us and and make us look cool and interesting to our friends.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seriously thanks for the great feedback. Should have asked this question on HN awhile ago.

Looks like I've still got a bit of work to do, luckily it's fun "work".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> May I suggest that you challenge your assumptions? Maybe the problem isn't sharability but something entirely different. Having said that, here are some general suggestions:

1\. Make a widget creator that allows members to easily display photos on their site. Offer this as a service to (news) blogs.

2\. Maybe you could offer a suite of commercial services? I can imagine some companies wanting to analyze their social photography presence. What about alerts a la google?

3\. Are you working on an android/iphone app? I think you should be working on an android/ihpone app!

4\. Any gamification you can throw in? How about battle between two photos where members can vote on the best/funniest/most touching one? How about score boards with people with the most comments, views, uploads, etc. There is so much fun to do in this space <http://gamification.org/wiki/Encyclopedia>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. These are awesome ideas.

I've already got number 1 covered with another website I created, <http://badgeplz.com> that provides widgets like that. But I think I need to incorporate that into the site as well.

2 - I want to try and aim it at companies organizing events so they can get all photos from the event (taken by real people attending) grouped together easily.

3 - Not yet, not sure if it would make sense though?

4 - Nice! Thanks for the link. I'll definitely be looking into this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> your site looks really great, but I miss the feeling of (social) activity on the front page.

Sorting pictures by the last disovery or most liked photos with a small "time ago" field could give it a feeling of a more active community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I like this idea and it's a pretty quick win since all the data is already available.

Edit: The tag categories on the front page is actually already sorted by date, just need to add the time ago portion.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://snapfinch.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> I see you've already got sharing buttons. Maybe some sort of chat / forum?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a good idea. I was thinking of adding chat functionality similar to Facebook and Gmail with the bar at the bottom. Could be cool if you can chat to the people you follow and follow you on Instagram etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The site is amazingly beautiful. But I don't immediately get what the point is. I do have a MySpace and Facebook account but rarely log in. I don't have a twitter account. So maybe I am just not the target audience. But I am wondering if some kind of info (on the front page) about what you can do with this would help? (Or maybe I'm the only twit who just can't figure it out -- I also had difficulty adjusting to the spare design of HN and your site is similarly clean-lined and elegant-looking.)

<comment><AUTHOR> From the feedback I've got so far it looks like you're not the only one. I'll definitely be addin some better info on the front page to let people know what it's about and how to sign up etc.

And perhaps a Snapfinch sign up for people without other social accounts?

<comment><USER6> Yes, a Snapfinch sign up would be great. I would be more likely to sign up for it if I don't have to first do some other social account. It's not like I haven't tried others out, but they just don't seem to click with me.</comment></comment></comment>


How does one begin freelance web development? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys. I'm a high school senior that wants to start web development for several reason: 1) I enjoy web development 2) I need a job 3) I'm probably shooting for a Computer Science degree. However, I'm at a loss as to begin this venture and how to procure my first several clients. I'm willing to do the first couple of clients pro bono, because at least that will give me some sample work that I can show off in the future to potential clients. I would be grateful for any advice. <comment><USER2> If you are going to do pro bono work, do it for your school or college (or school/college society), your own website/blog, your brother's rock band, your local charity/church/sports club or whatever. Don't do it for a "real" client - i.e. a client who has the money but is a cheapskate. They are the worst clients, the demanding, parasitic bottom feeders you find on the Craigslist ads everyone makes fun of. Do it for someone you know who could do with the help.

After a few of these you have a portfolio. This puts you in a position for paid work. However, your best bet is to first work for a professional web dev company - either as a contractor or full/part-time employee or intern. You'll learn best practices from experienced professionals. It's hard to really learn the trade on your own.

Second, doing freelance web development or design for client s, while good for practice, isn't really scalable - you might get to re-use some designs and code, but most of the time it's doing the same work over and over. Better to build an application that you can resell to many clients. For example, if you do a booking application for a hotel, think of how you can generalize it to sell to lots of hotels.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you need a job, then freelance web development isn't the way to go. Freelancing isn't a job, it's a business. If you were able to get a job doing web development, then that would be the best way to get started. That way you can learn from the others you are working with, get more experience as a professional web developer and see how web development works as a business.

Also, I'm not sure I would want to be doing freelance web development while in high school. I assume you are living with your parents and everything is paid for. This would be a good time to to continue improving on your skills, setup a home for your future business, establish your networks and possibly put some work in the open source world. Soon enough you will have real bills and much less time to do things like this, so take advantage of the opportunity while it's there.

I'm also not sure I would want to be doing freelance web development while in college. Again, this is a business. Essentially you are creating your own startup. Freelance work can be stressful and difficult to manage for a full timer with experience, let alone a part-timer just getting started. You need to save your sanity and focus for college if that's your plan. Again, I would suggest if at all possible to get an internship or part-time job doing web development while in college.

Otherwise, I can't give much more advice because you left out a lot of big details. For example, web development is a wide open term. There are a lot of niche areas of development you can get into. Most broadly, you are looking at being a designer or a programmer. What skills do you already have?

No matter what route you choose, your most important skills aren't going to be your technical skills, but rather your people skills. You need to be able to give your clients the warm and fuzzies. You need to be a good communicator. Perhaps most important is that you need to be a good salesman. If you are just average with your tech skills but genius on the people side (including selling) then you will be fine. Being good with sales and savvy with business in general might be the difference between one average developer getting away with charging double or more the rates of an excellent developer who isn't good in this are.

So, personally, I would concentrate on school and look for a job doing web development rather than freelancing. But that's not how I started. I went against all my advice here and ended up fine. If you did the same you will probably be fine also. Good luck either way.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've worked in job shops that do web sites for smaller businesses and I'll tell ya that it's a rough business.

If you're lucky you'll get to mess with a lot of new technology, and even meet some really cool clients, but sooner or later you're going to meet your nightmare client who burns up the profit you made on five good clients. If you're not careful, bad clients can drive out good clients and before you know it...

The industry is particularly impacted by people, who, as you're planning to do, will do work free or cheap. This puts the larger operations that are more responsible (offer health insurance, have a variety of experienced people with various specialties, always have somebody around even when some individual takes vacations, etc.) under a lot of pressure.

You're better off working on one or two big things than working on a bunch of small things that will distract you all over the place. I wouldn't go back to making web sites for small businesses even if it meant I'd starve to death or have to make my living selling aluminum siding or something.

</comment><comment><USER5> First suggestion: if you want business, give people a way to contact you. Put an email address (at least) in your HN profile. :-)

Corollary: personal website ASAP shamelessly pimping yourself. With contact info all over it.

Other people are doing what you want to do. They need help, and if they know you exist you might get some overflow work from them.

Phil

<comment><USER5> To the OP, if you're coming back to visit your post:

1\. The reason I suggested that you put contact information in your HN profile is because I am a possible person who would give you actual money to do some web tasks. There are probably other readers on HN who would be in a similar position. There are diamonds lying at your feet right now. (Shamelessly stolen literary device, yeah. So sue me.) Wave the flag. Don't be anonymous. (That for instance is why I use my real name as my handle everywhere I go, like Twitter, Skype, etc. I want people to find me.)

2\. As for the "get a job, don't freelance" suggestions, they're all valid. Ignore them anyway. I'll give you two reasons.

(a) The most important technical skill you will ever develop is your ability to look at a person and demand a large amount of money for your services. Without giggling. Go practice in the mirror: "That will be $20,000." I am dead serious. The world belongs to people who can ask for money, then deliver as promised. If you can do this, you will own your own life. Otherwise, you are owned by someone else. If your life is important to you, start now to develop the skill of selling and then delivering. Vastly more important than the technical skills. You can buy those (from other freelancers, heh).

(b) This is HN, FFS! HN is about startups. What could be more startup that someone like you, standing, facing the world, thinking "I think I can do this" and giving it a shot. You can fail utterly. Doesn't matter. If you have a pilot light within your soul that says "I could do this" then you must do it or end up an old man with "what if?" regrets. This is your life. I think you might have that pilot light burning in your soul. A person with pure employee mentality (rather than entrepreneur mentality) simply would not have raised the possibility that you raised.

3\. OK. Advice from someone who has been there, done that may not be enough. [Item 2]. The threat of real money in return for real work might. [Item 1]. Post your contact info in your HN profile.

/Phil

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time out to write all these suggestions. They were really helpful and I took the time to update my HN profile and give some information about myself, as well as providing contact information. Hopefully I can also find some way to get the cash for some affordable hosting and then I can put up a personal page, as well.

Regarding 2(a): This is so true! A summer back when, I was working at a computer repair shop, I was continuously baffled at the amount of money people would drop to have someone upgrade their RAM or reinstall their operating system. I felt almost guilty of theft when I had to charge someone hundreds of dollars for work that took me 30 minutes. I definitely need practice in correctly valuing my work so that I don't undervalue it to clients.

The main reason I want to do freelance web development right now is so that I can get some true working experience before college and because I really do have a passion web development. For me its fun and educational; getting paid to do it would really be the cherry on top. I don't really care, at this point, if its scalable or profitable in the long term.

Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _I'm willing to do the first couple of clients_ pro bono<

Getting worthy non profit clients to act as guinea pigs may be a tough row to hoe (if you're not using " _pro bono_ " as a synonym for "unpaid").

A common way to extend a portfolio through unpaid work, is to build something for yourself...e.g. using your company's website as an example of your web development skill.

My advice is never to take commercial work for free.

First, you're running a business.

Second, word of mouth recommendations will include your price. When your proposal includes getting paid, you will have already failed to meet the potential client's expectations.

Third, when you are not getting paid to help someone make money, it is harder to have the dedication required for excellence.</comment>


Ask HN: Beta users/testers, any good recommendation? - <AUTHOR> How to Find Early Beta Users for my app? <comment><USER2> Facebook groups/Reddit are quite useful. Search for something related and gently drop a link with explanation, but don't spam people and multiple groups in one go - go step by step to test reception. If you are solving someone's problem they are usually quite receptive to trying things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. Actually I find some subreddit's, but I coudn't find Facebook groups relevant for beta testing,...I will search more.</comment></comment>


TSA Puts Off Safety Study of X-ray Body Scanners  - <AUTHOR> http://www.propublica.org/article/tsa-puts-off-safety-study-of-x-ray-body-scanners

<comment><USER2> "There are currently 500 body scanners, split about evenly between the two technologies, deployed in airports. The TSA plans to deploy 1,275 backscatter and millimeter-wave scanners covering more than half its security lanes by the end of 2012 and 1,800 covering nearly all lanes by 2014."

potential risk to such a huge contract with a company Chertoff is profiting from seems like a pretty darn good reason to delay the study.

<comment><USER3> It's hard to come out with a study saying they're completely safe right when the EU is banning them for being unsafe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Give the gift of a dosimeter badge this holiday traveling season.

(TSA agents aren't allowed to have one, maybe the brighter ones will start to wonder why.)

<comment><USER5> It's very easy to get false positives with dosimeters. See [http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/515496-YZWUcS/webvi...](http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/515496-YZWUcS/webviewable/515496.pdf) A nuclear waste disposal facility had 10% of dosimeters falsely trigger each quarter. Eventually they traced the cause to some overhead lights. Different types of dosimeters can be falsely triggered by heat, cold, UV, or solvents.

People at the TSA know this, which is why they banned dosimeters. Even if backscatter machines are perfectly safe, the TSA is big enough that there will be countless false positives.

<comment><USER4> That's not why the TSA banned them. It ruins the security theater illusion and would bring on countless lawsuits.

The real way to end the TSA reign of terror is to force congresspeople, tsa executives and everyone else who wrote themselves into exemption from all scans and gropes - to actually have to go through lines and security theater. Then it would end quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How much harm do the scanners do to TSA employees who are around it for hours each day? If it's shown to severely affect them, or if they can be 'scared' into believing it does, it might solve this problem once and for all.

<comment><USER7> The closest thing I've seen regarding backlash from TSA workers is this inquiry by TSA union reps at Boston's Logan Airport about a possible cancer cluster: [http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/30/did-airport- scanners-g...](http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/30/did-airport-scanners- give-boston-tsa-agents-cancer/)

The union asked TSA to provide workers with dosimeters, but the request was never fulfilled.

For those of you who don't know, Boston Logan is like ground zero for the xray backscatter machines. The TSA there is a well oiled machine, busy irradiating a very high percentage of airport travelers. It's one of the few airports where I routinely have to request a pat down since they rarely have _that one line_ that is only being sent through a metal detector. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire Boston population starts to glow in a couple of years from all of the radiation being dished out at this airport.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It amazes me that people continuously complain about these things, yet nothing ever changes. People still go through the scanners, and the TSA keeps buying more.

<comment><USER9> I've never gone through one. It's been really inconvenient for me (and them) a few times, but the constant propaganda of "this won't hurt you, but will protect you," seems to work.

It makes no sense to me that people choose to go through the scanners knowing that _they_ don't have anything to hide from the scanner, and anyone who does just wouldn't go through it.

<comment><USER10> "This won't hurt you, but it will protect you. I can't really explain to you why, but you should trust me."

I have never gone through one, and I don't intend to ever go through one. If I do it will be against my will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I rather enjoy loudly opting out every chance I get. I say it loud enough so the whole line hears me. And really, who doesn't enjoy a nice pat down? Sadly, my complaints have not yet convinced anybody else in these lines to join me. Sheep. Yet I'm the one corralled into the opt-out pen.

<comment><USER12> Well, you've just convinced me to (very) loudly opt-out every time. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone have a reference to the allegation that someone who influenced the decision on purchasing the scanners has a vested interest in the scanner company?

<comment><USER14> Google Michael Chertoff, Rapiscan Systems. Some articles/posts have conspiracy vibe, but the facts are there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ever since the introduction of plastic, we, human being, are slowly doomed.

This is not to say that X-Ray is good or bad. Just that, the cause of cancer is everywhere and it becomes our lifestyle.

<comment><USER16> Are you trying to link X-Rays to cancer, or plastic?

I'm not a scientist, but as I understand it one of the leading causes of cancer is simply that we live long enough to get it these days.

<comment><USER17> What does 'as you understand it' mean?

The leading causes of cancer might be carcinogens, including documented viral infections, synthetic chemicals similar to hormones, bioaccumulating toxins, but not only age related accumulation of random transcription errors.

<comment><USER18> Carcinogens mostly cause small increases in the probability of cancer. GP is right; the main cause of cancer is "being old". It's true that, if you eliminated every source of DNA damage and miscopying, cancer wouldn't happen; but even if you eliminated all external carcinogens, that wouldn't stop the process, just slow it a bit.

<comment><USER19> Or more simply, oxygen is a carcinogen by the strictest definition.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Startups Differ from Mature Small Businesses - <AUTHOR> https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/october/how-startups-differ-mature-small-businesses <comment><USER2> >Startup firms are defined as small employer firms that were 5 years old or younger in 2016.

They're not using "startups" with the same meaning we have when we talk about startups.</comment>


Lossless Web Navigation with Trails - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@patrykadas/lossless-web-navigation-with-trails-9cd48c0abb56 <comment><USER2> This article points out (correctly) that tabbed browsers throw away information about how tabs are connected, but it fails to give any argument for why that information is valuable.

I'm not convinced of this feature. It provides a large visualization, that costs a lot of screen space, and I don't see what user need all that extra information is providing.

<comment><USER3> > but it fails to give any argument for why that information is valuable.

I often find myself opening several new tabs while browsing, and suddenly wanting to go back to a certain page I've seen.

To do this, I need to search for the tab which contains the page that I want to revisit in its history, which is a pain.

Another option is to look through the browser history, but you loose the navigation process; so if you would like to access the page that you visited after this one (that you opened in a new tab), you will have to go through the history again.

<comment><USER4> If you use a cmd + click workflow to open a new tab I built a chrome extension that tracks the parent/child tab: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/overtab/leceanmnoa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/overtab/leceanmnoanolhdkonbapdkplgikipon)

It doesn't track actual tab history, I couldn't figure out what the best way to implement that functionality would be....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A feature that would interest me more, is to have a visual indicator of tab parent tab.

For example, I have tab A, I cmd+click on some links to open them in other tabs. I go read the other tabs. Then, it would help me greatly to have a way to go back to the original tab A. But I'm more after a visual indicator or something non intrusive than a change of paradigm with tons of useless information.

<comment><USER6> Firefox has an addon called Tree Style Tab [1] that makes tabs form a tree, with parent/child relationships made obvious. It helps me enormously.

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

<comment><USER7> I used to use it, but found that it encourages poor tab hygiene - the lousy default UI actually provides an IMO useful constraint in that it quickly grows easier to sweep stale tabs and windows into a todo or for-later-reading list, or just dispose of them, rather than put up with the annoyance of letting them clutter the UI.

A history graph, on the other hand, seems like a lovely thing to have. My version control systems and my text editor already represent history as a dag, and it's nice to see the same capability arriving in the third of the tools I use all day, every day.

<comment><USER8> _I used to use it, but found that it encourages poor tab hygiene_

In my experience the opposite is true; Tree Style Tabs makes it easy to close an entire tree of tabs once you're done with a topic. Or alternatively, to move out one tab which contains the "result" (e.g. the lawnmover that you'll end up buying after 4 hours of research) and then get rid of the rest.

<comment><USER9> Even better is that you can bookmark a whole tree of tabs. And reopen later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is some great existing work in the academic community on better models for web interactions: [https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mk- in...](https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mk-int-safe- state-web/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I agree there's a problem here but why not just copy the history of the origin tab to the new tab when it's created?

<comment><USER12> That's what I was thinking. Don't need fancy graphics, just make the back button work further back than the tab creation. Doesn't even have to be a copy, if they make the history a tree structure in memory.

<comment><USER13> That last part doesn't work, unfortunately. We looked into doing exactly that, but the way history navigation works is specified quite strictly - and relied upon by existing web content - making this infeasible.

<comment><USER12> I don't see how this could be true. From the perspective of a web page, it'd be exactly the same as if the user's new-tab clicks were regular clicks instead.

From a user perspective, my main pain point is the prior history running out at the point where I opened a new tab. In many cases I've already closed the tab it came from, and if it's not closed I have to go looking for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would like to see a split screen mode applied to trails. Seeing the current page along side the page I visited to get to it would work well on a lot of the sites I visit. For instance, it would be useful to see the main page of HN along side pages I reached from it and be able to click on the HN links to alter the content of the other panel similar to the way side navs work in many apps.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this kind of windowing system matches nicely with mobile-first design. This kind of UI becomes even more powerful when you can fit several full apps on the screen at once. I think in the long run, all tools will be designed to fit a mobile form factor, and larger screens will just be for looking at multiple items at once, and for better zooming. Kind of like a newspaper.

"Desktop" apps that put more UI in a single module than could fit on a phone screen are basically unlearnable for the majority of users anyway. At best, they learn a familiar "trail" through the app and ignore most of the UI. Might as well break it up on purpose, since that's how people use it.

<comment><USER16> Here's a bet (confidence level: I don't know if I really think this, but I might think this): Long-term, the size constraints of "mobile" displays are likely to be an aberration for most applications. We'll get some kind of head- mounted display / glasses with high resolution and a bunch of augmented- reality fanciness, while other interface features disappear into wearables and the environment, and in 10 or 20 years, the phone-sized displays that have come to seem normal will mostly be as forgotten as the temporary popularity of "netbooks" from a few years back.

Well, that or civilization will collapse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Meh. Don't like this. For me I _like_ their being no history associated with the new tab - then I never lose track of a central "research" tab and the various separate avenues of exploration that I've opened. IE actually colour codes tabs grouping together pages that have been opened in separate tabs which is handy.

Trails would likely get confusing / complicated quickly, and possibly pose problems for SPAs that interact with tab history.

<comment><USER18> Have you tried Tree Style Tab? The hierarchic presentation is perfect for that kind of exploration, in my opinion.

<comment><USER19> Man, I'd love to use some kind of hierarchical tab layout, but I like tabs go horizontal and take up basically zero screen real estate (that wouldn't already be taken up, eg title bar, etc)

<comment><USER18> Tree Style Tab has the auto shrink feature, where they take just a slice and then expand on mouse over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why not just prepend the history of the opener window to the history of the opened window? Simple.

Ok if you want you can also render several such trails in a graph with overlaps.

</comment><comment><USER21> In Chrome on Mac you can cmd+click on Refresh, Back or Forward button which opens a new tab with navigation history preserved.

<comment><USER22> Nice shortcut. Looks like the same result as Ctrl-Click > Duplicate Tab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For all who question "why not just copy history to new tab?": it is part of the trail design. By saying they are not throwing the tab away they have most probably already done that. This will be another screen to view the trail, like the tab exposé on mac safari.

</comment><comment><USER24> visuals apart, for years I've been searching for browsing history stored as graphs. There's so much information there. I would google my own privacy with this so much.

<comment><USER25> History in browsers and editors should absolutely be a trer so we can do changes without the risk of losing a state we want. If you undo/go back and then make some change it's often impossible to reach back to before the undo. Why is history as a tree not a more common feature?

<comment><USER24> Emacs has an undo tree and it can be confusing, maybe browser devs tried and it ended up the same way.

Now I don't advocate for it to be an average main feature, but an opt-in or plugin would be awesome.

It's on my dillo patch TODO list for a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Meta: medium seems to switch urls between every user, making bookmarking tools less useful.

Is there any way to work around this?

</comment><comment><USER27> Git for web history?</comment>


Will we get a pay cut? - <AUTHOR> https://avoidingobscurity.substack.com/p/will-we-get-a-pay-cut <comment><USER2> If pay goes down, engineers will just swap for a different remote job, or move back to Silicon Valley. Many are in this industry for the money. If they can't find a way to keep their wage premium, they'll bounce. Startups will look more attractive. Part of paying FANG money is to keep the best folks available on retainer.</comment>


Google Taps AMD for Accelerating Machine Learning in the Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/11/15/google-taps-amd-for-accelerating-machine-learning-in-the-cloud/ <comment><USER2> Good. AMD has very powerful hardware without the software ecosystem that Nvidia has with Cuda. Now that google is giving AMD a huge thumbs up it could help them sell more GPUs and invest that into tools.</comment>


What may be the world's first cybernetic hate crime - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5926587/what-may-be-the-worlds-first-cybernetic-hate-crime-unfolds-in-french-mcdonalds

<comment><AUTHOR> (victim) Prof. Steve Mann's blog post of the incident: [http://eyetap.blogspot.ca/2012/07/physical-assault-by- mcdona...](http://eyetap.blogspot.ca/2012/07/physical-assault-by-mcdonalds- for.html)</comment>