Title Junk - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2010/12/title_junk <comment><USER4> _Putting SEO keywords in the page title (a) doesn't actually help your page's rank in search engine indexes, and (b) makes things harder for people trying to tweet a link, bookmark your page, or scan it from a list of currently open windows and tabs in their browser. Trust the Googlebot to figure it out._

I'm pretty sure point (a) is false [1], and I'm absolutely sure that the conclusion (trust the Googlebot!) is. You should probably optimize for humans first, but not humans only. That's just not the way the web works.

<http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors>

EDIT: I realize the SEOMoz data is based on SEO experts ranking what they believe is most influential, but what else are you going to go on? Maybe patio11 or someone else on here who is an SEO whiz can offer some of their experience.

<comment><USER5> I hate saying "trust me", but since I'm mentioned by name: he is as wrong as it is possible to be wrong about SEO. It's so wrong, its like me suggesting that all the cool iOS developers add their bezels with Photoshop, which is why you can't use Flash on an iPhone.

<comment><USER6> Sorry for being so dense, but _who_ is wrong: Daring Fireball or SEOMoz?

<comment><USER5> Unsurprisingly, the professional Mac pundit did not beat out the SEO thought leader on SEO 101.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Apple's homepage is used as an example, since its title is simply "Apple", but other pages at Apple's site are named fairly inconsistently: some use curly apostrophes, others use straight ones. Some have sentences ending in periods; others don't. Some use sentence case; others use title case. Some pages just state what the page is; others read like marketing babble.

Examples:

Apple

Welcome to the Apple Store – Apple Store (U.S.)

Apple – Mac

Apple – Play music and more on iPod.

Apple – iPhone 4 – Video calls, multitasking, HD video, and more

Apple – iPad – See the web, email, and photos like never before.

Apple – iTunes – Everything you need to be entertained

Apple – Support

iPad – iPad WiFi – iPad Wifi + 3G – Apple Store (U.S.)

Apple – MacBook Air – It thinks and acts like a full-size Mac.

Apple – iPod classic – Read the iPod classic technical specifications.

Apple – iPhone 4 – Design of the display, A4 processor, and more

Apple – iTunes – What's on – Discover music, movies, and more.

Apple – Why You'll Love a Mac – A Mac is the ultimate upgrade.

Apple – In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic for iPod and iPhone

Apple – Science – Inside the Image – Quantum Views

(Still, overall, Apple's is better than most websites: it's pretty clear what each of the above pages is about just from its title.)

<comment><USER8> What, Gruber used an overly selective example from Apple to prove some point while subtly asserting their superiority? No way!

<comment><USER7> Or, he just looked around at a few major website homepages, and used them as examples of decent titles. Gruber's example did a fine job illustrating his point, I thought – I just found it interesting that even Apple, a company known for its fastidious care for such trivial details, has inconsistent titles across its sprawling website(s), and found the inconsistencies themselves interesting, because they illustrate slightly different approaches to writing titles by the different teams creating the pages. To be honest, I find your sarcasm entirely unhelpful to this discussion.

<comment><USER9> This is evidence that Apple is not focused on web based organic growth. And why would/should they?

They have great marketing... mostly from the consumer.

<comment><USER10> Yes, file your evidence away for when the trial of "web-based-organic-growth" Vs. Apple inc begins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is highly inaccurate. Title tags have EVERY implication on ranking for a keyword. For the most competitive keywords in the world, it's very possible that certain sites _could_ rank without having it in the title tag due to the sheer volume of people linking to them with relevant anchor text, but this is highly unlikely. And more importantly, it doesn't make sense _not_ to do it, because it's pretty ridiculous to put UX in front of strong SEO in title tags, because the large majority of users completely ignore the title tags - <USER2> they show up in search results.

And, yes, you can't show up in search results (most often) unless you have SEO-optimized title tags. I would recommend serving up a specific SEO-title tag, and then another, closely related article title on the page itself - <USER3> least as it comes to news pieces.

And the other hand, I'd agree that it is in companies best interest to have the title tags short enough to get their brand in there - because brand relevancy helps CTR substantially. When CTR goes up, ranking _may_ increase since Google is looking at these things in their algo. Then you get more clicks, views and links, and it starts a downhill, positive domino effect for your website.

SEOMofo has a great tool for making sure you don't breach Google's title tag/meta description character limit in the SERPs:

<http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html>

<comment><USER12> Maybe he didn't mean that the title is irrelevant from a SEO perspective (I don't think he meant that, it's hardly a closely guarded secret).

Maybe he doesn't think people tend to google for "breaking news" much.

Maybe he meant that ranking is great, but what if people _don't click_ your jabberwocky title because it's confusing.

Just sayin'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We've spent dozens if not hundreds of man-hours trying to come up with reliable heuristics to get rid of "title junk". The state of the web in this regard is shameful.

There are many sites that don't even include the article title in <title> at all (even hackers like Zed Shaw get this wrong).

It is yet another thing that proves the rule that "metadata that isn't prominently visible in the browser is guaranteed to be wrong" (see meta description, meta keywords, and comments for worse examples. These often aren't even escaped properly.)

<comment><USER14> _"metadata that isn't prominently visible in the browser is guaranteed to be wrong"_

Very true. Still, I wish title junk was my only problem. My bank's online banking home page has a title of "Home". Just that. "Home". No "Acme Bank Home", not even "Online :: Banking :: Home". In 2010. Go figure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is amazingly annoying to users, but the fact remains that crudding up the title tag does actually provide tangible SEO benefits.

<comment><USER16> > the fact remains that crudding up the title tag does actually provide > tangible SEO benefits.

Source/study?

<comment><USER17> Sure. Here's a vacuum test study I performed on this very subject. Looks at the relative effects of words in URL, Title, Headings, and Body: [http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/01/the- round...](http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2006/01/the-roundabout- seo-test)

It's a little TLDR, but the point above is spelled out near the end in the final "conclusion". Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Trading an SEO advantage for a string to look better in the title bar and in bookmarks seems like a dumb trade.

<comment><USER19> Unless you (Gruber) care prominently about Apple/Google and other places with enough inbound link equity that your marginal SEO increase is minuscule and marginal UX*appreciation gain is large.

<comment><USER18> But for everyone else, there's MasterCard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _"No one punctuates with colons like that."_

Apparently the _Chicago Sun-Times_ does on its website, as do many other sites. " :: " is a simple visual separator that makes it clear that what's intended is not just a colon. It also prevents any confusion that can arise when you use a single colon or an em-dash as the title/site separator and then use the same punctuation element within a title.

<comment><USER8> If anybody wants to know the punctuation symbol that "::" is, it's called Paamayim Nekudotayim, better known in programming as the scope resolution operator. PHP (because of its Israeli roots) calls it by the Hebrew name.

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

<comment><USER21> Apologies for the pedantry I display below, but your comment is so full of errors that I got riled up. Again, apologies, I'm sure you were just trying to add interesting information for other hackers.

'::' is not a punctuation symbol, at least not in English. It is two of the same symbol (colon) in succession.

Now in Hebrew, it may be considered a single symbol (though a cursory google makes me think Paamayim Nekudotayim might just be the Hebrew term for 'double- colon'). If Paamayim Nekudotayim were a single symbol in Hebrew, the term has certainly not migrated to English, at least outside the PHP community.

In programming languages, it is commonly used as a scope resolution operator, and dates back to C++ at least. In PHP, they often call it Paamayim Nekudotayim. But this does not mean that you would be correct to come across the syntax in a C++ source file and call it Paamayim Nekudotayim.

So to summarize:

\- it is not a punctuation symbol \- if it were, it would not be called that in English \- it very likely isnt a single symbol in Hebrew \- it is the scope resolution operator is _some_ languages \- in those languages, it is not called Paamayim Nekudotayim, except in PHP.

(and after that rant, I fully expect to be proved wrong on some of those claims, which I will deserve).

<comment><USER8> No, thank you, I was indeed being imprecise, you are correct that double colon doesn't exist as punctuation in English or Hebrew grammar so it's not a "punctuation symbol". I guess I meant "programming symbol", but it is also used in other contexts such as ratio equivalence in math, or abbreviating analogies e.g. dog:house::fish:bowl. I guess I don't know what to call it, really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _MSNBC is the fourth result at Google in a search for "news", but its page title is so long that "MSNBC" doesn't actually appear in the result entry title._

that is hilarious. i wonder how quickly you can a/b test a change on a website with regard to its pagerank.

<comment><USER23> The problem with pagerank is that it's exceedingly hard to a/b test.

There's multiple factors involved in this but here's a few of the obvious ones:s For most sites your pagerank is typically determined by your root. (Unless google detects you're a hosting company like blogspot) So if you try to a/b test your leaf pages their pagerank is completely domainated by the root. Pagerank is not that frequently updated. (Depending on how much traffic you have.) There aren't individual and seperate googlebots to test against to seperate pageranks in tests so creating clean tests is very hard because Google very often updates their algorithms. (Try looking up ranking shuffles and you'll see what I mean.. every time there's a shuffle there's a furious scramble to figure out what changed and why and how to counteract it.) Even if you could a/b test would you really want to? For now, a successful business only has to stay slightly ahead of the curve to trounce its competitors. Sure, a/b testing might get you valuable knowledge if your goal is to be an SEO consultant (well, one worth actually paying anyway, a lot of "SEO consultants" in my opinion read a few blog posts a couple of years ago and have been charging for that as gospel ever since) but if you're a company with a product it's probably going to cost you more money than it earns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The mere fact that SEO exists as an industry is an aberration and just a testament to the long way the search engines must go.

People that make business decisions based on SEO are putting the cart before the horse and will go away quickly. Fine-tune it, but don't obsess over it.

<comment><USER25> There are a lot of SEO snake oil salesmen out there, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a viable industry built around making your product more visible to your target audience. Until Google is _psychic_ and can infer what you want by any search input, SEO will still have tangible and legitimate value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is the exact reason that we had to introduce "og:title" into the Open Graph Protocol. <http://ogp.me/>

We tried our best to just use <title> but is it so full of junk that it is unusable for Facebook stream stories.

<comment><USER27> Maybe browsers could use it when available. I use it whenever I can and with good results!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As someone who has about 100 tabs open in Firefox at any given moment, I firmly believe that the description of page content must appear before the title of the website or any other SEO junk in the title. This is what I see in my Firefox tab bar right now: <http://imagebin.org/128865>

What does "Hacker..." tell me? Or "Timoth..."? On the other hand, "SQL Co..." at least lets me know the page is about SQL. Same goes for "n-gram...", "Sylistic..." and "HTML5".

<comment><USER29> Safari will strip identical title prefixes in tab names for exactly that case.

Perhaps other browsers should copy this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If all sites had proper favicons for branding we could start dropping site name from page titles and focus just on the content.

<comment><USER20> Because we could usefully distinguish billions of sites by their tiny little icons?

ETA: To expand, I just opened the top 12 stories on HN right this moment in new tabs. I recognized the NYT logo in one favicon and the Apple logo in another. Of the other eight that did have favicons, those little icons told me absolutely _nothing_ useful. A few of those sites did indicate their names in the titles, however.

<comment><USER31> I can distinguish the icons of every site I visit on a semi-regular basis.

<comment><USER20> And you never visit any other sites?

How useful to you is an unfamiliar favicon, or a row of tabs with an assortment of unfamiliar favicons?

<comment><USER31> An unfamiliar favicon lets me know I am not somewhere I normally would be, and to regard the site I am at more suspiciously. Without familiar favicons, I would treat every site that way before looking at the page more thoroughly. Obviously I do not rely solely on favicons, but they are a good initial way of orienting myself when looking at tabs.

<comment><USER20> In other words, the favicon is only useful for familiar sites or for knowing a page isn't from a familiar site. It's of absolutely no use in any other case, whereas a site name or a domain in the title tag will actually tell me what the site is in all cases.

<comment><USER32> There is a meta pattern I recognise in my tab bar sometimes - I get pairs of unfamiliarfavicon:hackernewsfavicon.

That it actually quite useful when I flick back to a random browser window after being distracted... ("Ahhh, that's my timewasting window!")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> _The New Yorker's home page title is shamefully sloppy:

National and world news, Profiles, culture, reviews, fiction, poetry : The New Yorker

The New Yorker — arguably the most precisely punctuated and copy-edited publication in the English-speaking world — would never use a colon like that (i.e., with a preceding space) in print. And why in the world is "Profiles" capitalized?_

\--

 _Who are these title-junk keywords aimed at? Google? Do you they really think that putting "breaking news" in their home page title..._

\--

Why "Profiles" is capitalized?. What does he mean by "Do you they really..."?

People make mistakes.

I agree with his point. Wish he didn't pick on small things.

</comment><comment><USER34> Given that <titles> do matter for SEO, I wonder if there are any drawbacks to stuffing the <title> with keywords but, on page load, changing it to something short & meaningful, for a more pleasant bookmarking & browsing experience.

<comment><USER35> Could be nice but my guess is it would still bung up your listing in a search results page.

<comment><USER34> That's the intention. (Or at least a necessary and sometimes-beneficial and necessary effect of using the title for SEO juice.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's especially annoying when websites _prefix_ their title by "Hacker News". Now all your tabs read like "Hacker News | Foo Bar [... other 6 relevant words omitted]". That's what the favicon is for.

</comment><comment><USER37> "Surely, the name of the site should be the first thing (and in many cases, the only thing) in the title of the home page."

Surely, this man has investigated known facts about SEO before making this lengthy blog post about it. Surely?

The domain name alone will give you more then enough to go on regarding searchability for the name of your site. Several studies have shown that putting the branding last achieves better results for relevant searches than putting it first.

</comment><comment><USER38> To address his original point, this really only matters if you use bookmarking software that uses the "lists of links" model, really...

</comment><comment><USER39> Page titles are the only reason that made me dislike Tabs-on-top.

</comment><comment><USER40> Perhaps the author should have tried Googling for "Breaking news" and then opening the top 3 sites and looking at the titles of each, before making false statements. I can't find any value in this blog post.

</comment><comment><USER41> _Putting SEO keywords in the page title (a) doesn't actually help your page's rank in search engine indexes_

Paging patio11. Patio11 to this thread please.

</comment><comment><USER42> Complaining about proper punctuation in web page titles seems a little pedantic. Using colons and other strange "punctuation" is a substitute for graphics and styling since these are not available in title bars. For those cases where it is meant to be sort-of punctuation, I'd say titles on the internet simply follow a different set of rules and conventions than prose, or anything else prior, because they serve a different purpose.

<comment><USER7> The New Yorker (e.g.) is a publication known for its typographical pedantry, for example writing diaereses in words such as coöperate or naïve; it's entirely uncharacteristic of them to have sloppily punctuated titles.

<comment><USER42> In this case, it's not typography - it's the closet thing they can get to graphic design using ASCII in one line and still being dignified. If instead of a colon it was a pretty little fig leaf we'd all feel more pedantically satisfied. Unfortunately, that's not possible in titles - so they use a colon.

Regardless, I'm guessing the editor of the New Yorker has been to their website. Her approval defines what it is that the New Yorker does, and what it is known for. Sniping at such an organization previously known for pedantry is a bit presumptuous.

<comment><USER43> Unicode is _full_ of dingbats, most of which display properly in all modern software: [http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/dingbats/utf8t...](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/dingbats/utf8test.htm)

<comment><USER42> Fair enough. If they used them though, they might get sniped at for not sticking to web conventions. There's no cover from snipers on the internet.

There might be reasons not to as well - I imagine they break some bookmark tools, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Prioritize next launch feature set with anonymous input from your team - <AUTHOR> http://attentiv.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I built Attentiv after an incredibly exasperating consulting meeting. We could see that tired, old ideas were ruining a business and the yes-men in the room wouldn't stop it (you can read the full story here: [http://attentiv.com/employees-lying-to-you/](http://attentiv.com/employees- lying-to-you/)). I wanted to build something where ideas could flourish on their own, regardless of who presented them. Better interactions would lead to better decisions, better meetings, and more success.

Thus, Attentiv was born. Real-time, anonymous feedback and discussions tracked and automatically compiled into reports. Our users have shorter meeting times, better communication, and more productivity.

Now we use Attentiv with our dev team to determine priority of our next feature sets. We'd love your feedback, good or bad.

</comment><comment><USER3> Saw this on Product Hunt the other day. There was a 50% discount - <USER2> exclusive is still available here: [http://attentiv.com/producthunt/?ref=producthunt](http://attentiv.com/producthunt/?ref=producthunt)</comment>


Potential false-positive rate among the 'asymptomatic infected individuals' - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32133832 <comment><USER3> One fallacy that seems universal with healthcare folks is they think the false positive rate is the chance that a given positive result is erroneous. If an illness is rare, a positive result in a test with a 1% error rate might have an overwhelming probability of being a false positive. This is why prior probabilities need to be taken into account in making decisions.

<comment><USER4> >If an illness is rare, a positive result in a test with a 1% error rate might have an overwhelming probability of being a false positive.

Can you elaborate on this a little more...?

<comment><USER5> If a given test has a 1% chance of returning true, even when the actual result is false, then from a sample of say 1000 tests we would expect at least 10 trues, in addition to any actual true results. If the chance of having the disease in the general population is low (say 1 in a thousand for this example) then we would expect 11 true results in our thousand samples. Of which 91% are incorrect results - false positives.

<comment><USER6> Would I be correct with the following:

If the false positive rate is higher than the expected rate of disease in a given community, then the majority of positive tests will be false positives.

Does this relate to COVID in any way? Since the rates among affected communities seem to be growing rapidly. Would appreciate your thoughts.

<comment><USER7> Looking at growth rate with false positives is a bit of a mindbender: if you limit your testing to the potential contacts of a positive (false or not), you could get a "false R0" virtual epidemic from testing alone, if and only if you test more contacts per positive than 1/false positive rate. Unfortunately, actual hospitalizations and and deaths rule out a virtual epidemic so this is not a hope to cling to.

<comment><USER8> > Unfortunately, actual hospitalizations and and deaths rule out a virtual > epidemic so this is not a hope to cling to.

Not necessarily. In theory all the deaths could have some other cause, i.e. some fraction of people with a different underlying fatal condition had false positive tests for this coronavirus and then died of the other condition.

That's probably not what's happening, but it's theoretically possible. (It's also probable that _some_ of the reported deaths _are_ that, but who knows what percentage.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In Denmark we increased our testing 10-fold and found 300% more people infected. Our response to that increase has been to shut down the country completely for 2 weeks and expand our governments right to act: Forced entry into private property, forced isolation and treatment, forced testing. If this is all because of an error in the test kit I'm going to be super ticked off.

<comment><USER10> This is somewhat misleading information.

First, the country has NOT been completely shut down. I went shopping today and bought milk, yeast and flour. We didn't need toilet paper, but the store had plenty. All schools and most of the public sector closes down for two weeks on Monday. Some business (like restaurants, movie theaters and fitness gyms) are closing down on their own accord. But you can - if you will - <USER2> go shopping for clothes, gardening stuff, electronics and most importantly food.

Second, although the right to forced entry into private property was in the original draft it was removed before vote. Entry still follows the known rules of needing approval by a judge.

You are right, however, that forced testing, forced treatment, forced vaccination (if/when possible) and forced quarantine is mandated as per discretion of the public health authorities.

<comment><USER11> The situation is similar in Norway. We're a bit more strict, as parts of the private sector is also forcibly shut down: Gyms, pubs, hairdressers, movie theaters are all closed.

Our infection rate has grown dramatically in the past few days, and not as a result of increased testing AFAIK. Testing capacity has been limited, but is being drastically increased as of today. So maybe the already high growth rate will increase further as a result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would this indicate that the mortality rate is actually much higher percentage-wise, since the denominator is actually artificially inflated?

<comment><USER13> Not that I'd expect, since non-testing in probable positive cases (f.e. in NL those sick, but manageable and in home quarantine are usually not tested) seems to dwarf false-positives in negative cases.

<comment><USER14> But could that just be the flu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One big question is what percentage of positive tests are asymptomatic? If only a tiny percent are asymptomatic, then this false positive issue would not be elevating the total numbers much, right? I won't claim to have the best resource here but one article stated:

" Dr. Tedros noted that only 1 percent of cases in China are reported as "asymptomatic." And of that 1 percent, 75 percent do go on to develop symptoms."

[https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/dont-panic-the- compr...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/dont-panic-the- comprehensive-ars-technica-guide-to-the-coronavirus/2/)

</comment><comment><USER15> How did they estimate this? If anybody can read the actual paper, I'd love to know.

If false positives dominate true positives then you'd expect total positives to depend primarily on number of tests given, right? Which sounds wrong to me, but I'd be interested in hearing other thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can someone clarify which type of test they analyzed? 80% seems way too high. I would expect something closer to 10% at most (which would still mean the probability of a true positive might be very low per Bayes' theorem)

<comment><USER15> Are you confused or am I misreading your comment? The result is that 80% of positives are false positives, not that 80% of all tests are false positives. (IMO it is still fishy.)

<comment><USER17> 80%...in asymptomatic cases. So if most of the people who get tested DID show symptoms, the false positive rate generally could be far worse.

But, it would suggest downsides to more general testing.

<comment><USER18> But if your diagnostic criteria is showing symptoms later, then you are ejecting the entire population of carriers who might be, say, teeming with the virus but showing zero symptoms, for perhaps a genetic or "dumb luck" reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting, as this means that China would be quarantining more people than "necessary", which would help slow the pandemic anyway. I can't imagine an asymptomatic person would put stress on the hospital system? But maybe I'm wrong there.

I am curious if this also could indicate a false-positive problem with non asymptomatic people as well.

False-positives are also why the CDC tests had to be shipped back, although that was because it was showing false positives in other diseases it was testing for, not COVID-19.

<comment><USER20> > _I can 't imagine an asymptomatic person would put stress on the hospital > system?_

If s/he is in the hospital in quarantine you must give blankets and food, probably a nurse to check the temperature and symptoms two or three times per day, a medical doctor one a day just to be sure. Perhaps a blood analysis from time to time?

Luckily you don't have to handle visitors because they are in quarantine. (Or there are some visits? What if one patient tries to escape?) You must give an official reports for the family. Now you can assume the patient can send a WhatsApp message to the family saying s/he is fine, but you need probably still an official report. Paperwork, there is also paperwork.

How isolated are them from each other. If they are all together, you can transform the overcrowded false positives in real patients.

<comment><USER21> why would an asymptomatic person be in an hospital? Even people with minor symptoms are asked to self quarantine at home pretty much everywhere.

<comment><USER22> In China, asymptomatic with a positive test result still put you in their make-shift hospital facilities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wait, so the actual mortality rate for COVID-19 is much higher than thought because of all the false positives on cases without symptoms?

<comment><USER24> But that also means that it doesn't spread as quickly/easily as originally thought. Right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone save the full text? Every time I try to get to it I get a 404.

<comment><USER26> I believe the full article is in Chinese.

<comment><USER27> It's not in anything now. It's 404'd which is concerning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If tests indeed have such a high false-positive rate, then all estimates of fatality rate calculated by dividing over the number of individuals identified as "infected" are too low, i.e., by implication the virus is actually deadlier than naively estimated.

EDIT: _All else remaining the same._ See AnthonyMouse's comment below for important clarifications and corrections.

<comment><USER8> That's assuming a large fraction of the people who have been tested are asymptomatic, otherwise a high false positive rate among asymptomatic people would have minimal effect on the numbers because they aren't being tested to begin with.

Meanwhile you also have the opposite happening for the same reason -- if even a small percentage of asymptomatic people are actually infected but not being tested, a small percentage of "asymptomatic people" (i.e. nearly the entire population) could represent a very large proportion of those infected and cause the fatality rate estimates to be much _higher_ than the true number.

<comment><USER28> True. I updated my comment.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Google Wallet Won't Work - <AUTHOR> http://googlewatch.eweek.com/content/google_wallet/why_google_wallet_wont_work.html

<comment><USER2> Good points. I had recently been juggling the idea of what it would take to successfully replace cash and plastic with a mobile app, and rollout was a huge issue.

Depth of penetration is far more important than breadth. Ten thousand users in a single city is better than a million in a thousand. In order to be viable for point of sale, you have to give corner stores and drycleaners a reason to use your service, which means that their average customer has to want to use it. Sure, you can kickstart the process with big box retail chains, something that a company the size of Google is well-placed to do, but you'll never be dominant until you own the mom and pops. Without the ubiquity of credit cards, replacement mobile payments are at best a neat feature.

The author's second point ties into the first, and is equally valid. There is no discernible reason why Google would limit itself to a single credit card provider, unless that was their only option. All this will do is hurt uptake. The same is true of limiting it to a single phone.

Google needs to learn the Wave lesson, and go big or go home. By so meekly backing Wallet, they are all but ensuring its failure. This is no Android: it doesn't fix any big problem for any major player the way Android solved the OS and marketplace problem for the handset makers. Square works great for small businesses, especially those who provide on-site service. Wallet doesn't seem to provide any solutions beyond "paper and plastic are anachronistic". They really need to identify who their early adopters are going to be and launch a concerted effort to convert them. Short of that, it's another in a long line of half-assed product rollouts from Google.

<comment><USER3> >>Google needs to learn the Wave lesson, and go big or go home

Do you really feel that Wave failed because they didnt "go big"? If anything, thats what they DID do. They released a product with so much fanfare that lack clearly defined use cases. Wallet was /just/ announced. its not even a beta product yet. They need time to test out locations with a mostly staff lef trial period in very select locations. They have announced that they want it to do everything from debit cards to airline and concert tickets.

There is a chicken and egg issue here. Companies need to have readers in order for people to actually use it, and people need to actually use it in order for most companies to want to get setup with it.

>>They really need to identify who their early adopters are going to be and launch a concerted effort to convert them

I would say that launching on an offical Google phone in San Francsico and New York would be as close to launching for early adopters as one can get. This /is/ an early adopters product for now, and will be for a while. But you don't need to convert them - they are the adopters all ready. You need to convert moms. They won't do this until it is very easy to use and known to be very secure. How else to do this then a small release amongst high-tech savvy users in larger cities.

>>Short of that, it's another in a long line of half-assed product rollouts from Google.

I don't feel that people understand what this product means for Google. Lest we forget they are an advertising company. What more rich a source of pointed advertising information than the exact purchases of their user? Barring some horrific publicity ala Buzz, they are going to sink WAY more resources into this one mobile product than they would short of android itself.

<comment><USER2> >Do you really feel that Wave failed because they didnt "go big"? If anything, thats what they DID do. They released a product with so much fanfare that lack clearly defined use cases.

Wallet _does_ have a clearly-defined use case, however. A small initial rollout is good if done well. Limiting it to one phone, on one credit card, in a large area, with no major deals with retailers, just doesn't seem like a winning strategy. As I detailed above, a limited rollout is fine if it's a small-scale version of your intended usage. Get _everyone_ in a small area using it, then expand from there.

>How else to do this then a small release amongst high-tech savvy users in larger cities.

Everyone in a small area. Even in the Bay Area, tech-savvy early adopters are too spread out for the network effect to work in Google's favor. Concentration beats distribution, here.

>I don't feel that people understand what this product means for Google. Lest we forget they are an advertising company. What more rich a source of pointed advertising information than the exact purchases of their user?

Exactly. This _should_ be huge for them. Let's bracket the fees they'd collect if this overtook credit cards as a preferred method of payment and focus solely on the data they'd acquire from consumer behaviour. This has a huge amount of potential for them, but it feels like they're doing it Wrong.

<comment><USER3> >>...just doesn't seem like a winning strategy Its not a winning strategy, its a testing strategy. Theyre not going to talk people in Paducka Alabama into using it. They want it where they are, sf and ny, and are testing it with a partner. Get it right before you get a million people on board.

>> ...network effect to work in Google's favor What are you talking about here? What network has to exist? A person signs up, and uses it when it is available.

I dont understand what it is you think they need to be doing. Why would a small concentrated area be any better for mass adoption?

<comment><USER2> A smaller, concentrated area would be better for _any_ adoption.

If 1 in 1000 people in a given square mile have access to Wallet, and 1 in 1000 retail outlets support it, what are the chances anyone will actually use it and give you the data you need to improve it? A far better approach would be to give it to every google employee and as many residents around Google HQ as possible, and convince as many local businesses as you can to use it, covering their costs. _Then_ you start to get an idea of what its real-life usage cases are, and where you aren't delivering. Giving it to a smattering of technorati and having a few businesses support it isn't likely to lead to much use.

<comment><USER3> Are you suggesting there would be a peer pressure to use the system? What would prevent Google from covering the costs of the companies in the rollout? What is difficult about figuring out what use cases there are? They want to replace swiped credit cards. Wherever you swipe a credit card - they want to be.

>>A far better approach would be to give it to every google employee and as many residents around Google HQ as possible

Theres not preventing this from happening, in fact that kind of is whats happening already. The announcement only covers general population rollout.

>>Giving it to a smattering of technorati and having a few businesses support it isn't likely to lead to much use.

"Giving" what, exactly? They are testing a service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I couldn't find any argument on why it will not work. It gives some reason why it can't work right now, but the service is _five_ days old.

<comment><USER2> So if it doesn't work right now, what's going to make people want to go to Google six months from now when it _could_ work?

Google's not under any pressure to ship. They should have taken the time to get it right before they pushed it out the door.

<comment><USER3> what makes anyone want to use a product that released a alpha/beta? If its good. How else would they be getting it right without actual customers using the server.

<comment><USER2> The staggering local network effect required for mobile payments of this kind to be good require _many_ people to use it right away. If nobody wants to pay with it, then no stores will support it. If no stores support it, nobody will want to pay with it.

This isn't some web app where you can get a few initial users off an HN or TechCrunch spike and then grow from there. It's completely useless unless a lot of people in the same area want to use it, in which case retailers will be incentivized to support it. If you want to do a limited alpha rollout, convince every store within 3 miles of 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway to carry it and give out free phones with Google Wallet enabled to 5,000 people in the area. Work out the bugs, then make a concerted effort to get everyone in the Bay Area using it. From there you can do a general rollout with support for every major credit card and national bank, plus deals with the 50 largest retailers in the country.

The level of clout needed to pull this off successfully makes Google perfectly positioned to do so. Their insistence on rolling it out as if it were a web startup all but ensures its failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If Google Checkout is any measure, I'm cowering in fear of Google Wallet.</comment>


Famous People Born the Exact Same Day - <AUTHOR> https://m.ranker.com/list/people-born-the-same-day/celebrity-lists <comment><AUTHOR> I knew "Abraham Lincoln & Charles Darwin - February 12, 1809" but not many of the others...</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with deadbeat clients? - <AUTHOR>

As a result of an old ALA post that Zeldman recently brought back up (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/gettingpaid/) it got me thinking about the never-ending war those of us in the services business deal with - just getting paid for the work we've done for our clients.
It raised a number of questions for me - Is it just a matter of patience and perseverance?  Knowing that eventually all the chasing you do will pay off with the amount you invoiced?  Are there ways to mitigate this issue?
The first comment I normally get when I bring this up in conversation with peers is that you have to have a ROCK-SOLID contract and statement of work drawn up for your clients.  Sure, this helps people understand that you mean business, and will normally help with the majority of your business relationships.   But there's that fraction of clients that will laugh in your face and drag it out for however long they want because they know you can't afford to retain a lawyer to fight them.
So what are the other options?  cap deploy:web:disable?  Backup and delete everything?  That tack, to me, is a very last resort but still reeks of legal quagmire.  You, obviously, wouldn't want to be brought up on charges of "hacking", right?
The only other option I've considered - public shaming/outcry.  Designers and copy-writers who've had their work stolen/plagiarized have been quick to post on their blogs about it and circle the wagons w/their communities.  And quite often it works.  But what about posting about that deadbeat client?  Does that smell of desperation, poor business practice, and would it be a reputation killer? <comment><USER2> There's three things I do.

One, work with people who I think will pay. I get a lot of calls from people who sound stoned and don't seem to know what they're talking about. I don't move forward with those types of people. In general, I also try to avoid individuals. Companies pay slowly, but are less likely to disappear on you.

Two, I always ask for some money up front or spread the project out so that I get a chance to see their payment process before they get a delivered product.

Three, I send reminder emails about late payments on the first day that it's late. These aren't big emotional emails, just, "Could you give me an update on this invoice." Companies have institutionalized processes for making slow payments so you just need to expect that you'll be sending reminder emails.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have a signed contract with a stated amount you can put a lien on any business assets that they have. You can file a D&B report on their business credit or you can file a complaint with the BBB. The last, while easy, is not that great unless they have a large consumer base.</comment>


Can we talk about the copilot's depression now? HELL YES - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2015/03/andreas-lubitz-and-stigma-of-depression.html

<comment><USER2> This blog article misses a lot, by concentrating on small aspects and a specific case. Pilot depression? Talk about all employees (or civil servant) depression!

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_S.A.#Staff_suicides
      http://www.policesuicidestudy.com/

(And what about suicidal terrorists?)

The point is that there's a global problem with society (the disfunctional way it's organized) which leads to mental illnesses, increasing drug usage, increadible psychotrop chemicals usage levels, etc, almost everywhere.

<comment><USER3> Agree completely. One big problem IMO is that we are taught by the media to prize and chase pleasure. Sex, drugs, partying, whatever. Those don't fill the soul (whatever that is) with long term joy and stability. They usually don't create stronger long term relationships. As boring as it sounds, turning outwards, helping others and considering their needs first is what produces the best relationships, and that adds tremendous peace to life.

And although that will help in many people's cases, depression and chemical imbalances are real and need processional help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Or how about the common-sense idea of having two people in the cockpit at > all times? Apparently new to Lufthansa.

Is this necessarily 'common sense'? If it was a flight attendant who'd downed the plane, we'd all be lamenting how it should be common sense not to let people who are not as closely vetted or scrutinised in a locked room with an axe and the pilot in command...

</comment><comment><USER5> I've flagged this because it appears to try to hijack an issue in the news to push the authors book.

<comment><USER6> Except the book is free, probably a good resource for people who need help, and it's in the footer, not tied any particular blog post.</comment></comment>


The world's first Bitcoin ATM is coming to Canada next week - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/26/5031132/canada-bitcoin-atm-bitcoiniacs-robocoin-vancouver <comment><USER2> are these lines going to take forever waiting for confirmed transactions? when giving out cash, i'd imagine preventing a double spent is pretty high priority...</comment>


Design Principles - <AUTHOR> https://principles.adactio.com/ <comment><USER2> Be warned these aren't necessarily _good_ principles. The very first one, Robustness, is quite dangerous and is the case of much of the WWW's security and compatibility problems. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a long list of principles from many sources. I have bookmarked for later, when I have more time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you for this</comment>


Show HN: Receive emails, parse and post them to a webhook with Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Flolagale/mailin

<comment><USER2> Have you considered mailgun ? It is rock solid and affordable</comment>


New Approaches to Cracking the Communication of Whales and Dolphins - <AUTHOR> https://bioneers.org/james-nestor-new-approaches-to-cracking-the-communication-of-whales-and-dolphins-bioneers-2016/ <comment><AUTHOR> An article (more comprehensive) for those preferring to avoid linked video lecture:

[https://everwideningcircles.com/2018/10/28/sperm-whales- clic...](https://everwideningcircles.com/2018/10/28/sperm-whales-clicks-go- right-through-us/)

I would have posted the article as the main link, but chose the video lecture for its title, seemingly more fit for HN.</comment>


Teracube: Smartphone with a 4 Year Warranty - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/teracube/teracube-the-sustainable-smartphone-with-a-4-year-warranty <comment><AUTHOR> The basic idea of making a phone to last for longer than current contenders is appealing. No mention about the battery being replaceable though, which in my experience is the real limiting factor on current phone longevity. Edit: it includes a free battery change, impressive at this price

Not sure what the business argument is to have far better specs /and/ warranty than other phones at the low price point (early bird is $200 for an octa core with 6GB RAM). I wondered if they are subsidized by VC but didn't see anything on AngelList. Curious if anyone knows more.

<comment><USER2> Teracube is not backed by VC but the founders themselves. They provide free battery replacements (not just one time but as many as it takes throughout the 4-year warranty). It is true that users cannot replace the battery themselves but that's why the warranty comes with free parts, labor and two-way shipping.

The business idea is that by prolonging the phone's life, we can reduce 1/ e-waste (45M tons of e-waste produced by US and 135M WW) produced by people discarding their old phones, and 2/ raw materials used to produce the phones which not only the planet is running short but also the pollution caused during mining and manufacturing process.</comment></comment>


Wild mice actually enjoy running on exercise wheels - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2014/may/21/wild-mice-exercise-wheels-behaviour-stereotypy-neurosis

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7788162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7788162)</comment>


HTML video still can't beat GIF - <AUTHOR> http://pornel.net/beat-gif-manifesto

<comment><USER2> Doesn't seem to address the elephant in the room: that Apple, Nokia and Microsoft rejected Theora as a lowest common denominator fallback codec, and failed in their efforts to convince the relevant patent-holders to make Baseline H.264 available for use on the web and now are stonewalling WebM just because it doesn't suit their business interests.

I'm fairly certain the other stuff would have fallen into place if a codec was widely supported.

edit: actually I suppose this is covered by "browsers failed to support WebM as well as they support GIF." but it's confusingly worded since Microsoft and Apple basically don't support WebM at all, and the widespread usage that leads to a better interface (in the browser and in forum software) depends on that.

</comment><comment><USER3> A bit of the trick and appeal to animated gif is no sound (at all) and (typically) low cruft: it's the 'money shot', looped. no padding, no channel begging, optimized for download speed, no buffering, no pop-ups, no ads, no captions, etc.

I wouldn't mistake its prevalence as evidence of any failing of <video>. When people -want- video, they know how to post, embed or share it. While geeks care about plug-in-free video, the people sharing animated gifs do not.

</comment><comment><USER4> The use case for animated GIF isn't video even if it's been pressed into that function. Even in 2013 I've evaluated the options and ended up using an animated GIF on new pages[1][2]. It's the simplest tool available to do an animation, not a video. It sucks as a format though with it's poor color handling and lack of compression.

Ideally I'd replace those GIFs with a bunch of JPGs and a touch of javascript to cycle between them. It would even allow me to have the animation only start when the image is first visible, whereas now it just cycles indefinitely. But all that would require a bunch of work and the animated GIF was easy to create.

PS: I need to go pester the posthaven guys to implement auto cycling of photographs in their galleries to replace the ugly GIFs.

[1] [http://blog.corujas.net/summer-recipes- gazpacho](http://blog.corujas.net/summer-recipes-gazpacho)

[2] [http://blog.corujas.net/summer-recipes-francesinha-portos- fa...](http://blog.corujas.net/summer-recipes-francesinha-portos-famous- sandwich)</comment>


Worst company names - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but I win here. I had a project that kinda accidentally turned into a company. Never did ANY name research-- just grabbed the first thing that popped into my head... "Jobby" ( <http://www.gojobby.com> ). Turns out that Jobby (in Scotland), means "poop".

Nonetheless, we were able to sell the company after about 6 months. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> This falls into the category of "someone should have told them..." Run by some new arrivals to the US, I think. Somebody, their lawyer, or accountant... somebody should have told them.

I was cruising around an outdoor mall in Bellevue WA. There was a restaurant that... um... caught my eye. Looking in the window, I saw it was a perfectly ordinary BBQ place - bright lights, lots of people just having lunch, families, etc.

Restaurant's name? The Flaming Porker.

</comment><comment><USER4> My friend keeps telling me that my company has a name that is too hard to spell. "www.campusassassins.com" What you think?

<comment><USER5> Just register a few likely typos and it shouldn't be _too_ bad. I'd aim for at least one fewer syllable though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Invisible Hands

</comment><comment><USER7> news.com.com

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Brain Bakery

</comment><comment><USER8> Haliburtun

</comment><comment><USER9> yahoo google del.icio.us</comment>


Indian government says citizens don't have absolute right over their bodies - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/citizens-dont-have-absolute-right-over-their-bodies-government/articleshow/58486260.cms <comment><USER3> The arguments raised in favor of this motion, sound reasonable and applicable here in the West as well.

> _" Rohatgi contended that the right over one's body was not absolute as the > law prohibited people from committing suicide and women were barred from > terminating their pregnancy at an advanced stage. Had there been absolute > right then people would have been free to do whatever they wanted to do with > their body, but the law did not recognise the absolute right of people over > their bodies, he contended."_

<comment><USER4> Equating suicide to a flimsy ID program, meant to track everything you do is disingenuous.

There is zero transparency on the security of the system. Even if there was transparency, I would not trust the people running the system to store my private biometric data safely. Unlike a password which gets leaked i cannot change fingerprint or retina at will can I ? Using it authentication is just stupid . There is no real need for collecting forcibly collecting bio-metric data,

This is a question of fundamental right to privacy , despite whatever the court and government may have you believe . Just like the government does not have the right to capture nude pictures of you , it does not any inherent right to your biometric information .

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure who your comment is addressed towards, because I didn't say anything about ID programs. If you want to make an argument in favor of privacy, then make an argument in favor of privacy. But that argument has nothing to do with "absolute rights over your body".

<comment><USER4> My apologies, it was not in reply to your comment directly, I was talking about how the media and entire story about this is being framed as something it is not about at all. Your comment was on top and I did not articulate it well that the issue should be discussing something else entirely.

As another poster below summed it better than me, the framing is conflating forced bio-metric collection without any real use , security or benefit with some very real and needed restrictions on your rights over your body

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Demonetizing the most widely-circulated banknotes and now 'no consent required' by the government to get fingerprints. So much for the world's largest democracy.

<comment><USER6> Why bring Demonetization into this? That was an excellent move by the govt. Sure, the implementation could have been better but there is no change in this world that has not caused pain to the citizen. Maybe you can enlighten me of some radical changes which were super smooth and caused no trouble to anyone?

<comment><USER7> > That was an excellent move by the govt

The jury is still out on this one. Any hard proof or statistics that say otherwise ? Wish there was more transparency.

<comment><USER4> I don't know what macro economic impact it had. Pretty much all the currency came back through the various loop holes in the rules. The liquidity crunch continues to create lot of problems to majority of the country who do not have access to banking and financial services. Nobody really knows the cost of all this and all for what? I still see unaccounted money floating every day and nothing seems to have actually changed

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The context of this is a biometric national ID program

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

This program was originally described as voluntary, but over time it has been required for many more purposes.

<comment><AUTHOR> This _voluntary_ program is now being mandatory to file income tax returns among other things. The ongoing hearing in the Supreme Court (the argument in the linked article was made during the hearing) is regarding the voluntary ID being made mandatory for filing tax returns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Warning - rant ahead.

Aadhar is expensive, intrusive and ultimately futile for the stated objectives. More than $1.5B have been spent on it with more being allocated every budget. For context Mangalyan's budget was $74M. I haven't been able to find how much it has helped save. There is no cost/benefit analysis.

It was started as a way to ensure proper delivery of subsidised services to the poor, it has since enhanced its scope to encompass _all_ government services. One needs it for 1) getting a sim card, 2) filing tax returns 3) train journey(for seniors but won't be surprised if it soon becomes mandatory for everyone) 4) school admissions - really kids cannot be enrolled in school without Aadhar

with proposals to use the biometrics for 5) domestic air travel 6) biometric enabled POS 7) replace debit/credit cards

Somehow this will magically solve all our problems and make us a developed nation by virtue of using a biometric enabled digital tracking service.

For a nation of bilion people, even a faboulous error rate of 0.01% will affect 10M people. People responsible for it claim it is _secure_ and _hackproof_. I am having a hard time trying to decipher if this is ignorance, incompetence or malice or all three mixed in.

The current goverment is drunk on power. Obvious comparisons with previous dictatorial regimes gets laughed at. But the signs are there to see - <USER2> sycophancy to the PM, increased social intolerance, conflict escalation in/with Kashmir/Pakistan, arbitrary decisions like demonetization, moving the financial year to Jan-Dec.

For a supposedly non-corrupt government, the sly introduction of clause to remove cap on corporate donations to political parties in the Finance bill is blatant hypocrisy to say the least.

For anyone who thinks demonetization was good, just review the government narrative on why it was needed. First it was black money, then terrorist funding/fake notes, then digitization. The very people who lost their businesses/livelihood due to demonetization support the PM and think it was good. When asked why, no idea. Ignorance is strength.

Almost all modern governments are guilty to some extent, but this government has totally embraced the INGSOC principles and has mastered the art of doublethink. And the scary thing is, they have succeeded at it. People just dismiss the privacy and surveillance implications of Aadhar as hypothetical scenarios.

Anybody who criticizes the government is unpatriotic and a traitor.

</comment><comment><USER10> The basic summary of the situation so far (somewhat simplified) :

\- Aaadhar is brought in as a national identification system, originally for benefit distribution

\- The Supreme Court in a judgement on October 2015 notes that there is no legal framework for aadhar and restricts it to only 3 schemes. It notes that aadhaar cannot be made mandatory for any scheme

\- The current government rushes the aadhaar act as a money bill (the constitutional validity of which is also being challenged) on 11 mar 2016

\- Several government departments start issuing gazette notifications making aadhaar mandatory for various schemes (including benefits for AIDS patients, bhopal gas victims, college entrance examinations, birth certificates among others).

\- The Finance Bill of 2016 passes several amendments to make linking your aadhaar mandatory with your PAN card. Historically, a PAN card was the entity on which you filed your taxes, and with this in place, you cannot file taxes as your PAN card becomes invalid if you don't link it.

The case being argued today is one that challenges the amendments making aadhaar mandatory. If you are interested in the court proceedings and the arguments laid by both sides, here is a long summary (today was day 5 of the proceedings): [https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2017/05/03/the- constitut...](https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2017/05/03/the- constitutional-challenge-to-s-139aa-of-the-it-act-aadhaarpan-petitioners- arguments/)

<comment><USER11> Original purpose was to flush out illegal immigrants. Benefit distribution came later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The worrying bit about this statement is not what was said but the fact that the media is getting fixated on this intentionally ambiguous statement to conflate the real issue of forced biometric data collection into a black box central database with no clear and well defined purpose or use, security or benefit.

</comment><comment><USER13> The increasingly anti-privacy moves via the Aadhaar card which now links your driving license, bank account(s), mobile number and everything you can think of, banks charging you for withdrawing cash more than 4-5 times a month to incentivize digital payment, this is making me really scared right now

</comment><comment><USER14> This is nothing new. I think digitizing records of citizen can get hairy but it also has some pros.

The title of this report taken at face value sounds shocking, but the arguments raised are perfect here. You do not have the right to suicide or commit infanticide after a certain stage, nor can you take drugs. The point raised was, if we had 100% right over our bodies, we would have been allowed those things. Since we aren't, it is used as a means to explain why Finger prints and eye scans are irrefutable when getting the Adhaar card.

</comment><comment><USER7> This account live tweets the proceedings from Supreme Court : [https://twitter.com/gautambhatia88](https://twitter.com/gautambhatia88)

</comment><comment><USER15> We don't have it in the west either - if we did, there would be no war on drugs.

<comment><USER16> Or ban on euthanasia.

<comment><USER17> Or death sentences, prisons, quarantines, private property... there are lots of situations where government decides what you can or can't do with your body.

<comment><USER16> I was going with the examples that only concern your body, and not other things as well.

But of course, by a strict interpretation of "absolute right", any infraction could count.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a dangerous argument. Peoples' rights over their bodies must be absolute. Suicide, abortion at any stage, voluntary organ trade, drug use, prostitution - all these should be legal as they follow from one's right to her body.

<comment><USER19> Banning suicide is as effective as declaring pi as 3 via legislative fiat. At least in my mind.

For one, it is hard to enforce; those who choose to end their own lives may not show any signs until the attempt. If they succeed, they cannot be punished. If they fail, what is a "just" punishment? How do you effectively punish someone who wants to die so that after their punishment, they want to live?

I guess, philosophically, we do have absolute control of our bodies in practice. Making laws that defy the reality of what humans are is a path to tyranny. If people dont have absolute rights, does the state? There is talk of balancing individual rights against the state, which shallowly encouraging, but to me any system where the individual is not free to not make choices about their body will always be able to justify actions that trade more rights for "security".</comment></comment>


Bringing Sexy (Charts) Back - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupwhisperer.com/2008/09/bringing-sexy-charts-back.html

<comment><USER2> I really like this resource: [http://www.visual- literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table...](http://www.visual- literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html)

Often use it when I need a visualization technique for a presentation.

<comment><USER3> Anywhere I can look up on their definitions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It cannot be overstated how much people freakin' love charts.

The more you add the more you'll sell. I don't care what your product is, you should figure out a way to usefully add a graph or a chart.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have not clicked through to read this article, but I will nevertheless make several attempts to summarize it judging solely from its Hacker News headline:

\- If you want to have better sex, try to employ the use of more charts in the bedroom.

\- The author unveils a time series chart contrasting his copulation frequency with his masturbation frequency.

\- The author is attacked by plain-jane charts everywhere for espousing an impossibly high standard for chart sexiness.

\- A JavaScript charting library is so good that it makes the article author want to have sex with the JavaScript library author.

</comment><comment><USER6> The author seems to be confused about that chart and Tufte.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, the chart he refers to wasn't Tufte's own it is Minard's presented by Tufte.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Tic Tac Toe – Creating Unbeatable AI - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/tic-tac-toe-creating-unbeatable-ai-with-minimax-algorithm-8af9e52c1e7d <comment><USER2> Great read, and really impressive!

Sorry to distract but the medium paywall can't be dismissed now? I had to open an incognito window to read your article. Might want to think about moving to another blogging platform.</comment>


IPhone 4 - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2010/06/4 <comment><USER2> _That Apple pays so much attention to the details as to pick a different version of Helvetica for different classes of displays is emblematic of what makes the iPhone the iPhone — software and hardware that are designed in tandem as parts of a single whole._

Really? On the next paragraph...

 _There is, however, one problem with Helvetica Neue in iOS 4.0: it doesn't include italics.(...)I can only assume this is an oversight on Apple's part._

Yes, it is a small thing. I really don't care whether the phone comes with the Heuvetica Neue bold, or not. But I can't stop thinking about how Apple's marketing (or Gruber's writing) is eerily similar to hypnosis: you provide a baseless assertion that "sort of" makes sense intertwined with contradictions, making the target's brain take everything as valid.

<comment><USER3> As a designer, Helvetica Neue (even without italics) is a huge step in the right aesthetic direction. His original point was not so much about the font, but about the platform. He lays the groundwork, showing that the platform was higher resolution and therefore it made more sense for a font that displayed better at higher resolutions to be used.

I think it's a valid point and a great critique -- how is it contradictory to praise what is praiseworthy and point out what is wrong?

<comment><USER4> Surely it's like saying "Ford pay so much detail to every part of their cars, it's amazing the level of care put into each and every model"

and later saying "Of course Ford did forget to include wheels on this particular model"

<comment><USER5> Or maybe "Of course Ford did forget to include _tail fins_ on this particular model".

I don't think I've seen oblique, sans serif type used in an iOS user interface. Content, sure, and Helvetica is there for you, but this is the system user interface font. I think the clarity demanded of the system user interface argues against the subtle change afforded by slanting the font.

Oblique sans serif fonts are generally sort of an apologetic placeholder for: "Here is where I would have used a nice italic font, but my type designer couldn't pull that off in this clean, minimalist font, so please imagine that he did."

<comment><USER6> > I don't think I've seen oblique, sans serif type used in an iOS user > interface.

The system font in OS X (Lucida Grande) doesn't have an italic style either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >The overall build quality seems impossibly good. The iPhone 4 is beautiful to behold and feels like a valuable artifact. It's like a love letter to Dieter Rams.

Do other people actually like reading stuff like this? I mean, regardless of what you think of the iphone 4, that level of praise almost makes me feel bad for him. It's like romantic love for an object.

<comment><USER8> I skimmed through the article looking for anything negative. Acknowledging its flaws is more productive than studying its perfection.

<comment><USER9> There is plenty of discussion of the signal issue, the proximity sensor issue, and the potential fragility. It doesn't gloss over them or overplay them.

Is that sufficient? This seems at least as balanced and credible as the Ars Technical review.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Apple is so good at making buttons, it's almost enough to make one wish they made button-laden devices._

Oh come on...Pro mouse, Mighty Mouse, Magic Mouse, current and previous gen macbook trackpad buttons, the previous gen desktop keyboards, iPod click- wheels, Apple Remote...these are some of the worst buttons I've used. Apple has made _some_ decent buttons (I think the current and previous gen MBP keyboards are well made), but they're way too inconsistent to make a claim like that.

<comment><USER11> Is is truly surprising how the company that took the mouse mainstream now can't make one that's simultaneously aesthetically pleasing and a joy to use.

<comment><USER12> I can't use the Magic Mouse because it doesn't fit my human-sized man-hand: it has no palm support. And this strikes me as odd because how it looks should be extremely secondary: the only way to effectively use a mouse is to look at the screen not at the mouse, and even if you were to look at it, your hand is covering it up.

For those reasons, I find it neither aesthetically pleasing nor a joy to use. It's unfortunate that aesthetics have been merely associated with how something _looks when it's just sitting there_ and doesn't take into account a pragmatic, active angle (not saying that that's how you associate aesthetics, brianwillis).

<comment><USER13> It has no palm support because you're not supposed to put your palm on it -- it's meant to be held by the thumb and pinkie at the sides (like the pilloried hockey-puck mouse).

If it was shaped to rest your palm on it, you wouldn't be able to use any of the multitouch features without fully removing your hand first.

<comment><USER12> And I think that may be part of the problem: I didn't find that to be a comfortable position to use the mouse even for short periods of time, having to hold my fingers and palm up and not having a resting, but still moving the mouse, position. I found it extremely hard to get fine control of positioning while clicking, I'd always end up moving the mouse slightly while clicking (incidentally, I have similar issues with the touchpad on the MacBook Pro).

<comment><USER14> Lots of people do use a mouse like this, however: <http://www2.razerzone.com/MouseGuide/html/advantages.php>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15>
      "... but I've had fun trying out FaceTime with a few iPhone 4-enabled friends"

This sentence is absolutely delicious to my mind, specifically the use of the word "enabled". It's as if to own a device was to somehow be an upgrade for one's person.

Is this how we've really all come to think of devices now? Are they extensions of our bodies? A whole raft of questions has drifted to the shores of my mind.

<comment><USER16> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000R3PJ74/>

<http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/clark/clark_index.html>

<comment> saint-loup David Chalmers, in his preface of Clark's Supersizing the Mind :

"A month ago, I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory, storing phone numbers and addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires: I call up a memo with the names of my favorite dishes when I need to order at a local restaurant. I use it to calculate, when I need to figure out bills and tips. It is a tre- mendous resource in an argument, with Google ever present to help settle disputes. I make plans with it, using its calendar to help deter- mine what I can and can't do in the coming months. I even daydream on the iPhone, idly calling up words and images when my concentra- tion slips. Friends joke that I should get the iPhone implanted into my brain. But if Andy Clark is right, all this would do is speed up the processing and free up my hands. The iPhone is part of my mind already."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "This is the result of a new manufacturing process Apple has pioneered. No other company gives a shit about things like this."

Samsung is doing this for their new displays. And they were out before the iPhone 4 was even announced. But, to Gruber, if it's not Apple, it's automatically crap. No sense acknowledging its existence.

<comment><USER18> I might be mistaken, but I believe he's referring specifically to bonding the LCD display to a capacitive piece of glass, rather than just regular protective plastic.

(Does Samsung use glass in their displays? They all look plastic to me.)

<comment><USER19> No, it's not glass vs. plastic he's talking about (and yes Samsung Super- AMOLED screens are glass anyway). The original poster is correct, Gruber believes this reduction in layers above the screen was pioneered by Apple because they made it seem like they did in their introductory videos and thinks it unique because he neither knows nor cares about things happening outside the sphere of Apple. He doesn't even just say that it doesn't exist (which is of course not true), he says it _couldn't_ exist outside Apple because no-one else cares.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _The new volume buttons, silence toggle, and power button all have a better feel than ever before._

No way. The buttons feel cheap compared to the 3GS. The silence toggle is a piece of shit. And I preferred the volume up/down as one button.

<comment><USER21> I've only played with them at the Apple Store, but the iPhone4 silence switch seemed a lot better than the ones on my original 2G and current 3GS. My 2G switch was so flimsy that it would toggle on and off in my pocket from idle friction, while the 3GS one was stiff to the point where I needed both hands to reliably move it.

<comment><USER22> I do like the feel and design of the 3G model better (much easier to tell if it's silenced in your pocket), but on multiple occasions, the switch on my 3GS has switched from silenced to not. The new one seems a lot less prone to that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To a lot of you criticizing how in love with Apple he is... well it's not like Gruber hides being pro Apple, or that him taking sides on a personally owned blogged makes him a bad source of information and observations.

How biased he is can certainly be borderline infuriating at times but I don't know any other blogger right now that writes about Apple and consistently makes observations that weren't obvious to make. He also has a compelling talent for seeing the big picture and making pieces of the puzzle fit.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am sure he wouldn't have downplayed the 'signal' issue if it was an issue with an Android phone.

<comment><USER25> Downplayed? In what respect?

<comment><USER26> He tries to emphasize that it happens in only "marginal strength areas" (see also this other post: [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/29/gaywood- signal-i...](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/06/29/gaywood-signal-issue) ) but iPhone 4s displaying 'full bars' have been shown to suffer the problem (e.g. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNmXrVNeGzs> )

<comment><USER27> Without knowing more concrete information either way it's irresponsible to go too far in either direction.

<comment><USER28> I think the OPs point is that if this had been an issue with an Android phone Gruber would have jumped all over it as an example of how the phone manufacturer doesn't pay attention to detail and gets the simple things wrong.

I tend to agree on that criticism of Gruber but it isn't really worth pointing out. Everyone here already knows he is very biased and it is reflected in his writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm a little upset that this is called "IPhone 4". It is part of the story, in fact, a very telling part of his narrative that he merely titled it "4".

</comment><comment><USER30> My favorite line:

 _"No other company gives a shit about things like this."_

...pretty much sums up the major difference between Apple and every other electronics company, perhaps with the exception of litl.

</comment><comment><USER31> _A love letter to Dieter Rams_

Except its less durable and the unsymmetrical breaks in the steel band take away from its clean, minimal aesthetic. The band's function as an antenna is compromised by conductive fingers.

I normally would not be so critical, and I do not know I have designed it better... but when you gush like this for Ram's style of functional industrial design, the criticism is a comin'. The 27" iMac I'm writing this on however, may be the truest object to Ram's style that exists.

FYI Dieter Ram's 10 principles of good design:

Good design is innovative

Good design makes a product useful

Good design is aesthetic

Good design makes a product understandable

Good design is unobtrusive

Good design is honest

Good design is long-lasting

Good design is thorough down to the last detail

Good design is environmentally friendly

Good design is as little design as possible

</comment><comment><USER32> Is it only me who finds the flat sides and glass back "aesthetically" unpleasing... The 3GS looks a tad better to me than the 4 (ofcourse they aren't deal breakers, but wanted to know since Gruber seem to like them)

<comment><USER4> I agree, the 4 looks like a step back. Maybe to a 70s type of design. Looks cludgy to me.

<comment><USER3> I have to disagree. Nothing about the design harkens back to the 70's, except for maybe the earliest increases in adoption of minimalism. Maybe.

If you line this up next to their current line of products it fits right in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> OMG Gruber loved the new iPhone! Who would have guessed?

<comment><USER34> While I sympathize with your feelings on the matter, there's no need to be snarky about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> my favorite point:

"I think Apple is going to be able to get the price on such an iPod Touch below $200 before Cisco is going to create iMovie-like editing software for the Flip."

</comment><comment><USER36> He talks about how awesome audio and video quality on Facetime is. Yet, these are supposedly just SIP and H.264/AAC, or am I missing something there? Does Apple add some magic juice to these open protocols/codecs?

<comment><USER37> He's speaking of the call quality compared to a standard voice call.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I for one am getting tired of all this undeserved attention to things that don't make a difference in anybody's lives. This iphone doesn't make anybody more productive, more empowered, more effective, less frustrated. It doesn't free up time for anybody and doesn't do anything new.

In fact, I just wrote the complete opposite of Gruber article: a comparison of the GREAT things that are unique to iPhone and to Android for startups trying to get something done.

[http://www.ringio.com/2010/06/29/iphone-vs-android- getting-o...](http://www.ringio.com/2010/06/29/iphone-vs-android-getting-over- the-hype/)

<comment><USER39> Blogging about the hype only constitutes more hype. Your actions are at odds with your intent.

<comment><USER38> Pohl... I didn't blog about the hype. I wrote about real differences that make a user's life better.

For example: I said that Android's turn-by-turn navigation will lower the chances of you getting lost on the way to the airport.

Or that the pictures and videos you take on an iPhone will look better.

What I'm trying to get at is that a lot of these reviews (like Gruber's) focus on irrelevant or marginally relevant issues for real users.

It's great that the iPhone 4 has a hi-res display, but what is the impact?

<comment><USER39> Odd choice for a headline, then.

As it happens, nobody that I know personally cares about turn-by-turn navigation at all. I probably use that capability twice a year just for shits and giggles. A marginally better turn-by-turn implementation would have no impact for me or anyone I know, but that's because there's nothing terribly complex about navigating around my region.

It also happens that the display resolution on the latest iPhone was a major selling point for me, as I end up doing a lot of reading on my phone for the simple fact that I read a lot and it's always with me when I have those random, spare minutes throughout the day where I have nothing else to do but kill time. I just want the internet in my pocket, and not to strain my eyes.

I suspect I'm not alone in my priorities. Did you really not suspect that there are people out there who are dissimilar from you?

<comment><USER38> I guess you're saying that the article suffers from selection bias? Maybe.

But then you go on to state that "nobodody that I know" ... which is just the same kind of selection filter.

There are well over 50 million Garmin style GPS units in the market offering turn-by-turn navigation. While you may not have a need for them, they are providing widely adopted functionality, and since Android is the first mobile platform doing this, it is potentially disruptive.

Is the higher resolution display of the iPhone 4 disruptive, or an enhancement?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I find the hardware to be very delightful, in most respects, and I appreciate the thought and efforts that Apple puts into creating a unified software/hardware 'product solution' even if I disagree violently with some of the philosophical assumptions baked into that in both physical form (hold it differently, buy a case!) and software (you'll like the software we offer you, and we know best what you might want!).

All that aside... I can't say I really enjoy reading daring fireball, for many of the same reasons eloquently described in this thread. Substance (of a sort), but without soul.

</comment><comment><USER41> _> No other company gives a shit about things like this._

There was a time where I really liked John's articles. Now he's sounding like just another fanboy...

<comment><USER42> But he's right, can you name another tech firm that cares as much about these things?

I remember reading something a while back about how much time Apple spent on getting the angle (directon) of the mouse pointer right on the original Mac.

<comment><USER41> It's not about _what_ he says but more about _how_ he says it. I'd rather read something like _"Other companies don't take these things seriously"_ than _"No other company gives a shit about things like this."_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The screen is stunning. I found it annoying that Apple released the Ipad but a month before without it. It seems they could have pulled that one easy, but i guess we will see this in Ipad2, its fair business, but still kind of a dick move in my mind, I am glad i didn't get the ipad yet. I can wait for the retina enabled one.

I am not an Iphone user, but I held friends 3gs and the 4 to compare, and found the smooth block disconcerting, it was harder to cup the phone, and introduced a mild strain on the fingers, it felt slippery, prone to fall out of my hands if i am not too careful, which is often the case when i pick my cell. I suspect that I would have got used to it had I handled one for a longer period of time , but I have to ask, why should I?

The design strikes me as beautiful (the most elegant mobile phone design i have seen to date) But I also think that the design choices Apple imposes, exclude a good number of people physically,(minor discomfort for me, due to a hand injury) some people prefer physical keyboards because of the physical capabilities of their hands,why not make a version for them? Not to mention the great benefit IOS4 and apps can give people working in more physically hazardous environments that are missed by not having a little more variance in industrial design choices.

Its pretty much agreed by both people who dislike and people who love apple, that Apple is not looking to fulfill every niche of the market, it is a source of contention or pride, depending on where your sentiments are.

I am too much of a tinkerer to use an Iphone, i feel it restricts me. Indeed, Apple products, restrictions and other idiosyncrasies drive me mad, and so i don't use them.

I do recognize that these are issues of personal preference, and by most measures i am not the hypothetical "normal person" that always appears in most Apple reviews.

So I fully recognize the genius behind the design, it is elegant and beautiful, without peer in the industry (for shame) and it is also true that the "just works" cannot be overstated. It is simply of no personal concern to me, because i take pride in making things work on my own, and rather enjoy it, as i mentioned... tinkerer

But I would have bought my mom one without thinking twice about it, ware it not for the limited physical options, she cant handle it in her age with her hands, this exclusivity by Apple is a pity, and in that sense it is a bad design choice, I suspect elderly people, factory workers, or people that need to work with gloves would love to have a phone that indeed "just works". this exclusion is something I always found to be the chink in apples design ethos, imagine an apple designed product specifically tailored to the elderly, or an Apple designed tough industrial strength laptop or Ipad.

<comment><USER44> There is a world of difference between getting acceptable manufacturing yields on a 300ppi+ iPhone-sized screen and a similarly-dense iPad-sized screen.

<comment><USER43> I am sure there is,but can it be done? If it is possible, then its inevitable future design iteration, and worth the wait, because i suspect it will come soon, or am I wrong?

<comment><USER45> I don't think he's questioning the "inevitable future design iteration", but rather the characterization of withholding such a screen from iPad 1.0 as a "dick move".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> One has to read Gruber's review and Ars Technica's review of the iPhone 4 to see the difference between a fan boy and a level-headed writer.

Before I clicked the link I bet myself I would not see a single criticism and Gruber was predictable in his praise. The iPhone 4 is perfect, like every other piece of anything Apple puts out. _yawn_

<comment><USER47> _Before I clicked the link I bet myself I would not see a single criticism and Gruber was predictable in his praise._

So you just skipped the parts where he brought up criticisms and pointed out things he thinks are missing and speculated on ways Apple could resolve them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Re: the speed test video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGu4h1vP3qM>

I count it as 7, 14, 28 seconds for 4, 3GS, 3G - seems like x2 per generation to me.

</comment><comment><USER49> Not sure why ppl continue reading his completely biased crap.

<comment><USER3> It's a positive, thorough review by someone who develops on the Apple platform. Do you comment on Silverlight developers glowing posts as well? Or do you just dislike it when Apple developers do it?

<comment><USER2> What has Gruber developed for Apple, exactly? His "projects" page shows _nothing_ Apple-related: <http://daringfireball.net/projects/>

<comment><USER13> What? Every single one of those is Apple-related -- one is a low-level review of differences in 10.4, and all the rest were originally written as itch- scratching extensions for BBEdit, which is an ancient Mac-only commercial text editor, and his last day job was for the company that produced it as some sort of tech-support / help-writer.

<comment><USER2> I would say that they are _BBEdit_ -specific, except for the review of differences on Tiger. That's only tangentially related to Apple. It's not like he wrote something _for_ the iPhone and/or Mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Enough

</comment><comment><USER51> Even though this is the Haus of Gruber (why, exactly, does everything he post get FPd here? Confirmation bias, perhaps?), I'll take my downvote suffering-

>In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone

Except multitasking in apps. Actually, scratch that, except apps altogether. Two major shifts in direction.

Of course Gruber led into that talking about hardware. There you can look at the fact that the iPhone pre-4 had a worst-in-class DPI, but now with the 4 it's all about the Retina display. DPI is suddenly where everything is.

The original iPhones were about feminine curves. The new iPhone is about kick- you-in-the-face masculine squares.

And then the front-facing camera (a common complaint on the original iPhone). The volume buttons. And on and on. Original perfection indeed.

The iPhone 4 is a brilliant phone. I'm morally against Apple's dominance of mobile, yet it's hard to gather the strength to argue when a friend talks about possibly getting an iPhone 4: It's a hard choice to argue with.

Yet Gruber's salacious, disturbing love of all things Apple; his automatic justification of everything Apple does; is very tough to stomach.

As a somewhat unrelated aside, one thing that really strikes me about the iPhone is the large amount of wasted space. It's interesting seeing it near >=4" phones and they barely eclipse the iPhone in size, the huge bezel (esp. on the bottom) of the iPhone making a small screen in a large phone.

<comment><USER27> His quote makes a lot more sense in context:

* In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone. There are no new buttons, or even moved buttons. The Retina Display is emblematic of the iPhone 4 as a whole, both hardware and software: the same fundamental idea as the original iPhone, but clarified. It hasn't really changed so much as improved — like the same picture in increasingly sharper focus.*

Insofar as the automatic justification how does that explain his questions on the durability of the glass back? Missing italics which he urges people to bring to Apple's attention? His statement that the antenna issue is, worse case, a fatal design flaw? Seems like you're kind of spinning the article a bit to me by omission.

<comment><USER52> The only part of his comments that really amounts to negative criticism is about the glass back.

He isn't hard on Apple about the missing italic face in the same way he is about e.g. Microsoft's errors (he basically treats it as a regression for Apple to fix), and it's a gross distortion to characterize his verdict on the antenna as "This could be a fatal design flaw." Almost every mention of the antenna issue is cushioned with soothing positivity. He repeatedly states his belief that reception only drops when your reception is lousy to begin with, and overall he seems to think it's likely that the issue will be helped by a software patch, or maybe a small hardware fix. The "fatal design flaw" angle is brought up very briefly, immediately said to be unlikely, and then further softened by reiterating his belief that the issue doesn't affect your reception that much anyway.

I mean, I like Gruber. He's a good writer and has a lot of interesting insights and I actually value his opinion, but you'd have to be stark raving mad to read his blog and think, "Wow, this guy is kind of hard on Apple."

<comment><USER53> To put my two cents in on the antenna issue, I believe that Gruber is just saying it how it is in this case. I have an iPhone 4, and nearly everyone that sees it asks me about reception issues. I've talked on it for a total of probably 4 hours now, in various locations with various signal strength and have had no issues with dropped calls or reduced reception of any sort. During many of the longer calls, I've tried holding the phone upside down, bridging all the metal gaps, left handed, right handed, etc... and it made no difference.

So call him "optimistic" in his analysis, but if his experience is anything like mine, he is right to be wary of all the reports of the "death grip" as much as I am.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I haven't read the story yet... but I'm going to guess: he likes it!

<comment><USER55> No prize for guessing that. Everybody "guessed" it correctly. :P</comment></comment>


Microsoft release anti-Chrome parody advert - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-Cr6AgUo764

<comment><USER2> A) Chrome doesn't follow you, that's crap. If you use Google Services, those services are integrated in well-known ways. But to extend that all the way to Chrome, that's just completely false.

B) [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing- uses-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google- search.html)</comment>