Simplified Sign-Up and Log-In Flows - <AUTHOR> http://sachagreif.com/simplified-sign-up-and-log-in/ <comment><USER2> There's also the Stack Overflow method for first-time users: no sign-up at all. Let them use the site anonymously but fully, and register at their leisure. I'm using that for a current project.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's actually a very powerful "feature". I tried that approach for a simple app I wrote:

<http://scribble.wreally.com/>

It works totally offline, and if and when you are ready to sync, it takes the locally stored stuff online. For bonus points, it continues to work offline too! :)

Scribble users totally love it. BUT - it really increases the amount of effort and complexity involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Bagcheck example exposes the presence of an account - that can't be best- practise for security I would have thought.

<comment><USER5> "Those options correspond to however you've authenticated with the site in the past. In my case choosing "Twitter" redirects me to Twitter for the standard auth dialog, and picking "Bagcheck" displays a standard password field."

<comment><USER4> Right, but by typing a few characters I can establish if a user has an account or not, for a subsequent attack.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3059759> (top comment thread)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3156841>

<comment><AUTHOR> But how is that different from Googling "site:bagcheck.com John Smith"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "... tell them their password is waiting for them in their inbox."

Nope. That email should contain a link to password _creation_.

<comment><USER7> I really dislike this sentiment.

97%+ of people don't care about passwords being sent in plain text over email for non-banking sites. Or for accounts that have no info until you populate them.

The other 3% can just log in and CHANGE the password after-the-fact.

I'd rather not inconvenience the majority of my signups, nor force my ideas on how things should work on them.

<comment><USER6> And what percentage would – like me – delete their account as soon as you send them a plaintext temp password?

You're living in the past if you think this is an acceptable practice. I don't care how trivial your web service is, if you're throwing my password around willy-nilly, I don't want you.

<comment><USER8> It's unacceptable to transmit in plain-text a password that the _user_ specified.

But if it's a randomly-generated new nonce, seems OK as a pragmatic middle- ground. Folks like us, who care, will log in and change it.

<comment><USER6> Probably a draw, as you say, since someone could get ahold of an authenticated link in your email, too.

<comment><USER9> But usually, those links expire, or are only able to be used once. So the password the user creates is secure, and the period the attacker can use the captured link is only from the time the user requests the password reset until the time the user tries to use the reset, it doesn't work, and the user requests another reset.

When a user is sent a password via email, unless that user is required to change eir password upon entering it, it is inherently less secure than sending a link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another one for the list is a project of mine, YourPane: <http://www.yourpane.com>

To sign up/in, you just enter your email and get a permanent signin token which you can use to log in whenever you like. You can also change this if it gets compromised.

These days, though, I prefer BrowserID.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm really hoping that BrowserID takes away a lot of these issues and streamlines the process of logging in to sites.

<comment><USER12> Was it that Mozilla thing? Vaguely recall seeing a video about it.

Nevermind, found it. [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-browserid-and- how-...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-browserid-and-how-does-it- work) True to multi-tasking, I left my previously typed comments in still, hah!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use the following simplified signup procedure:

1) User is asked to enter his email address 2) User is immediately logged in, and a generated password is sent to his email adress

The generated password is short and pronounceable, lower case only and avoids annoying characters like l, I, 1 etc. While most security experts would consider this password extremely insecure, it is in practice much more secure than any other password the user would choose because the user can't choose the same password he usually chooses. If my server becomes compromised, there's no risk to his other online accounts.

This approach might not be sufficient for a banking site, but it's probably enough to deter occasional mischief.

<comment><USER14> As a user I would like this flow, but as the site owner I worry about people misspelling their e-mail address. They would then proceed to do things under the account, but once their login expires they could never get back.

<comment><USER15> Show them the email in nice, big, centered letters after they sign up and let them edit it. I think it was Luke Wroblewski who said this approach reduces misspellings to a ridiculously low number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know what I would love? A strong generator for the password field. My browser remembers all my password but I still have to generate a strong one by myself, which is completely unnecessary. I don't even have to see it; in worst case, I will simply request a password reset.

<comment><USER16> I'm using LastPass for this, you can specify how strong your unique generated password should be and it stores it for you.

There are other similar ones like this also.

<comment><USER17> Always amazed when I hear people use services like LastPass. Your password. In someone else's database.

I'm not saying LastPass (or any similar service) is bad. I am however amused at the anger we display when the likes of Path upload our contacts without our knowledge, while we voluntarily give our most sensitive data (passwords, and the locations they're used at) to a third party to manage.

<comment><USER15> I don't use LastPass, but:

1) Using LastPAss doesn't mean one stores sensitive passwords in it. You can memorize a few that really matter (email, bank, etc) and keep the rest there.

2) They claim it's secure:

        This is important because your sensitive data is always
        encrypted and decrypted locally on your computer before
        being synchronized. Your master password never leaves
        your computer and your key never leaves your computer.
        No one at LastPass (or anywhere else) can decrypt your
        data without you giving up your password (we will never
        ask you for it).

[https://lastpass.com/support.php?cmd=showfaq&id=1096](https://lastpass.com/support.php?cmd=showfaq&id=1096)

<comment><USER18> I use LastPass with the 2 factor-authentication. It doesn't have my email password in it (which also requires 2-factor authentication).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Funny that Bagcheck is listed as a "good" example.

I was just commenting to someone as to how confusing that site is. There's a box next to the "JOIN" / "SIGN IN" words in the upper right, that is positioned next to those words (as if those words are the label for the text box).

So you start to key in your name, to join, and a bunch of choices are displayed. If you select one (even your own), you are whisked away to another page that isn't even the join / sign in part of the site. You are no closer to being signed in than you were before. And actually further than if you had clicked on the label for the text box that says "sign in" (which is actually a button or a link, although not identified as such, unless you happen to mouse over it).

Ends up the "join / sign in" text box is actually a SEARCH text box.

yeah, real simplified. Put the word "search" in there. geesh.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you focus only on the sign in flow (and not the rest of the site), it's still a very innovative concept.

<comment><USER20> Innovation for the sake of innovation is no good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Two years ago we (UserVoice) removed the need for end-users to sign up or register. When submitting an idea, voting or commenting, they simply identify themselves with their email address – much like commenting on most blogs. This eliminated one of the biggest barriers for user participation: registration.

Later, if they want, users can confirm their address and add a password. This is optional, unless the user is an account administrator or is trying to access private content (in which case we do require to confirm and protect their identity for security reasons).

We also allow people to sign in with their Facebook or Google identity. Since those services return a verified email address, we can reconcile it with an existing user record if one exists. This eliminates another barrier for returning user participation: "Which 3rd party service did I sign up with last time?" and "If I choose the wrong service, will I accidentally create a separate user profile?"

Even if the user forgets, they can simply enter their email address and, if it's protected with a password or FB/Google authentication, we prompt them with the correct method to use (while unprotected users don't need to authenticate at all).

Lastly, we removed the need to sign-in (or sign-up) _before_ participating on the site. By asking users to identify themselves at the moment they want to participate and not requiring a registration process, participation is just as easy as leaving a comment on a blog. This, along with not requiring registration, eliminates the issue where new and returning users were interrupted by a sign-in/registration process in the middle of their existing workflow.

One thing worth noting is that this isn't a one-size-fits-all solution for all online services. It works great for UserVoice and our customers since most users aren't performing private or sensitive tasks.

I'm very excited to see more services focussing on creating great experiences when identifying new and returning users, and questioning whether common pre- conceived notions around these requirements are still necessary.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you want someone to pay for your service, put them through checkout first, __then __ask to choose a password.

</comment><comment><USER23> Eh, the user still has to go check their email to find whatever password has been assigned. That's an annoying step.

With the second example, I think it would be better to show both Facebook and Twitter logins. If the user authenticates with the wrong service, perhaps show a prompt encouraging them to authenticate with their other provider (Facebook or Twitter). Then you have both accounts authenticated and linked.

Still, in the grand scheme, all these signup and login schemes suck. Surely we can develop something better... ideas?

</comment><comment><USER24> BagCheck is more of a good concept of a simplified login, but the implementation drops the ball.

I've looked into registration/sign up flows for a project a while ago, and I find it hard to group Pinterest invites into the "sign up" flow. Ultimately, Pinterest users still have to complete a registration flow once they receive an invite.

I think it's pretty difficult to break from some established webform design (lukew's book was pretty good regarding web form design, but it's a bit old now) for registration.

I may be splitting hairs, but I ultimately consider some of the onboarding steps used to increase conversions part of a broader "conversions" flow with the "sign up" flow within that. Pinterest may increase conversions and give an illusion of simplicity, but the actua registration flow is hardly simplified by adding the invite step.

</comment><comment><USER25> Authentication on most of the web is directly connected with an email address.

If you have access to an account's email, then you can have access to the account.

Since most people have their email always open, or at least a click or two away from being open, why not skip the password creation altogether?

Users are presented with an email field and a button saying something like, "Send me a key to login".

An email is sent that contains a direct login link with a temporary token. Login tokens would quickly expire, but cookies could keep the user logged in to the site for extended periods of time.

This would be as secure as any password reset system, without having to go through the hassle of setting and remembering a password. It also prevents users from creating week passwords or using the same password across many sites.

<comment><USER26> While I see that is solves some issues I actually know few non-tech web users that keep their email constantly open. Implementing this would also remove the convenience of password saving tools.

Also, if all you need is an email to log in, if my email is compromised I have little to no indication that the offender has logged into that service if they delete the email. With the current web standards, if someone reset my password vie email I would no longer be able to log into the account. With your suggestion, my email could be compromised, services could be logged into and I would have no indication.

Some of these problems could be solved, but I'd say the biggest problem now is that it's very far removed from typical web standards.

<comment><USER25> Good points, especially about no longer being able to log into the account with old password because of a forced password change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> FWIW, until reading this article, I never thought one could just sign up for a Pinterest account randomly, so I never did. I had wanted to use the site, wanted to get an account, but was like "Request an Invitation?... bah, maybe I'll come back later".

</comment><comment><USER28> "Enter your name" reveals part of your user database to me?

I will never, ever, use your website Bagcheck.

<comment><USER29> I believe (based on the article, not first hand knowledge) that it reveals the contents of your browser's cookies, not the database.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it does reveal the database as far as I know. But again, it's a completely public site.

<comment><USER18> But one can get a list of usernames from this site. One can then see which passwords are on a known password list, and then one has a list of usernames and passwords to try against other services. Bagcheck doesn't seem to have a limit of the number of attempts you get to type the correct password, either, so one can run a full dictionary attack on the passwords too.

There's a reason no-one else does login like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Seems like Google Identity Toolkit addresses these problems and offers a viable solution. It's what I'm planning to use at our startup.

<http://code.google.com/apis/identitytoolkit/>

<http://accountchooser.com/>

example use: <http://www.openidsamplestore.com/basic/>

<comment><USER17> It definitely does address some of these problems, but raises others.

First and foremost is denial of service. If the identity toolkit goes, so does access to everything it issues tokens for.

To be absolutely fair, I've not used the toolkit so don't know whether I could use a Hotmail account when my Gmail account is inaccesible.

A business risk you take on is reliance on their T&Cs. It may (or not) be worthwhile planning a mitigation or contingency, depending on the value of your service.

The other part is that anything from Google is, by way of Google's business model, spyware. This is my (note: very personal) preference, but I don't use any Google products, services, or products or services that make use of anything from Google.

<comment><USER30> Having spoken to the product manager at google, I got the following response:

While there is no service level agreement (SLA) for the Google Identity Toolkit, Google itself uses the same infrastructure as GITKit to support federated login for Google accounts. Google users can even opt-in to use an Account Chooser in place of the traditional Google login box.

[https://code.google.com/apis/identitytoolkit/v1/learnmore.ht...](https://code.google.com/apis/identitytoolkit/v1/learnmore.html)

<comment><USER17> Sorry for the delayed reply. When I mentioned T&Cs I meant the risk that the provider you use changes the terms and conditions some time after you've deployed and have an established user base that relies on the provider's service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is everyone ok with the password being mailed out in plain text? (as one of these flows does, and Hacker News does itself)

Even if doing this on password creation doesnt imply that the passwords are stored plaintext, by emailing out the password, it can be sniffed over wifi or unsegmented wired networks, or read on intermediate servers, in your caches, in your backups, etc. Fairly low-hanging fruit.

<comment><USER32> We wrote a service for sending out one-time URIs instead of the value itself:

<https://onetimesecret.com/>

<comment><USER33> Same idea (one-time URI) but with client-side encryption and sender's email notification (including IP & geolocation of receiver): <https://whisperpassword.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> We should stop being cute. There's no need to create new authentication schemes. Just stick with username, password, email, what's wrong with that? It's worked for us for so many years. Pinterest really isn't creating a new login scheme though, but BagCheck's is really adding unnecessary confusion in the marketplace.

<comment><USER35> Hell no it hasn't. Passwords are useful when you need one or two at most. On the nets you need one for each service you use and you have to remember it. Also you have to choose your username, which you have to remember too.

This scheme puts a lot less requirements on the users, since they only have to remember their email, which is public, non-secret and (presumably) easy to remember.

<comment><USER34> Why do you need 1 for each service you use?

I just use 1 common password for every non-critical service and I make that password different from my email password. I stick with the same username as well.

I use 1 separate password for my critical services, and store it in EverNote, and I just copy/paste it when I log-in.

It's not such a huge pain. We as tech people always tend to over-abstract solutions to problems. But it has worked for the most part for 10+ years. Ask any regular internet user and they will tell you it's not a big deal. It's only when we invent new ways of logging in like FB Connect, when users start getting angry and spoiled, asking us "Where's FB connect?!".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Here's the question I have for Bagcheck: what happens when people have the same name? Since these are human names and not unique usernames, you're bound to get collisions. Are you relying on users identifying themselves from a tiny profile image? If anyone has an idea about how to solve that case, or if my assumptions are incorrect, please enlighten me.</comment>


Microsoft Planner - k-mcgrady https://blogs.office.com/2016/06/06/microsoft-planner-ready-for-showtime/ <comment><AUTHOR> We've been using the preview for a few weeks, and while it's nice to have an in-built option for lightweight planning, Planner still pretty rough around the edges.

It's missing features one might expect from something tied into 365 (of course subjective):

1\. Weak outlook integration (e.g., can't send a card as a task, email, or calendar invite)

2\. Weak sharepoint integration (e.g., can't browse for links to attachments). It supports onedrive, but just for the logged in user.

3\. Limited (read: one) reporting or charting options. Maybe Gantts are a bridge too far, but there are many useful visualizations beyond who has outstanding tasks.

4\. Can't move cards to new boards (just new buckets)

5\. Can't clone/copy cards

And it's just plain buggy:

1\. Many links aren't actually links, but rather click handlers on divs, breaking common UI like "right-click, open in new tab".

2\. Icons and previews have busted caching behavior, whereby "correct" icons show for a while (sometimes seconds) before being replaced with old versions

3\. Cards will duplicate or disappear while editing, usually fixed with a refresh

4\. and cetera.

There's potential for new features leveraging the 365 ecosystem, but its as yet unrealized, and it has a long way to go before matching its most obvious competitors in polish (UI and code quality, not necessarily style).

<comment><USER2> By the way, how strange is it to use the term "bucket" every day? All Kanban- inspired applications use the term "board" I thought

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks like they remade Trello. It also seems to have a certain "sterileness" to it, or perhaps classiness; I can't tell. The colors look good though and product brand looks good.

I hope they have some cool new features that inspire competition and improvements from Trello. Competition is always good if it makes Trello better!

But since I don't like where Microsoft is going with their privacy and advertising policies, I probably won't use this.

<comment><USER4> Good luck competing with free.

<comment><USER5> But it does compete with free. It's included in all of the office 365 business and enterprise subscriptions. So this is effectively free to a large set of business customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "With Planner, we improved collaboration by about 20 percent..." The units aren't mentioned, so I'm assuming it's the just standard units (collabotrons)

<comment><USER7> Man, that quote jumped out at me instead. You'd think they could apply some rigor and add a few decimal places rather than saying "about". Or that perhaps the marketing manager who wrote the release would realize how stupid that quote sounds.

<comment><USER8> Precision isn't the same as accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The "board" screenshot looks suspiciously similar to Trello. I wonder how much they aped its design for this?

<comment><USER10> it is true but both trello and this app is based on Kanban, which tons of other productivity tools like Jira implement so I guess it can't be blamed too much

<comment><USER11> There's 'cards in columns' and then there's cards with images, owners, checklists and due dates on them.

<comment><USER4> Ya .... its Trello.

<comment><USER12> No, it's literally every kanban software - ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Microsoft is trying to deliver the entire white collar productivity experience and I have to say I appreciate the vision but I hope a closed platform and single value chain doesn't win this battle.

There's little bits of Trello (the main Planner functionality), Google Drive (MSFT competitor Office365), and Slack (auto notifications).

I want the diverse value chain to thrive to increase innovation and extensibility on each link in the space.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure what you want Microsoft to do in that case. When a new product (Trello, Slack) appears and it turns out tons of workers and enterprises like it, Microsoft has 3 options:

1\. Ignore it, and hope it turns out to be a fad.

2\. Buy them and rebrand it

3\. Try to launch their own competitor version

1 isn't really an option, and between 2 and 3, I'd rather Microsoft did 3, so we can have more competition. The fact that it's a closed platform and tied in to all their services is just kind of unavoidable; it would be kind of silly of them to launch a new product and _not_ tie it in to O365.

<comment><USER15> There is a fourth choice, not mutually exclusive with 3: offer integration between their services and the other tools. They're doing this with Dropbox to an extent, for instance, while still competing with Dropbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Based on the video on the page, looks like Microsoft Trello with Office 365 file sharing integration. More tools for basic project tracking... and I just can't wait to meet clients who will use this instead of (heavier) TFS/Visual Studio Online for the same purpose, complicating work of our teams even more (I work at an offshore software house). Duh.

<comment><USER17> Someone who feels my pain! Nothing like going into a client meeting and being called old-school (I'm 26!) for using Redmine and pushed to use Trello. I work at an offshore/onshore shop as well, and getting our dev teams set up in client systems (that usually have user limits because the client uses the free version) is a huge pain in the arse.

<comment><USER18> Welcome to market fragmentation; the price we pay for... competition, I guess! :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not entirely related, but I'm getting an ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID on Chrome for Android but not Chrome or Firefox on Windows. Same SHA256 reported in all three browsers. The certificate was issued on May 4th, did Microsoft recently change their SSL certificate chain?

<comment><USER20> Certificate issuer "Microsoft IT SSL SHA2" is via Baltimore CyberTrust Root [1], which exists in Firefox's CA store, as well as /etc/ssl/certs. It also exists in Android (Settings -> Security -> Trusted Credentials). So, I'm not sure where Chrome-on-Android looks for certs.

[1] [https://ssl- tools.net/subjects/26102266b387fb8b911bc6d37b35b...](https://ssl- tools.net/subjects/26102266b387fb8b911bc6d37b35bcd0081c0074)

Indeed SSL checker[2] says that "this certificate is not trusted by all browsers". Intermediate cert probably missing.

[2] [https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl- checker.html#hostname=blogs.o...](https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl- checker.html#hostname=blogs.office.com)

<comment> iso-8859-1 Intermediate cert definitely missing: [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blogs.office....](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=blogs.office.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is anyone using gantt[1] charts? I've been using them for product planning for years. I know the kanban style planners are all the rage but I like the proceduralness of having the entire project laid out in front of me.

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

<comment> UK-AL Gnantt charts force you to plan the entire thing up front.

That's at odds with the more agile way people develop software today.

Plus they almost never match up to reality. Good for planning the sequence of things, but don't expect them to be accurate over the long term.

<comment><USER22> Agreed although we typically ensure we have plenty of tasks in parallel so one missed item doesn't throw off the whole schedule. Our Gantt charts are therefore ugly. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> The video shows planning, execution and monitoring/reporting of a project, yet the application is called "Planner"? :)

<comment><USER23> Probably, because name Project was already taken by someone

<comment><USER24> It's taken by another Microsoft product.

<comment><USER25> I believe that was the joke...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Immediately, I noticed the usage of doughnut charts to display project status. Suboptimal visualisations significantly impede the adoption/market differentiation of task and project management solutions and hamper their usability, once adopted. I thought about what I might want in such an 'at a glance' widget.

TL;DR: [https://i.imgur.com/hFpftp7.png](https://i.imgur.com/hFpftp7.png)

I suggest a vertical stream chart with a top legend (keeping the legend to one line, abbreviating the status labels to save horizontal space if needed but expanding them on mouse-over). In order to emphasise the present status, a stacked horizontal bar chart placed immediately before the stream chart but after the legend emphasises the current state. The inclusion of a stream graph along with a stacked horizontal chart maintains the square overall shape of the widget and the design's present temporal focus. Colour variations can use the second dimension to represent changes in velocity on a per category basis further increasing the information economy of the design, without cluttering its appearance.

However, usage of space in the suggested design is much improved. In using the same quantity of space as the presented widget, the presented design communicates the current state, as well as, a large chunk of the projects history with an emphasis on the near past.

Increasing the interactivity of the visualisation is a natural thought. Such additions might include a contextual (mouse over or fade discover) highlight on the chart (milestones/releases, key dates). Perhaps a forecast feature allowing you to mouse over the chart and using the (mouse wheel nudge or touch drag) into the future. If you (pinch zoom or mousewheel) a past area the graph could rescale to emphasise that point in time.

In short, a bit more attention to the visualisation design would yield a _much_ more substantial and powerful widget without increasing cognitive load and complexity on the user's part of the interaction. I think that, with a bit of focus, a well designed information retrieval and processing platform for project planning and management could easily differentiate itself in the marketplace even in the presence of gratis competition.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you're looking for something similar, look at Troop[1] (Slack + Trello). Seriously good workflow and execution.

[1] [https://troop.space](https://troop.space)

<comment><USER28> Execution on a mac safari is completely foobarred.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> If anyone on the Microsoft Planner team is reading this: I haven't used it yet, but did watch the video on the landing page. I'm impressed how you made solutions that will work well with both touch and nontouch screens, along with the ways users can filter and visualize their team's progress. These aren't easy challenges to overcome so effectively, and I really enjoyed seeing your solutions. Congratulations on your launch!

</comment><comment><USER30> Pardon my ignorance, but is this Windows-only, or what? I have an Office 365 subscription at work for Mac Office, but I barely ever use it. I can't figure out how to access this, so I'm assuming it's not available on Mac? It wasn't clear to me if there was a web component, or what...

<comment><USER31> It is getting phased roll out, so you should get it in few weeks. MSFT should improve its roll outs, It is getting all the PR today, but I can't access it. By the time I'll get access, would have already forgotten about it. This wastes PR effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> We use Trello business account. It is highly opinionated. It gives only one view of cards. If I want activities sorted by time, there is no filter. Cards by user view can also be improved. Graphs/Charts are also good tools for understanding and presenting the projects.

</comment><comment><USER32> [http://tasks.office.com](http://tasks.office.com)

<comment><USER33> Interestingly enough, we are using Office365 at work but "Planner" didn't show up by default; I'm guessing that someone in our organization has to opt-in to it. However, going to this link allows me to work with the new application as if it were installed in my Office365 portal. Now to check to see if I can collaborate with other people in my organization. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Looks cool.

...too bad a ton of people are going to completely write this off because of the recent goodwill-burning Microsoft has been participating in. I wonder how their internal departments feel about this?

</comment><comment><USER35> Did anybody else get the certificate error for blogs.microsoft.com?

</comment><comment><USER2> Not sure why they couldn't just create these functionalities inside Microsoft Project. (Probably because it might be harder to implement on an older code base?)

<comment><USER36> Because having Project installed is an early step in being forced to use Project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Different task grouping (e.g. by users) -- that's smart. I wish Trello could do this. Filtering via charts -- another smart feature. I like the product concept.

</comment><comment><USER38> One thing that caught my attention on the video is that people are expected to curate each of their teams. Sounds a lot like G+ circles, it's a lot to ask of users

</comment><comment><USER39> Why?

<comment><USER40> Yeah I wish they would focus on making a good OS. I guess since people have to use Windows for compatibility reasons MS doesn't care. They see the desktop market as dwindling so they're trying to get into new markets. I just wish if they were giving up on the desktop they would at least open source their closed source software to allow it to run on other platforms so people aren't forced to use a neglected OS.

<comment><USER10> Maybe you didn't get the memo but MS is not an OS company anymore (at least their top priority isn't). Everyone knows desktop platform has been commoditized by the Web--you can do pretty much anything through the web interface, and increasingly so as the computer processing powers go up.

They've been pretty clear about this new direction if you read the articles, MS is a productivity company. That's why they're building all these productivity apps on iOS and android.

<comment><USER41> Microsoft used to create compelling new upgrades: consumers wanted the new features. Now users are compelled to upgrade because they failed to or were unable to opt out.

Same word, different meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From the people who brought you Microsoft Project...</comment>


Ask HN: What are some Interesting things I can do with my location history? - <AUTHOR>

I just downloaded my location history from google, and I was wondering what are some interesting things that I can do with this data ? <comment><USER2> You could build something like the Foursquare Time Machine [https://foursquare.com/timemachine](https://foursquare.com/timemachine).</comment>


Storage strategies for collections in dynamically typed languages - <AUTHOR> http://tratt.net/laurie/research/pubs/html/bolz_diekmann_tratt__storage_strategies_for_collections_in_dynamically_typed_languages/

<comment><USER2> Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, this paper conflates dynamic typing with not being able to express anything about the types of values:

> An implicit effect of dynamic typing is that every variable, object slot, > and so on, can reference objects of arbitrary types.

This is simply untrue. It _happens_ to be true in Python and many other dynamic languages, but it by no means necessary. Dylan and Julia, for example, are both dynamically typed, yet let the programmer express that variables, fields, and collections will only contain certain types of values. That ability eliminates this whole class of problems – which tend to be the hardest problems when trying to optimized dynamic languages. If you don't have a nice type system, of course, then this kind of cleverness is absolutely necessary to get better performance. V8 in particular does this sort of thing amazingly well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some Lisp or Smalltalk guru steps in and says that they already did that in 80's in 7, 6, 5, 4, ...</comment>


V8 performance can beat C sometimes - <AUTHOR> http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=regexdna&lang=all&data=u64 <comment><USER2> This isn't V8 beating C; this is one regex library being faster than another (both written in C or C++).

<comment><USER3> No, V8's regex library is not written in C. V8 compiles its regular expressions to machine code at runtime. The availability of the compiler at runtime can be a liability for things like startup time or memory use, but can also be a key advantage in situations like regular expression parsing or packet processing.

<comment><USER4> Well it's not written in JavaScript, so as the OP said it's either C or C++.

<comment><USER3> The code that's doing the actual matching is not written in C or C++. It's an internal regex bytecode compiled directly to machine code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The code for the C implementation is incredibly verbose compared to the code for the JS implementation.

JS: [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test=regexdna&lang=v8&id=2)

C: [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test=regexdna&lang=gcc&id=1)

<comment><USER6> That's just ... absurd, in comparison at least. It uses TCL _and_ glib?!

I'll go out on a limb here and claim that this C program is not the shortest possible equivalent to the JS version.

<comment><USER7> That isn't the only C program shown :-)

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test=regexdna&lang=gcc&id=4)

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test=regexdna&lang=gcc&id=2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No this is not V8 performance beating C.

This is V8 calling a regexp library written in C++. C just happens to be using a different library that is slower.

<comment><AUTHOR> >"This is V8 calling a regexp library written in C++"

But it also beat the C++ implementation though.

<comment><USER8> I guess that re2 (the library that this C++ code is using) is slower than irregexp (the library that V8 is uses) on this benchmark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rather than argue back and forth about which regex implementation is better here, I'd simply note the absence of multicore numbers for V8 and that the crappy Tcl library beats single-threaded Javascript when run multicore.

It would be interesting, however, to compare the performance here to that of the "grep" command on the same expressions. I'd be surprised at anything short of a total smackdown of Javascript V8.

I would expect an even bigger smackdown if one invoked GPUs:

[http://bkase.github.io/CUDA- grep/finalreport.html](http://bkase.github.io/CUDA-grep/finalreport.html)

Even more interesting would be an OpenCL implementation that did exactly what V8 is doing to the regexes (Why? Because it can).

And total aside, this is why I don't participate in TopCoder competitions - they never let you have any real fun.

<comment><USER10> The idea was obviously to pick a test and environment that would make it look like V8 can beat something other than interpreted JS. Otherwise it would've been the complete package: string manipulation, numerical computation, multi- core etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I read this benchmark right: v8 regexps are faster than TCL regexps.

Hardly surprising.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also beats all the other regexps engines though.

<comment><USER12> Likely because V8 only works on platforms where JIT is possible, so the regex engine relies on JITting specialized native code for the regex. A portable C/C++ regex library can't really do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The V8 version used nearly 50% more memory than the C version. It is well known that you can often get faster execution times at the cost of increased memory usage.

<comment><USER7> More like 30%

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone else read this as "VB" as in, "Visual Basic"? Now _that_ I would bookmark :)

<comment> vezzy-fnord Yes, I got the same impression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> why is golang so much slower compared to Java ? Is it because the language is immature or because the language libraries are immature ?

<comment><USER16> Go not only uses a different library for processing regular expressions, but a different algorithm altogether. It is slower in some cases than the standard PCRE implementations but faster in others.

[http://code.google.com/p/re2/](http://code.google.com/p/re2/)

<comment><USER7> Go program using PCRE

[http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test=regexdna&lang=go&id=8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Quickly, everyone convert their C to javascript!

</comment><comment><USER18> So ruby java lua and python are all about the same?

</comment><comment><USER19> Congralutations! :-)

(And the program is IMHO clearer than the C implementation)

<comment><AUTHOR> To the V8 team and the implementer of the testing program.

Disclaimer: I had anything to do with this, I just thought it was interesting enough to post it.</comment></comment>


Toss Your Expectations Into the Ocean - <AUTHOR> http://zenhabits.net/ah/

<comment><USER3> I would like to toss the author of this paean to passivity into the ocean.

Yes, sure, clinging on to certain kinds of unrealistic expectations, in certain contexts (particularly personal relationships), can be fatal.

But this is a truism that any idiot could tell you - and in this case the post is generalized to the point of meaninglessness.

Suppose you encounter someone who is openly racist, dishonest or technically incompetent at their job, and no one is challenging him about it. Because it's bad to have expectations about public & professional behaviour, and even worse to actually impose them on others!

Here's the core message: when the world isn't how you think it should be, don't have the courage to try and change it, or to speak out about how you feel. Suppress your feelings, accept everything just the way it is, and - <USER2> as long as you yourself behave well - all the bad energy will go away!

Sounds to me like someone trying to justify being a total wimp. Like someone who's so afraid of experiencing any degree of anger or disappointment that they philosophize their way to vapidity and numbness. And I'm afraid that's my overall impression of people who embrace "zen" as a lifestyle paradigm, (rather than just a mindset for, say, a discrete programming project, for which it can work wonderfully). Zen has its place, but taken too far it becomes morally corrosive, and turns personalities to mud.

<comment><USER4> > _philosophize their way to vapidity and numbness_

I've often felt that the Buddhist "no desires" and "no mind" concepts are akin to the trivial solution in polynomials or vector math: set everything to 0!

That it's one solution does not mean there are not other, non-zero solutions.

<comment><USER5> You've fallen into the classic trap: Buddhism does not espouse nihilism (the negation of all things),

Buddhism simply asserts that what you think is your reality, isn't. That's not to say that NOTHING is real or that you don't experience something, it's to say what you put stock in is very much not worth doing so.

<comment><USER4> No. My statement was short, but that's not what I said at all. And while I'm not an expert, I've read extensively on the subject (20 books?), am actually quite familiar with and fond of eastern ways of thought, and am well aware of common misconceptions.

My main point, though, is in striving to be desire-free. (To the adept, this is an upaya, a clever means of potentially pointing out the truth, not the truth itself. However, it's an oft used one.) In the case of this article, being desire-free is translated into being expectation-free. They're the same idea to the author.

I'm not discussing what reality is here, or what it is not, but am looking at the idea that desire causes suffering. I've imagined this phrased as a set of coefficients indicating quantity for all desires in the world, i.e. x1 is how much you have desire d1:

x1 * d1 + x2 * d2 + ... = Suffering

In the classic Buddhist disciplines, one eliminates desire (whether as an end goal or upaya is up to you to decide, or more appropriately, ignore). To phrase it again as math, it's the trivial solution to the equation above:

0 * d1 + 0 * d2 + ... = No Suffering

My hypothesis is that the coefficients need not be 0 to find a non-suffering answer.

(And, in fact, I do believe that's what Buddhism teaches, or shows, eventually. But all of the above holds.)

<comment><USER6> It's a lot more complex than that. Check out Lama Yeshe's Introduction to Tantra: Transformation of Desire -- [http://www.amazon.com/Introduction- Tantra-Lama-Thubten-Yeshe...](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Tantra-Lama- Thubten-Yeshe/dp/0861711629)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is so much easier to see in other people than yourself.

For instance, I know someone who is very giving with his time and energy, but when someone fails to thank him to a degree that he thinks is proper, he gets really angry about it.

I've tried telling him not to do things with an expectation of something in return, even a 'Thank you', because it will just make him angry. He should be doing them because he wants to do them for the person.

For another example, a lady gave to charity at work every year. Then, her daughter fell on hard times and there wasn't enough money for her daughter, and her grand-daughter. She went to some of the very same organizations that she donated to for years and they all told her that she wasn't their target and they couldn't help her. She got really angry and stopped giving to charity at all.

I don't blame her, but she'd have been much less angry if she'd not expected anything.

</comment><comment><USER8> They could have elaborated on how to achieve this a bit more. At it's core, the thing which must be increased is awareness, of both yourself and the world (which, from the proper perspective, are one and the same). The concrete method is meditation, where the goal is to learn to make your mind perfectly still. In attempting to do so, one will become aware of the things which are not still, these things are attachments. Enlightenment is called the process of self-realization for this reason - when you become aware of how much of what you think you are is really not you at all, you will know your true self and transcend suffering. You will transcend it because you're not the one who's suffering in the first place. Suffering is essentially an identity crisis.

</comment><comment><USER9> Expecting less or nothing can indeed be calming, but it's not the only Way.

Rather than letting go of all expectation, simply shift your expectations as required by reality, and shift them without anger or regret. If one of your predicted expectations goes wrong, use Bayes' Theorem to adjust your probability functions until your expectations are right. If expectations turn out to be unpredictable, then we might wish to not have them. I don't think that is the case.

Here's more from the Tao Te Ching:

        The Master's power is like this.
        He lets all things come and go
        effortlessly, without desire.
        He never expects results;
        thus he is never disappointed.
        He is never disappointed;
        thus his spirit never grows old.

People focus their thoughts in the "results tank" but not in the "effort tank" or the "action tank". It's always "I want money!" not "I will learn a valuable skill and start working to use this skill." It's not that people have expectations, it's just that their expectations are often wrong and they don't adjust or take action.

<comment><USER4> The concept that verse espouses is Wu Wei. It's worth anyone's time to understand. My favorite explanations of it come from Alan Watts in Tao: The Watercourse Way [0], but Wikipedia [1] is not terrible.

The other concept indicated in the last paragraph on "results tank" not "effort tank" is _lust of result_. There aren't as many sources discussing this topic directly, but Zen in the Art of Archery [2] is good, as is Watts' Way of Zen [3].

I highly recommend them all for anyone interested in _creating_ things.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Watercourse-Way-Alan- Watts/dp/0394...](http://www.amazon.com/Tao-Watercourse-Way-Alan- Watts/dp/0394733118)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei>

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Archery-Eugen- Herrigel/dp/0375...](http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Archery-Eugen- Herrigel/dp/0375705090)

[3] <http://www.amazon.com/Way-Zen-Alan-W-Watts/dp/0375705104>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > What's a life without expectations like? It means you accept reality as it > is

Actually no.

The fact that some expectations don't match reality does not imply that there aren't any expectations that match reality.

Realistic expectations seem quite reasonable and useful.

Note that realistic doesn't have anything to do with your preferences.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can appreciate the benefits of lowering your expectations of others, but I have trouble reconciling how to lower expectations of oneself without sacrificing your goals.

My friends and family often tell me that I'd be more content if I lowered my self-expectations, but I have trouble _not_ equating that with throwing in the towel.

Is it possible to obtain a healthy balance in the middle? I hope so, otherwise I worry that the next Benjamin Franklin, or Steve Jobs, or insert-your- favorite-overachiever-here will read advice like this and take the easy route instead of working harder to follow their dreams.

Seriously though, I'd be thrilled if anybody could suggest that both are somehow possible.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is easier said than done. I'd like to think I learned not to expect anything from anyone, apart from very close persons. And I think it fits in the rational part of how I see things.

But even if I act and prepare myself to cope with people doing unexpected stuff, deep down I'm still hit when they actually do it. And this deep feeling is hard to suppress.

Besides, if you want to actually _do_ something with other people, you're bound to make some assumptions on how they will react. Thus, expectations.

</comment><comment><USER13> Haha nice, I publish an essay on amazon kindle a few months ago along the same line. [http://www.amazon.co.uk/To-Be-Human- ebook/dp/B00551JJTM/ref=...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/To-Be-Human- ebook/dp/B00551JJTM/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&m=A3TVV12T0I6NSM&s=digital- text&qid=1309536712&sr=1-7)

</comment><comment><USER14> It is hard to just drop your expectations, it requires practice. You might even end up doubly disappointed - once by your expectations and twice by your expectation about your expectations not being there anymore :)

</comment><comment><USER15> I ended up doing this without trying, apparently. Had I not read this, I wouldn't have formulated my degree of relaxation as a lack of expectations.

</comment><comment><USER16> Living with no expectations is an exceedingly dull, soul-sucking way to live. I know, I've tried it.

Some expectations are a good thing. Just let go of the bad ones, or learn how to let go if an expectation is not met. You don't _have_ to get upset when expectations are not met.

<comment><USER17> Goals are a good think. Faith in your own ability to achieve your goals is good. Spending time dreaming about outcomes and then wasting time wishing the real outcomes did not happen and wishing things had been different and that you had done something different ... that's all counterproductive.

Zen is all about cutting out the BS in your mind. Living inside your dreams about what should be, what should happen and what should have happened is all bad thinking. It's illogical.

Zen helps become less wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The most famour Sanskrit Verse from India : "karmanya Eva Adhikastha, maa Phaleshu kada Chana" - Do your work without thinking of the returns.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a fine way to live.

But it falls apart when you mix in other people. Because, if other people are emotionally immature (and most people are) they'll perceive you as weak, and limit your opportunities because you're not posturing as a chest-thumping blowhard. Thus, you too have to speak the language of power while knowing full well that you don't buy into it. I can think of nothing more boring than taking yourself seriously.

<comment><USER19> Not sure why this was downvoted. I'd hope to find real solutions to practicing this sort of viewpoint within social systems that value power.</comment></comment>


Delegative Democracy – a scalable voting model - <AUTHOR> http://www.andrewbadr.com/log/24/delegative-democracy-a-scalable-voting-model/ <comment><USER2> Sortition[0] (selection of decision makers by lottery to get a group that is representative the population as whole) seems to me to be a much more interesting model. That was how the original Athenian democracy worked, and there has been several proposals to do this in a modern version.

I can recommend reading this proposal: [http://www.context.org/iclib/ic11/calnbach/](http://www.context.org/iclib/ic11/calnbach/)

The clear benefit of this approach is that it would be a much simpler and more transparent process, with far less opportunity for the emergence of career politicians and corruption. People would also feel that they were far closer to the democratic process, when they were represented by others just like themselves, and the actual decision makers may be enticed to make better decisions when they are ordinary people that will have to live with the result of their choices afterwards.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition)

<comment><USER3> The big problem with Sortition is that the voters are necessarily uninformed. It means you need to teach your randomly selected group a huge amount of background information, even before explaining the specifics of the case. It falls into the same trap as a trial-by-jury: if you need to educate people to make a decision, you're putting the power in the hands of the teachers instead of the people.

<comment><USER4> In France, there was a law passed recently, about fighting terrorism. As all "think of the terrorists" laws, it passed without a hitch ("after all, we have to be seen as doing something about these people going to Iraq and Syria, regardless of whether it is effective"). In particular, this law contained provisions letting the executive branch shut down websites without any input from the judicial branch. Reading an article about the debates among the lawmakers made abundantly clear that people who still call the Internet "the new technologies" have absolutely no inkling about how it works and what consequences their votes may have. It is also clear that many of them barely read (or don't read at all) the texts they are voting on. What makes you say that random members of the population, not beholden to particular interest groups or current political parties, would do worse?

<comment><USER3> The problem is not that they would do worse. The problem is that they would be entirely dependent on the information they were provided. Anybody who gives them that information has their own opinion, and whether they want to or not, that opinion informs the way they dispense information. This means the random members of the population aren't deciding based on objective evidence. They can't really form their own opinions if every bit of information is biased one way or another.

That is why I said it was similar to a trial-by-jury. The jury isn't versed in law or in the details of the case, so they get all the information they need to make a decision from the lawyers presenting the case. That leads to situations like one we had in my home country: A woman was sentenced to life in prison for a murder without any evidence. None at all. She had motive and was 'an asshole', and that was enough for the jury to be sure she did it.

If there was a way to objectively give them the facts of the case and the knowledge they need, the system would be perfect, but unfortunately that's not possible. And until it is, i would rather have people making decisions based on their own badly informed opinions than people making decisions based on others' opinions with a veneer of legitimacy.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but in the current system, how many of these facts come to the lawmakers via deep-pocketed special interest groups? How many lawmakers know what war looks like, when they vote for military action? How many have any idea of how to regulate the banking sector? How many vote only based on what their party has decided?

There is the question of writing laws in the appropriate legalese. In practice, at least in France, most laws come from the executive branch, and the Parliament examines them in a commission, "patches" them by adding amendments, and votes. I'm sure the legalese part could be taught or handled by specialists. Apart from that, I don't see why it would function in a worse fashion that what we currently have.

<comment><USER3> Sure, many of the decisions in the current system are 'impure' in some way. Everybody has a price, everybody makes mistakes, everybody is uninformed about things. The big difference is the decisions still come from the elected lawmakers. They're often wrong, and even more often just guessing, but in the very least the system is transparent, we know where the power resides.

In the case of a randomized group, that power isn't with the group, it's with the people who educate them on the matters and who frame the issue. There are a million ways to present any matter, and none of them are objective. You're putting the power to influence and even determine a nation's decisions in the hands of the experts that inform them, rather than the randomly selected people. It would become very efficient to buy those people instead of the voters.

The problem of the matter isn't whether it would function worse. The problem is that it would function _less transparently_. It would ostensibly be a fair and completely unbiased system, but that could be manipulated behind the scenes in far more insidious ways. That's very dangerous. Personally, I would rather have a more unfair but more transparent system.

<comment><USER4> How is the current system transparent in this regard? How do you know where your MP/Congressperson got their information from (since we apparently agree that representatives are often not expert in the subject matter)?

<comment><USER3> I don't know, but at least I know it's them making the decision. I know they're corruptible, and I know their information can be manipulated and can be incomplete. It's transparent because everybody knows this, that's why we can complain about it. In some cases, we can call out lawmakers for it and get things changed. We know which ones tend to decide badly, and we can vote against them. It's an important balance in the system. If I have no control over who votes, and the whole system is made to look objective, that balance and that transparency is lost.

<comment><USER4> Ok, so your main beef with the lottery system is the anonymity of the randomly selected lawmakers? Well, if you don't know who they are, neither do the lobbyists. You still have Berlusconi/Putin-style influence-by-media, but that's not any different from what you have now.

<comment><USER3> My beef isn't with the anonymity, my beef is with the supposed objectiveness of the educators they use to give the randomly selected lawmakers the knowledge they need to decide. Those are the people to lobby, those are the people to buy, but they are hidden from the rest of the population. The only way to keep them honest would be to make every bit of information they give to the lawmakers public and freely available, so we can be sure the lawmakers aren't being manipulated. That runs into the same problems the delegate democracy has too: you can't make everything public in a state that still has foreign affairs.

<comment><USER4> My understanding is that only few representatives get close to state secrets, and they get them all from the executive branch (eg, the Intelligence Committee is relying on whatever the country's intelligence services deigns to tell them). Don't see why it should be different with randomly-selected lawmakers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Right now, the problem of "Representative democracy simply doesn't scale" worries me a whole lot less than "the politicization [and polarization] of absolutely everything": [http://www.vox.com/2014/11/1/7136343/gamergate-and- the-polit...](http://www.vox.com/2014/11/1/7136343/gamergate-and-the- politicization-of-absolutely-everything)

I worry that letting people delegate their vote to their favorite outspoken political ideologue would make things even worse, because it would give those people real and direct power. Imagine Rush Limbaugh having the power to vote on behalf of millions of people.

<comment><USER6> Here's what i say: Good. Bring it. I want our collective ignorance to shine, so we can confront it head-on as the destructive force that it is.

Representative democracy was put in place when regular people were presumably MUCH more ignorant. And giving citizens power through proxy likely spurred us to become more aware as citizenry. But I imagine it was pretty jarring at first.

Delegative democracy puts us in uncomfortable territory yet again, and I think that's a good thing.

<comment><USER5> > I want our collective ignorance to shine

Ok, I present to you:

Anti-vax: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/21/4767530/vaccine- deniers-i...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/21/4767530/vaccine-deniers- inside-the-dumb-dangerous-new-fad)

Climate change denial: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial)

Anti-GMO: [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/09/are_gmo_foods_safe_opponents_are_skewing_the_science_to_scare_people_.html)

Creation Science: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science)

> so we can confront it head-on as the destructive force that it is.

That hasn't been working so well...

<comment><USER6> I find none of those overly concerning in practice, at least not to the degree that they reflect poorly on delegative democracy.

\- [http://www.gallup.com/poll/168620/one-four-solidly- skeptical...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/168620/one-four-solidly-skeptical- global-warming.aspx)

\- [http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/...](http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/mid/1508/articleId/1483/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/Default.aspx)

\- [http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism- intel...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent- design.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't get it. Right now, an ostensibly fair and educated person could tweet his or her vote recommendations, and people could choose to vote according to those recommendations. Presumably a lot of voting is already motivated by trusted recommendations (even if it's just party lines).

<comment><USER8> Agreed. As described, it has the worst aspects of both systems; all the coordination problems of direct democracy, because anyone that feels inclined to vote on any particular issue has the right to do so, and most of the problems with representative democracy because a huge proportion of people will feel inclined to delegate [most of] their voting to well-funded and persuasive people or groups that may or may not be sincere about what they actually represent.

If those casting the delegated votes get secret ballots too, you can throw in a new problem: undetectable and potentially indefinite subterfuge...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is exactly what we are doing over at PlaceAVote.com [0].

We are running 50 congressmen in 2016 on this platform.

Often times, it's called Liquid Democracy.

[0] [http://placeavote.com](http://placeavote.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> How would this work with a case like foreign policy? Since everybody needs to able to participate, all the information related to a matter at hand needs to be made public. This is not always a good idea, especially when relating to diplomacy with other nations that don't follow this model, or to military intervention. It would essentially become impossible to hide anything from your enemies.

<comment><USER10> You could defer decisions involving sensitive information to the top N delegates (i.e. those with the most voting power.) They'd be a sort of ad-hoc congress.

You may face problems with those delegates still leaking sensitive information, but then again, Congressional staff is already notorious for doing that both willfully and accidentally.

<comment><USER3> That would default back to a representative democracy then, since if my opinion differs from the top N, I have no way to influence the decision.

<comment><USER6> Not necessarily. The composition of this "congress" might vary depending on the topic under discussion. The group trusted on "trade with china" might differ from that trusted on "military action in Syria". And entry is derived from trust networks theoretically involving all people, not some electoral process where only career politicians are realistically candidates.

<comment><USER3> But it does mean I can't decide to delegate it to my friend who knows a lot about the trade situation with China. All the power would become consolidated in a few people again, and giving your vote to anybody else would be a waste of it unless they pass it on to one of those. Sure, the group could be different for each issue, but in practice it won't be. You'll need to campaign long and hard to be in that top N, and try to get a lot of people to trust you. That leads right back to career politicians and popularity contests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _> Someone with power, like an employer, could pressure people into handing over their votes._

This is absolutely what's going to happen if such system is implemented.

Appearing to delegate one way, but having their votes counted another way? Seriously? It is way too complicated for an average voter. Even if you implement some sort of plausible deniability scheme (so that aforesaid someone can't just login with your credentials and set it up the way they want) - imagine explaining plausible deniability to a 90-years-old grandma or some uneducated farm worker, or a drug addict...

Elections are rigged this way even in countries with supposedly secret votes: bad guys might ask you to prove your vote by, say, snapping a picture of "correctly" filled ballot alongside your ID, but even that is not necessary - enough people will do what someone with power tells them to on a vague threat "if you try to fool us we will find out", or because it's a "patriotic" thing to do, or simply because they are told to and don't know better.

Not to mention that a huge number of people just couldn't care less. Half of population simply don't show up at the polls. How many of them will simply sell their right to vote for a token sum of money?

The current system is bad in many ways [1], but this proposal is even worse - way too much potential for abuse.

[1] Some reasons why - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the- post_voting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting)

<comment><USER6> You should watch this: [http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_frau...](http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud?language=en)

There are established ways around the percieved problem, even before you start thinking on cryptographic solutions

EDIT: sorry, voting digitally isnt addressed in those links :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think Delegative Democracy has lots of promise, and _if done right_ may the the ideal form.

But it is very much still pervertable, and the devil is in the details as always.

It would be nice to see a thorough analysis of the ways DD can fail, and mitigations. Andrew hinted as some (including privacy and coercion) but most discussions are this are light on critique.

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

</comment><comment><USER13> Sampled democracy is a much better solution. Replace Congress with 1,000 randomly sampled citizens. That's the only way to get true representation.

<comment><USER14> I think you need some degree of self-selection. To be a good representative, you need to dive in pretty deep, and it will take a couple years to be useful at all. You also need to have the mindset to draft good legislation -- it's too easy to leave a mess of laws, which the judiciary will need to try to piece together.

If you dismiss these concerns, what you'll get are a bunch of people easily manipulated by aides, staffers, lobbyists, etc. And those people certainly _are_ self-selected and ready to work.

But the idea to do away with traditional elections isn't so bad. A bunch of people throw their hat into the ring with a fairly low barrier to entry (some number of signatures, say), and you choose randomly among them. It would be difficult to pick a term length, though.

<comment><USER13> I think self-selection is a huge part of the current problem. People who are drawn to political power, are likely also drawn to military power. I think this contributes to the never-ending war-mongering the U.S. does.

Lobbyists, special interest groups, etc. would have no power, since they can't help you win an election. People are most easily manipulated for casual decisions with low value. If they had the responsibility, I think most people would rise to the challenge. If they can't, we need to end juries immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this is pretty much the German Pirate Party's "Liquid Democracy" internal voting model.

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

<comment> luke-stanley My friend has been working on Mesh Democracy with Retroshare - a trust graph and social graph with cryptographic credentials are handy. [http://www.chozabu.net/blog/?p=94](http://www.chozabu.net/blog/?p=94)

There is discussion on Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know of any software products that use this model at their core?

<comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Party#DemocracyOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Party#DemocracyOS) looks similar

<comment><USER16> It's so funny, I just saw some TED talk on that yesterday.

I came across it because for the past couple of months I've been thinking and writing down some thoughts on building an application that applied "Delegative Democracy" towards the goal of allowing large groups of people to make important decisions. I didn't realize there was even a term for this concept until this blog post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been thinking something along the lines of "legislature by jury" might be a better way of tackling propositions. Currently, I'm asked to make decisions about a bunch of issues that I don't know very much about. I can spend a lot of time researching them (and I usually do), or I can not vote (I do often triage a couple), or I can vote no if I don't understand it (or don't understand why the full time legislators can't just do it)... but regardless, it's a lot of time and effort and I imagine my vote is more or less lost in the sea of people who have paid less attention, and so much comes down to how effective the advertising, and I'm not confident that "stronger arguments in the set of arguments that can be understood in 5 minutes by the average voter" is a very good proxy for truth.

On the other hand, I do have some faith my my fellow citizen. Ask a group of us to set aside some time, do some research, sit down with some others, and make the best decision we can... and it wouldn't surprise me if we did a better job than either the legislature (not having to constantly think about how X will play with Y in the next election) or the broader mass of voters (having the time to focus on one particular issue, and knowing we have the responsibility of having our voice matter).

Oh, and pay us a high rate for our time. It would still be cheaper than running a campaign.

</comment><comment><USER18> This looks like an interesting mechanism for fixing the moderator problem on Reddit. It would take a couple of cycles to get working rules in place, but it looks promising.

</comment><comment><USER19> I had long decided that this was what I would focus on if I were going to be someone who did the start-up thing (I'm not. Mental illness is not compatible with doing a start up).

Rather Than governmental Democracy. Have a system where people can communicate information and ideas to large non-governmental entities.

Run a tree of delegates who feed information based upon its quality up to a higher level. Anyone may listen to anyone and speak to anyone but you can also choose to ignore anyone. You choose delegates for each individual case by picking someone receptive to your comment. People higher up the tree will generally only listen to people they know and trust.

This system would provide a useful middle ground to the current situation that people find themselves in when they need to communicate. Their main point of contact are automated systems or de-facto automated humans following processes. To get action on some significant issues, you need to win the publicity lottery and have you case become virally popular to the point where someone who can actually help makes contact.

It isn't as ambitious as running a government, but would serve a real need. As an example of the sort of thing where this may help, there have been numerous instances of Obvious Malware on the Google Play store that have managed to acquire a significant number of downloads. When these instances have been noticed and appear on reddit /r/android, they are swiftly removed from the store. I'm sure similar instances have happened where a company has taken the action they needed to take only after the problem has reached the front page of HN. Rather than having to make a big public noise (which only really works for a few), people should have an avenue to get information where it is needed.

As a business model I would aim to have companies pay to have their top tiers of the tree managed by full-time staff.

</comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this basically the way the electoral college works, at least on paper?

Wouldn't it be subject to the same limitations of the electoral college, that future laws could restrict how delegates vote based on popular election results, etc.?

<comment><USER21> Indeed, our system was originally a "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" sort, where if you didn't know him, you'd likely know someone who'd vouch for a House candidate or Elector (who was vouching for the President); the Senate back then was elected by state legislatures to protect their interests.

It had obvious scaling problems, and the total number of districts was fixed at 435 in 1910 ... yeah, in the period where the GooGoos (Good Government) types were smashing most everything in sight about our system, like Senate elections. They sure improved things :-(.

<comment><USER17> _" the Senate back then was elected by state legislatures"_

I actually think this change was a large part of what led to consolidation of power at the federal level.

If a citizen wanting X is deciding between Senate candidate A promising X, and B not promising X, why wouldn't they just pick candidate A?

If a _legislator_ is trying to decide between A and B, why wouldn't they just _do_ X and keep the credit?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I came up with almost exactly this idea several years ago -- I called it augmented representative democracy.

I figured that software programmers would immediately latch onto the concept, because they are familiar with the concept of inheritance. You elect a legislator to vote on your behalf, and in many situations that legislator's vote is the same as your own, yet you retain the right to cast your own vote on any given issue.

But there are several objections that I could not overcome:

1) In our free, open, representative-style government, each legislator's voting record is a matter of public record, but each individual citizen's voting record is confidential. If we were to switch to augmented representative democracy, the question arises: Do we make each citizen's voting record public or private? Both options come with potential problems. For instance, if all votes are private, we lose out on transparency, and anonymity tends to embolden people to make some pretty nasty choices. (Exhibit A: Any online forum.) But if all votes are public, it could invite retribution that the average citizen is not equipped to handle.

2) It's hard enough to monitor roughly 535 federal legislators, to make sure they're not taking bribes or kickbacks in exchange for their votes on particular pieces of legislation. Could you imagine if you had to instead monitor all 207.6 million eligible voters? True, it also becomes more difficult to influence a significant number of them through nefarious means. (Suppose you need to bribe five senators to tip the scale in your favor on a particular piece of legislation. So you offer them each $1 million. Now suppose every eligible voter got to weigh in. You'd need to bribe more than 10 million of them, assuming they all voted. And a $1 bribe isn't nearly as attractive as a $1 million bribe.) But on bills where the vote is really, really close ... there is really no viable way to keep everybody honest.

3) A legislator's workload is (or should be) a full-time job. It takes a lot of time to read through bills and understand them. It takes even more time to fully consider its broader implications and its potential unintended consequences. As part of that process, you'll likely have to engage in discourse with fellow legislators; evaluate expert testimony; listen to the concerns of constituents, trade groups, lobbyists, and other organizations; and weigh the potential for the law to be challenged as unconstitutional. All of that takes time, and it's unrealistic to expect every eligible voter to assume that responsibility for the purpose of voting on policy directly.

4) In practice, the cases in which this augmented representative democracy would result in a vote different from the legislator's would be relatively few -- and yet there would be a whole lot of extra effort required to support the system. Basically, you would need an issue where the legislator's vote is different than what the people who elected him would expect (and the legislator, if he wants to be re-elected, is only going to do that sparingly), and you would need a substantial turnout of people willing to overrule him. Considering how few people vote in general elections, that's a tall order.

5) When you break it down, augmented representative democracy is really direct democracy, and not true representative democracy. And one objection to direct democracy -- take it for what it's worth -- is that there's a danger of mob- mentality policy decisions. If you look at some historic decisions, at least here in the U.S., the legislature was a bit ahead of the curve, compared with the population at large. So ... I guess the question is ... could direct democracy have derailed or delayed something like the civil rights legislation of the mid-20th century?

<comment><USER23> I'd like to think a distributed workload model would help take the pressure off of needing to have the bottlenecks that come from #3. I imagine a valve like bazaar system - with groups forming spontaneously as the need for leadership arises - might work out.

The trouble then becomes figuring out who's qualified to chime in on certain issues - a free-for-all could mean anyone with a vested interest could form these groups and we lose the ability to put in checks and balances to help stop feedback loops due to mob mentality. Proving you even read the article in question could be difficult.

The number of people who were spouting outright mis-information over the obamacare documents was mindblowing.

Perhaps the first step is to reduce the scope of these laws and stop bundling everything together.

<comment><USER16> Yes. All decisions should be separated into subject focused groups. Then individuals must qualify themselves for voting into those groups by participating in discussions, doing research and having articles they've written or submitted upvoted by other people who have already graduated to decision makers within that group.

So any representative wouldn't have a single "score" that represents how many followers they have but a number of individual scores as they pertain to the focus that individual has chosen for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> When I read the title my first thought was that it would be a majoritarian system without districts: everyone votes for one candidate from the list and the top N candidates get elected to parliament. This would solve two main problems:

* The problem of the majority "choking" the minority in each district in the ordinary majoritarian system

* The problem of partisanship tending towards mergers and eventually a dual-party equilibrium in the proportional electoral system

I'm pretty sure this idea is not new and even has a name. And I'm wondering what potential drawbacks such a system could have.

</comment><comment><USER25> One of the biggest issues with this system would be that a rich company or individual could buy large blocks of votes on a particular issue.

Another might be that a delegate could present a popular set of views in public for the purposes of gaining a large number of delegate votes but then they could privately vote for their real beliefs which might be much more fringe, or perhaps they might change their mind close to the election.

<comment><USER26> > One of the biggest issues with this system would be that a rich company or > individual could buy large blocks of votes on a particular issue.

Whereas now a rich company/individual can just buy a politician.

<comment><USER25> At least in the case of a politician you can usually look at their voting record and see if that matches what you expected them to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This sounds like it will create a marketplace for votes. But I might be OK with that, as long as bureaucracies can't buy themselves more power, which happens from time to time with the current system via campaign contributions.

Besides, people already vote with their dollars in the private sector, which should be the first place to attempt to solve problems.

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems completely corruptible by intimidation, bribery... I guess our current system is too, but not as easily.

Who writes the legislation? Do we still have representatives for that? What does the Senate do? Seems to require a massive re-write of the constitiution. A non-starter.

<comment><USER3> Any system that isn't a very narrow form of representative democracy requires a massive re-write of the constitution. That is not a reason to not consider them.

In a delegative democracy, decision making is a lot more fluid than in the current system. You can buy or coerce someone for one specific issue, but the impact of that will be lower than buying a Senator. That makes intimidation and bribery less effective from the onset, and it can be mitigated further depending on the exact implementation. Either way, just like in the current system, there can be checks and balances to reduce the likelihood of it happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I suggest [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_election](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_election) should be simple/swift/inexpensive.

</comment><comment><USER29> We should use [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri) to select best politicians/representatives

</comment><comment><USER30> How about Qualitative Democracy?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cCyAqCkIw)

</comment><comment><USER31> In this model, what would stop a politician from paying voters to delegate their votes to his supporters and thus directly buying the election?

<comment><USER32> Wouldnt you have to buy at least 50% of the votes sounds expensive

<comment><USER33> Not unless you were trying to pass something so wildly unpopular that literally everyone would've voted against it otherwise. Most issues have at least a few people voting for each side, so you just need to add enough to get tip it in your favor. Sometimes just 20k votes would do it - that much would've probably swung the Colorado gubernatorial election this week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Being able to give your vote means you're able to sell it. I'm OK with this, but I'm pretty sure most people aren't.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power"\--Abraham Lincoln

</comment><comment><USER29> Winston Churchill said: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

</comment><comment><USER10> It's almost-pagerank applied to democracy

<comment><USER35> It could. Look for Eigendemocracy

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'd love to see something like this explored on a blockchain.

<comment><USER37> I opened this thread and immediately started scanning through to see who brought up the blockchain.

While I agree, it would be interesting, in practice the only country you might be able to convince to adopt it would be Iceland (because they're awesome) and yet, they have probably the least disfunctional democracy in the world so have no need to adopt it.

Might be worth exploring for steering open source projects, or prioritising objectives within a company.

<comment><USER36> I think that may accurately describe the field today. But the game board is changing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Some version of this idea pops up every few months on HN. It's a recurring trope of techno-utopianism.

Here's what I said previously. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936365)

I'd say something approximately as arrogantly today.

<comment><USER39> Paper is a technology that revolutionized the way we practice politics and law. It didn't lead to a utopia but made the system scalable beyond a tribe or village. Technology is meant to solve problems of scale here, not of human nature.</comment></comment>


Welcomed to the Bay Area - <AUTHOR>

I haven't wanted to feel this awake in what seems like years.  The Bay Area is the center of many signals with which I have a lot of resonance.  It was nice to see such a congregation of my peers in such a nice area with all the resources necessary to create some really nice stuff.  Build your city, improve your community, and connect the people around you.
A long time ago, we started farming.  When we farmed well enough, someone had time to make pots.  Pots kept grain from going bad, so we could spend less time farming and make more pots.  Eventually we had more time to create and less time was spent enslaved to the wheels of survival.
Empower the people around you to work on the things that they might find important, to connect with the things that interest them, before you capitalize on the discretionary income of bored individuals who are quickly addicted to entertainment and are mere consumers of the fruits of the human experience.
Also know that there are developers, users, and consumers.  A FOSS developer is one who architects and/or maintains FOSS.  A user is one who implements it. A consumer is one who can only benefit from final implementations.  Consumers are not evil, but recall how feedback works and know that the strongest community is the one that will propel you forward. <comment><USER2> Is it really that hard for people here to talk about their thoughts and experiences without trying to life coach you or go Harvard Business Review on your ass? Christ.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahaha, I take it you were hoping for the story of the actual trip? It was badass.

I'm not sure that every developer out there gets what is happening with Stack Overflow and Github. This is based on the kinds of software I see being developed. We're creating fire with these collaboration tools. The more the better.</comment></comment>