Geeflow

Not in American college football, but in German pro soccer, someone shorted the stock of a team and subsequently tried to blow up the team with multiple bombs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borussia_Dortmund_team_bus_b...

I can't recommend spaced repetition enough. I use it for everything: Phone numbers, names, business knowledge, dungeon and dragons, ...

A different article[1] sums it up pretty well: "Anki makes memory a choice, rather than a haphazard event, to be left to chance."

[1] https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

Reduced speed with degraded battery doesn't only happen for phones unfortunately. My Lenovo laptop is painfully slow when unplugged. I thought something is broken, but Lenovo told me it's because the battery is degraded. The consequences are similar as with phones: The battery can't be easily changed and the costs for letting it be changed by Lenovo are not worth it considering the age of the laptop. So I'll likely live with it until I'm annoyed enough to buy a new one.

I once built such a trial option myself. You could start a free trial (just within the app, no "native trial" involved) and then sign up for the paid plan with native in-app purchases once it ran out.

It got rejected by Apple. They insisted I use the native app store trial which is opt-out.

Actually, some people do.

There are tools like EuroBillTracker (https://en.eurobilltracker.com/) where you can enter the serial number of bills that you received and can watch them travel around the world. If someone else tracks them as well, that is.

I entered 31 serial numbers over the last 15 years. Those haven't been seen again so far. I guess it's not the right kind of game for me... :)

Is there any reason to believe that this actually happened? Conveniently, it was published on April 1st. The story itself would be a great April Fools' prank. :)

I wouldn't be much surprised. The amount of things people do _not_ notice is staggering. When I do usability tests there's almost always something that doesn't get noticed although I thought it obvious and/or important.

Personal anecdote: I managed to buy paper for my printer and only noticed upon arrival that it was the wrong size. The product photo looked right to be. I did not bother to check the details - or even the product title. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also, regarding "if the person isn't drunk": There's a great short talk called "the user is drunk" which makes one much more sympathetic to such seemingly unexplainable comprehension fails that sometimes drive product designers mad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2CbbBLVaPk&feature=emb_titl...

Was able to log in... what a great nostalgia flash! :)

Sad to see how many links are broken now...

... and some, like postsecret.com, are surprisingly still live and active 15 years later.

To extend on your analogy a bit: Imagine working on that term paper on GitHub and then having your repo deleted. The odds of reproducing that information completely is zero. But there might still be some forks (related species) around. So it's pretty hard to wipe out everything.

"Sign in with Google" also fails. So this outage is taking quite a few otherwise unrelated third party apps with it.

Sounds reasonable - but I'd still prefer to stay away from people who are shedding the virus.

There is also a similar theory that cloth masks might have the unintended positive side effect of building immunity. They are not perfect, so the virus might still reach its target. But the viral load could be reduced enough that instead of infection it leads to immunity.

Hey everyone,

I’m happy to show this project to you after years of mostly lurking. :)

Too many people are walking through life, working on never-ending task lists, losing sight of the big picture and missing what’s really important to them. Are you constantly working on what’s most urgent instead of most important? End up where the circumstances take you instead of taking control of your own path? Keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again instead of actively working on improving things? Then Focality is here to help you!

I started building Focality while working a full-time job and then became a father. So I had plenty of time to battle-test it myself in demanding circumstances. ;) This is the tech stack I used:

  - React
  - Material UI 
  - AWS Cognito, AppSync, DynamoDB 
  - Capacitor to wrap it into native App containers (iOS & Android) 
  - RevenueCat for handling payments 
  - Sentry for detecting errors

The biggest challenge so far has been to get attention. I knew this space would be crowded, but it’s quite a bit harder than expected. It feels like a new competitor launches every day (probably is). Users have so many options that it is very hard to engage them to learn their needs.

The second biggest challenge has been the Apple bureaucracy/requirements. :)

On the positive side, I’m really impressed with how powerful the frameworks have become. A few years ago it would not have been possible for me to build a side-project for web, iOS & Android. Neither would it have looked that good without the help of a designer.

Cheers

Florian

P.S.: I’m also launching on Product Hunt today if anyone is interested: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/focality

My thoughts exactly. Location Sharing in Google Maps is a totally different use case.

Commercially it was probably a tough sell. Engagement metrics were probably abysmal - since you only need it in exceptional circumstances.

It's really sad though. This was one of the products that really stood out for me. Not just a gimmick, but something that can really make a difference. I wish Google had shown a bit more idealism and kept it around.

I also ran flash on a HTC Wildfire around 2010. Flash sucked and drained the battery. But it was great to be able to access flash content. At that time, I frequently stumbled across content that I could not access otherwise. I was very happy that I was able to access it on my device, despite the crappy flash experience.

Take that as a data point that Flash on day 1 would have been good at least for one user. :)

Apple's decision probably still benefited the ecosystem as a whole because it drove the adoption of flash replacements.

Podcast Addict is my favorite podcast app. I have been using it with great satisfaction for years. I hope that gets sorted out quickly.

Another aspect that I don't quite understand: The story claims that Google asks for the app to be published as a new download. And indeed the provided screenshot includes this request (in pretty small print). This makes no sense to me. Why wouldn't Google be satisfied by just changing the existing app? Any ideas what the reason might be?

I believe this is one of those things that are really hard to understand unless you have experienced it first hand. Although I always knew how important prioritization is, I understand it way better since working on my resource-constrained side project. You often fail to appreciate just how many obviously good things you can't do because there are even more important things to do.

Or, to quote Steve Jobs: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are."

I would see it more like a conversation in a public place / at a convention. Sure, anyone can join the conversation and listen in. I would still be unpleasantly surprised if someone posted a recording on a website.

My first programming projects were scripts and modules for eggdrop. Every now and then I get a nostalgia flash. :) Surprisingly, some of those are still being used... 20 years after the last release.

I would have shared the same sentiment.

I never came across a logger, though, when I was still active on IRC. Are loggers a more recent (as in this millenium) development?

A nice example of "ensurers will ensure everything" is the Ansari X Prize (space competition). They ensured against someone actually winning the competition:

> The funding for the US $10,000,000 prize was unconventional in being "backed by an insurance policy to guarantee that the $10 million is in place on the day that the prize is won."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansari_X_Prize#Funding

I use tcomb-validation[1] to validate incoming data. The downside is that it cannot use TypeScript types so you have to define the schema twice.

For me, the duplicated types turned out to be less of a hassle than initially anticipated. In many cases, I ended up with different data structures anyway because the data is transformed in the client. I think of them as transport types and client types.

[1]: https://github.com/gcanti/tcomb-validation

My speculation (I have no data) as to why it works:

Showing this to everybody shows it more reliably to those who actually will sign up. It is hard to target the right people reliably (maybe they deleted their cookies, maybe they use a different device...) so if you just show it to everybody the right people will definitely see it. First time visitors still won't sign up, but significantly more established readers will.

I recently stumbled upon Airmeet[1]. It's not really for birthday parties, more like networking events. Still, I find the concept intriguing.

They offer a kind of socializing space. It is organized by virtual tables. Each table holds up to 4 participants via webcam. That way you do not have the typical issue of large zoom calls where only a few people can talk at a time. You get a lot smaller conversations much like a real networking event.

They seem to be still starting out, so there are a few issues. But I hope they iron them out. The concept seems really promising.

[1]: https://www.airmeet.com/

You can develop for iOS without actually owning Apple hardware.

I develop an app and use MacinCloud[1] to build the iOS version. Costs $1/hour on demand. The hardest part was getting a two-factor enabled apple id. I actually had to borrow a physical iPhone just to activate the two-factor authentication. Once it is activated, you can get away without an iPhone again.

Just saying that it is possible without the $1500 hardware. It still sucks that Apple makes one jump through all these hoops...

[1] https://www.macincloud.com/

To me, the most exciting aspect of this project is the common language. I would love to have a kind of dictionary of UI components where I can easily look up the correct (and widely accepted) name for a type of component.

No more carousels that are called sliders because they slide. No more wondering if it is a split button or button group...

Especially the Component Name Matrix[1] is great. Bookmarked.

[1] https://open-ui.org/analysis/component-matrix

I used this trick, and it did indeed work as intended. It was a little scary ("You want me to draw on my CPU?!?"), though.

I also think internal blogs are a great tool. But I also share your experience of how few people are actually using them. At my current company, it is the same thing: I wrote the majority of posts and a handful of people contributed a handful of other posts.

I guess the 1% rule [1] applies to internal systems as well...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

After reading the title I was really looking forward to some musical discussions on HN... :)

I took "Become a Product Manager" (https://www.udemy.com/course/become-a-product-manager-learn-...) and was quite happy with it. The title is a bit tacky - it is not instantly going to turn you into a product manager. But it is a nice overview of the field.

I paid about 10 bucks during one of the countless sales. Never pay the full price at Udemy. Their pricing policy is ridiculous. I feel like you only have to wait a few days for the next 90%-off-discount to come along. I counted three times during the past few weeks.

Not removing old labels before entering something into (partially) automated systems is just asking for trouble.

A friend of mine once returned an item to amazon but forgot to remove the original shipping label. The shipping company picked it up and promptly shipped it back to him instead of returning it to Amazon.