Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

brianrue.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#111

Post by bambax »

ramanujan wrote: post #105
bambax wrote: post #37

> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I see these categories of email 1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations" 2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back 3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow n…

#2: Google does have Gmail tasks, with keyboard shortcuts for using them. But because there isn't yet a tasks API it's hard to sync with other things. Some thoughts: 1. Whatever the new email is needs to look and feel like email at the beginning, though it can morph into something else over time. It also needs to be completely keyboard driven and entirely API controllable on the client and mail server side. GMail's A…

> 4. You might do something much more interesting with auto-responders. E.g. someone asking for a meeting could be redirected to your calendar to self-serve schedule if they are on your "ok to meet" whitelist.

Yes. We already have SIRI, why doesn't this already exist...? It must exist somewhere and we're not aware of it, no?

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#112

Post by bambax »

dgallagher wrote: post #79
bambax wrote: post #37

> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I see these categories of email 1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations" 2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back 3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow n…

A replacement for email probably won't look very much like email. It'll inherit the good and drop the bad. Speech ---> messenger ---> letters ---> telegraph ---> telephone ---> fax ---> email ---> ??? What's good about email? You can send it at any time. It's standardized and supported everywhere. UTF-8/UTF-16. Cheap/free. Extremely fast. Extremely easy. What's bad about email? Spam. Conversations get broken (reply i…

The "button" solution can be cracked by exactly the people you'd rather not send you any email, ever: people who have a lot of time on their hands and can spend a day pressing a button (or, worse, have someone in India pressing the button for them).

The cash solution is interesting, but again, do you want only rich people to send you email?

I think the prioritization problem is hard because it can only be done by the recipient (not her secretary, not her colleague, not anyone but her).

But I also think that people hate to prioritize not because it takes time, but because it's incredibly boring and then stays in your mind (you remember you were bored, and you remember all the useless crap you had to go through).

But very important and very busy CEOs still watch TV or go to baseball games, so they do have time left; it's just that they'd rather watch TV than sort through their mail.

So the problem becomes: how do we make prioritizing fun?

(I have no idea how to answer that question, but rephrasing the problem is a first step).

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#113

Post by bambax »

humbledrone wrote: post #104
pedoh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail offers email+foo@gmail.com, which is sent to email@gmail.com, but then you can filter on the To: field. I don't think that completely solves #3, but it's a helpful trick. Plus, then you can see how your email addresses get passed on, as long as whoever's got your email isn't clever enough to =~ s#\+.*?@#@# regex your address...

I love this feature, but unfortunately I've found that probably 30-40% of the websites that I supply with my email address will not accept it due to the "+" character. It seems like travel-related businesses are some of the worst offenders -- the vast majority of airlines and hotels seem to balk at the "+", which is frustrating, because "+travel" is one of my favorite filters.

Totally agree. For me it's a way to assess the quality of the website: be wary of websites that complain that emails can't contain a +.

If you have your own domain (which I think most people have on HN?) you can use different usernames to the same effect, or a different separator.

But even if it worked all the time it's only part of the solution.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#114

Post by [deleted] »

pron wrote: post #94
bambax wrote: post #37

> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I see these categories of email 1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations" 2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back 3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow n…

http://zeromail.com/ seems interesting. I always thought that a simple first step would be to group messages by senders, but AFAIK the only client that does that is the concept client persona ( http://personamail.info/ ).

[deleted]

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#115

Post by bambax »

pron wrote: post #94
bambax wrote: post #37

> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I see these categories of email 1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations" 2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back 3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow n…

http://zeromail.com/ seems interesting. I always thought that a simple first step would be to group messages by senders, but AFAIK the only client that does that is the concept client persona ( http://personamail.info/ ).

Thanks for this, zeromail does seem very interesting!

The signup for the closed beta is $100 though, which is expensive just to test something.

Also, it seems that in order to use it you have to migrate to their service completely, which is a big commitment.

Having a service that progressively takes part of your emails would be less aggressive maybe.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#116

Post by Natsu »

bambax wrote: post #37

> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I see these categories of email 1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations" 2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back 3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow n…

I don't know how others do email, but for me, everything gets filtered and the inbox contains only emails I didn't know hot to categorize.

Mostly, I filter out 'family', 'friends', a few mailing lists, and some other random things, not to mention spam, and use "mark as read" liberally so that I always know what I have and have not looked at.

I don't really use the important markings or stars in Gmail, labels + archive are enough. Only important items stay in the inbox and they only stay there until dealt with, so I keep my inbox clean.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#117

Post by sanxiyn »

pjscott wrote: post #76
bambax wrote: post #37

> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I see these categories of email 1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations" 2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back 3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow n…

#3 is a doozie, and we've been working on it at Greplin. I think we can break it down into some subcategories: * Notification emails that are very time-specific in their relevance. "Reminder: Coffee with Chuck at 3:25 today" or "Thank you for your reservation for a party of 4 at Alice's Restaurant at 7:30 tonight." You care about these a lot, until you have coffee with Chuck and abruptly stop caring. * Things that ar…

Re: mailing lists. I think RFC 2919 is pretty official. List-ID is registered at IANA permanent message header field registry.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#118

Post by kiwidrew »

humbledrone wrote: post #104
pedoh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail offers email+foo@gmail.com, which is sent to email@gmail.com, but then you can filter on the To: field. I don't think that completely solves #3, but it's a helpful trick. Plus, then you can see how your email addresses get passed on, as long as whoever's got your email isn't clever enough to =~ s#\+.*?@#@# regex your address...

I love this feature, but unfortunately I've found that probably 30-40% of the websites that I supply with my email address will not accept it due to the "+" character. It seems like travel-related businesses are some of the worst offenders -- the vast majority of airlines and hotels seem to balk at the "+", which is frustrating, because "+travel" is one of my favorite filters.

Amusingly, this is almost certainly due to the legacy backend systems which still use a six-bit character set, and this set doesn't include helpful things such as lowercase characters or the + symbol.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#119

Post by pnathan »

pron wrote: post #70

Everything here could be summarized under the headline "solve people's annoying, day-to-day problems (in an original manner)". There are some great perspectives here, but I have a (little) problem with the premise of "solve people's annoying problems". I understand that this probably was a business talk to people interested in entrepreneurship, and, certainly this is great advice for people wanting to build a profita…

I believe that engineers should be dreaming on the scale of the Moon missions. Things like transparent cryptography everywhere, automated cars everywhere, eradicating famine from lack of food production, fully renewable efficient energy sources, cheap and quality education materials everywhere...

These are very integrated problems spanning a wide range of disciplines to solve. Pure engineering geekery isn't going to solve them, and engineers need to recognize that we limit ourselves by going deep.

Anyway, at my day job, part of our company's work in the past decade has been to get electricity to villages that never had electricity before. That's pretty awesome. :-)

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#120

Post by cheatercheater »

dgallagher wrote: post #79
bambax wrote: post #37

> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I see these categories of email 1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations" 2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back 3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow n…

A replacement for email probably won't look very much like email. It'll inherit the good and drop the bad. Speech ---> messenger ---> letters ---> telegraph ---> telephone ---> fax ---> email ---> ??? What's good about email? You can send it at any time. It's standardized and supported everywhere. UTF-8/UTF-16. Cheap/free. Extremely fast. Extremely easy. What's bad about email? Spam. Conversations get broken (reply i…

You totally forgot that the evolution of messaging isn't linear. You skipped drums, which did not exist in europe, which almost monopolized technology as a source of inspiration. However, this anachronism is being reflected in modern communication. For example, drums were a broadcast method, and so was radio, and now so are social websites. Those three approaches (drums, radio, social sites) were re-invented over and over due to need. At each point in the improvement chain the broadcast nature was rejected as unwanted. Compare to what you said about only the good parts being taken to the next level. However, it's obviously needed.
Post reply on HN