I don't want to be overly dismissive -- I'm sure this is a huge engineering achievement -- but I just don't get it. A mobile phone, where battery life is precious and a big differentiating factor between devices, seems like the absolute last place you'd want to mine bitcoin. Manufacturers have spent years optimizing for battery life - why would they want to shoot themselves in the foot? What consumer in their right mind would buy a phone advertised as, "your battery will die much sooner, but hey, you don't have to use your credit card as much"?
Perhaps I'm wrong, and I'd love to be corrected. But I don't see the point.
It's not just unsubscribe. They let you turn off emails for an hour, a day, etc. Really convenient if you're generally interested in notifications, but just need a little break.
Another example: when you change your password, Slack will send you a special link to sign-in on mobile so you don't have to type out your new password on a tiny keyboard.
My favorite thing about Slack is how they've thought of all the little things. My go-to example is that when they send you a notification email, it includes links to silence further emails with a single click.
Obviously, this isn't a big "feature." It's not going to show up on their marketing materials. Nobody will ever say "hey, you should try out Slack because they let you silence emails." But it's this sort of UX philosophy, of anticipating and cleverly solving tiny little annoyances, that make it a really pleasurable product to use.
I think this completely misses the point. The "magic" part of Magic isn't that it's over text -- that's just an implementation detail. Rather, the value is that it navigates all these services for you. You don't have to mess with Instacart or Postmates or Doordash or any specific app. You don't have to search or filter or download or re-enter your credit card a million times. It just happens.
So, creating a single-business-specific Magic seems kinda useless.
17. At least in my social circles, it's polite to respond to texts (and Facebook messages) within a couple hours. Texting definitely carries more expectations than email (for example, I'd consider it rude to text back the next day, yet emailing in the morning is A-ok), but it's certainly not on the level of calls.
I don't think anyone has mentioned this: in my mind, the whole point of calling a business is getting an immediate response.
Most of us are conditioned to treat text as a fundamentally asynchronous medium. Texts aren't something you have to reply to now -- you should get to them eventually, but they don't demand attention in that moment. Much like email, the sender really has no idea when, if ever, the receiver will respond.
Phone calls are different in that they're totally synchronous. The receiver responds immediately, and you're not left in the dark wondering if they're busy. Even if you're put on hold, someone usually answers the phone first to let you know they'll be with you soon.
Phone calls are comforting -- you know for certain that you've been heard, and you get your answer right away. I can't think of a way for text to provide this, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
I'm scared this will mean rampant cheating. What's to prevent an early-stage startup from masquerading as a hack and getting a "fast-tracked" interview?
I know this is a problem for most hackathons, but the stakes seem significantly higher here.
The way I see it, every single app that uses email for password resets (usually by emailing a link, sometimes a code) already relies on the security of email.
Even if you have the most secure password in the world, if an attacker compromises your email account, they can simply send a password reset email. It's the weakest link.
A voting ring is a group of people that all upvote each other's posts. But most of the time, it lacks that level of organization -- usually, ring-voting just refers to having all your friends upvote your post for you.
One really easy way to trip HN's voting ring detector is to send your voters a direct link. However, in my experience, this acts less to detect voting rings than to weed out HN newbies. All my friends just post on facebook with something along the lines of "go search the New page for <x> and upvote, please!"
There are a bunch of comments about rolling your own scraper instead of relying upon a possibly unreliable SaaS app.
That makes me think -- would it be viable to run a service that, instead of running the scraping on their own servers, simply gave you a custom binary to run?
Assuming that you trusted the executable, you would never have to worry about the company failing. It'd just be a one-time fee, and yours to use in perpetuity. Presumably updates would be free.
Perhaps I'm wrong, and I'd love to be corrected. But I don't see the point.