Nathanael's comments

I'm sorry if the words sound empty to you. All I can say is when I place this badge in a GitHub repo's README or in my email signature, it's my way to wish well on the people who come in contact with that repo, or with my email, and it is sincere. The messages vary but they all support that same intention.

At times I've stumbled on graffiti in the street that were random messages of kindness from complete strangers, and they brightened my day. So I don't think it needs to come from someone who knows you to mean something.

Yeah that's completely fair. I've been thinking about making the database available for download, so that could help anyone who wants to use the messages. The backend code is already open source: https://github.com/kindspeech/api

Hey WaitWaitWha, that's great feedback. You mentioned domain registration information and I can certainly edit that. I could also add information to the website where I explain who I am, say with my name and picture. Would that help? Are there other things I could do to increase your trust?

One thing I've done but isn't really advertised is open source the backend: https://github.com/kindspeech/api

I agree, it's present in comment sections as well, and probably a lot of other places too unfortunately.

I think the best explanation I can offer for how advertising does it in my view is the manifesto I wrote for the website's homepage: https://kindspeech.org/

tldr: creating a desire or a need for people, which is what advertising usually attempt to do, implies that they are lacking in some way. That's not a good feeling. And it's often simply false or vastly exaggerated. Imo, making people feel bad in order to sell is unkind.

Hello HN, I've been working on these badges and other simple ways to spread kindness in my spare time. My main motivation is counterbalancing the large amount of covert unkind speech we are subjected to through advertising and various media. I hope you enjoy these and have a nice day. :)

Here's one example that comes to mind: because I don't have a TV anymore I now watch GoT at a friend's home, something I had never considered doing before.

Genuine question: What seems prideful in what I wrote? Or is it just the choice of subject?

Wouldn't a plateau then make more sense than a crash?

Maybe they're experimenting with a Buffer for incoming e-mails.

Hi. I'm the author and I live in France. I used EST for 2 reasons.

1/ Most HN readers can relate to that easily.

2/ GMT doesn't account for daylight savings time.

As long as the quantity of good submissions varies consistently depending on time of day, there will be times when more good submissions are competing for a fixed amount of frontpage time. Thus it's unlikely you could eliminate time-of-day effects.

I like your second suggestion though.

It is taken into account in my article...

Interesting. I wasn't aware of this resubmission mechanism.

Hey, author here. I'm going to transgress my no-HN rule this one time because I did in fact look at HN Pickup very closely and I already have a follow-up post planned in which I was going to mention it.

Now the difference between my post and HN Pickup is it's a prediction tool, so it's trying to pin-point precise moments when it's best to post, whereas I'm analyzing past data.

So in my post today I talked about the best time to post on average. But, I can also look at my data and say, for example, last Monday from 10 to 11 AM, 30% of submissions reached the frontpage and so it was, in effect, a great time to post.

And with that I could look at HN Pickup's past predictions and tell you how accurate they were, ie. at a time when HN Pickup was telling you it's a "very good time to submit a story", what percentage of stories actually made it?

It so happens that I've actually been able to do that. HN Pickup's creator was kind enough to provide me with a history of predictions for every 15 minutes of a whole week, and after comparing it to observed pickup percentages I found a rather weak correlation (0.25). So it would seem HN Pickup isn't a very effective tool.

Also its goal is only to look at frontpage pickups, it doesn't account for the duration of the stay on the frontpage or HN's traffic at the time, which I do in my analysis.

We're planning on doing a "normal" web app as well. :)

b) yeah that was recently introduced and seems to be causing an issue with some users.

c) the radius is actually dynamic (21km is the upper limit currently) and varies depending on the activity: the more activity, the smaller the radius, so that you always receive a manageable number of messages.

That's an issue with Google Play unfortunately. :/

Agreed, a subscribing system is much better.

Problem with sharing URLs is that people would be able to zoom in and see exactly where the messages/echoes come from. Not all of our users would be comfortable with that.

We have a reporting system planned and once (if we ever) get enough users/messages adding categories would make a lot of sense.

I like the idea of private channels.