Who Killed the Scrollbar? - <AUTHOR> https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq <comment><USER2> Flipping flip i agree! It's not just scrollbars. I hate the mobilification of everything. I hate that desktop designs are imitating the nonexistent information density of phones. Bring back menubars, and extensive left-hand hierarchies . Even in mobile, it's more practical for me. I like a full page where i can zoom in and out faster between its parts rather than scrolling up and down all the time (I browse reddit in old mode - it's just better)

<comment><USER3> I was pretty blown away to see that Dropbox's hamburger menu opens to take over the entire screen, including on desktop. In other words, they only considered mobile in their design. You can try it even if you don't have an account, just go to dropbox.com and click the hamburger in the upper right.

<comment><USER4> I see this happening a lot. "Mobile first!" doesn't mean "Mobile only!"

<comment><USER5> It kinda does though, because modern software companies tend to shift focus away from projects before they get completely "done". The whole reason for "mobile first" is the tacit admission that whatever is not the primary focus will often get drastically less attention because there's already something that sorta "works".

<comment><USER6> There's truth in what you're saying, especially in the "things mostly suck, so expect that" world.

But in the ideal world you're wrong... it's fundamentally easier to start with a mobile design and make some specific interventions to make it work well on desktop than to do the opposite.

Whether anyone actually makes those interventions is, as you indicate, somewhat unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to be finger sized. Making scroll bars finger sized takes up way too much screen space in mobile UI, so they were regulated to a passive progress bar indicator and the scrollbar actions were moved into swipe gestures instead. With that change you lose the ability to precisely skip around your location, probably because a desktop usage study showed that most people didn't use the the scroll bar much once scroll wheel mice were available.

Scroll bars only work with precision mice actions, and now desktop UX is legacy UX, mobile UX concepts enroach onto desktop UX, because developers do not like to create special cases, because that is more work and thus more $$$.

<comment><USER8> > The reason why scrollbars are not a first class UI widget in mobile UIs is > because they are finger based, which means every manipulable widget needs to > be finger sized

And yet, several mobile apps I use routinely have found a way to make it work reasonably well. They use a slim line of a scrollbar to indicate where you are, and if you touch the scrollbar then a larger finger-friendly handle appears which can be used like a traditional scrollbar.

But I'm much more forgiving of UI compromises that are forced by the limitations of mobile devices. It's when those same compromises are used on the desktop that I have a problem -- that's just degrading the UX for no good reason.

<comment><USER7> Testing on my iOS device, I don't think it's an app thing, but UIKit standard thing that comes with scrollviews. The bar doesn't become finger thick, but it's still usable. I've been using iOS devices for a long time, so it shows you how hidden it is.

I agree it's sloppy on desktops, but it helps to understand the reasons why the sloppyness happens. Kind of like electron apps :p

<comment><USER9> I believe it's new in iOS 13

<comment><USER10> Way back in 2008, the Music app made use of this sort of feature (baked into UIKit). Table views can be "indexed," meaning you get A, B, C, etc down the side, and can swipe on it to move faster down the list.

<comment><USER11> Contacts still has this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let's not dance around in a circle - Apple started this with their "minimalist design." First on desktop and later with mobile.

Fact of life is everyone copies Apple. Apple doesn't copy and paste things. They'll think deeply before copying. And will modify things to fit their unique needs and situation.

Unfortunately, those who copy Apple switch off their brains and pursue the "looks" ALONE, ignore the "feel" and just mess everything up.

The next big culprit is Google's Android with their let's just hide everything - hamburger.

Microsoft, the final boss, attempted to beat Apple in design. The result was Metro UI - a beautiful, text heavy, flat, design (they changed the name too many times to keep track off.)

Microsoft turned off their brains as well. The result:

They hid every thing - scroll bars, status bars and title bars. Wasted valuable screen real estate - empty spaces everywhere. Created a much hated start-screen with scroll bars that moved horizontally instead of vertically. And to make matters worse, moved in the opposite direction of scroll wheel. (Perfect if navigating with a finger but very confusing if using the mouse. It clashed with 20 years of mouse knowledge)

That's why people hated Windows 8.

Both Apple and Google riffed off Metro design. Google calls theirs material design, don't know what Apple named theirs.

If this article was titled, Who Killed Ports, 3.5mm audio jack, repairability, screws, or upgradable ram? The answer would still be Apple.

Summary: Prioritizing form over function is cancerous.

<comment><USER8> > Fact of life is everyone copies Apple.

And I really, really wish they'd stop it.

<comment><AUTHOR> A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really _is_ a useful thing.

Apple is, generally, good in many particulars. It is _extremely_ conservative, with only two desktop models (Classic Mac, 1984 - 2000, OS X, 2001 - 2019, and ongoing, which is to say, _longer_ than the original interface). It is ultimately completely antithetical to how I work in desktop, and I find myself vastly prefering Linux and the option of selecting a desktop environment. Ironically: Windowmaker, based on the foundations of the OSX Aqua desktop, NextStep.

Increasingly it seems that Apple is stuck with implications of design decisions made decades ago which correspond increasinly poorly to current practices. The high cost of cycling between applications in particular. No, I _don 't_ want ALL FLIPPING WINDOWS of an app to pop up when I switch between the primary current working windows of two different apps. Or workspace flipping as I switch / open new app windows.

Apple's third OS UI, iOS, has a tremendous number of shortcomings. As do virtually all other mobile interfaces. I'm coming to the conclusion that any screen size < 10-15 CM is simply too small to be useful, and prefer a minmum 9-10" (20-25 cm) devices myself.

<comment><USER8> > A small number of well-considered UI/UX design schemas really is a useful > thing.

Yes, in principle. But it becomes less than useful when the common schemas get in my way, which has been an increasing problem over the past few years. The aping of Apple's decisions appears to be a large part of why.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed.

As jwz has noted, _UI is different_ , in that changes to it provide relatively little payback:

 _[I]n the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has proven that UI is different than software._

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why- i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/)

(HN-safe archive link.)

The bulk of _present_ UI/UX metaphors can be traced _directly_ to the Mother of All Demos, now _over fifty years old_ :

[https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=yJDv- zdhzMY](https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

That said: from MoAD onward, the use-case has been of a _desktop_ (or very- desktop-like laptop) system, with keyboard, pointer (mouse, tablet, light pen, etc.), used at something vaguely resembling a desk or table.

It's not even the screen size of mobile devices _in raw resolution_ that's so different -- early GUI computers had as little as 640x480 (VGA) resolution _or less_. The original iPad was 1024x768.

But no keyboard, and finger-on-glass manipulation, call for a very different set of control and design considerations. A mouse pointer can have pixel- accuracy control. Fingers cover a probabalistic smear of screen space tens of pixels across _and hide the screen elements they 're affecting_ at the same time.

(And that's before you introduce such joys as screens repainting and repositioning as / before you complete a touch action.)

The real question is _how to achieve concensus for new design and to void bad entrenched patterns_ across a highly fragmented design industry. Ranty flipping blog posts are one possible solution....

<comment><USER13> This is "easy" to solve!

Come up with a really good UI concept, implement it, and see everybody love it.

Avoid patenting it through the nose, and let everyone copy most of it. This is how it will become the standard and win the world adoption.

It seems like you'd need millions of R&D budget spent in a large part for public good, or at least to seriously change the market landscape without a guarantee you'll dominate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm old enough that I started out building desktop apps with native widgets. You had consistent, easy to use UIs, and they were pretty much the same no matter what application you where in. Building the UI was considered they easy part. You could even draw the thing with drawing tools! Since the native widgets were designed by people who spend all day thinking about UI, user testing UI, etc everything pretty much just worked, and worked well.

Fast forward to today. There's no such thing as "native widgets" in a web app. So everyone rolls their own. Everyone keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. Everyone is chasing fads. There is no consistency from app to app. Today building the UI is the hard part.

(x-windows was the exception of course - you could choose from a dozen badly designed window managers and widget sets.)

<comment><USER15> > There's no such thing as "native widgets" in a web app.

HTML form elements are essentially "native" widgets, if only native to the browser. The problem with them is that older browsers lack support for many desirable widgets (e.g. calendar date entry), so some "UI-building" work is still needed.

<comment><USER16> There _should_ be an HTTP-friendly GUI standard and we should have GUI browsers that implement all the common GUI widgets we know and love rather than emulate them with buggy clunky JavaScript/DOM/CSS. And be state-friendly to avoid having to use Ajax-like techniques to get desktop-like state.

The industry is simply _missing_ a standard. Everyone was hoping HTML/JS/CSS would mature enough to solve it, but it didn't, despite being given 2+ decades. Developing in and using web standards for anything data-centric or highly interactive is a royal pain. You need rocket science to build a bicycle. Time for a dedicated bicycle standard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _2\. No flipping way to quickly navigate to the top or bottom of the post._

I don't know what the state of this is on Android, but iOS 13 lets you grab the scrollbar and go immediately to wherever you want in a document.

The scrollbar doesn't show up by default, so it's a 2-step operation. Scroll a bit to make the scroll indicator appear, then grab it and scroll faster.

Works well but I doubt many people are aware of it yet. People just assume you can't grab the scroll indicator in iOS since Apple took that feature away when they first launched the iPhone. Scroll bar has been non-interactable for the last 12 years of their touch devices.

<comment><USER18> >I don't know what the state of this is on Android, but iOS 13 lets you grab the scrollbar and go immediately to wherever you want in a document.

It's inconsistent on android, it works like that with most things but strangely not with some apps. You can't grab the scrollbar in Retroarch for example, even though you can see it. It makes scrolling through huge lists of ROMs extremely aggravating.

<comment><USER19> > _It's inconsistent in Android_

The only thing consistent about Android is its inconsistency, but even that can vary.

On a more serious note, I can't find the date this was originally published (??? Seriously?!) so I don't know what OS and browser versions were prevalent at the time of writing.

<comment><USER20> Top right corner over by the user info - 3 years ago.

I double checked by going to their other posts - it is the post-age, not the user-age, despite the "follow this user" button right next to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I actually prefer the current scollbar situation. I HATE when people hijack it but I prefer it to disappear when I don't need it. I can always scroll a tiny amount (magic mouse) to see my progress. I really do like the clearer look to UI's without the bar.

> No flipping clue how long the flipping post flipping is.

> No flipping way to quickly navigate to the top or bottom of the post.

I've literally never had either one of these issues with a disappearing scrollbar. OCCASIONALLY I have to try to grab it a second time but I'm more than happy with that state of affairs.

Also calling out Ello at the end is rather weak IMHO. If you really hate the lack of scrollbars so much then host your own blog...

<comment><USER8> > I prefer it to disappear when I don't need it.

My strong preference is the exact opposite of this. I want it to be there, full size, any time that scrolling is possible.

It seems that this is something that should be user configurable.

<comment><USER22> System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: Always

<comment><USER8> Which system/application is this for? Unless I'm missing something (which is entirely possible) it doesn't map to anything I use.

<comment><USER23> It's a MacOS system-wide setting.

<comment><USER8> Ah, thank you. I couldn't find it because I don't have any Apple machines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> ...and hijacking scroll behavior. Please stop that and just use the defaults, like everyone expects. I'm tired of getting to a site and having it scroll pages at a time when it should just scroll a few lines. And then trying to get back to the correct spot is a pain. Who does this stuff and why do you think it's necessary? What problem do you think you are solving by doing this? I just hit the back button. I'm not going to struggle and fight the browser to digest whatever it is you thought was important enough to print, because you've made it unnecessarily difficult and complicated to consume.

<comment><USER25> Maybe I'm a unique and strange person but my preferred scroll behaviour when reading a website is to middle click and move the mouse. Speed varies as the mouse moves so if you move just a bit you can get the page to auto-scroll at your perfect reading speed.

Of course, it's broken in a lot of sites, because many front end devs apparently don't know or care that this exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm born in the 80s so it's not totally objective, but I know there's something wrong when I boot up a win95 box and I don't miss 99% of so called innovation regarding UI.

<comment><USER2> I doubt it's nostalgia, even though i m old too. It's just a lot more efficent and faster to use, mouse and keyboard-wise. I often think to roll back to my windows 7 as a more sane desktop environment.

Some of the biggest offenses i 've seen are google's web apps. Total loss of hierarchy and replacement with elusive self-hiding buttons, even when it's clear from their use case that they should never have been hamburgerized. I 'm pretty sure, even in mobile, they are making the UX worse.

<comment><USER27> KDE or plasma whatever its name, is basically unchanged from 1995 UI philosophy. The closest we can have today in 2019.

<comment><USER28> I run XFCE (via Xubuntu) on my home desktop for the same reason. The lightness is a bonus.

<comment><USER29> Going off on a tangent, but KDE is lighter than XFCE these days.

Or at least [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold- prediction-kde-will-steal-the-lightweight-linux-desktop-crown-in-2020/) has been making the rounds.

<comment><USER28> Thanks, I hadn't seen that. That's quite interesting. I'd ended up settling on XFCE aound the time of the Gnome 2 / Gnome 3 / Unity schism. At the time, XFCE had felt a bit snappier than KDE. I've lately been thinking about giving KDE a try again, so this is good to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Scroll bars and top menus! One factor was the removal from the market of anything but 16:9 displays which sucks as well. I want my workstation UI back and to return the fischer-price bullshit on every OS. Windows and gnome are the worst, every thing they do in the name of progress makes computers harder to use.

I miss the simplicity of Windows 2000/XP classic, been downhill from there. Ubuntu Mate is good but is suffering from the encroachment of gnome also.

Also took 15 years for dark themes to become allowed again due to loss of theming functionality.

<comment><USER15> I can see the issues w/ Windows, but what's your beef with GNOME? It's the only UX I know of that actually makes a touchscreen usable for non-trivial tasks. (And many laptops feature touchscreens by now. Often with something like a fully-rotating hinge, to enable touch-only use.)

<comment><USER30> I use a keyboard and mouse at my desk. Not interested in touching the screen as it takes more effort and would need to be cleaned more often. I want easily discoverable menus, easily used scrollbars, and a dark theme. Real work has taken a backseat to play. I have an iPad/Phone for that and enjoy that at the sofa. Two use cases, not one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The same people who killed folders "because tags". Don't get me wrong, I love tags, but why on earth can't we have BOTH???? I don't always remember what I tagged something with, and searching through 8 years of work to find something is useless.

<comment><USER32> Tags would be okay as a folders replacement if they, you know, actually replaced folders. That is: if a tag can in turn have tags, and those tags automatically apply to the tagged files, then it should be trivial to not only emulate a folder hierarchy, but even _improve_ upon it by offering more flexibility.

It'd also help substantially if more tag-centric applications were up-front about which tags are already defined.

<comment><AUTHOR> LoCCS:

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

Seriously.

(Or one of a _very_ few equivalents, possibly the Colon Classification.)

<comment><USER32> Tangentially, I find it amusing that the Library of Congress classifies the Bible as "BS".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I personally believe that the proliferation of infinite scrolling/pagination has a strong correlation with the disappearance of the scrollbar.

In a world before infinite scroll, the bottom of the page was indeed the last bit of content on the page. In today's world, scrolling to the bottom of a page typically loads more content.

In this new world, I can imagine designers and engineers deciding to do the simple thing which is to remove the scroll bar since it's no longer usually an accurate depiction of where the users position is in relation to all the content available.

Of course all of this solely applies to feeds and not standalone pieces of content like articles. In the latter cases I'm unsure beyond minimal aesthetics why the scroll bar would be removed.

</comment><comment><USER34> Could I ask a related favor? Stop killing the Page Up / Page Down and cursor keys.

Or put another way, if you have a main content section that is scrollable (and the entire page isn't), then please make sure the focus is set to that scrollable div on page load.

I loaded the linked article and tried to scroll with Page Down, and nothing happened. I had to click inside the article body first, and only then could I scroll it with the keyboard.

I think a lot of sites and apps are built by people who do all their scrolling with the touchpad, and they _don 't know_ that there are other ways people like to scroll and it is the designer/developer's job to make sure they all work.

</comment><comment><USER35> Pretty brave for posting on a site that breaks the back button.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ello is dead.

It was, for a while, promising, useful, and interesting. I'd posted content there while that was the case.

(OP)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> For fuck's sake, if you need to be swearing (and I don't think it's necessary at all), just use the actual words.

<comment><AUTHOR> I often do.

I've been (occasionally) experimenting with slight bowderilisation. For better or worse, less swearing tends to go over slightly better. I can assure you the feeling was there in the original.

My general administrative announcement (NSFW langauge):

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/dlz9c2z6x-tvkd7rxtxwpw](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/dlz9c2z6x-tvkd7rxtxwpw)

[https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/100521241625879766](https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/100521241625879766)

<comment><USER36> Thing is I felt distracted by the amount of swearing, and the fake swears just exaggerated that. I don't care about the swearing in principle, it just felt misplaced in your article, in particular in this censored form.

Swearing helps convey frustration etc. and I guess that's what you were going for, but it doesn't actually work for me (as the reader) in all cases and in particular when it's "redacted".

Not that my opinion matters. I didn't intend this comment to be taken as serious discussion item and maybe I should have just not commented.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair points.

I wrote that some three years ago, among a series of rants (I don't recall the others that accompanied it), moved to extreme annoyance, and after looking at the initial result, decided to replace the initial language to tone it down a bit.

Today I tossed it into the HN submissions queue following an earlier item on similarly obnoxious and undiscoverable UI/UX, and was surprised to see the item take off. Planning which HN submissions will succeed is _not_ a high- probability endeavour.

The best way to read the language is "yeah, the author was pretty annoyed when they wrote this, but decided to tone down the effect without removing all references to that annoyance entirely".

I've written highly invecitve-filled pieces elsewhere. For public or private consumption. It's when I _stop_ any swearing that feedback (and usage) is quite likely to stop -- the outrage is a measure that I still care. Users past caring don't remain long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I agree that scrollbars should be preserved. However, mobile screens are small and the classic scrollbars we were used to a decade ago take up precious space.

Actually, mobile scrollbars cause problems for me pretty often. My fat fingers sometimes trigger the scrollbar instead when I mean to tap an element on the right side of the screen. It's very infuriating when you suddenly jump to some random spot in a large list and have to scroll to find where you were and try again.

I would love to see I think the solution is to come up with a design that indicates an element is scrollable. Maybe by darkening it at the bottom? A scrollbar could be toggled when the user scrolls far enough, then hidden again when the user stops scrolling for a while. Idk, I'm not a designer.

</comment><comment><USER38> is it just me or anyone else? As soon as i open a page on desktop i always look at the scrollbar first.

<comment><USER2> all the time - to assess how long the text is and decide whether to read it

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Agreed that these mobile-esque designs are out of control but some remedies are:

\- In iOS Safari you can tap the area above the address bar to jump back to the top of the web page.

\- On iOS 13, you can finally press-hold the scroll blob and drag it in a sensible way.

\- When there is a keyboard that lacks page-up/page-down/home/end, using the Command (Apple/Cloverleaf) key with up/down arrow tends to be equivalent to home/end.

\- Fortunately a lot of web sites that have messed-up layouts still support Reader View, which can restore some sanity and standard controls.

</comment><comment><USER40> > It's not so bad on desktops, and I can restore it there anyway via CSS.

I wouldn't recommend trying to modify DOM elements via CSS or extensions if you can avoid it. You're going to run into some broken web experiences.

Regarding scrollbars, you can set your OS to always show them. As a web dev, I'm out here trying to advocate to never screw with scrollbars.

<comment><USER3> OSX hiding scroll bars can be surprising for devs. You try your app on another OS and realize you've got several unintended scroll bars. I always turn them back on when working on OSX.

<comment><USER40> Yup, I learned this the hard way. We need to advocate for this within the companies we work for. Turn on scrollbars!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Sometimes I scroll down articles quickly just to make the hidden scrollbar appears so that I can estimate the length. Very annoying.

However I do agree that removing scrollbars on Mobile has one advantage: I simply can't accidentally move to the bottom of the page, which (no idea why) I do it very often...

</comment><comment> denton-scratch I couldn't agree more. Screw hamburger menus, scriptified scrollbars, and buttons that don't work properly. "Mobile first" is fine, but jeez, don't break my desktop. I mean, srsly, what do you think you're playing at?

</comment><comment><USER42> Surely this is related to a concurrent thread

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920)

It's the flat design trend. It is unintuitive by design.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is.

I'd posted a link to the piece on that discussion and decided to toss it into the submission queue on a lark. This got more attention than I'd expected.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356495)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> You can grab the scrollbar in iOS 13. Not sure how recent that feature is because I don't really miss being able to do it on mobile so I don't bother trying. Which of course is not to say it's a bad feature to have there.

</comment><comment><USER44> > I swear heads have to roll. Literally.

Author had some good points, but that escalated quickly.

<comment><USER45> I think he meant heads will have to _scroll_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Ubuntu 16.04 Mate regions for resizing a window with te mouse is too small. Scroll bars are often too small. If I have to move my mouse back and forth trying not to miss...its not a good gui interface.

</comment><comment> mark-r For me the worst example is Google Play Music on my phone. The scroll bar is there, but when you first open the app it's hidden underneath the pane at the top of the screen - you have to scroll down by dragging the window before you can even see it. Then if the window contents are long enough, as in when you're looking at the entire song list, you can't actually grab the scroll indicator unless you get really lucky - the sensitive part of the bar is much smaller than the visual indicator.

It flipping drives me mad.

</comment><comment><USER47> Fast navigation = less engagement time = less ad revenue. Case solved.

</comment><comment><USER48> I actually don't mind the lack of a scrollbar in the mobile version of Pocket. There are times where I don't necessarily want to see the progress of the article. The web version of Pocket seems fine to me.

What I really don't like is the Wall Street Journal mobile app which has an unreliable scrollbar, presumably due to ads. Articles frequently end well after you've scrolled to the "bottom" of the scrollbar so you can't ever tell how far through you are.

</comment><comment><USER49> An old dumb phone of mine had a mini trackball I found immensely useful. The firmware (proprietary) was total garbage, but moving between menus was a breeze. Having a trackball rather than a touch interface means that icons and text don't need to be larger to be hit by a finger; all the user does is move the trackball until the relevant object is focused or text highlighted, then use it. Voila, lots of space saved for actual information.

</comment><comment><USER50> The whole page appears as blank to me (Windows, Chrome, no addons, incognito mode).

I suspect that actually reading the article is unnecessary at this point.

<comment><USER51> It's a React SPA with no SSR. Why people do that for content only pages, I have no fucking idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Not to mention the scrollbar slider is almost invisible on windows 10 with the dark theme, and there are no way to fix it.

That's an awful detail.

</comment><comment><USER53> There aren't even any scrollbars on Hacker News. There are no scrollbars anywhere.

Firefox may be to blame, but Ubuntu gets final responsibility. Firefox in Ubuntu 18 simply doesn't do scroll bars. In case it is an unexpected culprit, I switched to XFCE and then uninstalled a bunch of Unity stuff, but that shouldn't break Firefox.

Fix?

<comment><USER54> There's something very wrong with your install.

There are plenty of scrollbars here on xubuntu 18.04 and xubuntu 19.04

I don't know, maybe it's Unity aftereffects. I've been on xubuntu (xfce ubuntu flavor) since before 14.04 came out. It never suprised me, which is the killer feature. Also scrollbars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I guess it's not that important as this article doesn't display a scrollbar either. /s

<comment><USER56> It mentions that at the bottom actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> A big part of the problem is it's not possible to customize the appearance of the scrollbar in most browsers. It's pretty much the _only_ thing you can put in a webpage that can't be changed with css, so designers avoid them.

</comment><comment><USER58> Related:

No scroll bars on iOS makes it look like features aren't available and no indication that you need to scroll.

[https://tyler.io/perfectly-cropped/](https://tyler.io/perfectly-cropped/)

</comment><comment><USER59> If you want to have a good scrolling experience with quick navigation for long articles on mobile try Opera browser.

Opera double tap zoom is also the only one that can relayout non-mobile friendly desktop paragraphs to mobile format.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the recommendation, though really this should be consistent for an entire OS or at least application framework (native _and_ web), not something that varies app-by-app.

Though if Opera are getting this right, good on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> I want to know why Android has absolutely ridiculous scrollbars that change size as you're scrolling. This is the stupidest thing and it's been this way forever. It makes them absolutely useless.

</comment><comment><USER61> After the 5th "flipping" I stopped flipping reading the post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do I have the flippin' friend for you: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356928)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Also see, from earlier today: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920)

</comment><comment><USER63> Who needs scrollbars when I've got my trusty PgUp & PgDn

<comment><USER64> Lucky you. I'm noticing an increasingly shrinking ability for them to their intended job lately. Sigh

<comment><USER65> Many sites just don't bother to assign focus to the main content region. (I don't think they even realize they're doing it wrong.) Page up/down work if you first mouse-click there, assuming you can find a place to do that without the page hijacking it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I'm glad scrollbars died on mobile. Right hand scroll bars are a PITA for left handed use on a touch device.

</comment><comment><USER67> Apple has actually brought useable scrollbars to iOS devices for the first time in iOS 13.

<comment><USER68> Which would be funny as from what I recall, to answer the headline, Apple led the pack in removing scrollbars, from OSX back in about 2011.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I wonder if part of this (the web part anyway) comes from a desire to monetize content paragraph-by-paragraph. With simple HTML scrolling (which browsers are really good at) it's hard to report what content is actually being read. With JS-controlled pseudo-scrolling, that's easy but it makes for a lousy UX.

<comment><AUTHOR> That tends to result in highly-paginated articles. In the worst cases, approaching paragraph-by-paragraph "slideshows" or pagination. An extreme anti-pattern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Idiots removed the triangles at top & bottom that you could use to scroll without dragging. I think they did it because they are stupid and evil.

<comment><USER71> They did it because the buttons took up room, were used by nearly nobody, and (in the case of the "jump to top" / "jump to bottom" buttons) destroyed the user's scroll state in a non-undoable way that was too easy to trigger.

<comment><AUTHOR> On touch devices, that's frequently the case.

Some form of multi-stage action (select/confirm) and a scroll-undo / scroll- backnav (return to prior location w/in doc/screen/page) _might_ help.

Small-screen design is hard, and there are a number of distinct breakpoints at which different concepts do and don't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> ello breaks the back button on my browser

i have to click back 2x in order to go back to my previous page.

</comment><comment><USER73> Iphone

</comment><comment><USER74> From the story: "today's kids".

</comment><comment><USER75> This is a pretty fluff piece. There isn't really much explored here.

The only interesting idea I can write out is that the author says that knowing the length/size of an article/book is intrinsically good. I do wonder if that is necessarily true.

Maybe one can argue that knowing the length of a written word has resulted in less people engaging?

<comment><USER76> > _This is a pretty fluff piece. There isn 't really much explored here._

It's not supposed to explore anything, be amusing, or whatever.

It's just a rant about a certain specific UI trend.

> _The only interesting idea I can write out is that the author says that > knowing the length /size of an article/book is intrinsically good_

That's not "the only interesting idea", in the sense that there were supposed to be more but are missing, or they are there but are not interesting.

It is literally the one and only idea the author wanted to convey with this post. They didn't set out to explore some vast expanse of UI design ideas. Just to write a rant about the lack of scrollbars/indication of position.

> _I do wonder if that is necessarily true._

Yes it is.

> _Maybe one can argue that knowing the length of a written word has resulted > in less people engaging?_

That's a problem for the content creator, not for the users...

<comment><USER75> For one, I remember a Google talk where they mentioned how the completion rate of e-books were higher than physical ones. One of the theories which stuck with me was that the reader not being aware of the end of the book could have been* a driver.

<comment><USER76> Yeah, this might be true, but that's a problem for the content provider I think -- or even not even for them (since you have already bought their book).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> "Lord knows, you can't actually grab the scrollbar and navigate with the bloody thing."

Do these people not have scroll wheels or scrolling gestures on their touch devices? I get it that some content is too long for scroll wheels, but it's just bad design if you are having to contend with data sets that are that large.

This just screams of old people screaming about change that they are not comfortable with... and I'm old AF.

</comment><comment><USER78> I actually think he's making a big deal out of nothing on this one. If you have a site that gets long, it would be smart to create some kind of system for jumping between sections, or scrolling up a great deal. Like Google Docs does when editing a long document. I can jump between bookmarks and pages with the "knob" on the right. But most websites don't need anything like this. It should be the job of the developer of the site to realize their site DOES need this, and implement some kind of smart solution.

<comment><USER79> I know it sounds crazy, but what if there were an ubiquitous solution that everyone was already familiar with and had used many times in the past, a solution that required little thought from developers and behaved consistently everywhere?

Something like... well, a scroll bar, at least before devs started being cute and hiding them for the sole purpose of aesthetics.

<comment><USER78> Because a scroll bar taking up real estate on the right side of a phone screen that is hard to touch because it's so thin is silly.

A knob on the right that's easily grabbed and barely covers anything is better.</comment></comment></comment>


Announcing .NET Core and ASP.NET 5 RC - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/11/18/announcing-net-core-and-asp-net-5-rc.aspx <comment><USER2> Microsoft is on a roll - they've got command line installable packages of the .NET execution environment for all 3 platforms - OSX, Linux and Windows! ([http://get.asp.net/OtherDownloads](http://get.asp.net/OtherDownloads))

Can't wait to figure out what you can do with this on Linux. Anyone knows? Maybe not desktop apps but Web Apps should be doable at this stage?

<comment><USER3> There are two major scenarios that we are targeting on top of Core:

\- ASP.NET 5 web apps and services - see: [https://github.com/aspnet/home](https://github.com/aspnet/home) \- Native executables - see: [https://github.com/dotnet/corert/blob/master/Documentation/i...](https://github.com/dotnet/corert/blob/master/Documentation/intro- to-corert.md)

What do you think?

Disclosure: .NET Core team member

<comment><USER4> How about F#? Is it viable through .NET Core on non-Windows platforms?

<comment><USER3> The F# team is working on getting F# working on .NET Core. It's an important goal for the team.

You can follow their progress: [https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/pulls?utf8=&q=is%3...](https://github.com/Microsoft/visualfsharp/pulls?utf8=&q=is%3Apr+CoreCLR+)

<comment><USER4> Looking forward to it. Thanks for the fast reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While looking around I thought it was cool that Microsoft developers are directly helping popular libraries become compatible with the new .NET Core.

[https://github.com/castleproject/Core/issues/90](https://github.com/castleproject/Core/issues/90)

[https://github.com/nunit/nunit/issues/575](https://github.com/nunit/nunit/issues/575)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is also a Release Candidate of the ASP.NET web framework.

 _edit_ Actually, the ASP MVC part has also progressed to RC1 as you can see here: [https://github.com/aspnet/Mvc/releases](https://github.com/aspnet/Mvc/releases)

Confusingly, the next release is ASP Version 5 and ASP MVC version 6.

Also important: "supported on Windows, OS X and Linux"

<comment><USER3> MVC is also RC.

See: [https://github.com/aspnet/Home/releases/tag/v1.0.0-rc1](https://github.com/aspnet/Home/releases/tag/v1.0.0-rc1)

<comment><USER6> You are right, and I have updated the parent post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This would be a lot more exciting if it actually worked with IIS but it looks like they rushed this out, calling it a "release candidate" in order to be able to say it was out in time for the Connect conference without actually hitting the kind of bar one expects from a release candidate.

Their github issue pages are full of unresolved issues around problems with ASP.NET 5 and IIS [0][1][2], and the official docs on publishing ASP.NET 5 to IIS have a significant and incomplete list of "common errors" people are encountering [3].

Personally, I'm seeing responses from Kestrel when hitting ASP.NET 5 hosted pages under IIS, but they are zero-byte error 404 responses which don't help much. It's all great in Visual Studio but it's a big zero when trying to actually use it for real. This is not a release candidate. At best it's a 9th beta.

[0] [https://github.com/aspnet/IISIntegration/issues/14](https://github.com/aspnet/IISIntegration/issues/14) [1] [https://github.com/aspnet/Hosting/issues/466](https://github.com/aspnet/Hosting/issues/466) [2] [https://github.com/aspnet/Hosting/issues/364](https://github.com/aspnet/Hosting/issues/364) [3] [https://docs.asp.net/en/latest/publishing/iis.html](https://docs.asp.net/en/latest/publishing/iis.html)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I've got a minor issue with the Configuration classes and they were already talking about RC2 a little while ago [1]. I don't think we can fault them too much for this - we've all been on those kinds of schedules.

1: [https://github.com/aspnet/Configuration/issues/335](https://github.com/aspnet/Configuration/issues/335)

<comment><USER7> Following your link led me to discover your [https://github.com/voltagex/minecraft- rebridge](https://github.com/voltagex/minecraft-rebridge), which looks very cool. Would it be difficult to configure the embedded http server to support persistent TCP connections for lower latency between subsequent requests? (I think NanoHTTPD supports persistent connections but I've never used it so don't know what's involved)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, get in touch with me so we don't derail the thread. You don't have any contact details in your profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Should .Net Core be considered a competitor to Mono? Why would someone use Mono when they can use a multi-platform .Net RT straight from Microsoft?

<comment><USER3> Not a competitor. We work closely with the Mono team, specifically Miguel. We are releasing lots of source for them with each .NET Framework release. The Mono team is adopting large quantities of that source to improve Mono. It's a collaboration.

Certainly, there are now two .NET choices on Linux. If you ask Miguel, I suspect he'd recommend .NET Core if you are building a server app.

Disclosure: .NET Core team member

<comment><USER10> I got confused when trying to install .NET Core, so sorry if this is a bad question. It seemed like .NET Core depended on Mono. Does it actually? I can't remember what exactly seemed like it depended on Mono. Perhaps Nuget? My memory is fuzzy.

Either way, these two docs [0,1] (not just those particular pages) could really use some clarifications. I had trouble working my way through either of them and they seemed to be giving conflicting information at times.

Granted, I have no significant experience with .NET or Mono. I was able to install Mono once on Ubuntu. But I gave up after trying to install .NET Core on Ubuntu (and FreeBSD) more recently - a week ago. Sorry, I can't provide more substantial criticism right now.

I guess the forums[2] would be the best place to bring these issues up in the future (with more information)?

[0] [http://dotnet.readthedocs.org/en/latest/getting- started/inst...](http://dotnet.readthedocs.org/en/latest/getting- started/installing-core-linux.html)

[1] [https://dotnet.github.io/getting- started/](https://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/)

[2] [http://forums.dotnetfoundation.org/](http://forums.dotnetfoundation.org/)

<comment><USER11> What's confusing about [1]?

I'm not on the ASP.NET team, but may be able to provide some general guidance.

<comment><USER10> It wasn't necessarily that [0] or [1] was confusing in and of themselves but that the information seemed to conflict at times. Having multiple sources can be helpful to establish patterns unless they are saying opposite things. But again, I cannot point to specifics.

I guess my current question is, can .NET Core be built on FreeBSD without a Windows machine? It appeared that this, for one, was not the case. This is a bit of a showstopper.

<comment><USER8> [https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/Documentation/...](https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/Documentation/building/freebsd- instructions.md) \- if that doesn't work, it's a bug.

<comment><USER10> So it looks like the answer is yes then. You do need a Windows machine to build the managed components. So I cannot build (for now) if I do not have a Windows machine.

I did actually follow this guide, though I still wasn't able to compile. The build failed before the managed components section. If I have a chance to look at it again, I'll try to file a bug report or get more help.

<comment><USER8> Sigh. It'd be really good if MS would give out some Azure time for open source work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > MaxPath

Oh, Microsoft finally woke up and supports path longer than 260 chars in dotNetCore. So, the questions when will Microsoft WinAPI & and the Windows Shell/Explorer too? Will we probably have for Windows 11...

<comment><USER13> What are the uses for this besides npm < 3.0? I'm super curious, the 260 limit seems like a huge flaw but in my interweb travels I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else

<comment><USER3> We are making .NET Core OS agnostic as a general principle. The 260 char limit seems like an unwelcome Windows behavior to include in the Linux and OS X implementation. With that removed, it makes sense to also remove it from Windows. That was our thinking.

We do hear about this limitations on Windows somewhat frequently in the context of .NET. This comes from internal Microsoft teams about as much as anyone else. We were glad to remove this limitation for .NET Core.

Disclosure: .NET Team member

<comment><USER14> Here are the two .NET design review meetings where the removal of the MAX_PATH limitations is discussed: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpa2OFauASM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpa2OFauASM) and [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpMqUBIAnLU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpMqUBIAnLU)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hope this means we are a little closer to powershell for OS X and Linux.

<comment><USER16> I'm pretty happy with bash - what does powershell do that makes you want it over the shells already available to nix platforms?

I've never used it much and assumed it was an MS attempt to gain something like what the other shells already had.

<comment><USER17> Basic man-page style documentation for your own scripts comes practically free with powershell. Powershell uses named parameters (though technically you're not forced to do so) with command-line tab-completion. Powershell uses a standardized verb+noun syntax design which makes it slightly easier to figure out what commands are what. Powershell uses an object pipeline instead of plain text.

This is the spirit of unix taken to the next generation. It's an incredibly useful CLI environment and pipeline which makes it easy to combine small tools to achieve powerful functionality while also facilitating making scripts by making them easier to use and easier to write.

For example, let's say I wanted to find every process using more than 100m of ram. With powershell that's just:

      get-process | where WorkingSet -gt 100e6

Because powershell is object based you gain a lot more potency in the command pipeline. For example, let's say I wanted to kill all processes that matched a certain filter. That's as easy as piping the output of get-process through some filters then into stop-process. Let's say instead I wanted to wait until all instances of firefox are closed, that's just this:

      get-process | where path -like '*\firefox.exe' | %{ $_.WaitForExit() }

Powershell is far from perfect and it has a few very annoying gotchas here and there, but so does bash, python, and any other language for that matter. Powershell is a very powerful language that has benefited from a lot of rethinking of some of the traditions in command line interfaces that exist solely because that's how it used to work back in the day despite the reasons for those choices no longer pertaining in the here and now (teletype terminals, slow connections, slow everything, etc.).

<comment><USER18> A common complaint from people used to bash is that it's verbose. But since everything is autocompleted _and_ there is support support for short aliases it's very hard to claim it has to be more verbose than bash. Using long description funcion names by default, and shorter alias as an option is clearly the sane design choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great. I was looking forward to a good alternative with decent syntax to PHP, and now that ASP.NET can run on linux, there's nothing that stops people from using it over PHP.

Honestly I wonder what reason would one have to choose PHP over ASP.NET for their apps in a few months / years time.

<comment><USER20> Same reason people choose PHP over Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Compojure, Yesod, or the billion of other choices available today: because so many small business have their hosting via super-cheap linux boxes that you only get FTP access to.

<comment><USER21> Cheap hosting and PHP do go well together, but when you work at a company that has a lot of stuff written in one language, and the whole team is experienced with that same language, there needs to be a legitimate reason to change the whole technology stack. Because it's "cool" or not is generally not a good enough reason - unless it gets to the point where it isn't supported anymore, you can't find employees, the community has dried up, there's nothing new happening with the language, etc. But PHP, despite the problems it does have, it suffers from none of those things. So I don't see a mass exodus happening any time soon.

<comment><USER22> Completely agree. It's very exciting, and extremely cool but in terms of a business decision for larger technology teams, it will very much be like node.js, it's a similar thing, runs on cheap linux boxes and can do everything PHP can but it's taken time for companies to get it in where it "fits"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone who has avoided Microsoft in the past, I've found myself in a position to write a few projects lately on the C# .NET platform, and actually find myself eager to have this available on OS X. I actually enjoyed a lot of features of Visual Studio specifically (I realize this isn't coming yet), but the platform itself really just feels pretty nice and natural.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've been eagerly keeping a close eye on .Net Core. Congratulations to the teams that have been working on this! It's long overdue and I can assure you many others are keenly interested in this.

For myself, mainly because as primarily a Python programmer I've been looking for where to move next with the 2/3 split. I've migrated completely to PyPy4 (which is Python2.7) rather than port/test to CPython3 in the last few years. It was worth the migration and testing that was involved.

I'm waiting to see if PyPy will announce they are the flag bearers for Python2. If so, I'll most likely continue using it going forward.

On the other hand we use .Net and Python at work so while most people would not agree or find .Net Core to be a bit pointless, for me it means I can move my projects and small business to run on my underpowered VPS, utilizing the same well-supported tech stack that many enterprises use.

Keeping my head in C# is a good advantage as I'm also interested in Xamarin and Unity (both professionally and personally). Of course, I'm one who does not have any particular grudge against Microsoft. I do prefer POSIX based systems. For my home business and hobby tech stack I'm currently looking at 1) PyPy4, 2) .NetCore 3) CPython3. While I'm currently running everything on PyPy4, there's a smaller gap between 1 and 2, and a big liklihood of adoption gap between 2 and 3.

</comment><comment><USER25> Exciting to see the rc released. I've been waiting up until this point to really dive into a project.

One of the things that will be a huge barrier for me though is the lack of system.drawing. I've worked in the sign and graphics industry for 8 years and a lot of software I have written relies on system.drawing. The font rendering is crucial. It appears the only feasible option is the mono implementation.(and maybe that is good enough)

Looking ahead I'm curious if there will ever be aa coreclr replacement for this? It seems Microsoft closed the open issue regarding this.

[https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/2020#event-360344181](https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/2020#event-360344181)

</comment><comment><USER26> Is MVC the default ASP.NET workflow now? Is it the only workflow? Are Web Forms still supported?

<comment><USER3> MVC is the default for ASP.NET 5, for both apps and services. It runs on both .NET Core and .NET Framework. Same with SignalR.

WebForms remains supported and new features go into it each release. It is supported on the .NET Framework.

Disclosure: .NET Core team member

<comment><USER26> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > For the most part, we have transitioned our focus to performance, > reliability and overal quality.

I giggled at that, I admit.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is really exciting!

</comment><comment><USER29> For hosting an MVC 5 app is Azure the way to go?

<comment><USER30> It's confusing, but ASP.NET 5 ships with ASP.NET MVC 6. ASP.NET MVC 5 was released in October, 2013. I'm assuming you meant ASP.NET 5 / ASP.NET MVC 6 since that's what was announced today.

There's a good chance you know this, but since some people reading this thread might not I figured I'd give some more detail.

It's definitely in Microsoft's interest to make Azure a great place to host your ASP.NET applications. The team that builds ASP.NET is part of the Azure group, and that's what pays the bills. (disclaimer: Microsoft employee, Azure fan)

However, ASP.NET 5 has been built to run great on your own web server. In addition to IIS on Windows, ASP.NET 5 has a cross platform, open source web server named Kestrel that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux: [https://github.com/aspnet/KestrelHttpServer/](https://github.com/aspnet/KestrelHttpServer/)

The team's working really hard to make sure that ASP.NET 5 not only runs cross platform, but that it works well and runs really fast cross-platform: [https://github.com/aspnet/benchmarks/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/aspnet/benchmarks/blob/master/README.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> can we please have a fully functional bash on windows?

</comment><comment><USER32> Sigh. Different release. Different error trying to get the hello world application running on a mac. One day...

<comment><USER11> Did you try [https://dotnet.github.io/getting- started/](https://dotnet.github.io/getting-started/)?

Can I help with getting it running?

<comment><USER32> I did that the other day, on beta8 or whatever. In that case, I could run a console app. Then I tried the Yeoman setup [1] for a simple website without auth. It failed to run.

Today, I uninstalled mono, previous dmx stuff, and ran the package linked in this story. Same result. Yeoman website failed.

It's failing to resolve the fx dependencies.

Also, it's difficult for me to understand if I need mono or not. I have it.

[1] [https://docs.asp.net/en/latest/tutorials/your-first-mac- aspn...](https://docs.asp.net/en/latest/tutorials/your-first-mac-aspnet.html)

<comment><USER11> Ah, sorry, I know nothing about Yeoman -- I'm only familiar with console applications :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yelp lays off 1000, furloughs 1100 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.yelp.com/2020/04/planning-for-yelps-future <comment><USER2> I know this is a very tired topic, but does anyone have any good blog posts or articles about "what exactly is it that you all do?" Yelp having 6000 employees. I'm not surprised, I'm not mad. I just want to understand.

<comment><USER3> Yelp's engineering isn't likely much more than ~150 people (I worked there ~2 years ago, maybe has grown since then but honestly, given their revenue situation even then, likely not by much). The mix there is just like most companies; you've got dedicated teams for each of their apps (which includes Android, iOS, web, business-facing, etc), you've got API teams, back office teams working on moving data around and business analytics, a very secretive abuse management team, IT, etc. Yelp also, given their age, wasn't (at some point) running their primary workloads in the cloud; they had (have?) a colo DC in San Francisco that hosted a ton of stuff, so there were people dedicated to that hardware. There was some movement to get rid of this as I remember.

Surprisingly, or hopefully not, the vast majority of the company is more directly revenue generating; sales and customer acquisition. Its spread very globally; at least as of a few years ago, the SF HQ didn't house any sales people, though I think they had an office in Oakland which did.

Point being, I always got the impression that their engineering team was very "right sized" given their revenue and product scope.

<comment><USER4> Even 150 blows my mind. Years ago I worked for one of the top 10 EHR software makers (at the time - maybe even now, I haven't looked) and we had 1/3 the number of engineers on that system.

<comment><USER5> I don't mean to be flippant or unnecessarily mean, but my anecdotal experience is that many EHR systems are pretty widely derided by healthcare providers (i.e. end-users).

Maybe it's not a good thing that only 50 engineers were working on that system.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't matter to me, I'm not in that industry any more. But yes, they're a mess. But, honestly, I don't know you would make it less of a mess. People just need to accept that some systems are complicated and the more you try and make it less complicated the further from that goal you get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Today we will let 1,000 of our colleagues go and furlough approximately > 1,100 more, while reducing hours for others. Your department leaders will be > in touch this morning to discuss how this affects you individually, and > letters with more details and FAQs will follow this afternoon.

Honest question - is it normal to announce layoffs publicly before telling the affected employees? I guess I can understand it from a PR perspective, but it must be awful to read that and sit around waiting to find out if you're affected.

<comment><USER7> The first person who gets laid off is going to immediately call The New York Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc. with probably-incorrect information about the layoffs. So PR wants to be out ahead of that. The real world doesn't have atomic transactions, so you have to pick between that scenario and one where some people are worried about their job for a few hours.

<comment><USER8> > The first person who gets laid off is going to immediately call The New York > Times, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc

Why do people do this? What do they get out of it? They don't pay for tip-offs do they? Seems unethical anyway.

<comment><USER9> Here is a better question. Why _not_ do this?

If you got fired, you don't really own the company anything anymore.

<comment><USER8> > Why not do this?

Because what do you get out of it? They don't pay you for a tip. Why do free work for a media conglomerate, even if you didn't care about the ethics?

<comment><USER9> > Because what do you get out of it?

Because they felt like it?

I can definitely see how someone might think that it is cool to cause a news story.

> Why do free work

You are overestimating the amount of "work" that would go into something like this. I do stuff all the time, just because I felt like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For reference, according to Google Yelp's employee in 2020 is 6,030 before layoff. So 1/3 of the workforce is laid off or furloughed.

<comment><USER11> what is furluoghed?

<comment><USER12> It means something more specific in government job parlance I believe, but essentially you are still employed but not getting paid your salary and you don't work. Usually (and most importantly) it means that your benefits like health insurance continue as well.

<comment><USER13> Are you eligible for unemployment or do you have to accept $0 income for the unforeseeable future?

<comment><USER14> It's not like that. You just wouldn't work/be paid for one week of the month, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A company like yelp making 1 billion revenue per year, I'd except they could have their employees back, for at least a couple months, maybe furlough them with 80% of their salaries...

<comment><USER16> and take a huge earnings hit? WHY? when you can just let people go. it's a company with shitty business ethics, so why would you even suggest that they do right by their employees?

<comment><USER17> Look layoffs are always shitty, and Yelp in many ways is not an ethical company. However if you read the actual post, the leadership is at least trying. The CEO is taking no pay, execs are taking pay cuts. They've cancelled projects. My guess is that their revenue has tanked to near 0 and that since many of their clients are closing, possibly for good they're expecting significantly lower revenue for the next 2 years.

<comment><USER18> Yup. I don't like Yelp, but in this situation the choice isn't between layoffs and no layoffs, it's between layoffs and bankruptcy. And in bankruptcy you'd see massive layoffs anyway.

There's not really even a choice here.

<comment><USER15> The choice is to build an emergency fund, just like you would do for yourself, so you can pay your rent, your bills if an accident in your life happens. Yet, financial crashes happens quite regurlarly but companies expect the gouvernment (citizens) to pay the rescue bill. And I'm not going to cry for the execs taking a 20-30% pay cut.

<comment><USER19> I don't really expect companies to plan for the government ordering the majority of economic activity to halt for an undefined length of time.

This isn't just some "rainy day" to save for. This is unprecedented, and it's only necessary because the government did not take steps to contain the outbreak sooner.

Money given to companies after this is not a bailout in the 2008 sense. It should be viewed as compensation for damages caused by the government's bungled response to the virus.

<comment><USER20> > _This is unprecedented, and it 's only necessary because the government did > not take steps to contain the outbreak sooner._

The whole world is shut down over COVID. Even with borders closed as much as possible it has spread. There is no intervention by the US government that could have been done in January that would mean the country would be open for business today.

<comment><USER19> > There is no intervention by the US government that could have been done in > January that would mean the country would be open for business today.

Sure there was. Other countries did it. The US and the EU were caught unprepared but several countries in Asia did the right thing, probably because they had previous experience with SARS.

A total societal lockdown is not the only viable response to a disease like COVID-19. It might be the only viable _late-stage_ response, but early testing, tracing, and quarantining has worked in other countries and it could have worked here if our government had been on the ball.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While job losses will pile further misery on the economy, I hope that means there are now fewer ad sales people trying to shake down local businesses so that they offer Yelp protection money to keep their ratings positive.

Companies like this always start with a noble purpose, before the pressure to monetize causes them to ruin what was once a valuable service.

<comment><USER22> This is not a thing. No one at Yelp does this. There is literally zero evidence that Yelp does this.

<comment><USER23> Ok, just keep pretending it isn't happening. But the owners of thousands of small cafes & restaurants would bend your ear for hours with bullshit they have to deal with.

<comment><USER22> Do you have any evidence to support this claim?

<comment> james-skemp Louis Rossmann has a Mac repair store in New York and, when I was subscribed to him, had posted numerous videos about his experiences with Yelp.

One example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIGKxLcoso](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CIGKxLcoso)

<comment><USER24> To summarize: Yelp account exec shared another business owner's stats with Louis. Louis reported this privacy violation to Yelp and the account exec got fired. The fired account exec took it personally and got her friends to write negative reviews on Louis's Yelp page.

That's evidence that Yelp practices extortion?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> hunter-2 Someone I work with from another company just messaged me that they are being furloughed for a couple of months. I wonder how many of these furloughs are going to end up in layoffs.

<comment><USER25> It'll depend a lot on how long the pandemic lasts.

I know a few friends that work for a major retail company that have been furloughed. Those will definitely turn to layoffs if this keeps going too much longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> With all these lays off it's going harder to find a job and companies probably try to force pay cuts for the roles they are hiring because of it. Bad time to be jobless; sadly I am in this situation:(

</comment><comment><USER27> Good riddance to an exploitative business.

<comment><USER28> Please explain.

<comment><USER29> Yelp is accused of predatory practices on business owners including pushing them to sign up for a paid subscription to hide negative reviews on their Yelp page. Otherwise, you are vulnerable to their algorithm which hides/shows reviews that are often less than favorable. Yelp reviews are now overtaking business' own pages on Google searches leaving businesses with less option to control, let alone, curate their brand's messaging.

<comment><USER30> Is there any evidence of this actually happening?

<comment><USER31> Numerous credible reports from business owners, and numerous denials from Yelp. I don't really know who to believe.

<comment><USER24> I would hardly call them credible reports. It's easy to see how business owners could draw false inferences when they receive a Yelp sales call and coincidentally get a negative review shortly after.

Honestly, I thought this was long since debunked. There is no physical evidence of Yelp sales execs extorting small businesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wait Yelp has 6000 employees? They haven't changed their site in a decade! What percentage of that is engineering? Seriously, I thought they have maybe 1000 at best.

<comment><USER30> Have you (and anyone else posting this same exact comment on any article that mentions employee count) ever worked at a large company? Once things operate at a large enough scale, it requires dedicated teams to focus on very specific parts of the application.

Take SEO for example, it's not just putting H1 and title tags on every page. You most likely have dedicated services that are generating millions of sitemaps, daily. You probably have separate infrastructure dedicated to serving the crawlers so that you can optimize the content and aren't serving your users and bots from the same pool of resources. You have analytics dedicated to monitoring the crawlers and running tests / adjustments as you see results. You likely have services that generate the SEO data for every page (meta tags, titles, canonical links, headings, etc). And in addition to this you have AB testing, legacy systems, and technical debt to deal with.

My point is, it's easy to brush these things off as unnecessary and large company waste (and some of it might be) but to say things like "It's just a CRUD app, why do they need a 1000 engineers. I could do it with 10" is ignoring the vast complexity involved in running at scale.

<comment><USER33> meanwhile I am sure other companies running an app that is comparable to yelp scale do so with much fewer engineers. Whatsapp comes to mind as an obvious example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What is the biggest source of revenue for Yelp? What part of Yelp's revenue is Empyr or other card-linked offers?

<comment><USER27> They call businesses to sell promotion packages, and those that don't buy get hammered with bad reviews.

[https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/10/1728222/yelp- accuse...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/01/10/1728222/yelp-accused-of- hiding-positive-reviews-for-non-advertiser)

<comment><USER35> If you're so inclined, you can look up your local Denny's for proof of the opposite. They are a big time advertiser with pretty poor reviews on average.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I guess even the 21st century mafia isn't immune to an economic downturn.

<comment><USER37> Nor is the actual Mafia immune [https://nypost.com/2020/03/29/how-coronavirus- cripples-the-n...](https://nypost.com/2020/03/29/how-coronavirus-cripples-the- new-york-mafia/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yelp basically replaced the Yellow pages and Zagat with a bit of the BBB thrown in for good measure. Its model is to sell listing services to businesses. I am guessing it is a sales heavy org.

</comment><comment><USER39> How bad will their data be after this crisis? If 30% of restaurants/bars don't survive, updating their data is going to be a challenge.

<comment><USER40> I feel like that is the least of their problems

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone have the role percentage breakdown of those let go/furloughed? e.g. marketing, dev, design, sales, etc.

</comment><comment><USER41> Every advertising business reliant on brick and mortar or real estate is going to be decimated.

</comment><comment><USER42> Does anyone know which departments/roles saw cuts?

<comment><USER23> Hopefully most of their scummy sales department

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Off topic: Can anyone explain why the dow jones is going up? The dow was _LOWER_ Jan 1st 2019. I feel we are worse off than Jan 1st 2019.

<comment><USER2> If anyone can "explain" it, they should go get filthy rich. But we can speculate in a semi-educated way. I think my best speculation is that the economy's fall factored in uncertainty about how bad this really is. The sell- off was based on worst case scenarios (given such high uncertainty).

Now that uncertainty is going down as we understand it all better, have more data, have plans in place, the economy is recovering to a more accurate, "this is actually what this whole ordeal will cost us"

<comment><USER44> Maybe. Personally, I think the median investor, especially the median short term investor, tends to be more optimistic than the rational market hypothesis would argue. Information availability isn't symmetric, and the news sources favored by these people tend to paint rosier pictures of the recovery than seem likely.

I mean, one very straightforward interpretation of the headline of this linked article is that Yelp will be seeing a 30-40% shortfall in revenue for the medium term future (i.e. long enough to make the firing and hiring process worthwhile). At its worst, the market was guessing at a 38% drop in valuation, and it's now recovered significantly from that.

My guess, and no I'm not buying puts to test it, is that we're going to see another series of shocks to the market when the revenue numbers start being reported and the big employers start running out of money and shutting things down.

Right now the immediate job losses are all in the service sector and small employers, and those jobs are basically invisible to your typical trader bro.

<comment><USER45> > Right now the immediate job losses are all in the service sector and small > employers, and those jobs are basically invisible to your typical trader > bro.

Most of this activity is driven by robotic trades by institutional investors. It's largely quantitative. Whether the quantitative priors are accurate, is debatable.

<comment><USER44> I don't buy that. Objective quantitative analysis based on models that don't know about the pandemic _should_ be pricing in a disastrous 30% unemployment, and clearly the market is not.

I'm not in the industry, but I have to believe the quants are doing what all of us are: they're throwing out the models, rewriting stuff where possible, but basically just guessing like the rest of us. And that process is a victim of their own subjectivity. And this is not just a demographic well-positioned to have a good, objective understanding of epidemiology.

Basically that's just a long winded way to say: wall street isn't looking at this correctly and is going to be surprised when quarterly results don't show the recovery they're expecting.

<comment><USER45> > Objective quantitative analysis based on models that don't know about the > pandemic should be pricing in a disastrous 30% unemployment, and clearly the > market is not.

That's not necessarily true. First of all, 30% unemployment, while a big scary unprecedented number, represents the expected outcome of the official policy of all governments (Federal & State) , which is forced unemployment. The CARES stimulus includes a $600/week unemployment insurance _on top of_ the existing state UI. In every state, the unemployment benefit is actually higher than the median wage [1]. Businesses know this, and proactively lay off / furlough their employees so that they may collect this benefit, with the intention of having them be first-in-line for re-hiring once this all passes. The other half of the CARES stimulus includes forgivable loans to businesses with the hope that those loans can keep businesses afloat so that they may be in a position to re-hire once this all passes. Put simply, because half the stimulus is in the form of direct insurance payments to people, and unemployment is the means of receiving that, you will see high unemployment numbers. Not only is this expected, it is intended.

All this being said, it's still not certain that many of these businesses will be able to survive even with the loans/stimulus, nobody knows for sure. The market doesn't price in the scary 30% unemployment number, it prices in the expectation that this number will fall back to usual levels by next year.

The grandparent comment asked why the Dow increased today, and it's because the Fed announced $2.3T in new small-business loans, which slightly increases the percentage of businesses that may be able to weather this storm.

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/AifRmdD](https://imgur.com/a/AifRmdD)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Remote Leaf[1] founder here, I would like to offer Yelp employees who lost their jobs a free month of membership, that might help you land a remote job. We hand-pick thousands of remote jobs from tons of job boards and only sends the ones that apply to you. Just ping me on Twitter[2] and send me an email to avail this :)

[1] - [https://twitter.com/remoteleaf](https://twitter.com/remoteleaf)

[2] - [https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl](https://twitter.com/abinaya_rl)

</comment><comment><USER47> Can't say this is really a bad thing, Yelp has had blackmail and predatory business practices a long time and should be shutdown on that alone. It's amazing to me they haven't been sued into oblivion yet.

</comment><comment><USER48> 122 points in 2 hours and already on 3rd page or results. Why are we hiding layoff news?</comment>


BufferBox: Amazon Lockers? We Had That Idea First - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/canadarealtime/2012/08/08/digits-bufferbox-amazon-lockers-we-had-that-idea-first/ <comment><USER2> I actually worked with BufferBox this summer as part of my design class. They mentioned that while they and Amazon Locker were breaking new ground here in North America, this type of service is pretty old-hat in Europe. For example, DHL runs their PackStation service in Germany (and apparently in the rest of Europe too) [<http://www.dhl.de/en/paket/privatkunden/packstation.html>]. There are a bunch of other fairly large and developed competitors all over Europe as well.

<comment><USER3> Wikipedia also has an English article about Packstation: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation>

(You might think it's only on the German wikipedia, that's why I think this is worthwhile to post.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In Estonia we've had two-way boxes (where you can also send stuff) for a few years now. For example local eBay clone osta.ee uses it for quite convenient parcel service, as you sometimes don't really want somebody to ship to your home address.

<comment><USER4> Forgot the mandatory link: <http://smartpost.ee/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These lockers are good, but what I think we should really improve is the quality/performance of our mailing/delivery systems. The lockers are just a patch to the existing lame systems.

If a company can deliver all days in a week (including weekends) and all time in a day (including evenings and nights), and the delivery men _really_ called before they left a note, that company would win the game.

<comment><USER6> I actually think lockers are more convenient because I don't even have to think about the day and time. I just pick up my package when it's convenient.

I also imagine customized delivery times would increase costs and make logistics more difficult. The only place I know offhand that has customized delivery times is Tokyo, so I wonder how they manage. Probably more affordable in a high density area with couriers.

<comment><USER7> They do customized delivery times all over Japan, not only in Tokyo. Amazon same-day delivery is only in Tokyo though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I always thought there were laws against running a service like this in the US. For example the rules for registering a USPS P.O. box are very stringent:

> To rent a PO Box, two different forms of identification are required. At > least one of them must be a valid photo ID. [1]

This way they can actually track you down if you have something illegal shipped to the box.

A service like this where you can easily sign up without properly verifying your identity is just waiting to be used as a temporary drop-box for people shipping drugs from SilkRoad, people shipping goods they bought with a stolen credit card, etc.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-office_box#United_States>

<comment><USER9> That Wikipedia article described USPS PO Boxes. Private companies (Mailboxes Etc, etc) have offered similar services in the US for years, although they are not technically a PO Box. They may have similar requirements, but the link that you provided does not discuss it.

<comment><USER8> Right. USPS PO Box was just one example. It's my understanding that the other services have the same requirements.

E.g. I checked and UPS offers a service called My Choice:

> The UPS My ChoiceSM enrollment process uses public record information to > verify your identity.

[http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/sri/ups_my_choice...](http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/sri/ups_my_choice_recognize_identity.html?srch_pos=14&srch_phr=UPS+My+Choice&WT.svl=SRCH)

<comment><USER10> The CIA could just set up cameras facing a locker location (and possibly fit cameras in the lockers). Add some very expensive computing for facial and image [of the goods] recognition and you might be doing them a favour???

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Norwegian postal service have been offering locker facility for parcels for awhile. Mostly in train/tube stations. I dont think they have been used much.

While interested I never did use one when I lived there as they cost much more than a normal delivery to your door and are very limited on for how long they are stored. Useless if you are away for the weekend or week, when such a locker service would be ideal.

<http://www.posten.no/17889/postautomat> [http://www.postennorge.no/nyheter- og-media/nyhetsarkiv/gamle...](http://www.postennorge.no/nyheter-og- media/nyhetsarkiv/gamle-nyheter/nyheter?contentKey=6732)

<comment><USER11> .... And as it turns out they were abandoned in 2011. (Google translate to the rescue for most of you)

[http://www.postennorge.no/nyheter-og- media/nyhetsarkiv/nyhet...](http://www.postennorge.no/nyheter-og- media/nyhetsarkiv/nyhetsarkiv/postautomatene-legges-ned-fra-nytt%C3%A5r)

[http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?sl=auto&tl=en...](http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.postennorge.no%2Fnyheter- og-media%2Fnyhetsarkiv%2Fnyhetsarkiv%2Fpostautomatene-legges-ned-fra- nytt%25C3%25A5r)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When someone says they had an idea first, it's almost always not true. I didn't know any similar technology but I was sure that statement was bullshit. Comments here proved me right. Just say "before them" instead of "first" and you won't end up looking like a douche (well, a smaller douche because it's still bad to cry about things like this).

PS: It might be that the writer came up with the word "first" as it is not cited.

</comment><comment><USER6> Installing lockers is something that I would get into if I wasn't already involved with a company doing something very similar but not for package deliveries. Once you build out the infrastructure, you have an asset with good ROI and a moat against potential competitors. I know someone doing exactly this right now and is basically trying to expand as quickly as possible.

</comment><comment><USER13> Same day delivery services like these have existed in Japan for years. They're wonderful.

But they lend themselves to low weight/high value goods that are easily shipped. And to highly concentrated population centers where the higher costs of same day shipping associated with operating a warehouse or retail store in an expensive environment can be amortized over higher margin goods.

</comment><comment><USER14> It'll be interesting to see Amazon square off against a startup. They've been doing battle with B&M stores, Google and Apple. It'll be interesting to see how they deal with a company several orders of magnitude smaller than them. With the amplifying effect of YC behind them, it'll be interesting to watch.

<comment><USER15> So, if Amazon loses here, they still get to ship lots of products to people who might otherwise buy from a B&M store? Seems win/win for Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What a perfect solution for peer-to-peer delivery and selling/buying stuff from craigslist! Amazon may have their lockers, but there's plenty of room for this take on use cases that Amazon wont (yet) - run fast!!! :)

<comment><USER17> I don't think this is viable for Craigslist style transactions, meeting in person lets you verify the listing is what you expected and still leaves room for haggling if necessary. Picking up from a locker would require complete trust in the vendor and leave little room for recourse if something went wrong.

This could still be good for small transactions, Craigslist is just too small.

<comment><USER10> It may be possible to reduce some of the risk with escrow tied to locker opening and probably with added ID requirements and maybe recording of locker contents.

<comment><USER17> Which adds complexity. The CL model works as it's requirements are so simple, two humans that:

\- Can communicate in the same language

\- Can use a web browser

\- Are able to make transactions of some kind (cash, check, Square, barter, CL doesn't care about the specifics)

Which makes their available market a rather large majority of the entire population of the Internet. Each extra restriction or requirement makes it less likely a given person will get involved.

Be very careful about "innovating" away simplicity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Saw one of these outside Y Combinator the other week - seriously cool idea. Best of luck with it, hope you expand to the UK soon enough.

<comment><USER15> It would be awesome if YC became a locker location.

<comment><USER19> My understanding is that it is. There's been a box inside (and now out front) for a few weeks now.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is now a kiosk outside YC and FedEx and UPS are now delivering to it.

<comment><USER15> You should get OnTrac to deliver to it as well, since Amazon often uses them.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems like Amazon uses OnTrac for delivery to certain areas. We haven't seen any deliveries come through OnTrac as of yet so Amazon may stick with UPS for the particular zip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any idea how fast will Amazon Lockers be rolling out across the US? Which metro's are they hitting first?

<comment><USER21> "Amazon Lockers are currently located in Seattle, New York, the Washington, DC area, and London."

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200689010)

<comment><USER22> I was offered local locations (all 7-11s) for an order I placed to the SF Bay Area yesterday, so it looks like SF can be added to that list.

<comment><USER23> Did you end up getting your order shipped there? I was given the option ship an order to one of the lockers in SF on Monday, but when I tried to select it, I got an error. In any case, it suggests that they should be available in SF soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are available here in the Bay Area (I went to go see one last week). Only products fulfilled by Amazon can be shipped to locker locations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> this has huge potential if they do it right. Let vendors pay with bitcoin. Let them pre-ship product that can be unlocked with a qr code. suddenly the silk road gets a lot more interesting.

<comment><USER25> If you're going to pre-ship products and customers are going to leave home to pick them up, why not just stock them in a conventional retail store?

<comment><USER26> So, I ordered a Google Nexus 7 from a seller in the UK (not available in Germany). I really, really wanted to have that thing in my hands.

Unfortunately the guy used the Royal Mail and their daughter TNT for shipping, so no 'PackStation' for me.

Due to the totally useless tracking information I couldn't be at home, the thing was delivered to a nearby (just 200m!) shop. This shop opened at 10 and - due to summer holidays and reduced staff - closed at 15 again during that week. How braindead is this concept? Even a post office is more reliable and I've come to expect the PackStation service. The packet arrives as soon as possible (no 'customer not present' loops, no 'delivered to a neighbor' crap where I need to hunt that guy down and hope that he's home/available/opens the door, no trip to a weird shop (an antique furniture shop in my case), relying on their opening hours), I'll be notified instantly (SMS as soon as they close the door of that locker) and can pick it up whenever I want (like, drunk on a Sunday morning at 4 am - given I remember my PIN).

If you consider that these boxes are available ~everywhere~ in larger cities, you usually can schedule the delivery to a place that is on your way to work, home, the gym or near your favorite restaurant.

tl/dr: The service is worlds apart from 'You can pick up your thing in a shop at this address'.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: newmogul no more? - <AUTHOR>

After noticing NM being unresponsive over a month ago, I asked HN where it went:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901119
Mainly got dismissive responses that people had asked the question before and that it seemed nickb was on vacation.  However, that was a previous incident and nickb came back, along with NM.
Now, NM has completely gone defunct, and there's nary a peep.  Strange, since it had a fairly dedicated following, excellent submissions, and some fairly high level participants.  I would not expect a site like that to just fold.
Anyone know what happened, or point me to a source?
Again, this is not the same issue that happen a couple months ago where nickb went away on vacation and came back and restored NM. <comment><USER2> it has been gone for some time now. looks like that community is reforming here: <http://www.markenomics.com/>

<comment><USER3> yes, but it could use more participants. So please come and join :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> did nickb throw in the towel?

<comment><USER3> Nobody seems to know...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cambridge tests jab with potential to end all Covid pandemics - <AUTHOR> https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cambridge-tests-jab-with-potential-to-end-all-covid-pandemics-qwmsdr6nv <comment><AUTHOR> A more ambitious tack then the others.

Although I could read the article in Apple News, the weblink itself is capped.</comment>


Problem with facebook status updates? When you have more than 250 friends - <AUTHOR> http://savedelete.com/problem-with-facebook-status-updates-when-you-have-more-than-250-friends.html <comment><USER2> Well, you can create groups. eg. best friends, family, colleagues etc. Then when you check the updates,just click on the specific group, you will see updates only from that group of people you care about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello Maxwin

thnx for yr reply .. yes you are absolutely right , we can create groups for that ... but if someone has not created it and his friend list is more than 250 then this problem will arrive.</comment></comment>


Hi HN, please review my web tool - a new interface to picture search - <AUTHOR>

http://www.haspictures.com
This is my first public web site.. I'd like to have your feedback on everything - do you find this useful, usability issues, scope of improvement..
* Features a slideshow of the search result.
* There is a one-click image sharing using the imgur API.
* You can navigate using keyboard (I tested using Firefox, Chrome and Safari)
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link:

<http://www.haspictures.com>

</comment><comment><USER2> I like it, good job. I love the slideshow-style in uniform sizes, and the keyboard shortcuts.

Image search is used by (and for) kids a lot, and I think this kind of presentation is perfect for them. Do you intend to keep it around or is this just a demo project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I'd keep it around. It is hosted with the free plan of Google App Engine, so keeping it won't be hard.

I never saw Kids as a target audience - I could use a strong SafeSearch and customize it for them if there is enough users..

<comment><USER2> I was going to ask what the SafeSearch settings are.

Kids, particularly younger kids, receive a lot of their information visually. If an older kid or adult wants to know what, say, an accordion is, they will ask Wikipedia. For a younger kid, one tends to go straight to image search and get a picture of an accordion.

So while I don't have demographics, I wouldn't be surprised if children and educators were heavy image search users (at least for worksafe images). One can imagine a few bell and whistle features (such as "clip this for my project") and you could end up with a real niche product.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: PCI Violation by client storing 'cardholder data' - <AUTHOR> I was recently contacted to fix the admin portion of a website that was not loading properly. Upon fixing the issue, I found that the website is storing credit card information (number, expiration, ccv and customer info) in their database and even displaying it in plain text to the admin for processing offline.
I've informed the client that this needs to be fixed as soon as possible and that it is a violation. From what I saw they have at least 4000+ entries of cardholder data.
What, if anything, should I do? <comment><USER2> Companies like this are why breaches can be so devastating (financially and privacy-wise) to the general public [1].

If you know who their credit card processor is, you should go directly to them and report the problematic business. You can also go to the credit card company sites and contact them directly. If you know whom their QSA is, I would also contact the credit card companies about the QSA and they can investigate whether his PCI auditor status should be revoked. [2]

It is in the credit card companies best interest to investigate things like this which is why the channels exist to report these instances.

For reference, requirement no. 3 of the PCI standards cover the appropriate procedures for storing this type of information [3].

IANAL and all that..

[1] See the first comment of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14401825](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14401825)

[2] [https://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/how-do-i-report-a-pci- vio...](https://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/how-do-i-report-a-pci-violation/)

[3] See page 36 of [https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/PCI_DSS_v3-2....](https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/PCI_DSS_v3-2.pdf?agreement=true&time=1495633461855)

</comment><comment><USER3> You did what you can do. Maybe point them to their merchant agreement and PCI compliance rules. I've run into this before and clients have paid be to fix the problem.</comment>


What If We Could Fight Coronavirus with Artificial Intelligence? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2020/641538/EPRS_ATA(2020)641538_EN.pdf <comment><USER2> We absolutely can, on all fronts.

Deep neural networks have emerged as applicable to a wide range of general problems - they are very powerful universal function approximators and excel in noisy data environments.

1\. Snooping out trends and correlations, especially nonlinear, non first order interactions that cannot be captures with typical statistics like averages and standard deviations. This could help with predicting mortality, tracking disease, modeling outcomes...

2\. Accelerating all manner of modeling, 2D and 3D, e.g. protein folding

3\. Classification problems, like image analysis, e.g. diagnosing 2019ncov from lung scans much more quickly and effectively than overburdened staff

Most importantly the technology is here. It is mature. Problems of similar complexity have repeatedly been solved in literature and most of the source code is available for rapid adaptation - and the great thing about neural nets is beyond basic architectural flow, neural nets of correct arrangement for a particular problem need little to no tweaking for other problems within a class. Much in the same way that the same mathematical equations govern phenomena across physics.

Now is our time to mobilize, to make connections and orchestrate solutions. You can run and train most of this stuff on a mid-range GPU with python, not to mention cloud computing is available for big problems.

This is a potential front in the coming civic mobilization against a global pandemic. Even as developers working remotely we can contribute to the effort.</comment>