Don't reinvent the scrollbar - <AUTHOR> http://bbrks.me/blog/reinventing-scrollbars/ <comment><USER2> I was nodding along, when suddenly...

 _> One alternative is to ignore iOS and OS X users. But that's not very nice. There are many scrolling libraries available that you can use, such as NiceScroll._

 _> Or you can just make your own indicator like the one seen at the very start of the article. Just don't use a horizontal indicator for vertical progression :)_

No! Do not do this. Just stop. Stop reinventing _and_ reimplementing the scrollbar.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Not to put to fine a point on it, but if your user is on iOS or OS X, they are accustomed to losing sight of their progress because, as the article says, "Apple knows best."

Going out of your way as a content author to correct for the user interface quirks of the reader's preferred reading environment seems extraordinary and unnecessary.

Presumably a non-trivial number of iOS and OS X users actually like the fact that scrollbars are hidden from view while reading and it may have been a factor (a small one, admittedly) in their decision process.

I agree with the OP in large measure.

<comment><USER4> It's my preferred reading environment, but I hate that apple made this decision, because, as my sibling commenter here noted, it's outright user hostile. Apple never really totally understood the "visibility" requirement of usable interfaces. They like to hide things to make them look pretty, and it only leads to better advertising, not better interfaces.

Thankfully there's still a setting to always show scrollbars. For now.

<comment><USER5> The scrolling interface is always visible. It's just on the input device instead of the screen.

Originally, the scroll bar itself was the interface. You scrolled by clicking the little arrows, or by grabbing the scroll thumb and dragging. But when scroll wheels were introduced, the scroll bar became less necessary. And with the advent of trackpad magic/mouse scrolling, which support both horizontal and vertical scrolling, the scroll-bar-as-interface becomes ridiculous.

(Note that the default OS X behavior is not "hide scroll bars," but "hide scroll bars if your mouse or trackpad supports scrolling.")

That said, while there's no longer much need to interact with scroll bars, there's still a need to indicate that scrolling is possible, and possibly your position in the document. But surely we can convey that in fewer than the ten thousand pixels that a scroll bar consumes?

<comment><USER6> For the most part I agree, I like what OSX does. However, there are edge cases which are infuriating. Have you tried to scroll through an HTML <select multiple> in Chrome on OSX? The only word I can use to describe the experience is 'rage'.

<comment><USER7> True, but select multiple is horrible. It's easy to code but my god is it unusable.

<comment><USER6> No argument here, it sucks and I would never design something that way, but phpmyadmin uses it in several places which is where I run into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > " _Simply hide all of the content which is not the article until the user > reaches it. ... "But how do you implement this" you ask? Easy. (Be warned > though, this code is untested!)_ "

First off, I wouldn't call that "Easy" code, or an "Easy" solution if that it is untested? More like a hypotheses. Secondly, I don't think that is a good alternative solution at all. That seems like a very messy way to handle the indication by changing the size of the scrollbar based on user triggered events.

While there are some decent points in this article (such as not splitting up your content into pages for ads), I think it still doesn't do a good job of defending why the top vertical bar for progress indication is bad. Nor does it give a good alternative.

And, as _clone1018_ pointed out in another comment, I don't think the indication feature was meant to be this ground-breaking UX feature or anything. I think it's more of some eye-candy for his blog.

I would be much more interested in a counter argument article on using the top horizontal bar for loading purposes (like YouTube does), since that is becoming more of a common UX feature.

<comment><USER9> > First off, I wouldn't call that "Easy" code, or an "Easy" solution if that > it is untested? More like a hypotheses. Secondly, I don't think that is a > good alternative solution at all. That seems like a very messy way to handle > the indication by changing the size of the scrollbar based on user triggered > events.

It's not exactly untested, there are lots of sites that wait to load in comments via AJAX until the user has scrolled down to the comment section. Many simply hide comments until the user clicks "show comments". Both are valid alternate solutions to the initial counterpoint ("what about the comments section!!!").

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There have been improvements to scroll bars; they just haven't really gained widespread acceptance.

On Genera, when you moused over the vertical scroll bar, a thin horizontal line appears across the screen at whatever x height your mouse was is. You could then click to tell the OS that you wanted to wanted to reflow the page using that x height as a reference point. If you pointed your mouse at the horizontal scroll bar, a vertical line appeared, and you could scroll left to right. This is sort of like pressing Control-l on Emacs. Instead scrolling and getting the desired result by trial and error, you could tell the OS exactly what you wanted to do. It was very useful for scrolling within pictures.

You can see a video of this here [1] at 46:50.

[1] [http://www.loper-os.org/?p=932](http://www.loper-os.org/?p=932)

<comment><USER11> Oberon does exactly this. X and Plan 9 do so as well, but without the markers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure this has been talked about before, but I think the ideal of what a scroll bar should try to impress on the user is that it is a shading, representing the area they currently see, over the entire bar, representing the entire length of the page. Basically similar to what Sublime does, showing you a zoomed out view of the text with a shading over the section you currently see. [http://i.stack.imgur.com/UeGnE.png](http://i.stack.imgur.com/UeGnE.png)

Obviously, this is pretty much how the size of the bar is calculated already, but few designs actually translate it very well. That's what really struck me about the iOS and OS X Lion scroll bars over the others he showed. They really do a much better job at actually conveying this to the user, or at least, they did for me. Ubuntu's terminal scrollbar is also similar in this regard. It would be awesome to see default designs start to focus on this in the future.

</comment><comment><USER13> I really like OS X's hiding scroll bars. Whenever I scroll, it appears in my peripheral vision and gives me an indicator of progress. Then it disappears when I don't need it.

It's likely things can be improved further, but IMO this is a better starting point than what we had before.

<comment><USER14> You can change it in system preferences -> general

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a programmer, I once thought there should be best GUI elements that people discover and then leave alone.

But then I realized that book and magazine publishers have been "reinventing the page number" since before there was a web.

Of course information designer will be reinventing the elements of the UI. The process of design is making form and content a unified whole.

</comment><comment><USER16> I hate Google News's custom scrollbar so, so much. I love how OS X hides the scrollbar when I don't need it, but Google thinks it knows better.

<comment><USER17> The worst reinvention of the scrollbar was Google Wave.

Shudder.

<comment><USER18> I told myself over and over that I must be stupid, because Those People Know What They're Doing even though it didn't make a lick of sense to me. Being wrong never felt so right, or something. What a strange application that was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Two assumptions:

* horizontal progress for vertical content is bad

* infinite scroll is better than pages/tabs/whatever

Just saying "poor natural mapping" doesn't mean horizontal progress is wrong and just saying "why would you" doesn't make pages wrong.

I'd like to see data to support those assumptions. On infinite scroll I'd bet horizontal progress has minuscule negative impact on usability vs vertical progress. On paged I bet it performs just as well.

And regarding pages vs infinite scroll, I bet pages actually perform much better. Infinite scroll is elegant for us, the developers, but for users it presents a dramatic increase in cognitive load to constantly be orienting yourself in this infinite space with hints of often unrelated content above and below. With lots of content, infinite scroll actually encourages people to _scroll_ which is usually the last thing you actually should do. If the primary means of navigation is via a navigation menu (aka the content needs to be organized, not an article), then why the hell would you dump all the output into one giant bucket of content?

<comment><USER20> As for "horizontal progress for vertical content is bad", I'm pretty sure that's right, but that's mainly relying on my intuition. If I think about the concept and scroll my page up and down while imagining a horizontal scroll bar, my mind just rebels and thinks "this is not right". It's just obvious to me that a scroll bar should be vertical when you scroll vertically.

I can also offer some reasoning: when the scroll bar is vertical, it moves in the same direction as the direction of your scrolling movement on the mouse. This makes it easier to mentally connect your fingers' scrolling movement to the scrolling on the screen, which makes the device use easier and more intuitive. In the case of iOS and OS X 10.7 and later, your finger movement is in the same direction as the content rather than the scroll bar, but it's still something on the screen moving with your fingers. But a horizontal scroll bar moving when you push your fingers vertically is too abstract a concept for your mind to _intuitively_ grasp, so it's harder to use.

<comment><USER19> I get 100% why it seem like it _should_ matter I just don't buy that it actually does matter (much). [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the- science-...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the-science- behind-those-obama-campaign-e-mails). That article is a great example of how completely wrong our intuition can be when it comes to optimizing conversions and I think the same applies to usability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21>
      An article shouldn't be split across multiple pages on the web!
      We have an infinitely long canvas to write on, along with an elegant
      way of moving through it. Why would you need to split it up?"

Well, there are some times you would want to break up a long article. E.G. A tutorial that can touch on multiple steps can be helped with multiple pages. An alternative would be to provide in-page anchors and a contents list a la Wikipedia. This way you can link to or bookmark a particular step easily.

<comment><USER22> Also some times you can't read long article on your phone because its too long to fit in phone memory. For ex try to view html 5 single page spec[1] on your phone, especialy if your phone not 8 cores 2GB mem device.

[1] - [http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/single- page.html](http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/single-page.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Kind of a tangent but it drives me nuts when websites not only reinvent the scrollbar, but also the actual mechanisms of scrolling. Every time I go to a blog post on Medium and press space to go down a page and it does nothing it triggers a disproportionate amount of frustration.

</comment><comment><USER24> A guy makes a fun little feature for his blog and gets an entire write up on how he's doing it wrong. Awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wasn't meant as a direct dig at anyone, just making my observations :)

<comment><USER25> Well from a UX perspective, it was a great write-up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! As my first blog post, this is quite encouraging haha

<comment><USER26> "But Ben!" \- Not to be discouraging, the "natural flow" is a fair point in your article, but genereally it feels highly arrogant.

Some experiments may go wrong, and it is ok that you point that out, but telling them not to reinvent anything is another thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't know... Reinventing the scrollbar can be fun: [http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/creation-introducing- th...](http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/02/creation-introducing-the-content- aware-scrollbar-ui/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I personally like apple's recent approach to the scrollbar. Hiding it when not in use minimizes distraction. It's very easy to tell how long a single content page article is without needing the scrollbar to persist on the window.

<comment><USER29> My one issue with the latest Apple scrollbar is that I've yet to figure out a convenient way to scroll horizontally. The horizontal scrollbar is almost always hidden, I can't use my mouse wheel to bring it up, and using arrow keys doesn't always work either.

If anyone has a suggestion, shoot. I went so far as looking for a hotkey for toggling scrollbar display (which I still think would be a good idea), but couldn't find anything. For the record, I'm using Synergy to control mouse/keyboard from a Ubuntu box with a MBP slave machine.

<comment><USER2> When I move my mouse wheel, both scrollbars show up, if the window is horizontally scrollable at the moment.

Horizontal scrolling with the mouse wheel is done by moving the mouse wheel with the shift key down.

Note that just touching the trackpad with two fingers, as if you're about to scroll, also brings up both scrollbars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Careful not to read this _too_ fast: I thought it was criticizing [http://ricostacruz.com/nprogress/](http://ricostacruz.com/nprogress/) but it's not.

<comment><USER31> Yeah I went a little too fast myself and so, started reading the comments because I was confused. I thought the _loading_ progress bar was actually a good thing and a UX improvement when waiting for heavy pages to load.

Regarding using such a bar as an indicator of _page-scroll_ progress, I'm indifferent. It's not intrusive, so if I don't care for it, it doesn't bother me. For those who do care for it, I think the horizontal positioning is easier to gauge page-scroll progress because looking up is easier than looking all the way over to the right of my viewport (I never look over there because I use a scroll-wheel or touchpad to do the scrolling ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Knowing where the comments start could be solved with a highlighted scrollbar. Such as are common in programming IDE's, Eclipse for example puts one color where every TODO is and another color for mark occurances etc. Just put a colored marking or a small arrow even at the scrollbar-position where the comments start.

Or why not put one at each heading of the page.

Implementing this _accurately_ on a web page with js is a bit tricky since most browsers display progress bars differently. The biggest problem is if it has tiny arrows at both ends or only on one side. You will get a few pixels off if you try to match the native scroll bar. Another option is to put a second scroll bar next to the native one that is annotated, I've found this to be the most reliable option.

An API from the browser to get help from the native scroll bar, or to enhance the native scroll bar would be great.

</comment><comment><USER33> Am I the only one who really appreciate OS X's disappearing scroll bar? Leaves the content alone and works well for overflowing divs on pages. And if you really want to take a peak at where you are, just… you know, two finger touch the trackpad. Good thing people aren't dragging the scroll bar anymore too.

<comment><USER34> Requiring the user to touch the trackpad (with _two_ fingers, at that) just to know the relative position in the page is an inconvenience, at least to some.

Also, isn't the scroll bar really useful when you need to scroll up and down the page quickly by an arbitrary amount?

<comment><USER33> It's an inconvenience for a (in my opinion) tiny problem. The pros far outweight the cons.

I expected someone asking about scrolling an arbitrary amount. After all these years of reading internet articles and pdf manuals on Mac/iOS, I've rarely ever encountered a case where clicking the position on the scroll bar beats the speed of flickering the trackpad (and that's even excluding the precision). In fact, there's rarely an internet page where I can't get to the end within one flick.

[http://www.theverge.com](http://www.theverge.com) <\- this is one flick

(While we're at it, yes, you can still drag OS X's scroll bar if you really want to. I've used it for pdf manuals).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> OSX/iOS hiding the scrollbar is not that big of a deal. You can tap the trackpad/touchscreen to get it to re-appear again so you know how far along the page you are when you need to.

It's not a problem that needs solving. OSX/iOS users are very used to this and it is second nature.

</comment><comment><USER36> > "But how do you implement this" you ask? Easy. (Be warned though, this code > is untested!)

Scrollbar within a scrollbar!

          Content

...

</comment><comment><USER37> This may be all true, theres nothing I can say against this article, but there's really a reason to split an article or comments section to multiple pages - battery performance. On heavy ad-based sites with flash content etc, the page rendering can get really cpu intensive - at least on smartphones and tablets.. (I'm referring to a 30000x1024 pixels to scroll through. OSX sometimes really fights with them and smooth scrolling (i have a retina macbook, maybe thats the reason, macericks should bring some improvements to that...) on ios can get laggy. Tumblr pages with infinite scrolling and heavy imagery are an example for that. Nice article though!

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd love a scrollbar that displays which part is the actual article, and which part is the comments following it. Often the comments are much longer than the article, so it's difficult to gauge how much of the article is left.

</comment><comment><USER39> I dislike scrolling. I dislike scrollbars. All.

Re-imagine content. Eliminate scrolling. Keep content represented on the screen. Elegent, progressively granular navigation on the screen.

I love when a scrollbar handle thins to represent the proportion of content on the screen and shits the usability bed.

You have only so many words left to say or type. Use less. Live/Say more. Condense information to fit the medium. Lose you paradigm.

Writers are paid by the word and we pay by the byte. Writers shit the net. Don't waste my life with words. Get to the point. We're dying here.

<comment><USER40> Writers aren't typically paid by the word.

<comment><USER41> I don't know about 'typically', but it isn't uncommon among freelancer writers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Reinvent everything. Break the rules. Be better. Explore. Fail. Explore until you're so far out in left field, everyone every where else is looking to you to lead them.

</comment><comment><USER43> It sounds a great solution also for SEO optimisation. Hidden comments won't be indexed or badly indexed, right ? And generally, we don't want texts of comments to spoil/rot too much the words indexed in the article. However sometimes we might want to let some comments, especially the most appreciated, it should give meaning to the text above. So maybe you could add "leave the best 2 or 3 comments below the article"

</comment><comment><USER44> > _Maybe there are better ways of monetising than forcing multiple pages of > ads down your users throats? :)_

Kill the CPM model and your wish will come true. Unfortunately, advertisers often first ask "Well how many pageviews does your <site/app/whatever> have?" Most advertising metrics are still stuck 10 years behind where we are and where we're going.

</comment><comment><USER45> Am I the only one who actually likes this approach of having horizontal progress-bar on articles? Its not a scrollbar as it fills up from the left rather than moving a small block across the screen. Living here in Northern Europe I've always read left to right and counting percentages 0>100 seems more natural to visualize left>right rather than top>down.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm not sure i agree. I'm used to reading horizontally and usually i scroll enough so the content i'm reading is always at the top of the page. So it was much faster, and looked more natural, for me to check my progress on the reading on the page that had the horizontal progress than it is on the vertical scrollbar.

</comment><comment><USER47> Omg, some people have strange problems ... If you want to know how far you are you just look where the scroll bar is now, scroll down until the end (or comments) sections and then you can estimate how far that is.

I do it that way and I have seen many people who do it the same. However I agree, that pages are bullshit in a web context.

</comment><comment><USER48> >We don't need page numbers on the web

There are some very good use cases for pagination. Granted, you shouldn't be using it on an article but if you're browsing 500+ records its a lot easier to paginate them than it is to have the user come back later and have to scroll to where they were before.

</comment><comment><USER49> I had a client in the telecom industry some years ago who had a project that was re-writing built in scroll bar technology because a few of the execs didn't like the scroll bars available in Windows.

Needless to say the project was years behind. I'm glad I never got too close to it.

</comment><comment><USER50> While I hate that Apple hides the scrollbar when not in use for the main page, the new iOS-inspired scrollbar looks much nicer when designing scrolling divs inside the page.

[Note: never said anything about custom scrollbars; just that websites with scrolling divs tend to look better on OSX]

<comment><USER2> If you hate that _your_ scrollbar is hidden when not in use, you can go to System Preferences / General and change the "Show scroll bars" setting to "Always".

If you hate that _my_ scrollbar is hidden when not in use, well, tough luck. I like it this way.

If you force yet another custom, badly-implemented, weirdly-behaving, not- entirely-thought-through scrollbar on me, I will hate you and never visit your website again.

<comment><USER51> "If you force yet another custom, badly-implemented, weirdly-behaving, not- entirely-thought-through scrollbar on me, I will hate you and never visit your website again."

Pretty sure Gmail uses custom scrollbars and I wouldn't be surprised if it's the most commonly used e-mail in the world.

I think Facebook also uses a custom scrollbar on their activity feed.

Same with Rdio's web app and Spotify's web app (unless it looks different on PC?)

<comment><USER52> IMO that's in spite of their scollbars, not due to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> > Maybe there are better ways of monetising than forcing multiple pages of ads > down your users throats? :)

If you decide that you want to show multiple ads, just intersperse them throughout the content. Break it up and insert them in between some of the paragraphs

</comment><comment><USER54> Long live the scroll bar! I'm a personal fan but I think it really all does come down to personal preference. However, this could be "old man" syndrome. Am I the only one that thinks they should bring the joystick back?

</comment><comment><USER55> Was I the only one expecting a comments section to appear once I reached the bottom?

</comment><comment><USER56> I like the meta display of your own article with the scrollbar! I also love the "5 minute read" at the top. I hope that's autogenerated from a word count, cause that would be awesome!

</comment><comment><USER57> I personally prefer the way iA.net does it (with an indicator next to the scrollbar):

[http://ia.net/blog/learning-to-see/](http://ia.net/blog/learning-to-see/)

</comment><comment><USER58> You think that's bad? Gnome 3 removed single line scrolling by removing the up and down arrows "because nobody would need _that_ ".

Unity is even worse, with its overlay scrollbars.

<comment><USER59> I feel like I'm the only one in the world who actually _likes_ overlay scrollbars on Linux. They give me the ability to easily scroll the terminal when I need to, without wasting space during the majority of the time that I don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60>
      > Maybe there are better ways of monetising than forcing
      >multiple pages of ads down your users throats? :)

If only life were so black and white.

<comment><USER61> Yeah according to advertisers, ads save lifes after all! (AMBER)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Yeah, Redfin does something similar, but we all know that Twitter and the endless-page killed the scrollbar as a useful meter.

</comment><comment><USER63> It reminds me of the volume control in iPad some time ago, it was horizontal under the movie, it looked like the time bar.

</comment><comment><USER64> But Ben! What happens when spiders crawl your site and can't find comment content?

<comment><USER20> Spiders should see the comments if you hide the comments with JS on page load instead of in the default CSS.

<comment><USER65> I'm not sure, but Google could be unhappy with that. It'll look like you are trying to put a lot of keywords for the crawler that the users don't see and may classify the site as spammy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Most mobile friendly articles are split across multiple pages to reduce the page size.

<comment><USER67> Which is a terrible way of doing it. Unless the page is heavy on images loading all the text at once will be far faster and easier than splitting it up.

Plus there's really no reason split them up. It's not a book, there's no limit on page length.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> though the difference from scroll bar to the article indicator on my site is i set mine to only the length of the article not the page, so long comments sections/footers dont contribute to your progress.

</comment><comment><USER69> Nice usability article on a site, where I can't find any button to go to the main blog.

<comment><USER70> Nice ad hominem.

It looks like there is not a "main blog" page to go to.</comment></comment>


Panning for Pangrams: The Search for the New Quick Brown Fox - <AUTHOR> https://barronwasteland.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/panning-for-pangrams-the-search-for-the-new-quick-brown-fox/

<comment><USER2> As far as I can tell, the upshot after scoring a million tweets is that the only one with all 26 letters was just

"?????????????????????the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog??????????????????"

This is considerably less interesting than I hoped it would be. (And a little surprising! That's a lot of data.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that tweet was a let down. I guess the best resolution is that pangrams (or things with many unique letters) are hard to come by?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Isn't it a bit silly to throw away every single @<user> tweet? Imagine I'm having a twitter conversation with my friends about who can make the best pangram and this data is ignored just because we're tweeting @ each other?

I'm guessing that the majority of tweets will reference a person. How about just stripping that @word from the tweet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. The issue I was getting was that it would like tweets that were "@MyFriendWhoHasAUserNameLikeZXCVBNMQWERTYU hey". Should I just strip it of the word "@____"?

<comment><USER4> That would absolutely be the way I'd suggest going about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay. Iteration is key! I'll update her maybe tonight. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At first I thaught "Searching Twitter for a better pangram" was the pangram.

I'm stupid.

<comment><USER6> "Searching Twitterdjklquvxyz for a better pangram" works!

<comment><AUTHOR> hahah I should have thought of that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not easy to remember, but I recall this phrase appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records for shortest pangram: "Veldt jynx grimps waqf zho buck."

More here: [http://www.chaos.org.uk/~pdh/string/alphabet.htm](http://www.chaos.org.uk/~pdh/string/alphabet.htm)

</comment><comment><USER8> Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes.</comment>


Show HN: Fully-automatic image background removal tool - <AUTHOR> https://www.remove.bg/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN! We originally built this as part of a bigger app but since removing backgrounds of images can be a tiresome task in itself we thought why not release it as a standalone tool? Feedback appreciated!

<comment><USER2> Very impressive! It has some issues with uncommon hats though (which isn't too surprising):

Original: [https://www.howtogeek.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/xrichar...](https://www.howtogeek.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/xrichard- stallman.jpg.pagespeed.gp+jp+jw+pj+ws+js+rj+rp+rw+ri+cp+md.ic.9qDC7nl9gF.jpg)

Background removed: [https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/1c5f1c6...](https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/1c5f1c68-70f2-49a6-8f88-477f7a0b6d65/b_xrichard- stallman.jpg.pagespeed.gp%2Bjp%2Bjw%2Bpj%2Bws%2Bjs%2Brj%2Brp%2Brw%2Bri%2Bcp%2Bmd.ic.9qDC7nl9gF.png)

<comment><USER3> I feel like RMS would be positively tickled to know that his hat had broken a commercial machine learning API.

<comment><USER4> And disappointed that his photos were fed to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We once had to get photos taken in Mumbai. The shop had two guys working Photoshop to remove the dirt marks from the wall behind us. Why did they not just paint the wall ? Because the Photoshop artists were part of the service, so they could charge us for it.

You, sir, are going to put Photoshop wallahs out of work !

</comment><comment><USER6> > We process them, and temporarily store the results so you can download them. > After that (about an hour later) we delete your files. We do not share your > images or use them for any other purpose than removing the background and > letting you download the result.

Glad they respect your rights on the image and delete their temp files after a reasonable amount of time.

<comment><USER7> It's also just a smart policy for saving money on storage space, and not getting in trouble when someone uploads illegal content to your site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Works perfectly with people! Such a well done and simple tool.

Of course I'm biased, but I think putting in the effort to have this work with pets would be well worth the time.

There's services that allow you to turn photos with transparent backgrounds into stickers.

Hook this up with that, and you may have a source of revenue.

</comment><comment><USER9> At last, an actually useful application of AI!

I am not even kidding. This is probably the first time I have seen a truly useful application of AI that automates a normally labor-intensive and menial task. Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER10> Around 2008, one of my first jobs out of college was working as a photo retoucher for a retail fashion company. One of our main tasks was placing 3rd party product shots on a neutral background so that the photography would look consistent. I was pretty good with it and had a few tricks up my sleeve (Photoshop Actions FTW!) but it was still pretty time intensive.

Even back then, I was fearful of making a career out of that job. At worst, my company could have offshored a lot of that work rather than paying full time benefits in NYC. And while there were a few plugins back then, they weren't this good.

I'm fortunate I was able to move my career in another direction, but I did work with some amazing people who knew PS/photography inside and out. A part of me is sad that these skills are increasingly obsolete.

<comment><USER11> As someone who used to also work in this space, I don't really agree with the sentiment. The manual cutting part of the work was always the boring and mundane part and honestly I would've always appreciated better automation in that regard. Making the rote work automatic leaves you with more time to work on the creative aspects of the work, it doesn't make it obsolete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This works really well! It would be nice if it told you it only works on images with people before you upload an image.

<comment><USER6> I knew I wouldn't be the only one to try that. It is neat that it will tell you that no people are found in your image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Care to explain more about how it works?

Your about page says "sophisticated AI technology to detect foreground layers and separate them from the background" but that's pretty vague.

What kind of AI?

<comment><USER14> Usually cheaply paid humans.

<comment><USER13> That doesn't seem plausible. It works too fast and the results are too good.

<comment><USER15> Perhaps this? Was posted here a few months ago. Going to look into it. [https://towardsdatascience.com/background-removal-with- deep-...](https://towardsdatascience.com/background-removal-with-deep- learning-c4f2104b3157)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there an open source underlying library as part of your service? Would love to start using it in smaller projects :) great job BTW

<comment><USER17> Given its produced by a ".ai" company I would imagine they are using a U-Net derived ML model and not traditional OpenCV methods.

You can read more about that approach here:

[https://hackernoon.com/releasing-supervisely-person- dataset-...](https://hackernoon.com/releasing-supervisely-person-dataset-for- teaching-machines-to-segment-humans-1f1fc1f28469)

Good results though for sure and very handy for quick image edits.

<comment><USER18> Yup. Multiple u-nets, actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for doing this! This is an awesome app! I have a lot of pain trying to remove the background. How long did it take to build this particular app?

</comment><comment><USER20> This worked surprisingly well on a picture of a fursuiter with several people (no suits) in the background. I didn't expect it to work at all.

<comment><USER21> Post a link. I'm interested to see how well it worked.

<comment><USER20> It seems to have been "fixed" for that one photo. Now it pulls out random people in the background instead of the focus of the picture.

It did work (mostly) on this shot though: [https://snouts.online/@Kye/101262023246984238](https://snouts.online/@Kye/101262023246984238)

Poor Duke lost his ear...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Worked superbly. I spent hours yesterday manually removing backgrounds from family pics to have tshirts printed. This did it in a second.

</comment><comment><USER23> The demos look awesome, but unfortunately it works neither in FF 64 nor Chromium 71 even without adblocker: It keeps saying: "Removing background ..." and does not show an edited version of the uploaded image.

<comment><USER18> we are about to add new servers to handle the load

<comment><USER24> you should warn people about the average wait

<comment><USER18> agreed. did not expect this interest. should work again.

<comment><USER25> Are you already using GPU acceleration? I'm currently working on alpha matting for my master's thesis and found that it helps quite a lot.

<comment><USER18> yup

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Spektral, a Danish company, has been doing this in real-time on iPhone for live video. No surprise, Apple bought them for more than $30 million: [https://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/apple-spektral- aqu...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/apple-spektral-aquisition/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Ooo now this _is_ impressive.

I used to work in VFX, where I did my fair share of pain and roto.(before moving to tech) Cutting out hair was my single biggest dread. However this appears to do a stella job automatically.

</comment><comment><USER28> It's amazing that this can be done automatically, major kudos to the team. The breadth of what current AI can do is already astounding.

However, as someone who's been doing this kind of work professionally for decades, I find the demo results rather poor.

I have mixed feelings about what I think is a trend, such as fake software bokeh, for instance. Even though it makes pro techniques available to the masses, quality takes such a plunge that I fear we may not recover, setting the "good enough" bar way too low.

</comment><comment><USER29> It would be so awesome if I could something like this at a much smaller scale in a darktable module for cleaning up images and for doing artistic types of portrait editing. Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks good. I got a Unable to upload image when I pasted a URL. [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.barcablaugranes.com/platfor...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.barcablaugranes.com/platform/amp/barcelona- la-liga/2018/12/17/18144280/ernest-valverde-says-we-just-have-to-enjoy-lionel- messi-after-barcelona-hat-trick) May I ask what Your Tech stack is?

</comment><comment><USER30> > for performance reasons the output image is limited to 500 × 500 pixels. We > are currently looking into ways to increase this limit (...)

Curious to see how this tool will evolve. Already impressive, with many potential use cases: products, animals, photomontages.

Besides resolution, how the app will handle super thin elements like hair will be key. A lot of tedious work is still required to cut out figures properly with Photoshop even though their selection tools got better over the years.

<comment><USER31> I guess for people wanting to get better resolution you could make a mask at 500x500 and then scale that up to your image size, add smoothing to the mask layer (or vectorise the mask edge) and apply to image of arbitrary size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Very impressive. Works even on Mona Lisa: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Mo...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg/687px- Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER33> Pretty good, though it is not too hard to find images that confuse it: [https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/6aaacde...](https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/6aaacde8-1592-4997-a9d0-ffcdfea649b5/b_2011-12-27-181003.png)

</comment><comment><USER34> Works perfect. Very easy to use and quick. Last week I was trying to remove background from image and it took a while to finish the task.

Great job :-)

</comment><comment><USER35> Nice work! Just curious, any reason that the output image is constrained to a lower resolution?

Also, any thought to handling video in the future?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Computation time increases quadratically with image size, so we had to set some limit. For now that's 500x500 px but we are looking into ways to increase the limit!

Video: Possible, we tried this prototypically already, but it would need some more optimization for good results (e.g. to avoid flickering between frames).

<comment><USER3> For higher resolution you should seriously consider charging a subscription, or on a pay-for-credits basis. Many organizations, especially those with limited or highly-demanded in-house design talent (ranging from finance to marketing to funded startups), would absolutely justify this product at rates absurdly greater than server costs. Unlike Fivver talent manually tracing boundaries, this has near instant turnaround, and that is HUGE for people with deadlines and infinite Uber budgets who just need stock images combined together.

Source: am in NYC.

<comment><USER36> Just want to jump in on this - I spent a significant amount of time in the print ad design world and something like this would be an easily justified expense.

<comment><USER37> Small business owner. I would use it since it would save me a ton of time and money on my own stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is awesome!

I uploaded a photo of myself as a kid with my sister and grandpa. Early 80's, a washed out photo, where the lines were less definitive. Had some issues with that image.

This photo if you're curious. [https://imgur.com/a/a4jQ5y1](https://imgur.com/a/a4jQ5y1)

</comment><comment><USER39> Even works with paintings!

[https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/c9ae8e5...](https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/c9ae8e58-a6d9-403e-9750-2c5ddaee9385/b_041FA711-1239-408E-A494-FBF32B643726.png)

<comment><USER40> Link doesn't work, as the images get deleted after 60m

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm pleasantly surprised with how well this works. It would be awesome if you added the ability to pick a second photo to provide a new background. Of course this isn't that hard to do on my own once I have the background removed, but saving another step would be great :)

</comment><comment><USER42> Nice service! I have. Couple ideas you might consider to make it even better:

1\. Make a plug in for photoshop/gimp/[favorite editor]. You could charge for that service.

2\. Figure out a way for users to manually fix any errors and use that data for further training.

</comment><comment><USER43> Ok it just says "Removing Background", and never finishes that. Is it HN Effect?

<comment><USER44> Same issue here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> There some pretty major color shift in the photo I tried. A lot of red was missing from the resulting photo.

Also, it is possible to see the background through the lens of my glasses; that portion of the background was not removed.

</comment><comment><USER46> > and it's FREE.

So how do you pay for it, and what does it cost me (in non-monetary form)?

<comment><USER47> I'm guessing they'll charge for the API and possibly support for higher- resolutions.

<comment><USER46> That would have been one of my _guesses_ also - but I don't want to guess, and that info doesn't appear to be available on their site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Really impressive! as a photographer this is the most time consuming part of any edit. Just curious, are you doing this with photoshop or something more low level? Any technical write up would be fascinating to read!

</comment><comment><USER49> for people that want to try at home: [https://github.com/d-grossman/joojanta200](https://github.com/d-grossman/joojanta200)

The project utilizes CRF as RNN model to assign labels to pixels. The demo preserves pixels assigned to people while blacking out pixels associated with other labels. (Think of it as automating background removal around people)

</comment><comment><USER50> I've just seen this research on this same subject: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYIQbfnS9jA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYIQbfnS9jA)

<comment><USER18> I tried this during development. It works amazingly well but there are also a lot of downsides: the long processing time is just a minor example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I used to spend hours cutting "renders" of images a decade ago.. and while I found a few images that confused it, many worked with surprising effect! Color me impressed!

</comment><comment><USER52> Beautiful. Works great with portrait poses, less well with groups.

</comment><comment><USER53> if you don't bump up the resolution output for this service.. it will be mostly be constrained to basic website use.

> I would pay a small usage fee for ultra-high-res that covers the additional > server costs needed to offer this.

</comment><comment><USER54> Pretty impressive.

Hard to judge because resulted image is tiny - but looked good.

</comment><comment><USER55> How does this background removal tool work? The removal and keeping the people is really good, far better than I have done in the past manually

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm interested to learn how was it done? Works as expected, great work OP. People like you make me always hungry for information

</comment><comment><USER57> Wow!! I only tried this because of the comments here, you guys have got to try it, this is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER58> This works pretty well, thanks for sharing, this could be useful for thumbnails!

</comment><comment><USER59> This is the best tool i've come across so far. Thanks a lottttt!

</comment><comment><USER60> This is impressively good!

</comment><comment> WD-42 I was not expecting this to work as well as it did. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER61> Works amazingly well, and has an even better domain name.

</comment><comment><USER62> Amazing! :D Any information on the tech behind this? :)

<comment><USER15> [https://github.com/facebookresearch/deepmask/blob/master/REA...](https://github.com/facebookresearch/deepmask/blob/master/README.md) can be implemented in PyTorch for a DL approach or [https://docs.opencv.org/3.1.0/db/d5c/tutorial_py_bg_subtract...](https://docs.opencv.org/3.1.0/db/d5c/tutorial_py_bg_subtraction.html) for a traditional OpenCV based implementation

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Wow. Fast and it did a good job on my test photo.

</comment><comment><USER64> "Without a single click"

but... how do I select a photo!?

<comment><USER65> As I did, using keystrokes on a keyboard. Do you have any further questions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Does not work with cats.

<comment><USER67> It says so in the about section. The AI is trained on people.

<comment><USER68> Let's make this a feature request for the version 2.0. People love cats and dogs.

EDIT: And horses? I guess they are common in photos of trips.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> cool,let me try

</comment><comment><USER70> > 100% automatically – in 5 seconds – without a single click

cant drag-n-drop images on the webpage... so the slogan is a lie

impressive service nonetheless

</comment><comment><USER71> Nice work, but citing the FAQ:

> How does it work?

> We use sophisticated AI technology to detect foreground layers and separate > them from the background.

You use "sophisticated AI technology"?

Why can't you write, that you trained a CNN and do some image postprocessing? This kind of voodoo-language turns me as a potential technical customer completely off.

<comment> VvR-Ox Customers like you don't pay that good, that's why xD

Welcome to the world of marketing where you use phrases like this to attract customers who don't have a clue about what AI could be but the power to decide about money.</comment></comment>


Android design does have a soul - <AUTHOR> http://scan.me/blog/2012/03/android-design-does-have-a-soul/

<comment><USER2> Android needs some more love.</comment>


Crash Course: Design for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-web-design-ux-crash-course

<comment><USER2> i don't know, i'm a little conflicted here because really, really, i know this is gonna sound stupid but the best way to get good is to _make a lot of shit_ and then, after you don't feel weird about what you made, you _show it to people_ who have taste (or that you value) and _get critique._

I think you should design the way that you ______. Do you code? Apply that mindset to your design. Do you just hammer something out or do you try to improve it? Do you look for inspiration from other projects on github? Do you look for inspiration in orthogonal things like architecture or nature or industrial design or _____. Apply that to your design. Apply the same standards from something you're _passionate_ about to your budding design work, it'll show. The more you make this _your process_ the more your design will be _your design._

as with all other things, there's a whole lot of cargo cult design where you toss in a grid and you dutifully build up some crazy type hierarchy or you use _appropriate fonts_ or just plop down a müller-brockman layout or a tschichold page proportion or three sizes, two weights of helvetica neue, etc. You can convince yourself this is "correct," but sometimes you're just going through the motions. I've made a ton of absolute crap but sometimes i make something and i'm like "oh wow, _that's_ an actually appropriate use for a grid, man what a total cock up that other project was."

It's very easy to make and parrot the current zeitgeist (just look at forrst), but it's hard to go out on a limb and try to make something that comes from _you._ It's even harder to make it something that other people will see and say "oh neat, i like that even though it's a little weird," and that's what _practice_ does to you, but it doesn't come overnight, it takes effort, like anything worth doing, like programming or cooking or sports or _____.

The things that make you great in design are the things that make you great in any other field: passion, curiosity, exploration, failure, practice, communication and critique. all in great quantity. this is the moral you see on hn a lot, so it's like preaching to the choir, but go outside your comfort zone and try to make what's in your brain; it's a humbling and rewarding path.

i don't want to knock the post, it's fine, but also keep in mind that not everything needs to look like a startup website. I'm _tired_ of friendly blue all the time, i want to see new designs, i want to see people going on a limb. I guess what i'm saying is: this is design for conversion sake, not for design's sake, and those are _two totally different pots of gold._

<comment><USER3> Next time, don't prepare the reader to read shit and then... gives us a very sensible comment. It loses vigor :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mark Boulton's posts really are some of the best typography eye-openers. Especially his "Five Steps" posts[1][2] were what got me into design and made me "get" it. And it didn't take a lot of time to read through them. I recommend that people skip his book and read these two pieces instead.

Bear in mind that the grid guide is more of an intro piece; you probably won't be able to create grid-based websites after reading it (I know I wasn't).

Another good resource is Typography for Lawyers[3]. I'm actually very surprised (and disappointed!) that Paul didn't mention it. It's recently undergone a redesign, which has rendered all its former links broken, and it seems a little harder to navigate and browse for fun, but you _must_ flip through the digital pages. It's probably the best typography resource for newcomers along with Boulton's 5-step guides.

I also just combed through my bookmarks to see if Boulton had anything else, and a great presentation popped up[4]. It, too, is great to get you into the typographic mindset.

These are really the best way to get someone into typography, and they are quick to read; no resounding _THUMP_ from dumping seemingly insurmountable literature on your desk.

Of course, once you've got the bug, it'll never leave you, and a lot of the world will look a lot worse and be more painful for it. Educate yourself at your own risk.

[1]: [http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple- st...](http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-steps-to- better-typography)

[2]: [http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple- st...](http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five-simple-steps-to- designing-grid-systems-part-1)

[3]: <http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/?page_id=1876>

[4]: <http://webtypography.net/sxsw2007>

NB! At some point, Boulton has changed his site, which has rendered the links to the other parts invalid. To remedy this, replace the underscores (_) in the links with dashes (-).

</comment><comment><USER5> I've seen several of these on HN in the past few months, and this one is definitely my favorite.

This post is well-written and covers a huge range of topics. I found the information detailed enough to point me in the right direction without going over my head. I also appreciate the tips on which design resources the author found valuable. Good stuff!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that's great to hear. I honestly had no idea if this was going to be helpful.. it kind of felt like a raw, disorganized brain dump when I was writing it.

<comment><USER6> You're too hard on yourself. This has to be one of the most informative HN articles I've ever read. You gave very specific advice rather than waving your hands around. You provided sources where others can learn what you've learned. This is a template for a "how-to" post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Using LittleSnapper (or equivalent tool) to take and archive screenshots of well-done page designs is a really good way to enhance brainstorming.

After months or years of doing this, you build up an asset that has real value to you and other designers.

You should consider posting your screenshot library - I'm sure quite a few designers would be interested in it (or at least links to the pages, to avoid any copyright issues). New webapp idea?

<comment><USER8> I've used Delicious for this for years. I used to just tag stuff as "design" but over the years my taste has changed and so now the good stuff is more like: <http://delicious.com/philfreo/design+amazing+inspiration>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I can take an opposite view, I think this article on design is far from useful. It is stuffed with unproven generalizations (like, why the hell should plain edges be "boring"? why should we "adjust opacity"?). Better read Jacob Nielsen on this.

</comment><comment><USER10> Something I find helpful is to start coding the basic outline in a browser, then take a screenshot and cut up the design in Photoshop.

It's then really quick to experiment with different layouts and adjustments.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow, this is the damn best design blog post I've seen. Down to earth explanations, plenty of examples & resources, can't ask for more, thank you so much for taking the time to write & share this!

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been wanting someone to write a post like this for the longest time. Thanks very much, Paul.

</comment><comment><USER13> That's a ton of information, and the more I read it, the more confused I feel.

I run a website called <http://deeproute.com>

It's a football general manager website with fake players. It's a full game. Take just the front page. There are all sorts of theoretical things to do, but I just want people to join.

Should I chop it up, and put jquery picture viewers all over the place with any half way relevant picture towards the game?

Maybe buy some stock photos of attractive, diverse people looking excited, which surely would be about any topic other than this game.

I don't know. I get lost in all the options, and a huge post like this doesn't help.

<comment><USER14> I came across <http://carwoo.com/blog/design-tips/> the other day, I think on a post from here but not sure. I think it speaks directly to these specific questions.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, reading it now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know the hacker's absolute weapon for testing quality of web design. Just make a screenshot of your site. And try to write a program that can recognize on this picture all the important stuff (headings, paragraphs, links, phones, keywords...) and determine the UI elements and other stuff (headers, footers, menus, buttons, ADs, etc). If writing such program would be easy deal, then your design is good enough.

</comment><comment><USER16> If that's your stencil in that pic, any idea of where I can get a hold of one, would be great for my notebook mockups

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.uistencils.com/>

<comment><USER16> Wicked, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What an excellent post. If nothing else, and you're a coder who wants to spend the bare minimum amount of time improving your designs, I highly recommend grabbing "The non-designer's designer book" mentioned in the text.

</comment><comment><USER18> You need to bring back your logo! I thought it was well designed and memorable. It wasn't until I scrolled down and saw it in a previous design that I realized that this new design was your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> That has been on my mind a bit recently.. I think I might play with that this weekend!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> sorry if this is completely OT, but as seen on footnote 4, holy shit, they are making mib 3 ? thats awesome!

<comment><AUTHOR> Filming got delayed a bunch of times, is ridiculously over budget and one actor quit but they still have Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones onboard. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1409024/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would add Logo Design Love to your excellent reading list!

Thank you for putting this together. I am going to use your checklist this weekend to fine-tune my latest creation, cardealerquotes.org. Maawaaahhaha :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't think to mention logo design as that would come far after mastery of general concepts I think and when starting to describe illustration too.

Though, you can get some logo design experience with studying typography... many companies just have logotypes. I say "just" but there's a lot that goes into it.. I digress.

<comment><USER20> I mention it because I thought many of the ideas in there can be also used in website design. I particular liked how they consider brand and incorporating that in. I loved all the examples - so many. Not just talk. But prototype and evolutions.

I would also include "The Advertising Concept Book". To me a website is an ad. This book actually shows what worked what didn't - ads from the last 40 years for the masters. I love sketches to actually ads run. A lot of analysis on Apple ads. It was just an awesome, eye-opening book. So many case studies.

Side note; I think of account about typography in one of the books about FLICKR. Where if you were not careful what type you choose you would very much offend many people since the capital L and I might merge to be U.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much do you save in the SF Bay Area with $120k salary? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm going crazy trying to sort through this. Got a job offer with one of the big bay area companies. $140K base + bonus/stock to get to $210K. Doesn't seem like enough to move my family there from the midwest, so I'm about to say no because I can't make it work (while saving for retirement/paying for college/etc) on $200K per year? WTF?

<comment><USER3> I've lived in downtown SF for 5 years and as I type this visiting Nashville TN, as I am thinking about moving to Nashville.

The biggest expenses to consider in SF besides the obvious housing costs:

\- Food + drink + groceries are way, way, way more expensive. There is no Walmart in the city. Get used to corner stores that charge a hefty premium. I miss Walmart and strip shopping malls.

\- Income taxes. Tennessee for example has 0% income state tax, excluding dividends. The 0% state income tax in Tennessee also includes capital gains (stocks, company selling) which is huge.

\- Health insurance. San Francisco according to my quick research using Blue Shield retail prices are some of the most expensive in the entire United States. I pay $500 a month for a middle of the road plan (single). That's a car payment for a nice BMW or Mercedes. Absolutely absurd.

<comment><USER4> Why not live in the suburbs of bay area (East Bay, for example), and quickly cut 30% of your housing costs? Obviously the commute sucks (I endure it daily), but it makes the numbers work. It boggles my mind that most software workers think that they have to live in SF. Bonus: There's Walmart and strip malls in the East Bay. :)

Agreed with your other points though. Not having staate income tax is a huge bonus.

<comment><USER5> > It boggles my mind that most software workers think that they have to live > in SF

Because they don't want to spend 6 hours a day commuting?

<comment><USER6> 6 hours is kind of an exaggeration, it's more like 2 hours total which could be well worth it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Apologies for the throwaway, and numbers are rough

$140k:

      - 1500/mo in 401k
      - 6200 after-tax, after 401k income
      - 2800 savings from after-tax income
      - Total discounted savings/mo, roughly: 2800 + .85 * 1500 = 4075

Is the bay area cost of living expensive? Absolutely. But I'd argue if you're a generally frugal person you'll save more (in absolute terms) here than anyplace else. I doubt I could get much above $100k anywhere else but NYC.

<comment><USER8> In Houston sr. devs(3+ years of experience if your driven, 7 if your not) are easily making 100k+. And most devs who are on hacker news could easily make 140k+.

<comment><USER9> I'll second the comment about $100k in Houston, though in general most of the jobs are in health care or energy, and you'll find yourself doing something like .NET or ColdFusion.

I do think you overestimate the average skill level on HN though :-)

<comment><USER10> What is wrong with .NET? For some reason it is not sexy here but c# and certainly f# are great languages and large parts of the stack is open source. Not quite sure why it is seen as something negative especially when something like JS is seen as positive.

<comment><USER9> > What is wrong with .NET?

Nothing at all. I've done quite a bit of it (ColdFusion too!). Nothing wrong with health care or energy industries either. I do think there's a lot of the HN crowd that only have eyes for the hip languages or fun startups though, whether it makes sense or not.

<comment><USER10> Let's make .NET hip again... Rise4fun, f# and yes, f* are seriously cool. For any self professed language freak. The framework is robust, fast and now available everywhere. I write and compile large projects on Linux and working on a tool chain to compile iOS Xamarin on Linux.

It is very nice. And Bridge.Net is very mature as well; all our core libraries compile with only a few injects and it is not too big either compared to what I see most people doing online.

I do a lot of JS because legacy but it really hurts when you have such nice languages and tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I spend $1150 on rent. $100 on utilities. $300 on food. $150 on transportation. Plus a few hundred for annual expenses of flying home and buying new clothes. Adds up to a little over 20k per year.

Plenty of families in the Bay Area earn less than $120k and get by. I feel very fortunate to earn more.

<comment><USER12> What's your living situation that makes $1150 per month possible? Room mates?

<comment><USER11> Three people in a three-bedroom apartment in Millbrae.

Craigslist shows many rooms in the Bay Area less than $1,500, though almost no studios.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I live in San Francisco and have made 120k for the last year (just recently got a raise to 130k). I don't have a family to support, and live with friends renting a bedroom for 1600/mo in a 4br in Bernal Heights (I prefer to live with people, so not having a 1br apartment downtown helps a lot).

My take home is around 77k annually and I got about 1300 back from taxes last year. I eat out/go to bars a couple times a week, but mainly try to cook for myself. I have a few hobbies that eat money and I end up spending a couple hundred at least every month on them. I travel every 3-4 months, have gone to Seattle, NY, Vancouver, LA in the last year.

With all this I've still saved somewhere between 30-35k. I also bought a motorcycle with all the crap that comes with that (gear, insurance, parts, etc) in that period, so if I hadn't then I'd probably have another 8k or so.

I honestly make more than enough money to live comfortably and when I moved to the city I was only making 80k and my rent was the same. I still felt I had enough to live comfortably but I wasn't able to save nearly as much.

120k will be fine as a single person in SF. If you have a family maybe not.

</comment><comment><USER14> Make 110k, take home around 4800 month after taxes and maxed out 401k.

Rent $1600 in SF (lucky here). But I still have over $2k month after all expenses. As a single person, I consider myself fortunate.

People will complain about living expenses but they need to calculate the income - expenses plus what the area you want to live in. City living isn't always a viable option for people. Whereas some people love it.

I don't think I can find any urban city that I can live in and find myself in a situation where I can bank more than $2k a month after expenses and maxed out 401k.

SoCal was an option for me. However I hate the suburbs, hate having a car and the salaries for new grads were 50-80k where most rents were still at least $1300.

<comment><USER12> So how does that rent compare to the mean in the area, and what are you renting at that price? Because, as an outsider, that seems remarkably low (the averages for SF that I can find suggest 2-3k for a studio or 1-bedroom).

Also, how does the rest of your budget break down? Math suggests $1200/mo for all other expenses and I'm curious how that's allocated.

<comment><USER14> Yea I have been spending a little too much. It's the moving cost and weddings I have been attending that are killing my budget.

Yea rent for studios are between 2k-3k a month. And I'm near downtown with only 20 minute walk to work. I live with my brother but if it wasn't for him, I still prefer to live with other people.

Again, depends on the lifestyle that people want. I know people who want their own place, have a car, maybe even a boat. They will have to work in places that aren't NY or SF.

<comment><USER12> So room mate and no transportation costs. That context helps a lot, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately, you're not going to get an exact answer here, because everybody's lifestyle is slightly different. However, you can guess what's going to be the big changes in your budget. I think there will be 4:

1) Your take-home pay will change. Use a calculator for you exact number, but according to [1], a single person will take home about $6,400 / month.

2) Unless you live in Manhattan, your rent will dramatically increase. Like everywhere, there's a huge range. Want to live in Oakland with a roommate and bike to BART? You could probably find $1,500 / month. Want a new construction 2 bedroom downtown or close to Caltrain on the peninsula? $5,000 / month. Houses can easily run $8,000 / month with mortgage + taxes if you can scrape together the $300k down payment. Look around on Zillow and ballpark it.

3) Eating "nice" food out isn't cheap. There's plenty of good, cheap eats, but if you're thinking date night, it's easy to drop $120 for 2 people then go off and order half a dozen $8 beers. The high end is really bad -- there's a bunch of amazing restaurants that are $75 - $100 for 6-8 courses. If you're moving from a small city, these simply don't exist. This might be a shock if you're used to eating at "the best place in town" for a special occasion.

4) Depending on where you are in life, there's a bunch of family-ish things that can really eat up a budget. Dog walkers are $20 / day. Infant day care is $2,000 / month. Getting around is kind of a pain if you don't exclusively live, work, and play in the city, which can be fixed by giving Uber $25 / ride. And unlike other cities, there isn't anything that's remarkably cheap (e.g. when I lived in VA, groceries were like half the price I expected. It was great.)

Ultimately, though, a lot of people make it work. The networking and career attitudes in tech are unmatched (I moved from Boston at age 30), the weather is great, and it turns out that a bunch of my friends who I thought had disappeared had just moved out here and they all hang out.

If you're just in it for the money, it's a close call. Your best bet is to work out here between age 22 and when you have kids, then move somewhere affordable with the $5mil you made during that time. But that's not exactly why I moved here -- I've learned more in the last 2 years than I thought possible, and I've fundamentally altered the arc of my career. I may leave at some point, but I'm glad I moved out here.

[1] [https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck- calculator](https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator)

<comment><USER16> $5M in 10 years at $120k? Even at $200k it's $2M before tax without living expenses. I don't see how you get to $5M unless you're working at Google etc. and even then it's extremely unlikely. You'd have to save half a million a year. Where is this dream job?

<comment><USER17> Maybe he's counting on winning the stock options lottery. Pretty unlikely, based on my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At $115K, I take home about $5.5K/month, of which I save about $2.5K.

<comment><USER2> That's commendable. Would you mind breaking down your budget a bit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's really a housing and commute question. Living one hour away from work can reduce cost of living by 25%.

But quality of life with that much commuting (?) :-/

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting comments but curious to know from the perspective of racism and related issues. As an Immigrant from India, and Living in California (for over 10 years) at this time seems to be best bet from that perspective.

With expanding family, I have been contemplating a lot to move outside of CA for cost saving but thoughts about racial issues plaguing the country just makes me nervous.

<comment><USER5> Did you experience it yourself? I haven't heard many reports about racial violence against Indians.

As a white person, I occasionally experienced verbal aggression from Black people (didn't talk back, so it ended that way). I think the other way round is more or less a taboo these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't live there but saw this and thought it might help (shows salaries around the world adjusted for cost of life, I found it accurate for London and Berlin).

[https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software- engineer...](https://www.codementor.io/blog/best-cities-software-engineer- earnings-271vpf599k)

<comment><USER8> I can attest Houston is a great city for saving money. I was able to save $40,000 living in a nice 1400 sq ft house in a beautiful historic neighborhood, 5 minutes from downtown. This is while my wife was going to school and not working, we were going out to eat and/or drinks 4-7 times a week, and taking two week long vacation each year.

Used the savings to quit my job try and get a startup or consultancy going.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm shocked by some of these answers. Is SF that ridiculously expensive these days?

For reference, I was saving 50% of take-home on a $90k salary three years ago, living without roommates in a nice neighborhood in NYC - which isn't exactly known for being inexpensive.

What do you spend that much money on?

</comment><comment> et-al linkregister had a conservative breakdown of a fresh graduate saving $1k/month:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13010868)

Numbers are from a year ago, but rents haven't increased too much since then, and we had assumed the grad's salary was $100k.

</comment><comment><USER23> would be curious to know take home pay (120k minus tax) as well

<comment><USER24> take home at 130 was almost exactly 3k/check

housing ate 48% of my monthly income

<comment><USER25> This is why I'm going to Southern California in the future rather than the Bay Area. Still, housing in California..

<comment><USER26> Yeah, orange_county is right: you're not going to find much better down here either. If you're not in Santa Monica paying bay area rent for a rundown shack you're going to make less the further inland you go, and the rents don't get much cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hey, I was in a similar situation 2 years ago when I had a similar offer from one of Facebook, although in the high-cost European city of London. Pros:

\- you will learn a lot at these companies

\- you will work with very smart people, which is a great experience

\- your expectations (toward yourself, your peers, the product you're working on) will be torn apart and recalibrated at a much higher level, which is a good thing

\- working on products that are used by 100s millions / billions of people is a positive human experience because you're helping give people services that improve their lives (buying books so they can learn to program, building products so they can keep in touch with their loved ones, helping them find information on the web, etc.)

But, keep in mind:

\- these are big companies, so the peopleware is slow: getting promoted takes time and depends on a myriad of factors outside your control; don't _count_ on it [in the first 2 years]

\- the signing/relocation bonus won't be around in year#2, so dependending on how much of a refresher you get, you could make less in year#2

\- stock prices fluctuate! it could go down 30% (as well as up 70%) in the next 9 months; as a rule of thumb, make sure your base salary covers living expenses

\- as a rule of thumb, assume your refresher grant will be 1/2 of the initial stock grant, and has the same vesting schedule; use Quora to get more details on your specific company, or ask a friend who works there

\- be sure to use the correct tax rates (also for stocks) when net'ing the offer numbers (look out for federal and state taxes, income vs cap.gains)

\- if you're a software engineer, the offer numbers seems a bit low vs your 20 years of experience for SV, esp. the stock part

\--- either this company pays less than others or they're under-leveling you

\--- if you care, ask your recruiter what level they put you at

\--- there's rational reasons for these big tech companies to under-level people with lots of experience, which is that they have their own internal stack and ways of doing things, plus they're very good at spinning people up in their bootcamp programs, so they don't care _that_ much about prior experience

\- if you take the offer, you will probably soon meet people at the company (or in SV) who are doing roughly the same job as you are, are a _lot_ younger, but have _significantly_ better packages because they had better signaling (went to top uni, had competing offers); depending on who you are, this may end up bothering you

Another thing to consider: many of these companies also have offices in the US, but outside of SV, eg. Seattle, Washington, Texas, NYC, where I believe they offer roughly the same packages, but cost of living / commutes are much more reasonable.

Good luck!</comment>


Remote work - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,

   For the last two years,i have been doing consulting with big co.Now i don't have any client.
   I'm looking for remote jobs if you can help.

    I have experience with:
     database:sql server,postgresql,oracle
     backend:asp.net ,asp.net mvc ,python,
     front:html,jquery
     other trades :c++,wpf/mvvm,Java
     willing to learn nodejs,android dev
 Best Regards,
PS:i'm not a native english speaker. <comment><USER2> [Remove the two spaces before each sentence to not trigger the "code" mode. Add a blank line to separate paragraphs.]

There is a official "Who want's to be hired?" / "freelancers" post the first day of each month. You should post there, it's very popular. Be alert, because it's in a few days. (There is also a simultaneous "Who is hiring post?" that you should read.)

Last month editions for reference:

Who wants to be hired?: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127238) (109 points, 25 days ago, 183 comments)

Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127243) (130 points, 25 days ago, 163 comments)

Who is hiring?: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127232) (408 points, 25 days ago, 696 comments)

</comment><comment><USER3> You can check this list: [https://github.com/RichardLitt/awesome-remote- job](https://github.com/RichardLitt/awesome-remote-job) curated by the guy responsible for "The User is Drunk": [http://theuserisdrunk.com](http://theuserisdrunk.com).

<comment><USER4> This is actually a fork that is less up to date than the original[0].

[0] [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote- job](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job)</comment></comment>


Corp Dev Language Translator: What words used by acquirers actually mean - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-startups/corp-dev-language-translator-2f9b043c768e#.nmf8yipjm <comment><USER2> This is really great (all the advice) and hilarious (the translation part), Brenden!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks .. hacker news hates my stuff though :(</comment></comment>


LiquiGlide raises $16M to get every last drop out - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/24/liquiglide-raises-16-million-to-get-every-last-drop-out-of-packages-or-tanks/ <comment><USER2> "already FDA-approved ingredients" != organic or biodegradable... especially if the ingredients aren't specifically approved for _consumption_ (the article doesn't say).

Some non-stick coatings for cookware ended up having toxicity that was unknown when initially approved.</comment>


Why Aren't More Advertisers Using Widgets? - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/article?article_id=132778 <comment><USER2> A few reasons:

1) Advertisers don't "get" it. They try to fit the idea of a "widget" into their standard idea of an ad, so that's all it ends up being. To much -brand- and not enough -utility-.

2) They are risky. The people pushing widgets use a bunch of metrics that don't really correspond to anything other than low-quality eyeballs.

3) They are stupid. Talking desktop avatars. Put your face here. Get the weather. Is someone actually going to get long-term value out of them? No.

That's certainly not an exhaustive list, but it's what came to mind after working with the advertisers and working for a widget developer for a year.</comment>


Show HN: A home for Marc Andreessen tweetstorms - <AUTHOR> https://tagandsee.com/team/tweetstorm/slideshow

<comment><USER2> just a reminder, this is the same person that says snowden is a trator</comment>


Show HN: Vantage, run scripts inside easily swappable environments - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vantage-org/vantage/ <comment><AUTHOR> I made vantage years ago, to scratch an itch I had with using Docker for dev work. I have a bunch of bash scripts in my repo for; spinning up the dev server, running DB migrations, running tests then deploying, etc. etc.

vantage manages the environment for these scripts. Meaning that I can do:

        vantage db migrate

For my local DB, then:

        vantage -e production db migrate

For my production one.

Recently I added bash completion, so I thought I'd post here to see what other people thought.

Let me know :)</comment>


Tableau Prep (Project Maestro) is here: Redefining your data prep experience - <AUTHOR> https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2018/3/tableau-prep-project-maestro-here-redefining-your-data-prep-experience-84620 <comment><USER2> Tableau has reached its peak in terms of product development, just like MS Word has. It's a mature, feature rich tool, but it has nowhere to grow substantially as a product anymore. Some new bells and whistles here and there will be added of course, but nothing game changing. I wonder if they will redirect their R&D focus on data prep now.</comment>


The New Economics of Music, or, why stealing feels so right - <AUTHOR> http://www.bubblegeneration.com/?a=a&resource=musicrisk1 This article (part 1 and 2) has helped me think critically about new models for selling music, along with the process of discovering other kinds of user-generated content.
<comment><USER2> I started a facebook group yesterday to discuss all aspects of Bubblegeneration/Umair Haque, FYI:

<http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5842972550>

Obviously, the game is in reducing search costs.

The REAL issue I see here for all these "music recommendation" startups is that they still are nowhere near competing with quality human DJ/knowledge.

There are thousands of music supervisors, party Dj's, and just general record nerds whose recommendations/playlists CRUSH last.fm, et al.

Somebody needs to build the Digg of music, moderated by people with real music knowledge.

That's the moneymaker.

All this implicit listening information is garbage.

<comment><AUTHOR> But would the Digg of music be enough? iJigg, which is something like that, launcher earlier this year. <http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/18/jigg-that- music/>. Although it doesn't seem to have moderaters with real music knowledge. But even if it did, that wouldn't be enough to make results relevant for everyone because the criteria for relevance is an individuals concept of "good". Sure moderators might know what is "good" for certain audiences, but if results are organized in a digg-esque fashion, it becomes a top-ten list, meaning that no matter how good your moderators are, they can't generate recommendations that will be "good" for individuals (and the strategy to appeal to the largerst number of individuals is to appeal to the lowest common denominator, which one could argue radio already does well.)

<comment><USER2> well, my proxy of "digg for music" is only a jumping off point.

It would have to be organized differently.

That iJigg thing is garbage, for now

I would strongly recommend reading Scott Karp's pitch for Publishing 2, a "journalist-powered news aggregator":

[http://blog.publish2.com/2007/08/14/introducing- publish2-net...](http://blog.publish2.com/2007/08/14/introducing- publish2-networked-news/)

The key with these communities is seeding them with, OMG, domain-specific talent.

I can imagine a social platform where various DJ's, music supervisors, musicians, etc, could be the curators of long long long playlists [organized by mood, genre, style, time period, lyrics, whatever] that are tagged with a bunch of metadata [enabling them to be recombined easily].

Non-curators can suggest tracks and gain authority by having them added to curated uberplaylists.

Or something like that ;-)

The key is knowing your ass from a hole in the ground about music...really. Not just thinking you have good taste...that's how all the media execs (that all tech people hate) got into this mess in the first place.

Anyways, I'm already on this, if anyone is interested further you can contact me ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that it is entirely accurate to equate news delivery with music delivery, nor do I think the lessons from journalists are entirely relevant when it comes to building a social platform for music playlists. Cultural objects (e.g. music,art,fashion,film,literature etc.) are substantively different than news articles.

The news is largely valued for its accuracy, timeliness, and topical relevance to a reader. Music and other cultural objects are valued for their enjoyment, which is contingent on individual personal preferences. I'm skeptical of a platform that would use domain-specific talent to create playlists for what comes down to individual personal preference. Domain specific talent makes much more sense regarding news where the relevance can be easily determined because it is largely topical, whereas the relevance for music is based on personal preference, which can't be determined through domain specific talent.

I'm also not convinced that more meta-tagging is the answer either. If I tag a song with a mood, genre, style, etc., it will help a user find that song based on those new categories. But in the end, finding new songs based on categories isn't that helpful because what matters is finding songs based on individual personal preferences. For example, I might know I want an energetic, intense, electro-rock ballad, but defining that domain doesn't guarantee I will like the results. People rarely like all the songs on an album, and as far as domains go, albums are very tightly defined domains. Likewise, using Uber-Dj's as domains don't seem to be the best answer. After all, their playlists are based off of their preferences, and, regardless of how much they "know" about music, unless their preferences are like mine, their list will not help much.

<comment><USER2> You're being pretty dogmatic about what music is...

You may be right that, in some respects, "cultural objects are substantively different than news articles", but not in ways that are germane to this argument:

"The news is largely valued for its accuracy, timeliness, and topical relevance to a reader. Music and other cultural objects are valued for their enjoyment, which is contingent on individual personal preferences."

I addressed this in an earlier response..."personal enjoyment" of music is _inexorable_ from "timeliness" and "relevance."

I get more "personal enjoyment" from John Zorn than anyone else, but I don't wanna hear it when I'm making out with my girl, or at a club.

Think about the success of mood/circumstance specific mix CD's like "Ibiza Club" or "Ellington for Lovers"...

Musical preferences have a lot more to them than "people like you also like"...

Also, with all the choice available, it's easy to overestimate people's desire to even HAVE choice.

Finally, I am imagining a more sophisticated metadata model that is not just about creating categories for things. I don't really have the details on that, though ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> The examples you use as counter-arguments to my approach are not really counter-arguments, but deal with a different issue than what I was talking addressing in my last response. I was talking about finding music based on personal preferences. Your counter-examples of "making out with my girl" or dancing "at a club" are group situations where group preferences are most important.

You are right when you say that compilations like "Ibiza Club" or "Ellington for Lovers" make a lot of money: so does selling Muzak (the background music in supermarkets and most commercial spaces with music). Background music is the ultimate "genre" that is compatible with group preferences: no one is offended... but at the same time, nobody really cares.

I agree with you that musical preferences have more to them than "people like you also like"... this would disregard the reality that people sometimes do categorize music by situation/mood, categories like listening to music to dance, exercise, study, make-out, host cocktail parties etc.

But as I suggested before, domain specific categories of music do not have to be mutually exclusive to personal preferences (currently they are). Let's say your goal is to have romantic music. Why not use a "people like you also like" function bounded by the category of romantic music? This way you could get romantic music, i.e. music everyone thinks is romantic, and romantic music that you like as an individual. Even better would be to use a "people like you and your girlfriend also like" function within the specific category of romantic music :)

"Also, with all the choice available, it's easy to overestimate people's desire to even HAVE choice." This is pretty fatalistic don't you think? I think the explosion of choice online frustrates people because they KNOW something is out there that they will really love, but they can't FIND it. This screams opportunity for a website to act as a choice agent to direct people to the music, video, merchandise etc. that they want but can't find themselves among the infinite choices. Infinite choice results in infinite search costs without a decision agent.

<comment><USER2> Okay, I think I have identified a central reason why we disagree on some of this stuff, and it basically stems from views on art criticism.

The phrase "personal preference" to me makes a case for relativism:

"If I think something is good, then it is good."

WRONG.

As Bruce Sterling and others have argued, just because you like something [or just because you can _make_ something, like a mash-up] doesn't mean it's good.

I don't have time to parse this much more right now, but the fact is that it behooves technologists to develop a robust art criticism within these applications.

Another reason I am high on the idea of people making decisions about what to listen to vs. algorithms [if there has to be a choice] is that, while there is a LOT of choice in the music world, it's not even CLOSE to infinite.

I believe that among the 10,000-50,000 (a pretty random number of people i picked), "legit" (whatever that means) music aficionados could parse out the vast majority of great music in all genre/mood/styles, from Britney to Bach, in a fairly short amount of time.

Also, this paragraph:

"You are right when you say that compilations like "Ibiza Club" or "Ellington for Lovers" make a lot of money: so does selling Muzak (the background music in supermarkets and most commercial spaces with music). Background music is the ultimate "genre" that is compatible with group preferences: no one is offended... but at the same time, nobody really cares."

Is utter bullshit. Do you honestly think I'm thinking of it that way?

Finally, let the record show that in all my hundreds of hours listening to last.fm and Pandora [PURELY for research reasons] I have NEVER EVER heard anything that I wasn't already aware of _that was half decent_. EVER.

So, my perspective on this is skewed. Like everything else, 95% of people don't know shit about music, so these incremental algorithmic solutions are a panacea to them.

Your idea of weighing "influential" people heavier in an algorithm has a lot of merit. I just think that pure human-powered peer production would get to the solution of better music for every occasion a lot faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> interesting article, but i'm not sure if I agree.

I think iTunes reduces a lot of the risk the article is revolving around (of buying something you didn't like in the first place). I think most P2P downloads are of songs one heard on the radio. If I wanted to discover new music I'd go for Pandora or last.fm instead of illegal downloads.

I can say from personal experience that when I was a student and was low on cash I felt bad about spending 20 dollars at a time on an album (out of which I liked a couple of songs). Buying songs from iTunes allowed me to buy what I wanted or get entire albums for $10 dollars. But even that didn't allow me to get all the music I wanted on a student budget.

Now that I have a job I ended up spending hundreds of dollars on iTunes over time because for the most part it was less time consuming than finding the music on P2P networks. Once my time became valuable buying music started to make sense.

<comment><USER4> When online piracy reaches a certain point of perfection, there is no reason to buy music anymore.

I'm a member of oink, which is one of the best private bittorrent trackers out there. It is focused mainly on music. It's both where I acquire music and discover music. Everyday, I go and I look at the Top 50 most popular albums uploaded today and at least three or four sound interesting. I usually download at one MB/s and the oink archives are by far more complete than iTunes. I also get to pick from a FLAC and V0 encoding, at least. By the time I've discovered my new music, I already have the whole album. Thank you, technology.</comment></comment>