ACM signed letter opposing open access - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.publishers.org/researchers-and-publishers-oppose-immediate-free-distribution-of-peer-reviewed-journal-articles <comment><USER3> I've said this before on other threads but frankly, scientific publishers represent institutionalised theft of tax payer money:

\- Academics (most often publicly funded via grants and university salaries) do the work for free.

\- They are expected to learn to use LaTeX and to typeset their work for free.

\- They are expected to copy-edit the papers for free, or else pay a copy editor themselves with, you guessed it, public funds.

\- Volunteer Academics (on university time and therefore, again, public money) are expected to review the work for technical accuracy and novelty. If done well this is extremely time consuming.

\- Finally, the Journals have the temerity to charge the same universities who produce their product millions of pounds a year in journal subscriptions and Open Access fees.

\- Finally finally, none of the Authors are ever paid for their work. Not that it matters, because again: public funding should mean public access.

The most frustrating part is that Academics themselves are locked into this system by the career prospects conferred by prestigious journals/conferences.

I like to hope the ACM and other signatories will face a backlash for this. But they most likely wont

<comment><USER4> If your issue is that tax payer money is being stolen then presumably open access should only be granted to citizens of a country, for research arising from academic institutions in that country? Otherwise countries will similarly be stealing tax payer money from one another. Actually, do public libraries get access to Elsevier etc?

<comment> vincent-toups The presumption you're making is that a country would never spend money for the public good, where that is defined to include the entire human race, rather than just nationals.

Weird assumption! Generally speaking, academic research is considered to be an international, or super-national, cooperative effort in most fields.

<comment><USER4> I don't make this assumption. I simply think OPs argument that research should be open because tax payers have funded it is weak, for the reason I stated, i.e. it implies that non-tax payers should not have access, or conversely, implies that taxpayers in each country should get to decide how this research is distributed, possibly restricting access to non-nationals.

> The presumption you're making is that a country would never spend money for > the public good, where that is defined to include the entire human race, > rather than just nationals.

I think in general this is the case? Obviously governments budget for foreign aid, and also contribute to collective efforts e.g. climate change or (relevant to this discussion) EU funds such as Horizon 2020. But I don't think any governments do/should consider "the public" as meaning "the entire human race".

<comment><USER5> 1\. A->B does not imply !A->!B 2\. Government foreign aid is a counterexample

<comment><USER4> I don't know what's meant to be A and B here. I already listed foreign aid as a counterexample in the post you're replying to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My wife is a scientist who has peer reviewed hundreds of articles. She has never been paid a dime. Worse, she is forced to pirate articles published in the same journals she is publishing in and reviews articles for, because she can't afford them and her University does not pay for them. So when they say: ```Peer-reviewed articles are not free to produce``` they are not lying, they are just forgetting to mention who covers most of that cost, for FREE!

<comment><USER7> Amazon pulls in thousands of unpaid reviews for any product. Now what do you do? Give all of them the product free?

Lets say 3 in 100 reviews are good. And you want those 3 to come back and review the next product. You are even willing to pay them something. Is there a guarantee that they have interest and will show up, and if they do, is there a guarantee that they produce a useful review of the same standard the second time around?

Thats just one simplified reason about the dynamics of this process, that is going to block everyone from getting things for free.

Its easy to react, to push to dismantle it and you just end up with YouTube style mega mass of comments under every vid where the best comments are guaranteed to get buried unless they pander to the will of the herd.

<comment><USER8> Reviewing an amazon article costs 5 minutes. Reviewing a paper costs a day.

Journals extort hundreds of man hours per conference from reviewers. The largest cost of all, research and writing the paper, isn't reimbursed in the slightest and largely covered by tax payers, who then still won't be able to access the results because of paywalls.

The entire business plan of journals is to take research and peer review for free, and then sell it. Back when distribution was costly that may have made sense, but nowadays with the internet the cost of distribution is a fraction of what it used to be.

<comment><USER7> Cost of distribution maybe free but attracting qualified and useful reviews is definitely not.

People who think open access is the solution to that are dealing with a focusing illusion - [https://www.edge.org/response- detail/11984](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11984)

<comment><USER9> You seem to repeatedly ignore people claiming that they _are_ doing peer- reviews for free. I guess free facts are not qualified and useful facts ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I peer reviewed lots of articles when I was a researcher, including for IEEE and ACM publications. Peer reviews, editorial work, authoring articles, etc. are all part of academic life, much of which is publicly funded and benefits society.

I've never heard of anyone getting payed or compensated for peer reviews. This is not a thing. Journal editors probably get payed in some cases but mostly this is a thing that is part of their professional responsibilities as e.g. a university professor and also something that looks good on their CVs and gives them influence and power. Actual labor related to proof reading, typesetting, etc. is uncommon except for some high profile publications. Mostly this work is done by authors themselves. I've dealt with professional proof readers only on two occasions.

Cost related to distribution of scientific work is almost exclusively related to the printing process, which for the past 25 years has technically been completely redundant. As soon as the WWW emerged in the early nineties, scientist started distributing articles in digital form. I know, because this is when I started doing research. I think that over the course of my research career, I've only visited the library twice. Once to get a copy of some journal article by a publisher that just was just super anal about online articles and once to drop off a box of thesis copies (a requirement of the university at the time). Even before Google became a thing, finding articles online was easy.

Considering the ACM is an organization that claims to act in the interest of it's members (i.e. researchers), open access should be a foregone conclusion and completely and utterly uncontroversial. The fact that this is not the case, tells me it is prioritizing other interests and not acting in good faith on behalf of its own members who would be do well to make continued membership conditional on this getting resolved ASAP. Money talks and members walking away would fix this in no time. Online publication is cheap (not free obviously) and should be easily funded from membership fees.

<comment><USER11> > I've never heard of anyone getting payed or compensated for peer reviews. > This is not a thing.

You are paid for it because if you're a paid researcher then it's part of your paid day-to-day job, in your job description.

<comment><USER12> Right, but those costs are paid by the university and/or the taxpayer (in the case of publicly funded research) - they are _not_ paid by the publishers. The latter effectively treat academics as free labour from which they can profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "publishers across America make significant investments, at no cost to taxpayers" is an interesting claim. As I understand it, the majority of journal subscription revenue is from libraries and universities. Are they not taxpayer-funded?

I'd also be interested to know the reasoning behind "this cost shift would place billions of dollars of new and additional burden on taxpayers". Is that because universities will have to organise their own peer review instead of paying for journals to do it for them? Surely, if organising peer review is so valuable, the universities will happily pay for it, and the almighty market (hallowed be its name) will return those billions of dollars to their rightful owners.

Broadly, I think this argument is worth reading with an eye to what it doesn't say, rather than what it does. It's big on lofty appeals to "government intervention in the private market", and fastidious about mentioning the "billions of dollars" that flow through journal publishers, yet mysteriously waffles on the actual value they provide in exchange.

<comment><USER14> >yet mysteriously waffles on the actual value they provide in exchange

I honestly cannot really think of one. For example, conferences organized by ACM still cost an enormous amount of money to just attend and largely break even by accepting company donations. The grants there are also largely provided by companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yesterday I had to deal with copyright to have a conference paper published by ACM. Open Access was charged 700/900$ based on my membership. The two others options was transferring all the management rights (keep dreaming), or giving them a license that basically allow them to do whatever they want anyway. I took the last option but I was angry: this is basically blackmailing me against my carrer path to get my work for free and make money on it. And I had to do all the bullshit job of dealing with templating, which should be done by the publisher.

Hopefully my personal page is well indexed in Google Scholar when searching for my name, so anyone can get my articles for free.

<comment><USER16> @tasogare If you are an ACM member, you can use the Authorizer service to enable free access to your papers. The service creates a special link that you can use on two web-sites - for example your institutional web-site and your personal web-site, so that visitors to your web-site, will be redirected to PDF download of your papers.

This effectively allows open-access to your papers, as long as you have a web- site.

<comment><USER15> I'm not. And after that I don't plan to be one. From what I understand they "grant" me the rights to publish my preprint paper on my website. Which I planned to do anyway. As a UE citizen living in Asia I would have done so anyway, good luck for them suing me over my own work in a foreign jurisdiction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It looks like the ACM General Elections are coming up, with several officers and various other positions being available:

[https://www.acm.org/elections/acm- council/2020-slate](https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate)

It's likely worth someone contacting each of the nominees to publish info on where they stand on the Open Access issue.

With that, the general ACM members who vote should have a decent ability to affect the ACM's future directions on this issue. :)

That is assuming not 100% of all nominated people are against Open Access. Could be a bad assumption though. :(

<comment><USER16> Due to ACM protecting American business interests in cases such as this, as a member I give priority to people not from USA and if there is a choice, people not from EU.

Most researchers from USA and EU do not understand that $15 per paper for reader access is way too much, that $99 for professional access is way too much, that SIG groups should not organize events in USA only, and when they organize event they should choose places that well connected to most of the world, and that do not have too strict visa requirements for researchers visits to scientific events.

<comment><USER18> To be fair to the ACM, they _do_ have cheaper rates in developing countries: $99 won't apply to you if you're outside of North America or Europe.

Still a profiteering organization, but they've thought this out a little.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The ACM is a parasite of an organization.

If you want to be in one of the clubs that badly, support the IEEE instead. Friendlier, cheaper, and _not_ controlled by lawyers.

The ACM has a lot of cool people, and a few nice resources, but it's not worth supporting the profiteering it does.

<comment><USER19> I totally disagree if you get a membership which is affordable at $99 per year you get access to lots of good learning material. That includes computer books from O'reilly and courses from Skillsoft.

Portal [https://learning.acm.org/](https://learning.acm.org/)

<comment><USER18> That doesn't give you access to the Digital Library, which is the part of this that's relevant to the article, and it doesn't change the other arguments given.

<comment><USER20> Still, if you compare getting O'Reilly membership by itself it would be cheaper to get the ACM membership

<comment><USER21> My public library offers O'Reilly digital access. Unfortunately, it was some limited subset of what O'Reilly's own subscription service offers. How does ACM compare?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> These are the dying throes of a industry that knows its days are numbered.

In biology, we now have biorxiv - arxiv but for biology papers - and the growth of papers there has been exponential (source: [https://twitter.com/cshperspectives/status/11922084840136744...](https://twitter.com/cshperspectives/status/1192208484013674496/photo/1) ) Biorxiv is free, not peer reviewed, and accepts any format the paper is in (except reviews and rebuttals IIRC).

IMHO: Papers posted to biorxiv are, currently, of higher quality than what you get as a peer reviewer from journals, because authors rely a little bit on the peer review process to clear up any remaining problems. Sometimes this actually happens. Once people are getting used to biorxiv, we'll see more low quality stuff getting submitted there, but still - biorxiv has shown us that in the Internet age, biology doesn't really need journals.

HOWEVER funding bodies, universities, people who have to judge your scientific work still rely on the stamp of journals 100%. My current employer wants us to submit at least 5 papers per year in the top 10% impact factor (IF) journals of our field. If we get into a really large IF journal (Nature, Science), we get a small financial bonus. Universities are, in turn, judged based on in how many high-IF journals they publish (think uni rankings). The higher the ranking, the easier it is to advertise to students, the more money you get in fees.

As long as these people can't find a different measurement for quality of scientific work we're stuck with journals - but once we have a different measurement, we can toss journals out the window immediately.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have been a reviewer for (Computer Science) journals of publications like - Springer, Elsevier, IEEE, AAAI and ACM. The reviewer doesn't receive any money for reviews. The editing is entirely taken care by the authors of the paper.

</comment><comment><USER24> Personally I cannot wait for the dissolution of the modern publishing industry. HN might find it of interest that many large academic publishers are trying to pivot to providing a variety of data management services to universities. The academics thus far have not been fooled, but we will see how the politics plays out.

</comment><comment><USER25> For any department/institution that wants to run its own journal, there's the Open Journal System [1]. They also develop the Open Conference System [2].

I used to be a sysadmin for a research institute using them. Both OJS and OCS performed reasonably well back then.

Technical options to systematically counteract predatory publishing like ACM and Elsevier [3] do exist. However, it requires plenty of institutional commitment and overcoming political opposition, as it boils down to enhancing researcher reputation in an effective way.

Building reputation almost from scratch vs. depending on established, well recognized publishers is kind of the perpetual FOSS vs. proprietary software conflict.

[1] [https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/](https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/)

[2] [https://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/](https://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge)

</comment><comment><USER26> > Going below the current 12 month 'embargo' would make it very difficult for > most American publishers to invest in publishing these articles.

Then just stop doing it. If science needs publishers, scientists will soon notice. If not, well, good riddance!

Frankly, ACM just kills it's own value proposition. You publish with ACM, or IEEE et. al., because they propose greater reach. If scientists realize that noone pays the ridiculous amounts of money and usually go to archive.org instead, they will soon realize that they don't need ACM for publishing.

Soon after, free, or very cheap, open access journals and collections will be the go-to default. If the traditional publishers have any more value to add than a searchable catalog and a barely functioning citation index, they will compete. But I doubt it.

<comment><USER16> You are forgetting that as a researcher you are evaluated by your own university based on where you publish. And no university will suddenly start to recognize some obscure publication venues, in fact what they will do is issue a policy that such papers will not be taken into account during evalution period.

Otherwise, I would claim that my personal web-site or my colleagues personal web-site is a scientific publisher and would publish my papers only there.

There is a very strong infinite feedback mechanism between respected publishers and respected universities forcing us to flock to such publishers no matter the costs which are exorbitantly high for most of us. But we simply do not have a choice.

<comment><USER27> Are there prohibitions to publish in multiple publications?

<comment><USER28> Yes, pretty much every serious venue is considering only papers with novel, unpublished research, so if you've published "that thing" already somewhere else then that disqualifies you from getting a well-ranked publication out of that piece of research, and it's strong disincentive to publish anything outside of the venues that 'count' for the purposes of evaluating you or your project goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well, I guess 2019 is going to be the last year of my paid membership. I've been a member for the past 15 years. I'll send my membership dues to Sci-Hub instead.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Peer-reviewed articles are not free to produce.

Yeah, they are not free to produce, but they can cost as little as $10 per submission. See _Discrete Analysis_ [1], for instance. Here's Tim Gowers' announcement from 2015 going into the economic details.[2]

[1] [https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/](https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/)

[2] [https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis- an...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv- overlay-journal/)

</comment><comment><USER31> The scientific publishing industry is a racket. It's defending a pricing model that was steep when all journals had to be typeset and printed. Now it's inexcusable.

All Open Access does is shift the cost to the authors of the paper (usually as an explicit portion of the funding grant). The publishers still get paid! They just can't keep charging over and over for the same PDF. Of course they're going to whine and moan.

<comment><USER32> Indeed, but the ACM is not (purely) a publisher. It should represent the interests of its members instead of betraying them.

<comment><USER16> Next time vote for persons who are not working in USA and who are not voting in EU and other wealthy countries. The rest are not so well funded, so they should know better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Information wants to be free."

The iconic phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand,[1] who, in the late 1960s, founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing.[2] The earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. Brand told Steve Wozniak:[3]

From Wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am an ACM member and I am not American, and I was not asked if I agree with this. I feel this is an abuse of power by the ACM leadership and will speak against this internally.

But, as I mentioned in another post, ACM allows it's members to use their Authorizer service to allow access to their own papers for free via their institutional or personal web-sites. This means that papers will be in-a-way openly accessible, but not via the ACM Digital Library - as a visitor you should try to go to the authors website and see if there is a free link to download the paper.

</comment><comment><USER34> Long live arXiv.org, paid publications should be totally disrupted in 2020.

<comment><USER8> arXiv is a nice idea but I kinda hate it. It's not compatible with overleaf for no good reason at all. arXiv expects you to ship the source of the article + some sort of generated bib file of a specific version, instead of generating the bib file from the source. As a result, arXiv will fail to host overleaf generated content if both happen to use different versions of tex at the time. But I'm submitting the entire source to arXiv, so there is no good reason for arXiv to fail to produce a pdf from it!

Gave up on arXiv because of that. I use overleaf to avoid all the Latex issues, and I'm absolutely not interested in supporting something that expects me to get back to wasting time on fixing latex issues instead of producing content.

<comment><USER35> Just delete the _.bib file. arXiv only needs the_.bbl file. What is confusing is even if you have both the _.bib and_.bbl, arXiv doesn't ignore the former, it raises an error anyway. Bad error reporting.

Another tip if you're using overleaf: make sure your bibliography related warnings that overleaf points out, are gone too. Overleaf is resilient to these but arXiv is not.

<comment><USER8> I think the bbl file is what I meant. It's created from the source and bib file, and arXiv refuses to accept the one that is created by overleaf. I really dislike arXiv for demanding the full source and refusing pdfs, but then insisting you also provide a file that is generated from that source, but not accepting that file unless it's generated with specific builders.

<comment><USER35> Oh that's surprising. I uploaded content generated by overleaf (they provide a arXiv compatible dump of your project) a month or so ago and it worked smoothly (after uploading to arXiv I deleted the bib file of course).

<comment><USER8> I tried about a year ago and about half a year ago, respectively. Both times, the exported bbl file hat a different version than the one accepted by arXiv. First time, the bbl version was too old. Second time, the bbl version was too new. First time, I ended up printing the latex generated pdf file so that arXiv wouldn't recognize it as a Latex produced file. That kinda sucked because in the printed pdf, you couldn't select text or access references. Second time that didn't work anymore because arXiv added a check to prevent users from uploading printed pdfs. I ended up simply hosting it at our institute page and abandoning arXiv.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Journals get away with extortionate fees because tenure committees, interview panels etc take journal quality as a proxy for research quality when evaluating a candidate.

If they stopped doing that it would certainly reduce the incentive to submit research to the more expensive journals.

</comment><comment><USER37> As soon as I saw American Heart Association on the list I knew it was going to be a scam idea. This "non-profit" pays their CEO $1.5M, just fired all their product distributors to bring profit home, and just squeezed all their independent training centers by tripling the price of supplies to them. Lastly, they plant "volunteers" into its customers. For example, the purchasing manager for Veterans Affairs in charge of buying all CPR training for the world's largest health system is also in a leadership position with AHA. Guess who has the exclusive, non-competitive contract?

When anti net neutrality was up for debate, same thing. I just needed to tell grandmom: it's a political thing Comcast is fighting for. Grandmom replies "if Comcast wants it it must be bad". Bam! Done explaining.

</comment><comment><USER38> Is there any comparable list of organisations which have _supported_ this measure?

Though the list of signatories to this particular letter is extraordinarily disheartening.

I'd written a brief bit a few years ago, "What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls 'research': Why Sci-Hub is so popular"

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/)

Among other points, it includes cites from notable academics (NYU's Graduate Center president Chase Robinson, and Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz) making the case for information as a public good.

</comment><comment><USER39> Of course... Money over free flow of scientific information.

How is this possible? Much of this research is - at least partially - <USER2> funded. And then publishing corporations skim money from the distribution of the information providing little or no value. In my book that perfectly meets the definition of a parasite.

Perhaps I am missing something.

</comment><comment><USER40> I am an ACM member and I see many other members like me disappointed by the stance ACM took. What is the best way to get our grievances known? Thousands comments across various forums are lost in information noise. If there is a petition or an open letter we can sign?

<comment><USER41> [https://www.acm.org/elections/acm- council/2020-slate](https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> >> This mandate already amounts to a significant government intervention in the private market.

This caught my eye. I find it curious that "government intervention in the private market" seems to be treated as _de facto_ harmful.

The "mandate" refers to "a legacy regulation that is still in force today" under which "proprietary journal articles that report on federally funded research must be made available for free within 12 months of publication".

<comment><USER43> > This caught my eye. I find it curious that "government intervention in the > private market" seems to be treated as de facto harmful.

The current administration and Senate is the target of that sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Well of course they did. The business model for the established journals is gatekeeping knowledge, so why would they be for open science?

</comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association), organizers of the biggest trade show for manufacturers of Cellphone service equipment, coming out against right to repair in 2017 during Nebraska state hearing.

</comment><comment><USER46> As I said many times, the organizations which support the publishers is the problem. Lots of money go to publishers pockets because academic management support them.

</comment><comment><USER47> Their arguments would be convincing if their peer review processes actually worked to guarantee the integrity of their published results.

</comment><comment><USER27> Honest question: what is the benefit of publishing in a peer reviewed journal vs something like Wikipedia?

<comment><USER48> Wikipedia will reject "original research". That phrase would completely apply, without scare quotes, to articles that need peer review. You could always use a blogging platform?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> What a farrago of lies and deceit this is! Calling Open Access a "legacy regulation" is a rather excessive bit of lying. These journals depend very much on tax dollars which is why every library that drops them destroys their bottom line and the base of individual subscribers (teaching faculty) generally don't pay for their subscriptions themselves.

Frankly in reading this I was just shocked to see the Trump administration accused of possibly taking steps forward that the Obama administration did not/would not. We should only be paying for research once. Paying publishers repeatedly for access to somebody else's work isn't right in this age of competing budget priorities.

<comment><USER50> If I wanted to kill open access in today's political environment, I'd frame it as communism/socialism vs. big business/tax dollars and lobby Trump on that basis, and goad him with some anti-Obama trash talk. At first blush it sounds difficult to get Trump to care about this apparent ivory-tower issue, but in that framing, he might just care enough to act. It's a sorry state of affairs that the president is so predictably shallow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> trying hard to sympathize with this letter

So , a bunch of societies publish journals which rely on closed access and library subscription fees to survive. They are afraid to start charging for the open access fees, because they know that authors will prefer to publishing in other, better known open access journals instead. So they attempt to lobby Trump using the sleaziest of pretenses, appealing to his "america first" sensitivities. They also misrepresent themselves as they don't operate in an open private marketplace, since library subscriptions are practically mandatory and paid by the state in most of europe and much of US. They don't produce the intellectual property they describe either - the original authors do and also hold copyrights to it. Plus they publish a ton of submissions from foreign countries so, what are they talking about? So ... these guys should look up "streisand effect"

It is inevitable that mandatory open access will lead to consolidation to a few open access libraries. That's both good and bad , but significantly more good

</comment><comment><USER52> The letter isn't that long, and I find the press release less useful than the full text. It's also signed by many more publishers than just the ACM.

> Dear President Trump:

> The undersigned organizations represent the leading publishers and non- > profit scientific societies in the United States. We write to you with deep > concern regarding a proposed policy that has come to our attention that > would jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged > in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals and research articles > and would potentially delay the publication of new research results. The > role of the publisher is to advance scholarship and innovation, fostering > the American leadership in science that drives our economy and global > competitiveness. As copyrighted works, peer-reviewed journal articles are > licensed to users in hundreds of foreign countries, supporting billions of > dollars in U.S. exports and an extensive network of American businesses and > jobs. In producing and disseminating these articles, we make ongoing > competitive investments to support the scientific and technical communities > that we serve.

> As noted above, we have learned that the Administration may be preparing to > step into the private marketplace and force the immediate free distribution > of journal articles financed and published by organizations in the private > sector, including many non-profits. This would effectively nationalize the > valuable American intellectual property that we produce and force us to give > it away to the rest of the world for free. This risks reducing exports and > negating many of the intellectual property protections the Administration > has negotiated with our trading partners.

> We write to express our strong opposition to this proposal, but in doing so > we want to underscore that publishers make no claims to research data > resulting from federal funding.

> To be clear, publishers both support and enable "open access" business > models and "open data" as important options within a larger framework that > assumes critical publisher investments remain viable. Under a legacy > regulation that is still in force today, proprietary journal articles that > report on federally funded research must be made available for free within > 12 months of publication. This mandate already amounts to a significant > government intervention in the private market. Going below the current 12 > month "embargo" would make it very difficult for most American publishers to > invest in publishing these articles. As a consequence, it would place > increased financial responsibility on the government through diverted > federal research grant funds or additional monies to underwrite the > important value added by publishing.

> In the coming years, this cost shift would place billions of dollars of new > and additional burden on taxpayers. In the process, such a policy would > undermine American jobs, exports, innovation, and intellectual property. It > could also result in some scientific societies being forced to close their > doors or to no longer be able to support the publication of U.S.-sponsored > science that is key to ensuring that the U.S. remains the world leader in > science and technology.

> In addition to financing and managing a world-leading peer review process, > publishers make extensive investments in education, research, and innovative > digital platforms that advance American competitiveness and help ensure the > quality and integrity of American science. Undermining the marketplace is > unnecessary, counterproductive, and would significantly harm the system of > peer-reviewed scholarly communication that fuels America's leadership in > research and innovation.

> We urge you to oppose this proposed policy, and we look forward to working > with the Administration on this matter.</comment>


Show HN: Weekend project, D3.js Globe of Recent Earthquakes - <AUTHOR> http://boydgreenfield.com/quakes

<comment><USER2> Really nice.

It doesn't always auto play, and clicking play/pause doesn't make it work (happened twice to me in five refreshes on Chrome).

When it said "Highlight an earthquake..." I was nervous I would have to follow those little circles with my mouse while trying to read the information, but it works well!

The earth quake zones just popping into view looks a little goofy. Is there any way to fade them in, or have them start as a line and transform into a circle (going through an ellipse). That might make it look a little cleaner on entry/exit.

Great work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah... I'm trying to fix that bug (related again to JSONP), but wanted to post it here in the meantime. And planning to move from circles -> svg:paths with the next D3.js release (they've rewritten / fixed the geographic clipping functions).

<comment><USER3> just clipping the circles with the outer ring might help. when i did this - <http://www.acooke.org/arms.html> \- i tried to make the ellipses the correct shape, but it's non-trivial for extended ellipses on a curved surface (although yours are small so perhaps that's not an issue). anyway, the big breakthrough in making it look natural was to simply clip at the edge of the globe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks beautiful, but it doesn't release my mouse click on Chrome; i.e. when I click on the globe to click & drag, the rotation of the globe keeps following my mouse, and I can't click the "play" button.

Nice project though, as a geo guy who's been meaning to play with D3, it's inspiring.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah... that's a bug that I haven't been able to squash yet.

Particularly with high latency, it will sometimes fail to load the JSONP from the USGS. Because JSONP is a <script> and I'm not properly catching the thrown error that causes D3 to bug out. I'm trying to get USGS to let me use CORS with the JSON files so I don't have to deal with the callback function of JSONP.

Oh - and refreshing the page should fix that! Thanks, and glad you like it.

<comment><USER5> Also if you flip it upside down (drag over a pole) the side to side turns backwards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. It's actually updating the origin of the map projection with the animation, so it will always be spinning eastwards. That's why the globe will rotate clockwise if you center over the North Pole.

All of this can be changed in the JS parameters easily enough, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know it's based off D3.js but is the rest of the code open source?

I'd like to use it for a project and credit you. The most advanced I've found open so far is just a base rotating D3.js globe (<http://bl.ocks.org/d/1246403/>).

<comment><AUTHOR> It can / will be. I just have a really messy commit log as I was editing files from Github manually from another machine (not a good strategy...).

Email me at boyd.greenfield at gmail and I'll get you the source if you'd like to chat about it. Otherwise I'll get to opening it up and adding an (open) license shortly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's really cool. Care to explain why do you have <http://mbostock.github.com/d3/d3.v2.min.js> in header that has only one line - links to actual d3 at <http://d3js.org/d3.v2.min.js>? Am I missing some reasoning behind this? It doesn't seem very reasonable. Adds two unnecesary hops to two different domains? If you dont want to host d3 why not just reference it directly in header from d3js.org?

Edit: Oh, and how you distort svg to make it look spherical while dragging? This is very cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't noticed that re-direct. Thanks and fixed.

All of the SVG magic is D3.js and simply modified from this sweet example by Mike Bostock: <http://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111018/azimuthal.html>

Edit: Oddly, I'm noticing that the title of Mike's page is "Afghanistan", which is the one country in the GEOJSON I'm using that doesn't render properly... (it shows empty like a 2nd Caspian Sea)

<comment><USER8> I was just looking at Mike Bostock's example, and there are also some rendering problems for Afghanistan there.

Maybe it has something to do with Afghanistan being the first country in an alphabetical list? I'd try putting another country in the first position in the data table and see if the rendering problem switches locations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks great, well done.

One nitpick I have is that earthquakes are no longer measured on the Richter scale, but rather the Momentum magnitude scale. See [http://www.usgs.gov/faq/index.php?sid=54684&lang=en&...](http://www.usgs.gov/faq/index.php?sid=54684&lang=en&action=artikel&cat=118&id=1750&artlang=en)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. Updated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first time I tried it, nothing happened. I clicked on the globe because I thought maybe you had to drag it, and couldn't un-drag so it kept jiggling around without doing anything. No red dots came up.

I glanced at the comments to see if anyone said "It's broken" and nobody did, so I went back and tried hitting the play button but nothing happened, same result.

Then I read the first comment on here and went back one more time and it worked; however, this time when it spins and I click on a red dot nothing happens and I get ' error parsing d="" ' in the console, with the line being /quakes/:1, which is just the <html> tag.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, sorry you're having trouble with it. The 'error parsing d=""' is an issue with the SVG parser within your browser, and shouldn't prevent it from rendering properly. I believe upgrading to the next version of d3.js will likely fix this.

It's possible that it's not properly loading the data for you, either due to latency or some browser restrictions. What are you running?

I'd like to debug if possible. I believe D3.js only fully works in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox (+ maybe Opera?).

<comment><USER10> I'm actually building a website in D3JS myself ( <http://uscfstats.com/matches> ) and the SVG and D3 work fine there, and I am using the latest version of Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well done!

I actually had the same idea, but changed it slightly when it came time for execution because I wanting to use geolocation api's. Never really ended up finishing it though, turns out theres not much quake activity on the east coast and I lost intrest. :(

<http://quakes.arrly.co>

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice. Only suggestion would be intertial rotation. I keep flinging it thinking it will keep spinning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, yeah that would be fun. Though it might get a bit out of control!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> nice, but what's the arc for down the right hand side of the globe?

<comment><AUTHOR> Aesthetics?

<comment><USER3> ah, well, i guess that's valid. i was thinking it must be something to do with sunrise or time or something... (you can tell how appreciative i am of aesthetics, in that i prefered the previous usgs site to the recent update)

[edit, since i can't reply directly, and probably shouldn't string out a long thread anyway: i do agree with your choice, it looks good as it is. i just assumed it meant something. not sure how you avoid that.]

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I go back and forth on it. It just looks visually unbalanced without some kind of weight in the globe IMO.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I learned to charge my customers - <AUTHOR> https://idiallo.com/blog/how-much-do-you-charge-for-your-work <comment><USER2> I do some consulting on the side and I won't charge by the hour if I can avoid it because:

1) I hate keeping track of time.

2) hourly rates aren't how my customers think of the issue. They think: "this product will make (or save) me $20,000/year" (making up numbers here). If I tell them that I can do the job for $5,000, that sounds like a great deal to them. But if I tell them I can do it for $200/hour, and I estimate it will take me 20/hours, then I just look like an expensive consultant. Notice that in the first scenario, I made more money and still _seem_ cheaper.

<comment><USER3> Genuinely curious, how do you mitigate scope creep when you charge by product? What stops the client from pushing back when there's a bug in the future or feature request they think should have been included?

<comment><USER4> In the past, I have always only charged for the entire project all at once instead of by the hour.

Main trick to mitigating feature crap I have used is by first I add extra padding to cost.

Second i tell my clients that I provide free maintenance for 2 weeks after the project si delivered. Mostly this helps because clients want speed over reliability. So we push and the next two weeks is bug fixing - sometimes it's three.

However no matter what happens I would never build a new feature in the maintenance period

<comment><USER5> How many weeks are these projects, including the 2 free weeks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I spent 10 years freelancing. If i can give an humble advice: you don't cost your customer some money, you produce some extra value for him. Charge between 10% and 30% of the extra value you provide to your customer. Charging per hour is a trap. It is nice to start, it is easy to read, easy to calculate but it makes you a commodity. Don't be a commodity, be an expert.

<comment><USER7> Finding out about that extra value is trickier than it sounds, unless the accountant is willing to share the classified info with you.

<comment> edouard-harris There's certainly a knack to it, but it has nothing to do with accountants or classified information. If one has experience in this sort of thing, it's generally possible to ballpark likely value-adds based on a single 30-minute conversation. Experienced consultants in this tier often offer a free initial call with prospective clients partly for this reason.

<comment><USER8> You also don't need to match the profit entirely.

You just need to match it so it's worth more than what anything else would be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hey everyone, author here.

My experience is that customers will always want more features than they initially ask for. That's why I make sure to tell them my hourly rate, then give them an estimate. For example, I can say $5000 for a 1 month project. Here I'll break down the average time I will work a week as a courtesy.

This helps me justify charging them again when we are at month 3 and the project is not done. I learned this the hard way, charging a flat fee and continue to work long after I had spent all my earnings.

<comment><USER10> Not really on-topic, but I have to say that I really enjoy the audio narration :)

It's well recorded and the music is not too loud either.

<comment><USER11> I couldn't manage to make the player work on iOS. Sad day after seeing your comment.

<comment><USER9> Thank you for letting me know, and here I thought testing on chrome and firefox on Windows was enough. I'll update it as soon as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting that the author doesn't address outcome-based pricing. The rule of thumb I use is 10% of total value - if it's less than I want to make, I decline. It doesn't make sense for them to pay me, so it doesn't make sense for me to work.

"Urgency" strikes me so much less compelling of a pricing conversation, but I guess it works.

<comment><USER13> So if you help someone build a $3M empire the fee would leave them with $2.7M ? Not bad. Seems to be a more astute way to charge for services rendered because the client will actually have revenue to pay you, and the cost/benefit is fairly clear from the get-go. Do you typically both [client and creator] agree on how much value the work will bring in, and is it based on time? (This much in the first year, etc)

<comment><USER12> The former - I mostly work with large non-tech corporates, so you need to have a business case to get anything of significance approved anyway. I typically start off at 10% of "the big number on the slide."

If I'm independent, I always work fixed fee & payment schedule. When I've had a big company at my back, I've also worked at X% of realized revenue, capped at $Y.

Now, the important thing this implies is ownership of the outcome. I'm not building "a website;" I'm building "an e-commerce product" (or whatever) with all the expectations that come with it.

Back to the article... looking at the rates again, I think this is the author's next step in pricing. They're obviously very good. To make it as an independent developer, you need to have a clear understanding of value anyway - so why not just estimate the outcome ahead of time and benchmark against it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Those rates seem low. 20 years ago consultancies were charging $150/hr + materials. Their employees might see $30-50 depending on how much unallocated time they had. For a solo, the average including down time (sales) could reach $80-100, charging that same $150 to the clients.

Have rates fallen so far?

<comment><USER15> Some anecdotal stats from my experience being a consultant with both megacorps and smaller gov contractor. The hourly rate is about $200 an hour on average. This is for a senior, highly specialized, engineer type role. Megacorp paid me about $60 per hour where the smaller firms paid me closer to $80. Both as an employee with benefits. When I first joined a startup we would go as low as $120 per hour and pay $30 an hour too a junior/mid level consultant.

I'm sure someone super specialized and in a hot market could get up to $300 an hour if they are delivering value.

<comment><USER16> having been employed by agencies directly, and having worked as a freelancer working with agencies as well as other businesses directly, these rates are right in line with my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am working with a small company and this is an ongoing debate regarding how to best bill our customers for the work we do. Our product is an extremely long-term, high-value proposition. It effectively replaces & automates large swathes of our customers' legacy business processes.

For our customers, an hourly rate is a non-starter, despite the appealing nature of using a rate-based billing approach to head off scope creep and change requests. They need something more concrete with comprehensive up-front terms. We are starting to look at a model where the features are on individual contracts based upon their specific complexity:

"<Some Business Feature> will cost you $X to implement, another $Y/year to support and will take ~W months to reach acceptance testing phase. Minimum contract term is Z years."

This gives each customer an opportunity to prioritize specific sub-components of the product that are most important to them so that we are not implementing things without net positive business value.

We also figured out that we need to push acceptance testing and delivery timing back onto the customer so that they understand that longer timetables are a direct consequence of scope creep, change requests or their non- participation in the process. Since this is kind of a marriage between the organizations, we have built a "core" product that is a lower-stakes implementation and covers a few basic business processes. This allows for a less intense trial phase of the product where the customer can see how the overall process works for them. If they decide it's what they are looking for (i.e. they can see the business value), then we talk about tacking on the additional discrete feature modules and signing longer-term contracts.

I think our most important realization is that not all customers are compatible with our product, how much it costs, or the way we go about implementing it. The core piece of this equation is the customer being able to see through all the noise to the business value. If we cannot make the value clear to them, then we are not in any position to be talking about pricing or which features should be implemented in what order.

</comment><comment><USER18> Ahh yes I've charged $100/hr and I have gotten almost no work despite being both an engineer and programmer.

I can make half that with employment.

If I have a sales team, maybe we can split the $100/hr labor once I find a company willing.

<comment><USER19> Your $50/hr with employment is more like $75/hr with overhead accounted for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I was doing consulting for small websites, data work and programming through craigslist, much like the original article. I charged $35/h with a minimum one hour charge. This was 6 or 7 years ago and at the time, I wasn't really thinking about making it full time work.

I did a lot of research before hand on average rates for the type of work I was doing and my experience level, checked out other ads things like that.

I chose my rate because it was higher than the spammy looking cheap ads but was on the lower end for consulting rates.

I got a decent amount of work. I had one customer specifically tell me he chose me after finding out my rate because I charged more than the people with the cheap ads that had done poor quality work.

I never had anyone quibble about the rates. Luckily, my customers were mostly business owners and stuff.

I got some tine tracking software that also helped keep work stuff seperate from hone stuff. If I clocked in, I was working, I kept a list of tasks. In the end though, nobody really asked to see or check, they just wanted the bill.

Don't be afraid to charge a rate you feel is reasonable for your work ans don't feel bad when you hand over that invoice.

</comment><comment><USER21> While this may be somewhat tongue in cheek, I often think of this post from Anil Dash:

"I talk to a lot of consultants, freelancers, and small businesses who do web work, and I used to be a freelancer myself, so sometimes I get asked for advice on how to price one's goods and services.

I think I came up with my best suggestion today, and it involves only two simple steps:

      Slap the client in face.

      Tell the client your hourly rate.

If the person looked more shocked, horrified, offended, hurt, saddened, or wounded by the slap in the face, then you are still pricing yourself too low.

Your mileage may vary, this is not to be construed as legal advice, eye-poking may be substituted for slapping in some states."

[https://anildash.com/2005/05/12/pay_by_the_hour/](https://anildash.com/2005/05/12/pay_by_the_hour/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Companies tend to internally budget using hourly rates and time cards, so I can't see how charging an hourly rate like most consultancies and professions, such as law, would not sit well with client companies. Also, charging a fixed price makes you very vulnerable to having to absorb additional costs if the project takes longer than anticipated. An hourly rate removes this risk as you amortise your costs into your hourly rate.

As an individual going up against an entire company you want to protect yourself as best you can, charging by the hour helps ensure that. Also make sure you get yourself liability insurance.

</comment><comment><USER23> If I were to write an article on this topic, it would be a similar story. I don't think this would have helped us answer the question when we were starting out though.

</comment><comment><USER24> That explains why all the recruiters on LinkedIn are trying to low-ball me so much. The actual rate they charge is double!

<comment><USER25> This makes me soooooooo mad. Instead of LAMP, I spelled out Linux/Apache... etc in my resume. One recruiter spent 10 minutes arguing with me that LAMP is not the same as Linux...

Why do they deserve 50% of the billing rate (they can't even bother spending 30 seconds to google and note down what these terms mean)? Is their service that valuable? Heck, compared to them even the freelance websites that take 20% (Fiverr etc) seem like saints.

Another recruiter changed my resume without my knowledge. I found out during the _interview_. All kinds of shady stuff going on with these people.

<comment><USER26> Every time I encounter a shady recruitment agency (or their practices) I'm reminded of this blog post [1], although this is an archived version rather than the original.

In the UK, everyone even close to tech-adjacent has similar stories.

[1]: [https://gist.github.com/CumpsD/696599d1bd4cd472a056586967293...](https://gist.github.com/CumpsD/696599d1bd4cd472a0565869672933da)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've done by the hour, fixed price, and with a friend of mine recently I just said pay me what you think its worth when you want. All of them have worked out pretty reasonable. Only time I haven't thought it was worth it if the job was too small.</comment>


Hackerbot: Yet another HN iOS client, this time with custom push notifications - <AUTHOR> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hackerbot-for-hacker-news/id1460215083 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, Rafael here. Hackerbot is a new iOS app that lets you setup custom notifications based on keywords or domains to stay connected with interests you care about. I also added the "Best of Hacker News" so you don't miss the most voted stories of the day and the week.

I'd love get some feedback and I'm happy to answer questions!

<comment><USER2> Shouldn't this be a "Show HN" post?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing it out. I'm gonna try to edit the title. Nevertheless, I hope you got a chance to try the app.</comment></comment></comment>


Maven WebLogic plugin deployments over SSL ports without hostname verification - <AUTHOR> https://www.igorkromin.net/index.php/2018/05/24/maven-weblogic-plugin-deployments-over-ssl-ports-without-hostname-verification/ <comment><USER2> What's the point of ab-using SSL, if you make it equivalent to HTTP? "It's SSL, magic security dust [mumble mumble we disable all the security measures but whatever]!"</comment>


Analyze Your Splatoon Play In Real-Time - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hasegaw/IkaLog <comment><AUTHOR> Wiki in English [https://github.com/hasegaw/IkaLog/wiki/en_Home](https://github.com/hasegaw/IkaLog/wiki/en_Home)

Related Project [https://stat.ink/](https://stat.ink/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is analyzing the video feed in real-time to scrape info and stats that display on screen. I always assumed someone would do this for splatoon, since nintendo is way behind in this sort of thing (they don't even have a way to specatate a match), but I thought it would be done by intercepting network traffic.

<comment><USER3> Hopefully the network traffic is encrypted?

<comment><USER4> Do networked games usually encrypt their traffic? Genuinely asking as someone unfamiliar with this sort of thing. Seems like a lot of extra CPU cycles and latency for not much gain. Are people worried about attackers analyzing their strats ;-)?

<comment><USER5> yes, for example World of Tanks always uses same key, replays are simply a dump of network traffic to a file = encrypted with same key. Here is a project decrypting replay files (so a network traffic stream) and interpreting data.

[https://github.com/evido/wotreplay- parser](https://github.com/evido/wotreplay-parser)

with a bit of work this could be modded to work live on network tap. You could even generate heatmap for current battle on second screen while you play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very impressive project. Some things are more simple recognition to scrape the numbers that show up on the screen for k/d, etc. but their engine also has k-nearest neighbors learning to recognize weapons & abilities.

</comment><comment><USER7> I doubt most of HN speaks Japanese. Is there an English description somewhere?

<comment><USER8> IkaLog (Squid-Log in Japanese) is a third-party program to support players of the Nintendo game, Splatoon.

IkaLog recognizes what's happening in the game through HDMI video capture devices, and outputs battle logs automatically. In addition, IkaLog can also save screenshots of the scoreboard, post messages to Twitter/Slack, and record your gameplay with OBS!

[https://github.com/hasegaw/IkaLog/wiki/en_WinIkaLog](https://github.com/hasegaw/IkaLog/wiki/en_WinIkaLog)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool. I don't have time to check it all out at the moment, but since it's possible to view your Wii U gamepad video on your computer, I thought it'd be cool to analyze the map in real-time and estimate ink percentages for both teams. (From what I saw, this doesn't seem to do that?)

</comment><comment><USER10> For anyone confused about what this does, English information here [1] tells us it interfaces with a video capture card to capture the HDMI output of a Wii U game console and analyze it in real time.

[1] [https://github.com/hasegaw/IkaLog/wiki/en_WinIkaLog](https://github.com/hasegaw/IkaLog/wiki/en_WinIkaLog)

</comment><comment><USER11> This seems somewhat relevant: Kartlytics: Applying Big Data Analytics to Mario Kart[1]

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6179318](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6179318)

</comment><comment><USER12> Could someone please describe what this repository accomplishes? I know the game but don't know what is the use-case for this tool.

</comment><comment><USER13> Heh, the title is literally "Squid Log".

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm quite confused as to what this does... my knowledge of Japanese is quite severely lacking, I'm afraid.</comment>


Haskell: Do Notation Considered Harmful (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://syntaxfree.wordpress.com/2006/12/12/do-notation-considered-harmful/

<comment><USER2> Well, I finally understand Monads, so that's nice.</comment>


HireFire - The Heroku Worker Manager - <AUTHOR> http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2011/managing-herokus-workers-with-hirefire/

<comment><USER2> As you are most certainly already aware you never start a article with "As you are most certainly already aware" because it is looking down on your reader.

<comment><USER3> Just as important: if I am already most certainly aware, why are you wasting my time by telling me?

The same goes for people who write "obviously". If it's obvious, why write it? If the person doesn't already know, then you sound pretentious or the person feels like they missed out on something. It's pretty much lose-lose.

On a more related note, I'll probably check this out sometime. The dashboard looks nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good pointers! Definitely will take that with me to my future posts! Also, thanks for the compliments! Hope it helps!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How fast do Heroku workers come up and start crunching? I'd consider porting my worker code to Ruby (right now it's in Clojure) if it meant I could bring it up in seconds.

And they're billed per minute or per second?

<comment><AUTHOR> Heroku Workers are pro-rated to the second, just like Dyno's. So the second you shut it down, the timer stops ticking.

The time it takes to boot a worker mostly depends on your ruby application. The heavier it is, the longer it takes to boot up. Heroku spawns them fast, I think instantly because they are spawned from a compiled slug which is generated each time you push your app to Heroku.

The HireFire checkup interval takes at most 60 seconds, and less if more resources are available on HireFire's servers.

<comment><USER4> And presumably if I ran the HireFire open source library I could check even more frequently..?

<comment><AUTHOR> The open source library checks immediately when job gets enqueued, but this is because it does a post-create API request to Heroku every time it does it. Problem is that doing an API on reqests is terribly slow, which is one of the reasons that led me to create a hosted service out of it.

See the HireFireApp homepage's text for more information, or check out it's knowledge base.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool. Though I don't see myself needing the hosted version for a while, I can see how it would be useful for people who need tight control over the scheduling of their job queue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. The open source solution is fine in some cases. Though because it does post-create api calls it tends to be slow. Something I had not thought about prior to developing it, ironically. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I might just have skipped something o heroku's docs, but is there any similsr service/app to allow spinning dynos automagically as needed (in traffic peaks)?

<comment><AUTHOR> If the demand is high enough I may incorporate such functionality in HireFire. There used to be another service but they have been down for I think a couple of months.

If you feel this is an important feature, please submit it to the forums. I'll definitely keep it in mind and see what the possibilities are for also handling Dyno's!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sweet! Any plans to provide this as an add-on in Heroku?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! I have actually considered doing so! I haven't taken an in- depth look at to how their add-on platform works but it's on my short-term to- do list.

Would be nice to get an even more "plug-and-play" feel. Though, thankfully setting it up manually isn't hard at all, but it is indeed a nice touch to create an add-on for it.

<comment><USER8> Why would Heroku let you be an add-on provider in order to under-cut their pricing model? Makes no sense.

<comment><USER9> You've made this remark twice now. The fact is that Heroku have always been open this sort of scaling (and there's a fork of delayed_job which does autoscaling of workers on Heroku and... it's _written_ by a Heroku employee. It's regularly mentioned on the mailing list too.

<https://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What happens when Heroku bans requests coming in from your IP address?

I actually think it would be reasonable and justifiable for them to do it too, given that you are preventing a revenue aspect of their business model.

Heroku's pricing has always seemed VERY fair and generous to me - it costs them money to provide the service even at the free tier but rather than charging by cost lineally they charge based on value. If you need to start using Workers then you probably are deriving a larger degree of value and so it makes sense for them to charge for that.

Their model seems fair to me, and is what gives them the ability to offer the free tier.

I'm all for disrupting big businesses, and yes, Heroku is now part of SalesForce. But their pricing is what I call "nice guy" pricing and as a community we should be supporting that, not undermining it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? I don't know if you've ever set up a VPS or dedicated server, but you should compare the cost of that to what Heroku charges for the same resources. You'll see a significant difference.

Let me put it this way. 1 Heroku Worker (roughly 80-100mb of ram) $36 a month. Now, what can you get for $36 a month? Go look at 6sync.com linode.com webbynode.com prgmr.com. You can easily fit 10 workers in any of them. With this I come to the conclusion you're paying 10 times more than with a quality VPS provider. Sure, you don't have to monitor these processes, and it scales up and down easily, but 10 times more expensive is reasonable? Please. :)

Let me tell you what I find reasonable: If you're charging me 10 times more for the same thing, I find it reasonable I shut down my resources when I don't need them so I only pay for what I actually use. Why else would you offer the ability to set the worker quantity via their API?

Or how about this: You park your car, you pay for a parking ticket that lasts until the next month. Reasonable? I think not.

You should also consider the fact that this could also potentially encourage more people to actually host on Heroku, rather than be scared off by ridiculous pricing at early stages. I'm also not trying to "disrupt" their business. If this would greatly affect their business then I'll be damned, and I think I'm not the only one. So don't count on it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I love motorcycles..any ideas for something to build? - <AUTHOR>

I ride a sport bike. I love it.
I watch MotoGP.
I am a good web developer (HTML, JS, CSS, JQuery, MySQL, PHP mostly)
I know C++ very well.
My other hobby site is 6colors.net. I haven't added anything in a long time as I was redoing the UI and got bored.
I am looking for something interesting thing to code as a hobby related to motorcycles.
Any ideas? <comment><USER2> If you're into WebGL, you could create a motocycle 3d-showroom and allow people to customize their virtual machines.

</comment><comment><USER3> Learn how to do metal fab and turn your I4 into an I3 with an eccentric supercharger :)</comment>


Should the Fed go for Negative Interest Rates? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/business/economy/19view.html It May Be Time for the Fed to Go Negative <comment><USER2> Suggestions of negative interest rates are clever in the same sense that Swift suggesting eating Irish children is clever. Its GLARINGLY wrong, but you might learn something figuring out why. And there isn't just one reason why. There are plenty, so everybody can play.

Here's my reason: A negative interest rate is the fed giving away money. Now the fed rates are not available to everybody, so a negative interest rate is primarily the fed giving away money to banks.

Once you REALIZE it is a subisidy, then you realize the government is just giving money away to some people. You can then get over the stigma of the government giving money away to people since you are doing it anyway, and you can give up on the relatively ineffective plan of giving the money away inefficiently to rich people (banks and bankers), and proceed with a much more efficient giveaway.

The fed could just mail people money. Maybe $1000 each every man woman and child. The poorer amongst us would almost certainly quickly spend it. The richer amongst us wouldn't, but what the hey, when you are giving away money you can't expect perfect efficiency. The advantage here: people spending $1000 bucks they got free and clear is a lot less stupid than going into debt to spend $1000, when they already have too much debt, generally.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would call this a pretty brain dead article, esp. for a Harvard Economist. Pay people to borrow money? Maybe if the negative interest rate is low enough, I can retire on the mortgage on my house. The article has other equally stupid ideas like declaring currency ending in a selected digit worthless, e.g. bills ending in 9 are worthless.

Negative interest actually exists in periods of high inflation. We all know how much fun that is.

Makes me want to turn in my Harvard economics degree for a refund.

</comment><comment><USER4> No.

[http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/04/time- for-...](http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/04/time-for-mankiv- to-resign.html)</comment>


AI Will Shift Preferences to the Microstate – Killing Large Republics - <AUTHOR> http://adamashwal.com/microstate <comment><USER2> Recent experiments with democracy have created large efficient machines for reducing rent-seeking from political elite – free markets, an idea that's more of an aspiration than a reality, have proven to be potent for encouraging innovation

-We don't have democracy any more than we have free markets. Most of the world constitutions were really old or modeled off real old ideas.

-Also, I fail to see how rent seeking is reduced in a free market.

</comment><comment><USER2> The core assumptions I make are threefold: the cost of basic necessities (food + shelter), of land reclamation, and of protection (law enforcement and national defense) fall to 0 with AI and robotics.

\- I guess I don't buy any of those assumptions</comment>


Tesla wins in North Carolina, paves the way for direct-to-consumer sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/27/tesla-victory-north-carolina <comment><USER2> For those who are not aware, buying cars in the US is a terrible experience, and has stayed that way for many years.

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-435-why- buying-a-car-is-so-awful) [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/19/172402376/why- buyi...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/19/172402376/why-buying-a-car- never-changes)

<comment><USER3> As someone who just purchased a car at a dealer: it really is.

I'm majorly hoping that Tesla paves the way to change that. Once prices come down to the ~$30k range and a larger percentage of consumers have the option of buying through Tesla, I think we'll be seeing a dramatic paradigm shift away from the horrible dealer experience.

Although there's still a long way to go, I'm excited for Tesla.

<comment><USER4> The last car I bought was a surprisingly pleasant experience. But I was deciding between two cars at different dealers. And I bought the one from the dealer that was the best experience. I probably would have been happy with either car, but the buying experience doesn't have to suck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Imagine if we had to buy software like cars.

"Come visit to Weber Software Emporium. Here you can discuss and look to buy Microsoft 8 for the low low price of $999* (plus shipping fees, dealer installation fee, boxing fee, and a rustproof fee for a total of $1,299)."

 _shudders_

<comment><USER6> Its moving in that direction... Msoft, Apple and Polaroid are all going the way of brick and mortar.

<comment><USER7> Polaroid?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a white house petition to allow tesla to sell directly to consumers in all 50 states. Please sign.

[https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/allow-tesla- motors...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/allow-tesla-motors-sell- directly-consumers-all-50-states/bFN7NHQR)

<comment><USER9> I'm a big Tesla fan, but is it really the job of the white house to tell states how to regulate commerce? I could be wrong but it doesn't seem like this is an interstate commerce issue if Tesla is trying to actually open shops in each state.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause#Role_of_the_po...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause#Role_of_the_political_process)

<comment><USER10> If we assume that growing wheat on your own land for the purpose of eating it is interstate commerce, I would have no problem believing that a multi-state company selling cars in each state is interstate commerce.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn)

<comment><USER11> I suppose due to precedent that decision can't be overturned since it was over 60 years ago. But it still blows my mind that the Court ruled that explicitly not engaging in interstate commerce, or commerce of any kind, is in itself, interstate commerce.

<comment><USER12> The Court, like many other parts of the government, has systematically increased its power and influence over the years.

No matter what your opinion is on the recent gay marriage rulings, you should read the dissenting opinions that warn of the new power the court has ruled for itself through the decisions.

<comment><USER13> Scalia's dissent is wonderfully written and very much worth reading (whether or not you agree with him, as you say). I cannot offer the same praise for the other two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Occasionally, it seems, Americans remember what markets are supposed to look like. Bravo!

</comment><comment><USER15> I think its ridiculous that they need to be fighting for their right to sell direct. Car dealer mafia, i mean lobby, is in full effect here.

</comment><comment><USER16> So, judging by the text of the article, the cost of the government's backing is a test drive in a shiny car.

Please tell me there's more to the story than that.

<comment><USER17> The story certainly implies that, but it's also quite likely that it was the opportunity for Tesla to argue their case face to face with the legislators that caused the change.

<comment><USER18> I'm sure it was a combination of both. Having that same chat in a local diner instead of in one of the cars would surely not be as effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I dream of a world where kids idolize Elon Musk like they do pop stars and movie stars. Most influential person of our time. And so my man crush continues.

<comment><USER20> He is the real-life incarnation of Tony Stark.

<comment><USER21> Jon Favreau is friends with Elon, and actually based the current incarnation of Tony Stark after Elon (note the Roadster in Tony's garage in the first Iron Man, along with Elon's cameo appearance about an electric aircraft in Iron Man 2).

[http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/tesla- ceo-...](http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/tesla-ceo-elon- musk-inspired-tony-stark-of-iron-man-fame)

Hell, I'm 30 and Elon is my hero. No bullshit, all execution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great to see Tesla changing the industry.

It's disappointing to see New York (whom I view as a progressively similar to California) attempting to block Tesla though[0].

[0] [http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/21/autos/tesla-new- york/index.h...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/21/autos/tesla-new- york/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> Think about all the potential car dealers you just put out of business...

<comment><USER24> Please donate to support your local car dealer... C'mon people, don't be so mean !

<comment><USER25> I'd support my local car dealer... Unless they were trying their best to put a green car company out of business over greed. Luckily my locals are not :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Steve Blank: Strangling Innovation: Tesla versus "Rent Seekers" [http://steveblank.com/2013/06/24/tesla-versus-rent- seekers/](http://steveblank.com/2013/06/24/tesla-versus-rent-seekers/)</comment>


HN, would love your feedback on my idea - <AUTHOR> http://domainvitals.com/

<comment><USER2> What friends and random people on the web (even on HN) think about your idea is irrelevant.

You need to speak to prospective customers and get reliable answers to these questions:

1\. Are you solving a problem they have?

2\. What substitutes do they resort to right now?

3\. How much are they willing to pay for this service?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I agree with you, and we thought HN might be one of the best places to get some feedback, since this is where a lot of tech entrepreneurs hang out. I'm hoping the audience here can spread it to anyone they feel the idea may be relevant to.

<comment><USER2> Small business owners are your most likely customers. I'd suggest also asking for feedback on small business forums like:

<http://www.smallbusinessforums.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow - 28,000 registered users!!! Definitely going to ask around in these forums.

<comment><USER3> most of them are likely spam bots. last activity on those forums was like 3 months ago.... it's dead

<comment><USER4> august 2006 was 3 months ago?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> the part where you categorize income & expenses automatically is pretty hard. so there will be a lot of manual labor involved and lot of clarifying with clients if you want to do it properly.

you said it yourself on your website, bookkeeping _is_ expensive and time- consuming... your idea is like waterbed. you off-load your clients only to have this problem on your own plate now. it just won't become magically cheap and fast just because you do it.

and if you execute this idea, it will be nothing more than an outsourced bookkeeping service. there are thousands of bookkeeping firms already doing this.

<comment><USER5> Disagree. It'll be an outsourced bookkeeping service _on the web_.

That fact alone lets you offer heaps of goodies and efficiencies that your bookkeeper around the corner can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Your idea is great. So great even, that there is already a precedence for this sort of thing.

Mint.com, indinero, less accounting, all of them use backend bank services like Yodlee to sync with bank accounts and statements, auto-categorize expenses, and generate visual reports and integrated tracking tools to make accounting and bookkeeping simple.

The question isn't "is my idea good?" it really is "do I have enough of a unique angle to compete with others in that space?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely - I'm familiar with the companies out there. However, those companies typically only focus on a few banks to do an automated reports. Also, from bank statements and credit card statements you can't get granular information like amount paid for multiple items from one store or even the tax you paid.

Our solution would take your receipts and invoice, extract that granular data and feed it back into a system for the business owners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would pay $1000/yr for this service if you could do one key thing: figure out, based on the receipts, which ones are tax deductible (e.g. food) and which could be tax deductible if I did something extra (e.g. NY ST 121.3, sales tax exemption for computer hardware). None of the existing solutions take the tax issue to the next step.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly.... This is the key pain point we are trying to solve! Glad to see you think it would be useful :)

<comment><USER8> Not to rain on your parade. Shoeboxed* does this type of thing already. I am currently using their limited trial. <http://www.shoeboxed.com/receipts-for- taxes/> I'm not sure how you would differentiate yourself. You might have in mind other ways to tackle this problem.

You have an excellent idea and the space ripe for disruption because I for one dislike receipt management for expenditures. It is a necessary evil.

*I'm in no associated with any of the above.

<comment><USER7> The key thing which all of the existing solutions miss is proactive recommendations based on your company.

I mentioned ST 121.3 as an awesome example because most NYC startup founders aren't aware of the rule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You are looking for <http://Shoeboxed.com> plus any of its various integrations.

The Shoeboxed part is hard. The reporting is less hard insomuch as it is a UX challenge, not an operational challenge.

</comment><comment><USER10> You mean like this: <http://www.invoice2go.com/>? Yeah, go for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks for the link.

<comment><USER11> Isn't it slightly concerning that you are finding out about your competitors through this feedback thread.

I recommend you find out about all your competitors, try their services and see what they are doing "wrong". If you can improve on these or come up with innovative features that make live easier for small business than its a good idea. Otherwise your just another book keeping firm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think a "What do you think of my idea" site generator would cover a real need

<comment><USER13> Google Moderator can be used for getting idea feedback, though it won't generate good looking pages.

<http://www.google.com/moderator/></comment></comment>


Army researchers develop cancer vaccine that could cut recurrence rates - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/01/08/010812-news-cancer-vaccine/

<comment><USER2> Here's the relevant data (bottom paragraph). Note that the results are not "stat sig". [http://investors.galenabiopharma.com/releasedetail.cfm?Relea...](http://investors.galenabiopharma.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=620971)

I'm surprised this story is being upvoted here. The original article seems like a puff piece and cancer vaccines have quite a checkered history. Also, Galena's press releases related to the vaccine seem a little scammy (e.g., "Galena Biopharma Announces Investigational New Drug Approval for Phase 2 Trial for NeuVax(TM) (E75 + GM-CSF) Combined With Herceptin(R) (trastuzumab)"... The title is trying to play off of the phrase "new drug approval" when in reality, they simply received approval to run the trial.

A total of 187 patients were enrolled in the combined trials (vaccine=108, control=79). Patients enrolled in the trial were node positive or high-risk node negative breast cancer patients with any level of HER2 expression (IHC 1+, 2+, or 3+), and rendered disease-free after standard adjuvant therapies. With 60 months median follow-up, the vaccine group experienced a 10.6% recurrence rate compared to 20.3% in the control group (48% risk reduction, p=0.098). Recurrence rates for vaccine and control patients with different disease features (nodal status, HER2 expression, tumor grade, and hormone receptor status) were also analyzed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gerd Gigerenzer would suggest that this article contains too many percentages for regular people to make sense of.

> _For women in a control group given no treatment, the rate of cancer > recurrence was 20 percent,_

> _Peoples said. Among patients given the new drug, he said, "we cut that rate > in half."_

This is clearer than many papers would have reported, but people still risk making a mistake here.

> _while Herceptin only works for about 20 percent of patients, E-75 worked > for 60 percent._

People will get confused here. 20% of what? 60% of what?

It's much better to use real numbers.

> In a group of 10,000 women who've had breast cancer but who are not given > further treatment approximately 2,000 will go on to get cancer again. In a > group of 10,000 women who've had breast cancer but who are given E-75 > approximately 1,000 will go on to get cancer again.

<comment><USER4> Furthermore, I absolutely despise how most press/bloggers routinely neglect to add citation data to articles. Without citation, this article means nothing. They could be making up the results for all I know. Where is their primary source? Nothing makes my blood boil quite like seeing unsupported scientific articles.

This version of the article is more informative, but still lacking citations: <http://content.govdelivery.com/bulletins/gd/USDOD-24ab59>

Ahh, so we learn that this vaccine will called NeuVax and is being pursued as a partnership between the military and Galena Biopharmaceuticals. Digging around, we turn up this letter from 2008: [http://journals.lww.com/oncology- times/Fulltext/2008/06250/B...](http://journals.lww.com/oncology- times/Fulltext/2008/06250/Breast_Cancer__HER_2_neu_Peptide_Vaccine_Shown_to.20.aspx)

That article has some inline citations, but it was written while the primary literature was still ePub'ed ahead of print.

So lets go to the clinical trial page for the new 2011 study: <http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/study/NCT01479244>

This gives us enough information to find the previous phase I trials:

<http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00841399>

<http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00854789>

Which lists major publications that came from the trials at the bottom. Skimming through those, we can find this paper:

"Combined clinical trial results of a HER2/neu (E75) vaccine for the prevention of recurrence in high-risk breast cancer patients: U.S. Military Cancer Institute Clinical Trials Group Study I-01 and I-02."

Got it! There are other publications there, but this is the major summarization of the phase I trials and a good overview. (EDIT: From busyant's comment, it looks like the Phase II data is unpublished: [http://investors.galenabiopharma.com/releasedetail.cfm?Relea...](http://investors.galenabiopharma.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=620971)). This took maybe 15 minutes for me to find, and would have been easier if the journalist had just asked the guy he was interviewing what paper to cite.

Basically, I'm saying this article sucked and most scientific journalists suck even more. Quit being so damn sloppy and do your job.

<comment><USER5> This is why I read HN, the comments contain better journalism than the articles posted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cancer isn't X, it's A-Z.

<comment><USER7> ...and so one of (the many) goal(s) of cancer research is to find out if all of those letters come from the same alphabet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope the US military makes this drug available free of charge in Fallujah [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic- le...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic-legacy-of-us- assault-on-fallujah-worse-than-hiroshima-2034065.html)</comment>


Why are web apps so badly designed from a user-friendliness perspective? - <AUTHOR> an example is plotly...impossible to make it work<p>Do developers actually have beta testers who aren't also developers, such as random people, or do they just assume that their users will somehow figure it out . it's like the people who design this stuff don't actually test it on random people. having your fellow developers do your beta testing is not a good beta <comment><USER2> Complex web interfaces aren't easy, you gotta do a lot of magic to make a browser be like a desktop app. I think most struggle in getting their concept to work in the first place, and when they get to ease of use it's a lot more work they may not want to invest time in.

Given web limitations you cant just do the same UI as a desktop you have to be mindful of web browser input idiosyncrasies, screen size limitations, etc.

I've written intranet database stuff, which can be a bit a tad rough and user intensive - but when you are doing more public facing things you have to concentrate on simplification, sanity checks, added security and cross- platform issues. That stuff doesn't always come easy.

Until you get a handle on how you are going to pull-off doing X on the web you can't think too much on how to make it work easier. I think you would see better UX when you have seasoned web developers doing the apps, as they understand the environment and can now also concentrate on UX.

<comment><USER3> Might as well follow up with "why are desktop apps so badly designed...?" Web technologies are certainly their own specialization, but UI/UX is bad for a most user-facing software, regardless of the technology used to present it.

Web technologies don't make UI/UX harder (in a lot of ways, they make it easier!). There's just a lot of them, and they've become dominant for the vast majority of things the vast majority of users experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because we design around database tables and not workflows.

Quite often our underlying architecture simple mirrors the database structure with pattern like the Repository pattern and Active Record. Then it flows to the user. Instead of the user creating x as part of their workflow, they have to first create x on the "add x" page then go back to what they were doing.

Of course this only applies to some software, you couldn't make a word processor that encapsulate the user workflow, but for many apps, especially LOB apps, you can.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not a web app, but another interface: Hulu on Roku. When watching a movie you get an overlay suggesting "Watch this next" that cannot be removed by hitting the back arrow or any other means, doing so leaves the movie. This means you can't watch any scenes in the credits without having 1/4 of the screen obscured.

Why did this survive into production? It's clearly user hostile, especially with the way a lot of movies (comedies and action movies in particular) include extra snippets. It survived because it drove people to click on the next movie. Which is what Hulu wants, they _want_ people to keep watching (it bolsters their viewership numbers which is what lets them charge $$ for advertisers).

A lot of web UIs have the same issue. The things they measure are clicks and page views. They don't care how good/bad the page is if it gets them views and clicks that they can sell. It's like anything else where what's measurable becomes the goal itself, even when creates a system that's hostile/counter to the original intent.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am not an UX expert, but idea of beta testers who aren't also developers is a solid idea. Even big companies fail on this. Recently I have written about it

[https://hackernoon.com/users-are-not-programmers-amazon- expe...](https://hackernoon.com/users-are-not-programmers-amazon-expects-pipe- character-for-user-input-d56c6d178515#.akg8hsnea)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think that things are easy and intuitive for the designers, not so much for the user that tries the app for the first time. Devs don't see the problem. Moreover serious qualitative research is expensive and difficult to do. Finally it is hard to actually apply changes proposed after doing the UX research because it may require a lot of coding which costs both lots of time and money.

In short: the business wants to deliver fast and the users will use it anyway.

</comment><comment><USER8> maybe its cause they get shitty useless feedback like the above "impossible to make it work" is not constructive. It's an utter waste of time. To read and to write. Man up and put some fact in your bitching.

</comment><comment><USER9> HCI is more of art than science. That's why UX/UI engineers have their own title, not just "web developer".</comment>