Ask HN: How to price a website I'm building for a friend's company - <AUTHOR> Howdy, and thank you for clicking!
I have a buddy that works for a commercial real estate firm. A main piece of his job deals with filling out this long input form into excel. They noticed problems with this model and want me to build a website that will handle all of this form input.
I am curious as to how to price this work bc:
A. The scope of work is fairly minimal (~30-40 hr), but the business's efficiently impact is seemingly large
B. His boss is willing to have all of his employees use the service
C. My buddy is prepared to pay me for my time
D. I know of they used an agency, then the price would easily be in the tens of thousands of dollars
E. I am used to a salary job and have never done a straight freelance gig
I am wondering how I should prove this type of work bc obviously there would be ongoing support and idk if I could make this a business bc of the limited niche that this problem solves.
Any advice on how to handle this would be greatly appreciated <comment><USER2> Determine the demand for your product and price your solution right below the point where people will think you're charging too much, such that they would continue to use the old way of doing things.

The finding of that price is hard. So try to find it pragmatically. Ask questions like how much do you pay your employees to do this task? How many employees do this task, what is their hourly cost? How much time will the new software/website save those employees? How will revenue or profits be increased?

Your price should be what the market is willing to pay, not what you think your software is worth or how long it will take you to build the solution. If you're going to price the solution as a service with recurring revenue, make sure you can continually justify your value to your customers on an ongoing basis. If you want to build this solution as a one time custom project, price it accordingly to the value delivered, the cost of your time, your opportunity costs, and establish a rate for ongoing care and feeding of the code base before agreeing to build the solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> First off, read tptacek's excellent answer over and over until you can recite it from memory. I have been doing freelance consulting for years and I know I'm going to steal a number of his ideas.

Second, here are some additional thoughts, based on my experience doing similarly-sized gigs for similar clients.

1) To start with, just to encourage you, this is a very doable project that can be very lucrative to you (>$10k), helpful to the client, and can open the door to a lot of fun side gigs. This is the best part of consulting.

2) When looking at your first side job, the temptation will be to come up with a price based on your day job's equivalent hourly rate. _Do not do this._ This is easily $100+/hr work. For a real estate firm, your app may be generating millions in revenue/cost savings over a few years, and although it's a simple little project to you, building a webapp is deep magick to a business user. Try to pitch and charge based on _value_.

You should know your costs/equivalent hourly rate, but only as a bare minimum so you are never working at a loss.

3) Based on the fact that this project is mostly rebuilding an existing Excel spreadsheet (Pro Tip: you can get a lot of business from simply "rebuilding Excel worksheets!"), it seems like you could spec it out enough where you could offer a fixed price. You can use tptacek's approach of quoting X days at $YYYY per day, or a total fixed price.

You always have the option of going hourly though. Some clients will prefer this, but it can limit your total compensation. You can charge $X0,000 - $X00,000 for a given app (remember: deep magick) but you can't charge $X000 per hour. Do quote high though. My favorite advice is "pick the most ridiculous semi-realistic number you can think of, then double it." You can always offer a discount for Friends & Family, New Customer, Summer Sale, whatever.

4) Be vague about delivery times if you cannot take 1-2 weeks off work to complete the project. But plan to have regular deliverables/signs of life to keep them on board. Think about mockups/wireframes you can deliver.

5) Ask for at least some of the payment up-front. This will ensure they are serious, and motivate you to deliver once you receive money. :)

Home these ramblings are helpful. Welcome to the world of Real Consulting!

<comment><USER4> > the temptation will be to come up with a price based on your day job's > equivalent hourly rate. Do not do this.

To expand, remember that regular employment comes with way more 'compensation' than just the salary that a freelacing gig doesn't come with. As a regular employee, you get paid regularly, on time, based on hours, you get paid holidays, taxes paid, etc. A freelancer/contractor has much less certaintly and much more risk. Hence freelancers should be paid more per hour/day/week than a regular employee.

> Think about mockups/wireframes you can deliver.

Hint: Don't make the mockup look done. Use a mockup style that looks like drawing on a napkin (or even draw it on paper and send a photo of that paper). Non-techies think the amount of work depends on the amount of UI changes. If they see a pixel perfect photoshop image of a done web page, they could think that all the work is done.

<comment><USER5> Second the mockup point. Even mid-fidelity mockups have caused me all kinds of headaches. Perhaps that uncanny valley effect, but no one ever asks you to move buttons 5px to the left, or change the title bar colour from dark blue to a slightly darker blue with a paper sketch!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The bill rate for serious end-to-end web application development in a modern language, where the customer provides a loose spec and the outcome is "working, usable application" is somewhere in between 100-200/hr on the very conservative (low) end.

So, take your outside estimate of how much time the project is going to take (you think 40 hours; maybe make it 48), and pick a bill rate in the spectrum of 100-200/hr. Work that into a daily rate.

Provide proposal under the following terms:

* You offer to build the project on a time & materials basis, 6 days at a daily rate of ((100..200)x8).

* Prior to starting the engagement, you will complete a proposal with detailed acceptance criteria (app MUST do this, app MUST NOT do that, app MAY do this, &c). You'll interview your client (gratis, because you're a professional) to work out that acceptance criteria in advance.

* Should any of the requirements or acceptance criteria change once contracts have been signed, you'll accommodate by adding additional billable days to the project (subject to whatever scheduling constraints you may have at the time).

* Should they want to lock in additional billable days in anticipation of changing requirements out from under you, they can buy those billable days on a retainer (use-it-or-lose-it) basis at a small (~10%) discount to your daily rate. This (or some clause like it) allows them to pay you extra (ie, for days they buy but you don't work) to guarantee that if they change their mind about some goofy feature, you'll be available immediately to accommodate, and they don't have to wait 6 months.

* Your contract will specify a class of _critical_ bugs (security, things that potentially lose previously-stored data) and a class of _major_ bugs (things that make the system unusable). For a period of N months (maybe 12) after delivery, you'll commit to fixing _critical_ bugs within N days, for free if they take less than N hours to fix, and at your daily rate otherwise; repeat (but with more favorable terms for you) for _major_ bugs.

* For an annual fee of 20% of the price of the contract, you'll provide maintenance, which (a) continues the critical/major bug fix window past the N months specified above and (b) provides an annual bucket of K billable days with which you will fix non-major bugs; this is provided on a retainer (use-it-or-lose-it) basis.

The idea is simple: you want to:

(a) Give the client something that looks as close as possible to a fixed-price project cost.

(b) Not _actually_ commit to a fixed-price project cost more than you have to.

(c) Turn the downside of long-term bugfix support into an upside of recurring revenue.

This is just a sketch, you'd want to tune these terms. You'll also want to pay a lawyer ~$100-$200 to sanity check the contract. (Your contract will look like a boilerplate consulting contract, ending in a "Statement of Work" that is a series of "Exhibits" [contract-ese for appendix] that spells out most of the details I listed above). Pay special attention to the acceptance criteria.

Remember also that you're liable for self-employment tax, which is due _quarterly_ , not on April 15. You might also consider registering a Delaware LLC (~$100, online) and getting a tax ID, because liability gets sticky with software you deliver to make someone else's business work. You probably do not need to consult a lawyer about LLC formation; most of the trickiness of company formation is with partnership terms and equity, which isn't your problem.

<comment><USER7> Any reason for the Delaware LLC vs a (your resident state) LLC? I thought Delaware was really only requested for S and C corp structures accepting outside investment.

<comment><USER6> There are a bunch of little reasons that Delaware LLCs are easier to deal with; for instance, your home state may have a little dance you have to go through with running advertisements in the newspaper, or have weird rules about SMLLCs. Mostly, though, I just know that you can get a Delaware LLC and a TIN online in a couple days by filling out a couple forms.

<comment><USER8> Won't it be necessary to register your LLC as a foreign LLC in whatever state you are actually operating and be subjected to your states regulations anyway?

<comment><USER9> You certainly have to register as a foreign corporation in my state (NC), but state rules vary, so there may be less hoops to jump through for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just as curiosity, what tool will you use? Rails?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I will be using Rails!</comment></comment>


How to survive Corona if you are a startup for printable place cards at events - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.openstartuplist.com/cory-zue-corona-virus-place-card-me <comment><AUTHOR> I like Cory's attitude towards this situation, he kept lean, diversified and currently he is in a good state, even though his startup Place Card Me is mainly aimed at large gatherings. Curious to hear how others are handling Corona right now.</comment>


All I need is just 2 hours to get Creative & Innovative - <AUTHOR> http://nainomics.blogspot.com/2011/11/all-i-need-is-just-2-hours-to-get.html

<comment><USER2> though the term polymorphism is really used out of its meaning, but the article was quite. Same kind of thing happened with me when i was in the school</comment>


Fact-Check the Physics of Captain America Hammering Thanos - ga-vu https://www.wired.com/story/fact-check-the-physics-of-captain-america-hammering-thanos/ <comment><AUTHOR> The only thing I think is missing from this is area behind cap when he swings Mjolnir and knocks Thanos down. Also citing when Thor wacks Hulk with it in Avengers 1. It suffers from the same thing. I mean... when you think about it when Thor hit the car in Avengers 1, though it was a practical effect, probably should have been more theatrical based on this article.</comment>


Why do all websites look the same? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/on-the-visual-weariness-of-the-web-8af1c969ce73 <comment><USER2> Also:

1) Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard.

2) Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same.

3) Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides.

There are components that are common in all facets of our lives that when different can cause problems or surprise which could be good or bad. We need to join two floors of a building. Use stairs! People understand stairs. We need to showcase a collection of clickable images. Use a grid! People understand link grids.

If you want to make your website usable you have to lean on expectations and those are pretty well defined nowadays. Imagine walking into a room and turning on the lights using a switch in the middle of the floor or plugging in your laptop's power cord at the top/back of the screen.

Most companies spending money on a website want them to feel fresh and creative and engaging but they also have to temper that with usability and expectations. That's why all websites "look the same" or at least why the author thinks they do.

Just because certain elements are in the same spot(s) or behave similarly doesn't mean things are the same. Or, at least, to me they aren't.

<comment><USER3> I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever.

Some flash sites were horrible. But there were some real gems. That Hacker News design by Tyrion's brother is probably inspired by a bunch of old Flash sites that followed that template.

Flash was _so easy_ to work with. Draw some neat stuff with their tools, animate it in the same program with their timeline, then make it all navigable and smart, still in the same program. You test it, in that same program. Then you publish it, and it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever. One file. So easy for artists, designers, and non-technical people.

That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to make.

<comment><USER4> Out of 100 sites in flash, maybe 2 were the gems you describe. The remaining 98 were utter crap that should die in a fire.

The people who designed these gems would probably be able to design good sites no matter what tools they had at their disposal.

<comment><USER5> Except in that the people paying the designers would demand sites like the 98 horrible ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the redesigns in that article demonstrate why most websites look the same.

Let's do a test. Go to a bookshop and buy a novel. Now go to a different bookshop, and buy a different novel from a different writer and a different publisher. Read them. Chances are they're going to look very similar. Different cover maybe, but inside, mostly black letters in an unobtrusive font on a white page with sensible margins. No decorations or illustrations, nothing at weird angles or sizes. They all use the form that's efficient at transferring the content, the story, to your head.

Some web sites are about their design, but most are about the content they present, and they want to present that content in an efficient manner. A design that distracts from the content is not practical.

<comment><USER7> A website shouldn't be a book.

<comment><USER8> A website whose purpose is to convey textual information and to be readable should _resemble_ a book, or more likely, a magazine, because it has a similar function to the printed page.

<comment><USER9> "Convey textual information" is not the sole purpose of any website.

Websites have many purposes and functions, including of course interactive functions and connections with other elements both within the site and from other places.

Completely different to any book.

<comment><USER8> > "Convey textual information" is not the sole purpose of any website.

It doesn't have to be the sole purpose of any website for it to be the primary purpose of many.

For instance the purpose of this forum, along with many forums, is to convey primarily textual information in the form of comments arranged in a hierarchy.

The purpose of medium.com is to convey textual information in the form of blog posts.

The purpose of a site like Wired, newspaper sites and magazine sites, like their analog counterparts, is to convey textual information (albeit with a heavy graphical element) in the form of articles.

Websites expand upon the possibilities inherent to the medium of the printed page but HTML is a _hypertext_ format, and its purpose (and therefore the purpose of most webpages) is to convey information in the form of _hyper_ text. Interactivity and embedded elements don't detract from the textual nature of the web or its origin in concept or the relationship in the styles evolved with the printed page.

>Completely different to any book.

Different in structure, but not different in purpose, and therefore not completely divorced from the same design considerations.

Yes, we could design every website to look the way the redesigns in the article do, but would you really rather use the hacker news redesign presented in the article than this one? Would you rather use _any_ of those redesigns?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Websites are not art*

They are communication mediums. Either delivering communication effectively to the user, or to let the user communicate effectively with others, or do so bi- directionally.

Or they're tools to get work done - maybe even make other art.

In all cases _functionality_ is most important - which is not incompatible with aesthetics. Aesthetics and usability are vital too.

But it does constrain somewhat the variety of your medium. And that's okay.

As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the same as well.

* Except when they are, and when they are they should be appreciated as such and graded as such, and there are such websites, but they are by far the exception.

<comment><USER11> > As LitFan said - it's the same reason cars and smartphones tend to look the > same as well.

I agree, but for a different reason: they're all following the same design _fads_ and/or using the same frameworks, which make certain designs "easier" than others. The content of the fads or the defaults aren't necessarily the most effective or functional for the particular use-case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> They don't look the same; you can make an argument they look similar though.

"Fabian and Florian turned Hacker News into an interactive visualization. The social media site is a news aggregator, focusing on computer science and information technology. Its design is bare-bones but it has complex functionality for voting and discussions. Fabian and Florian have taken the existing structure and turned it into a typographic space of timelines and networks. The visual presentation is based on the sequence and connections of news and comments. They also connected their design to the API of Hacker News, so you can actually use it to read the site. View the redesign of Hacker News."

And the redesign is a usability nightmare. You cannot easily skip a topic you're not interested in, and you cannot even skip the comments easily which are emphasized. In normal HN, you can browse news.ycombinator.com and click on the links from there. You can open the original links and the HN discussions in tabs. Not in this redesign. Perhaps it is God's greatest gift on mobile (I tried it on desktop), I don't know. Examples of doing it different should be objectively _better_ ; this one doesn't appear to be such an example, so don't mention it [1]. Instead, go back to the drawing board.

[1] There's also a bug that clicking on No. and Pts. gets you to that user's hompeage. Which could be 1 or 76, but it has nothing to do with that userID.

<comment><USER13> I've tried it on mobile. (iPhone 8) The whole thing takes more than five seconds to load, and the UI is basically unusuable. Tried clicking at an article, comment text is almost impossible to read due to the broken layout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Turns out, 95% of the Internet is used for practical purposes, and certain best practices arise...a balance between the content and the ads.

The other 5% is a self-expressive art project.

Part of me wonders if the author is trolling everyone by writing an article about the need for more unique design on Medium.com.

<comment><USER15> reminds me of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145995)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> All websites looking "the same" is effectively evolution at work. Many website designs and layouts have been tried, and the "best" of them have stuck around.

This can be seen in any product (cars, smartphones, food - the list goes on).

From time to time there are designs that don't look like others, and those may or may not be met with approval. If they're liked, those designs (or aspects of them) get blended with the standard.

<comment><USER17> I don't think this is true. I think designs get copied from websites which are successful (in all ways, not just design), because people have positive feelings with those designs, and also because using them requires a learning effort. It doesn't mean, however, that the designs themselves are best.

<comment><USER18> For a casual user, a design that requires extra learning effort to use it is objectively worse than a familiar design.

So for a generic website which cares about first-time visitors (as opposed to a specialized tool that people use often) following established standards and familiar UX paradigms _is_ good usability design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I run a front-end agency that specializes in helping top-league branding agencies and designers code their websites.

Designers try to make sth fresh and out of the box all the time. The problem with these solutions are:

1\. UX sucks

2\. Don't scale to other resolutions (especially mobile / tablet).

3\. EXTREMELY expensive to code comparing to "boring" web solutions (multipliers might be as big as 5-10x)

So most of the work we do is to try to make designers think with patterns ("boring" but the only way to fit in budget) and try to get as much as they can from STATIC design. Play with typography, key visuals, content etc. This is where their work brings most value for reasonable money.

The author of the article is a professor, so wouldn't expect realistic business thinking from him. He might be sad because web is boring, but usually no one wants to spend huge amount of money for prototypes where there's 95% probability that UX and stability will be worse than standard.

And there's a HUGE value in familiarity for users. That's why most of "creative projects" end up looking pretty similar at the end. I've seen many e-commerce sites which had "fancy design" and after months/years ended up with standard e-comm layout.

Also, web today is super hard comparing to 10 years ago. Number of things to think about multiplied by A LOT. Coding great static website with all things stable and looking great is a big task already.

It's like asking for a car with steering wheel in the back or with 3 wheels and paying for it 5x more. Do you want one?

EDIT:

Not saying "creative projects" are bad or sth, they sometimes are super coool. But I treat them more like "web art installation". Nice if you like them but not really practical.

</comment><comment><USER20> None of the examples the author shared are usable. They're different just for the sake of being different. This sort of stuff only works for marketing campaigns that have a short shelf-life or maybe art museums.

I'm surprised a bunch of people who call themselves interaction designers put little thought into how people would actually interact with these "web-art" masterpieces.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why is there layout on the web at all?

In almost every case, I care about the content, not the particular web site designer's vision of the "experience". I don't want an experience, I want information. I would prefer the content be delivered to my browser with metadata describing what it is, e.g. "news article" or "comment" or "image of purchasable item", and choose my own experience- that is best for me.

Browsers seem like a silly vanity for me- 90% of the functionality is about allowing a remote party to control my experience. I'd rather control my own.

<comment><USER8> > Why is there layout on the web at all?

For the same reason text in a book is arranged in paragraphs, and why magazines separate articles into headers, body text, insets, etc, rather than having all printed media be simply unformatted text.

Having navigational elements and content groups on a site (a "layout") with a predictable visual style allows users to more easily differentiate between the different parts of a site, their different functions, and to navigate those sections more easily. Typographic elements like headers, paragraphs, font styling (bold, underline, etc.) make text easier to read and communicate concepts like hierarchy and emphasis. Flow is a necessary consideration when incorporating non-textual elements such as images into a document alongside text. Modern sites must also consider how they will appear on multiple screen sizes down to mobile.

>Browsers seem like a silly vanity for me- 90% of the functionality is about allowing a remote party to control my experience. I'd rather control my own.

A remote party isn't controlling your experience, they're sending you documents in a markup language, and your browser is interpreting that markup. If you want to download and view raw HTML then you can wget the pages and open them in the text editor of your choice (I think RMS does something like that to avoid executing nonfree code), but you should realize that most people don't want to view raw metadata and have to write their own stylesheet and schema for each site, they just want to read the document.

<comment><USER21> I want to decouple layout from content, and control layout myself locally. There is too much active content and too much commingling of style directives and content in most modern web sites. I want the markup to be higher level and focus on describing the content rather than specifying style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."

[https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law.html](https://lawsofux.com/jakobs-law.html)

<comment><USER6> By that logic, all websites should look like Facebook.

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure that's wrong. Look at the (temporary) outrage whenever Facebook does a redesign, even Facebook is allowed to not look like Facebook.

<comment><USER24> FWIW, from what i remember facebook's redesigns were never just a visual thing. they always added and pushed some functionality, made some things much harder to find, or quietly removed things entirely.

A similar thing happened when Last.fm did their huge redesign. The new website was all js now, and they quit all support on the forums, messaging, pretty much all the old ways of communication between users. And for me, that was awful, since i was a part of a music collective that communicated primarily on those forums. After that everybody dispersed.

So outrage at a redesign is not always unfounded or silly. Web companies tend to hide things in them.

<comment><USER25> > they always added and pushed some functionality

Most of the outrage I remember was around hiding and removing functionality: Chronological newsfeed, page customizations, network pages, etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looking at this and then the 4 examples they give, wow, I appreciate Bootstrap more (saying Bootstrap as it tends to be blamed for conformity of websites now).

The reason why Bootstrap is nice relative to what they give as examples is that while (usually) it looks pretty, the content is what you focus on and not the dissonance that the UI creates. In the case of the art ones, it makes sense as I imagine that was the intent, to flip the focus, so as an art exhibition, that's perfectly fine and good. But as a website, I wouldn't use it.

It reminds me of early days (around 1995. I remember buying No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom CD around this time and their band's URL wasn't a custom domain but something hosted by one of their labels, I believe. Different times). A lot of bands, with Nine Inch Nails being a bigger one, would go for these UI nightmare sites with, my guess, the intent that they're essentially a game of sorts seeking out hidden stuff. Those types of things turned me off (still liked the music though, just not the sites), but I know there are those who loved them so more power to them.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the concept of HN: [https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future- retro/HN/](https://interface.fh-potsdam.de/future-retro/HN/) if someone missed it

<comment><USER27> This is completely unusable -is it supposed to be a parody?

<comment><USER28> I see this more as an example of what can be done. It's a bit like concept cars - they aren't supposed to be driven so designers take the opporuntiy to push the limits of what can be done. Perhaps that website, once the usability is improved, could be the beginning of a good idea, or perhaps it should be dropped altogether but it doesn't hurt to try new things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Why do all websites look the same?" and it's a Medium post.

More seriously, I think the Internet has the reverse issue. Every website looks and is used differently. You don't have to figure out how to turn pages when reading a new book.

</comment><comment><USER30> They don't.

Trivial example: Hacker News looks nothing like Medium. All blogs on Medium look the same though.

The mainstream web looks the same because it's all gone through the same funnel.

The web is split. You have the oldschool developer part (mostly textmode with the odd showoff project), and the mainstream part (full of GDPR banners, advertisements, cookies, tracking stuff, 10MB page loads, etc).

<comment><USER31> The GDPR pop-ups are incredibly annoying. The particular website has no obligation to comply with it. Most websites don't need to even give it a thought. It seems to just be a knee jerk reaction yet it is irrelevant.

<comment><USER31> I normally don't complain about downvotes, because honestly who cares. But I am curious why I do get consistently downvoted for simply stating that the GDPR is not relevant for a significant portion of the internet. EU users might not like it. But it's true. Most websites do not need a banner. They can absolutely flaunt compliance without worries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Man, all of those models look like flash websites. That's the problem. The unconstrained mess of deconstructed html, the Skeuomorph movement and reconstruction of architecture in the browser, the relationship diagram... these are the same explorations of early flash and dhtml websites.

It's challenging to rebel against the dominant paradigm because everyone ends up with tattoos and blue hair and alternative becomes mainstream all over again.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd say these re-designs are inaccessible but people would get the wrong idea; inaccessible usually means not accessible to people who have handicaps of some variety, and that doesn't accurately capture the problems with these re- designed websites: They're not accessible to _anyone_ , _anywhere_ , _regardless_ of how able they are, unless they're the designer themself.

They not only blindly assume you have the latest web browser technology and are willing to use it, heedless of security concerns and basic propriety, on relatively minor sites, they assume you've crawled up inside the designer's head and therefore see the site the way the designer sees it.

Which brings me to why sites "All Look The Same" (kind of a stupid thing to say, but I'll not fight it): It's a design language, something where designers and users can agree which elements do what, what affordances they have, and, therefore, how to _use_ the site to get what they want from it.

 _None_ of the re-designs follow that.

 _None_ of the re-designs are respectful of anyone else.

These re-designs are a bad parody of design work, and make designers look bad by association.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was with the author, until I saw the HN redesign. Looked beautiful, but not functional. Made me realize why HN / reddit / quora / etc use the format they do: it works.

</comment><comment><USER35> > David Carson once said, "don't confuse communication with legibility." We > should apply this advice to the current state of web design.

Granted I didn't go to design school, but efficiency and the ability to be understood are pretty high on my list.

Take example 2, not only does it scroll jack for a square pattern, there are things that highlight but aren't clickable, there's a gif that's chewing up CPU cycles, and this seemingly functionless page requires 58 requests, 48MB and somehow 1.2 minutes to load according to chrome dev tools, compare to loading the HN homepage in 1.1 seconds.

I'm not an advocate for turning the internet into a server of pure text files, but when art and usability are head to head, usability must win every time or your users will go somewhere else.

<comment><USER36> Carson was saying that as a rejection of minimalism. It was an embrace of experimental graphic design. He was specifically saying that "efficiency and the ability to be understood" were not always the most important factors in a design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Please don't encourage these kind of interfaces to websites. A website is not a piece of art. It's a thing I interface with! Your fellow users and I, thank you.

<comment><USER38> At no point did the author argue that your local bank's website should resemble one of the examples. It is an article about unconventional designs on the web, of course he is going to show the most out-there examples from his students.

Personally I loved the cyberpunk feel of the Hacker News prototype, even though it's a usability nightmare. I like to view this stuff to engage my imagination and think about what's possible, not whether this design is ready to scale to millions of users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The attempt at redesigning the web ends in unreadable nonsense, so I think that answers the question of "why" with "readability"?

</comment><comment><USER40> > _Why do all websites look the same?_

This question puts two things in the spotlight:

1) the all too common software developer's ignorance for the art of design

2) the all too common designer's ignorance for the art of frontend software (which is usually data retrieval and entry, using common and learned UX functionality)

There often is a lack of humbleness regarding putting what I (designer) fancy behind what users need.

OTOH devs admire things like material design today or bootstrap in the old days as a way to "solve" design. Yet, those frameworks only touch half of what design is needed for (common UX patterns, don't come across as unprofessional) and fail at the other. I.e. there is no uniqueness, subliminal mood, branding, emotion or even recognizability in most pages/apps that use those frameworks.

The idea of letting A/B tests guide your design decisions gave us the many ugly things Google did in the past. And while they certainly improved on design, material design breathes the same spirit. The spirit of design as something "to solve".

Luckily with material design's CDK this spirit seems to be solved too :-)

</comment><comment><USER41> Why shouldn't they look the same? They are tools. Usually for communication, and you usually want your visitors to intuitively know how to navigate your content. By all means, feel free to break conventions if you have a purpose in doing so, but for most brochure sites or information-based sites, you have no reason for such things.

Quite the contrary, when I set up a site for someone, I tell them to make it match their brand, but not to get overly creative other aspects of the design. A creative design may be interesting, but is that the goal of the site? To convince the audience that you found an interesting designer? Or do you want to communicate something about your product/project?

Simple, effective designs have evolved over the last couple decades. Designers should experiment, as that is their purpose, and it is how we avoid stagnation. Everyone else should use what works.

</comment><comment><USER42> There's some irony to having this posted on Medium which is about the most generic looking site on the internet.

<comment><USER6> My thought exactly, even when I clicked on the link.

I think publishing this in Medium rather than on one of those designs of their students, kinda proves why most websites prefer to look boring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> As a hacker with no design background, reading Design for Hackers [1] was life changing. I finally understood that design is just a set of rules and that really modelled well on my engineering mindset.

Add to that frameworks such as Bootstrap CSS and opinionated website builders such as Weebly and I finally overcame a major limitation in my skillset. I could now actually build what I wanted to build, knowing that it looks decent and I can focus on what is under the hood.

If the web all looks the same, it is probably because it is built by people like me who need a rigid framework to work within.

[1] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse- Engineering-...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering- Beauty/dp/1119998956)

</comment><comment><USER44> Interesting article and there is some truth to it. Although to be fair, the counter-examples provided, while interesting and nice, are almost all unpractical, illegible or hard to navigate. A lot of work went there, sure, but the results kind of weaken his otherwise good points.

</comment><comment><USER45> No, just no. I understand that to push the current state further, you need to think outside of the box, but what you call bland, I call essential to communication.

I find the David Carson quote (confusing communication with legibility) to be ridiculous on it's face. If your intention is to communicate information, it _needs_ to be legible, clear, and understandable. If your goal is to make beautiful designs, fine, but understand and state your goal.

Not a single website redesign here would ever work, and would be offensive as a user trying to consume information.

Design is about embracing constraints for the medium to solve a goal. This is about removing any constraint to make a pretty picture. Great, looks nice, but I won't ever use it. So what was the real goal?

</comment><comment><USER46> The answer to this as of the last 5-10 years seems to be to simply be 'responsive design'.

Since we need to lay out a web page in several different ways as-is, it seems as though evolution has taken care of what seems to be a very 'natural' design pattern at this point.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think it's because web design used to be a branch of graphic design, and now it's not - it's now a branch of web development.

Designs for websites were made in photoshop by creatives. Now designs for websites are made by front end engineers, or UX consultants.

<comment><USER48> Exactly. Making an artistic and unique website is simply too expensive. Think of all the lost revenue. Web design has become a science of analytics crunching, conversion optimization and retention. The author seems to show total ignorance for human pattern recognition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> "We have the capability to implement almost every conceivable idea and layout. We can create radical, surprising, and evocative websites. We can combine experimental typography with generative images and interactive experiences."

Depends on the type of website, for example, if it's a banking or airline ticketing website, my tolerance for creativity for the sake of differentiation is non-existent. I am not passively consuming media, I came to the site to complete a task and want to get it done with the least friction and advertising shoved in my face as possible.

Similarly, this is why I'll never stop using ad-blockers and keep mentally noting which sites employ scummy UX dark patterns so I can spread awareness of alternatives to friends and family-- cause I consider 'dark patterns' both psychological opportunistic and predatory.

People use technology as a means to an end, whether to check their savings account balance, chat with friends, or look up information, introducing friction in the form of 'avant-garde' creativity without UX research/data on the impact to usability, is a recipe for disaster on user engagement metrics and revenue stream intimately tracked by upper management to justify continuing to pay the salaries of designers, developers, product/project managers/BSAs, etc. and to keep the lights on at a majority of tech companies (in my experience). Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER50> Ironically, this is a medium post. Why didn't the author make their own website to demonstrate how creative they can be?

The real answer why sites are homogenous is because everything has to be mobile friendly. There are only a few options that work, unless you're going to completely redo your layout and css for mobile. The truth is, modern front end is hard, so that's not a good option. Ui designers also save a ton of work by keeping the mobile design similar to the desktop one.

</comment><comment><USER51> Because Designers don't know how to build them without using frameworks. Because Customers don't know what they need, but very much what they want.

<comment><USER8> Most frameworks are built around readability and a few standard layout configurations based on the principles of magazine page design and typography.

What do customers need that modern web frameworks don't provide, and why is it wrong for customers to want the web to be familiar and unobtrusive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I still think there's a lot of subtle UX innovation going around. You just need to know where to look. Some more well known sites include:

\- Medium

\- Atlas Obscura

\- Techcrunch

\- New York Times (visual / interactive story articles)

\- [https://baymard.com/research](https://baymard.com/research) \- ecommerce UX research

Not all UX design content mediums have been invented yet, there's billions of permutations, and different content requirements. Different color, typography, color psychology, shadows, icons, animations, etc all change the way a story is told. A website is just a content medium, much like a video or image.

However, at the end of the day, content will mostly be the same. It's just CSS and JS changing the look and feel of the site. Example, one static HTML file and multiple CSS implementations: [http://csszengarden.com](http://csszengarden.com).

To the untrained eye, every site does look the same. My definition of good UX is this - _minimize the total distance your eyes have to adjust, and maximize the amount of content captured_. Without being overly fatiguing (usage of whitespace, eye relief, etc).

</comment><comment><USER53> Because rectilinear layout is well-supported ... but completely non-intuitive and artless. Options to do otherwise are painful and time-consuming and immediately run into browser incompatibilities.

Just try laying out a series of iconic buttons in a swooping curve. Or try laying out some text inside a circle ... or just making a circle, a triangle, a leaf-shape... or fitting an image between two columns of text ...

The tools to do all of this were available 25 years ago in desktop-publishing apps. Creating a beautiful page took design skills, but the layout was not done with CSS but by drawing on the page and making adjustments with handles.

Not by endless hours of fussing with CSS version xyz and grids and flexes and compromises by sacrificing original intent.

HTML layout is absurdly painful. Most people with deadlines don't have time to spend hours to make it work in one browser, switching to another browser and SCREAMING, and tossing it all out and returning to rectilinear boxes.

That's why.

</comment><comment> V-2 These stylistic experiments on breaking away from the 'by the numbers' routines immediately reminded me of Vonnegut's "pity the readers" advice, acknowledging the inevitable limitations of artistic liberty of a writer.

 _7\. Pity the readers_

 _They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don 't really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school --- twelve long years._

 _So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify --- whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales._

Pity your average web surfer.

</comment><comment><USER54> This is a case where an Artist has confused themselves with a designer. Designers solve problems, often by using existing conventions to help an interface/tool/object/room be instantly usable and understandable.

An artist flexes their creativity and communicates thoughts through imagery/experience/sound.

</comment><comment><USER55> I also recommend the author's follow up article " _Balancing Creativity and Usability_ " [0].

[0]: [https://medium.com/@borism/balancing-creativity-and- usabilit...](https://medium.com/@borism/balancing-creativity-and- usability-9bb2cd0fe929)

</comment><comment><USER56> If the search area is not on top right, everybody will loose time looking for it. Web is not art anymore. It's mainstream. It might be sad, but well...

Just look at all the rant there are when an app change a bit of it's design. You want adoption by users ? Make it easy for them.

Is it frustrating for designers ? I bet so. But can you imagine living somewhere where every shop have its own design and way of sorting things ? Imagine a supermarket where products will be stores in alphabetic order ?

Seems a good idea, you won't have to search for the good line any more. But it'll have to survive long enough to customer to adapt.

Well, now imagine every supermarket having those disruptives ideas.

Maybe in a future where we'll all have time for it, if we won't have to work more than 5-10 hours a week. Why not ? Until then, let's keep it simple.

</comment><comment><USER57> I was going to blame Bootstrap for this but then found this on the site: [https://expo.getbootstrap.com](https://expo.getbootstrap.com). Some really good examples of innovative design even using good old Bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER58> I think he left SEO as a reason out of this article. We're now building websites as much for humans as for google crawlers to read them, which means meeting standards of accordance in order to even participate in the SEO game. H1, H2, H3 tags, layout, and content headers don't have to look the same or be layed out or structured the same, but many sites have deviated from these formats at their own peril only to return to the warm embrace of conformity. Not to mention that Amp is basically a design standard as much as a content standard.

</comment><comment><USER59> WordPress

"WORDPRESS IS POWERING 26% OF THE WEB"

[https://digital.com/blog/wordpress- stats/](https://digital.com/blog/wordpress-stats/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Every time I try to do something original I go back to something generic because of the following reasons:

\- Supporting all devices makes custom design really hard, with need to design for phones, tablets, PC in all kind of browser window size/ratio. Different screen size, dpi and input type. \- Accessibility is really hard with out of the ordinary designs. \- A website must "give out its content" in seconds. You cannot establish a relation with the user like, say, in games.

</comment><comment><USER61> Truth be told, when a website is totally unconventional, it has my attention for a short time, generally on account of novelty.

Once that has worn off, unless the site is exceedingly usable, memorable or memorable, I'm out.

It's taxing to have to visually search, analyze, scaffold, and navigate a new mental model of how I expect a website to behave.

And therein lies the problem, people have expectations of websites, and it is generally in their best interest to conform to existing standards.

</comment><comment><USER62> In the past: holy grail layout

Now: masonry layout / infinite scrolling

</comment><comment><USER63> I don't think anyone has mentioned it apart from the fact most people would find these confusing, but these types of layouts look like accessibility nightmares, and for what benefit? Making something look a bit nicer?

I mean, it's fine if the main goal of the website is to be artistic, but as others have pointed out, that's not the main goal of most websites, it's communicating information.

</comment><comment><USER64> Do they look the same? Or does the differentiation just take place on a lower level of detail that is hidden to the author of the article?

</comment><comment><USER65> Donald Norman does a good job explaining why in The Design of Everyday Things. I am sure most of you have probably read it, but if you haven't... [https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald- Norman/...](https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald- Norman/dp/0465067107/)

</comment><comment><USER66> Swiss style design solved much of bad design.

If you divert from that you better have a reason and be good at it or just layer something unique on top.

</comment><comment><USER67> All webdevs use the same tools that push certain directions. No webdev has the time to be creative and try out new things so they build each website the same way.

Diversity is found near exclusively in the domain of homepages built by people not in the business that didn't make their website to put on a resume to proof they can use whatever tool is currently in.

</comment><comment><USER68> I prefer same type design as opposed to going off piste..

In fact, if I want to leard about something or somebody I will often choose Wikipedia primarily over something else because I know it's format and can get straight to digesting the information I came for.

(The issue of me using a crowdsourced platform as a prioritised source of something else for a different discussion)

</comment><comment><USER69> Depends on the purpose of the website. If the purpose is to convey information, then there will be quite some similarities between websites that share that purpose.

If the purpose is to use the web as a medium of artistic expression, then you can see some variety. But that's likely a small percentage of websites by purpose.

</comment><comment><USER70> "Type Primer" was a revealing and relevant read for this topic. Design is about functionality, and good typography and alignment can often-times get you there. Colors, shapes, etc. are interesting for art; but when someone needs to use what you've built, ensuring functionality is clear is crucial.

</comment><comment><USER71> I don't understand what the author was aiming for with this. "Designers are lazy and unimaginative; why don't they all make their websites look like these unusable, ugly explosions in a type foundry?"

I wouldn't even ~~be able to~~ want to read a static document that looked like those examples.

</comment><comment><USER72> Matthew Butterick wrote about this 5 years ago:

[https://unitscale.com/mb/bomb-in-the-garden/](https://unitscale.com/mb/bomb- in-the-garden/)

Even publications that produce a beautiful paper product seem to be willing to accept a garbage design when they post it online.

</comment><comment><USER48> Off topic but these days I load every website in reader view. It's amazing how annoying custom fonts, sizes and colors become once you get used to reader view for everything. Doesn't matter what font, font size, color or layout you use - I won't see it and I love it.

<comment><USER73> I do this too. I scan the first paragraph or two and if I decide it is worth reading, I hit the reader button.

I really couldn't care less about modern web design -- Just show me the text.

<comment><USER48> You can set every page to open in reader view automatically by pressing and holding that icon I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> If you compare web sites that are hand crafted to web sites created with a CMS and template, of course the hand crafted sites will be more unique. If you want to master design and user interfaces, you must first learn all the rules, but then you must break them!

</comment><comment><USER19> "Somewhere between $20m and $100m ARR,

All marketing sites converge on an identical design"

[https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1004366817035313152](https://twitter.com/jasonlk/status/1004366817035313152)

</comment><comment><USER75> Because of Bootstrap. Everyone uses it. Every old website that looked different in the past, now does a UI refresh (by just using Bootstrap out of the box with minimal customisation) and becomes another one of those the same looking websites.

<comment><USER76> Outside of the HN comment bubble, nobody uses Bootstrap. And it doesn't explain the examples in TFA.

<comment> david-cako Speaking anecdotally, up to around 2016 every other website used Bootstrap or Foundation, often with minimal customization, just because it looks and works well out of the box on all devices. Now it seems like it's getting better, but generic UI components are an extremely relevant aspect.

Promethease is a good example. Years later a bootstrap website signals to me "it's about the functionality, not the design". [https://promethease.com/](https://promethease.com/)

Before that everything was jQuery UI. Government websites still use a ton of it. All of Colorado's web portals are built with it. And now things are shifting towards UI frameworks "plus more", like Ionic, which adds a bunch of design/devops workflow and cross platform functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Lord help them when they realize that all designed things tend to look the same.

Within a particular generation, all things tend toward a familiar design. There is a herd mentality to fit in with the crowd, allowing for only minor differences.

</comment><comment><USER78> Those examples make me very, very glad all the websites 'look the same'.

<comment><USER79> Indeed. The web is more consistent than its ever been, and I think that's a very good thing - it means that I'm not often surprised when I scroll down and the page moves to the right (I'm looking at you, Apple...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> All of the real content lives outside the context. [http://sebastian.io/monte- fischer-design-school/](http://sebastian.io/monte-fischer-design-school/)

</comment><comment><USER81> I can't think of another website that even remotely resembles superbad [0] and that's quite okay with me. [0]: [http://superbad.com](http://superbad.com)

</comment><comment><USER82> "People spend most of their time browsing other websites"

Yes, it's a truism, but it explains why site designs converge. Fewer people will be willing to learn your site's custom layout and behavior.

</comment><comment><USER32> Man, all of those models look like flash websites. That's the problem. The unconstrained mess of deconstructed html, the Skeuomorph movement and reconstruction of architecture in the browser,

</comment><comment><USER83> None of these "redesigned web" examples are balanced or readable. While I'm not convinced today's design is the most optimal, I'd prefer them over any of these futuristic examples

</comment><comment><USER84> "Generic fonts"

The web had ~ 5 system fonts before Web Fonts were available in 2008 / 2009.

Now the web has many thousands of the best fonts ever created by the world's best foundries.

<comment><USER85> Yes, another "cool" thing slowing down loading/rendering the site. "Waiting for fonts.googleapis.com"...

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Designers: "Let's make it avant garde"

Business People: "Let's make it fast"

Developers: "Choose one"

</comment><comment><USER87> why do all cars look the same? why do all magazine covers look the same? why do all the graphics on cable news channels look the same?

These are questions that do not require an article worth of words for analysis..

</comment><comment><USER88> Says the guy writing on medium.

They don't, you're reading the wrong sites.

</comment><comment><USER89> It's a broader problem. Why do all phones look the same?

</comment><comment><USER90> Why do all cars look the same? Houses? I could go on.

</comment><comment><USER91> Readability and legibility are important, too.

</comment><comment><USER92> Because everyone decided to use a framework.

It helped standardize design.

I'm against this but I can see the benefits of the same layout.</comment>


Should I host my programming blog on Medium, Tumblr, etc? - <AUTHOR> https://dbader.org/blog/should-i-host-my-programming-blog-on-medium-tumblr <comment><USER2> Wow that's the most annoying subscription popup I've seen in a while.</comment>


Amazon Needs More Delivery Companies and Wants You to Start Them - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/amazon-delivery-service/ <comment><USER2> It's a brilliant business move, since they are important enough to motivate many people to take on the work. The greatest value will come from having a group tracking the performance and methods of all these small entrepreneurial companies, to find the innovators. Most will invent nothing, just try to make a living akin to that of Uber drivers. A few will think, experiment, and figure something radical. Then they'll be rewarded handsomely (and absorbed) in order to scale up, to the entire country, and to the world.

What other business problems should be farmed out by current tech giants to small entrepreneurs in order to find better solutions? In a way, Apple's iOS app store was a mechanism that achieved something like that -- on a wider, deeper scale than they probably had initially conceived.</comment>


Collection Pipeline (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://martinfowler.com/articles/collection-pipeline/ <comment><USER2> Found a recently published Python example: [http://code.activestate.com/recipes/580625-collection- pipeli...](http://code.activestate.com/recipes/580625-collection-pipeline-in- python/)

<comment><USER3> Also [https://github.com/JulienPalard/Pipe](https://github.com/JulienPalard/Pipe)

Though I think there are a few generator based libs like this. I think the style is called "flow programming"?

Does anyone know where "Collection Pipeline" comes from? Did Martin coin this term?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oddly coincidental, there was a book released today covering this exact topic in the context of PHP development: [http://adamwathan.me/refactoring-to- collections/](http://adamwathan.me/refactoring-to-collections/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Previously, on HN...

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8063532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8063532)</comment>


Halmak, the AI designed keyboard layout (2016) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ40gmfDFfQ <comment><USER2> I was toying with the idea of using a different layout than QWERTY because I already remap almost all my keys with Karabiner.

However I think it's not worth it in the end because on iOS for example I wouldn't be able to use Halmak or Colmak so it's not worth the context switch.

My Karabiner layout: [https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/macOS/apps/karabiner/Karabin...](https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/macOS/apps/karabiner/Karabiner.html)

<comment><USER3> Have been using Dvorak for 6 years now. But only on my laptop/desktop. On the iPhone I continue using the standard Qwerty layout. I don't notice the context switch. Probably because switching to a mobile screen keyboard is an even bigger context switch, and we are already used to that. I tried using some 3rd party Dvorak keyboards on iOS but my typing was slower than with Qwerty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm very happy with QFMLWY [1] because it greatly reduced my wrist pain.

[1]: [http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization](http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization)

<comment><USER5> How long did it take you to learn the new layout? Why this one instead of Dvorak or Colemak?

<comment><USER4> About one month (going cold turkey). Supposedly it's more efficient than the two. It certainly feels less strenuous than QWERTY.

<comment><USER5> I am fearful of switching because of all the keyboard shortcuts I'd have to relearn. Sometimes an established layout like Dvorak and Colemak has scripts/modifications readily available from the community that can help you to get things working quickly, for e.g. Emacs and Vim rebindings.

How are you finding the keyboard shortcuts after your transition?

Is there any community around QFMLWY (forums/mailing list)?

<comment><USER4> The keyboard shortcuts remain the same, except of course that they then use the new keys. For instance, my "Ctrl+C" is QWERTY's Ctrl+V. You get used to it. It don't think it's an issue. I also don't know of a community behind QFMLWY, but I'm not sure you really need one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting, but as a vim user I will have to retrain my muscle memory. And say goodbye to :inoremap jk <esc>.

Edit: typo.

</comment><comment><USER7> Love the idea of keeping the cmd+ based commands on a different layer.

</comment><comment><USER8> not a programmers keyboard. semicolon at the hardest to reach position

<comment><AUTHOR> There are plenty of programming languages that don't use semicolons. And it's not even the hardest position to reach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been waiting for a better layout for long, and I had already assumed the ideal layout would be determined by software. I like that there's effort being put into it.

But I don't like that one of my major complaints about qwerty while programming is not being solved: Of the times I use the top row, almost always I'm using it with shift in order to insert a symbol. That's why I have a custom qwerty layout that reverts the situation: shift+key is number, key by itself is symbol. Same with other usually-shifted keys.

I also dislike that the graphs shown are only for English. The graphs should be shown for the most popular Latin script languages: Spanish, English, Portuguese, German and French (+programming, related to my previous complaint). People that write in at least two Latin-script languages far outnumber the people that only write English.

But props for the setup, looks cool and I expect great things from it!</comment>


Show HN: NichePlease – Brainstorming niches and ideas for t-shirt/POD sellers - <AUTHOR> https://nicheplease.surge.sh <comment><USER2> Can you please add a comment with some info about your project? I tried clicking some buttons on the left, changing the "sort by" dropdown (what does it sort?), then some more buttons on the right. And i'm still confused. Sadly, there is no "topinambur senior" or anything "straight outta curly coated retriever" to be found on Amazon or Etsy.

<comment><AUTHOR> noted. will add a walkthrough to it. are you tshirt seller? it just generates random keyword, if you are lucky then you will find untapped niche :)</comment></comment>


The Walking Arm Trebuchet - <AUTHOR> https://www.instructables.com/id/Worlds-Simplest-and-Newest-Trebuchet-Walking-Arm-T/ <comment><USER2> To me, the most interesting thing about this design is that the counterweight comes to an almost complete stop as the projectile launches, putting a high portion of the initial energy into it. A normal trebuchet seems to be less efficient, because you often see the counterweight swinging after the launch.

Getting the large one balanced stably seems difficult, and repeatability might suffer as well.

<comment><USER3> This video was an interesting experiment in optimizing trebuchets: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gn2RGPqe_A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gn2RGPqe_A)

Edit: and the followup with wheels: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpFTyE- wiNo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpFTyE-wiNo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's a really interesting design. Not sure if "World's simplest" applies or not, but surely has to be contender. Wonder how practical that is from a siege weapon perspective.

<comment><USER5> It looks fairly unreliable to me -- it appears that a successful shot requires it to fall just right, and even then it might miss a barn.

OTOH it looks like a single person can carry it around, which could make for quite the ambush

<comment><USER6> Might make sense where range is important but accuracy is not needed.

<comment><USER7> This could be very accurate if it was, for example, set in a sort of guide bed. You could dig one with some wooden supports, or use concrete for a larger version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool! It would be a lot easier to use if the "arm" part had an inverted "T" base to make it more stable on the ground. Although he may have needed to forego that modification to keep maximum efficiency within the competition's rules...

</comment><comment><USER9> Of course, everyone has wanted to build a Trebuchet. A classic book about the experience is Jim Paul's CATAPULT: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon ([https://www.amazon.com/Catapult-Harry-Build-Siege- Weapon/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Catapult-Harry-Build-Siege- Weapon/dp/0394585070)).

<comment><USER10> I built a trebuchet once when I was 10 or 12. It was about as high as I was tall at the time, and it was on a platform with 6 wheels. I shot some of the neighbors' prunes into a meadow next to our house, and then when I went for a massive load of IIRC pebbles, shot myself straight in the face. I wobbled home, had a headache for 3 days, then tore the thing down.

Not sure what my point is - maybe 'careful what you wish for'?

<comment><USER9> Jim and Harry's Trebuchet was built in part at the Exploratorium and was tested in the Marin Headlands. They were not allowed to chuck rocks into the ocean so they marked all of the rocks used for their tests with the tag "This is not a rock", a paean to surrealist Rene Magritte.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've often thought, much of the trebuchet energy goes into pushing at the pivot point in a non-tangential way. Creating waste heat instead of velocity.

Another design, is to wrap the rope once around a round pulley at the hub, run it to a tower and drop the weight straight down. Now all the force is applied tangentially, going into rotational energy.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wait, so this is a novel design of an age-old siege weapon? That sounds crazy inventive!

</comment><comment><USER13> These two mentions...

 _TEACHER NOTES Teachers! Did you use this instructable in your classroom?_

...

 _The racquetball that my son was launching in the videos above was partially filled with water to bring it up to a regulation weight of 3 ounces. Water- filled racquetballs make fun projectiles._

I had wood shop in middle school. Imagine a shops teacher assigning this as a final project to his 8th grade students.

</comment><comment><USER14> The pumpkin market is really rising.</comment>


Nasa Aeronautics Book Series (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/unlimited_horizons_detail.html <comment><USER2> [http://www.militarymuseum.org/Lockheed-Skunk- Works.pdf](http://www.militarymuseum.org/Lockheed-Skunk-Works.pdf) Skunk Works history is nice reading for someone results oriented...

<comment><USER3> There's also "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed" by Ben Rich for a more intimate perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The one on breaking the mishap chain is great.

[https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/643903main_BreakingMishapChain- eboo...](https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/643903main_BreakingMishapChain-ebook.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone recommend a book for an introduction level (i.e. tutorial or cookbook style) coverage of Fault Tree Analysis? I've seen it mentioned in article about SpaceX blowups, it is something I'd like to understand better.

<comment><USER6> Fault Tree Analysis is fairly simple. [http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol4iss47.htm](http://www.itsmsolutions.com/newsletters/DITYvol4iss47.htm)

Having a clear understanding of the dependencies of the components of the system, and the ways they can fail/degrade, is the hard part.

<comment><USER7> Thanks so much for this. Our team recently did a Lynda course on ITIL problem management strategies and this technique was universally misunderstood. This article was much clearer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad I got to see this as I worked through Operation Overflight (book of Francis Gary Powers) as a kid but never followed up on the technical details and development. I started with the ending instead of the beginning!

</comment><comment><USER9> Teenage me would have loved this. Middle age me is still interested.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, the idea of the books is great... but I doubt I'll ever get around to reading any of them very closely.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Advanced Swift - <AUTHOR> https://www.objc.io/books/advanced-swift/ <comment><USER2> I've read the book (the pre-release and the final release) and it is currently the best Swift book I've read. For a book author, it is probably always difficult to decide which topics to include and which to leave out, and then how much time to spend on a given topic. Advanced Swift does really well here. They explain some of the most-used concepts in Swift in a _very_ detailed way (like Collections, Optionals, Protocols, or Value Types) but also include a couple of advanced topics which you might run into less often, but which are usually complicated and error prone to get right (like using C libraries or String internals). Highly recommended, great book.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the UK, at least, it's cheaper the buy the paperback book (£27.32) than the digital edition ($46.80; ~£32.50).

Presumably this is because VAT is charged on ebooks but not on physical books.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Amazon is a bit unpredictable with pricing. The advantage of the digital edition is that you will get updates whenever we change something. We've done that for the past 1.5 years with the Functional Swift book =).

<comment><USER3> That is quite an advantage, especially given how quickly Swift is being developed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

We just finished our book on Advanced Swift, and I think you folks are the perfect crowd. There's also an online preview =). Let me know if you have any questions!

<comment><USER4> What sets this book apart from Apple's "The Swift Programming Language"?

<comment><USER5> This book goes WAY deeper into the patterns and corner cases of the current language implementations. Like the title says Advanced Swift, ie the book you should read after reading the book from Apple. It does a fantastic job of explaining not only how you might use the features in swift but the effects and patterns features might cause you to use. I say patterns but it's not a design pattern type of book but a advanced language type of book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd highly recommend getting the bundle with Core Data - I read Core Data a month ago, and it was, without exaggeration, the most practically helpful programming book I have ever read. The sample project and explanations are saving me days if not weeks of learning things "the hard way". Huge props to the authors.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the kind words – glad it was helpful to you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just in time for Swift 2.2. Will much material need to change to be 2.2 compliant?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's all updated for 2.2!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks great, I'm definitely buying this book. Does anyone have a good book recommendation focused on advanced iOS user interface development?

I'm starting to do programmatic layouts in code for my side projects and I think there are huge advantages to building user interfaces in code, but everyone seems to just do storyboards. Instead of waiting for Apple to release nice abstractions like UIStackView, in code you can create your own layout abstractions the way you'd like. There seems to be close to no content based around this unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does this include recently released 2.2 stuff?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now I only want the Swift Programming Guide itself in paper form.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is this available on the iBookStore?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, but it will be!</comment></comment>


Seeking Job - <AUTHOR> HI,
I am a senior software developer with 4+ years of development experience. I have worked extensively on Ruby on Rails, Golang, Node and Javascript. I also have experience in working remotely as a backend developer. I am interested in web dev, Distributed systems , Databases.
Linked in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/singhniharika/ Github:
www.github.com/niharika88 <comment><USER2> You should post to the monthly thread for jobseekers (search for "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?").</comment>


The Teens Will Save Us - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dinachka82/the-teens-will-save-us-af5448b4ddfd <comment><USER2> Young people are more willing to "rise up and fight The Man" than ever before, to be sure. The problem is, now that information is easier to spread instantaneously across the entire globe--and we carry devices that let us access this global information network in our pockets at all times--people are more prone to groupthink than ever before, and one's political beliefs are more directly shaped by social circumstances than ever before. Many young people express desire to fight for various causes and will make all the social media posts in the world in support, but once they get the dopamine hit from feedback to said posts (likes, retweets, replies, etc.), they feel that they've done Something Good, and call it a day, instead of actively engaging more directly with whatever causes they're supporting. Critical thinking is becoming more and more discouraged, especially in educational settings, as outward expression of such is increasingly drowned out by overemotional responses. I'm not sure what to make of all of this, but it seems overly simple to say "the teens will save us" just because they're more likely to "resist."

<comment><USER3> Your assertion of "slacktivism" seems in contradiction to the fact that more Americans are marching in the streets for various reasons in the last 10 years than in the preceding years of my life.

<comment><USER2> Yes, and what does this marching in the streets really accomplish? What does having a "March for Women" really get done in the greater scheme of things, aside from making everyone participating it and supporting it feel good about themselves? Same goes for the "March for Science" and other such "marches."

"Political protest" has become normalized to the point where the general populace is becoming increasingly numb to it, making the concept lose whatever effectiveness it once had, and it's gotten to the point where at least for me personally, I can't keep up with the "marches" anymore. What are we marching for this week? Anti-racism? Anti-sexism? Anti-homophobia? Anti-transphobia? Anti-2A? Anti-fascism? Anti-Nazi?

All this marching just seems very evocative of Two Minutes Hate at this point. Let the public get it out of their system and move on to some other issue next month. Rinse and repeat, keep the hysteria and fear up, keep the population subdued and angry and afraid and emotionally vulnerable. It's been working out well so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First they came for the guns. An unarmed populace is powerless against an abusive government. America was founded because we wanted more liberty. And for many years, we understood that increased liberty came with increased responsability and risk. People now seem to have forgotten that. If you want to remain free, it will be hard. Sometimes there will even be bloodshed. I mourn for the students killed, as I mourn for all who have died, advertently or inadvertently, to protect our rights and freedoms. pulp

<comment><USER5> Your AR-15 is not going to defend you against a drone strike. The idea you could fight the government with privately owned weapons is completely laughable, and the entire notion comes from an era long before tanks and missiles and nuclear bombs made the entire concept ridiculous. If you want to fight an abusive government you do it through the power of an organized populace. You can't force an entire nation to live at the barrel of a gun.

<comment><USER6> "The point is not that you can win pitched battles against a professional army with all its ordinance as a ragtag citizens' militia with small arms. The point is that you can fight. You can bleed them. When they come patrolling through your neighborhood, you may be able to take a couple of the fuckers with you. You might even be able to run away and do it again. Theoretically, you wouldn't be alone and they couldn't engage in endless "manhunts" for everyone who resisted them. And they'd never feel safe; there could be a shooter behind any window. Of course, they could call in artillery and air support and level your neighborhood; sure. What would this get them? It would anger a lot of people when innocents died and play right into the hands of the rebels. It would also make a lot of the soldiers in that professional military seriously consider whether they were doing the right thing. Finally, it would simply kill people. No one wants to rule a nation of corpses.

The aim of a tyrant is to control, not to kill. What they want is to be able to have militarized police/gestapo point guns at people and cow them into submission to whatever dictates they might want to impose. If those people are instead waiting behind their doors and ready to shoot first when the jackbooted thugs come around, they've already failed. So the point is to fight. If you resist, you're not being controlled, and you're also undermining attempts to control others who can't or won't fight. You might die, of course. That's why Patrick Henry said what he famously said, more or less. As long as people can resist, they can be free, and tyrants can never succeed. But when you're talking about using swords and knives and clubs against modem military weapons, it actually becomes pointless, because you can't bleed them at all. They'll just shoot you with beanbags and rubber and water cannons and microwave guns. That's why having guns is so important."

<comment><USER7> Not sure if this was your point, but your first paragraph is an accurate depiction of the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan (and I'm sure plenty of other war-torn countries in the region). Despite the USA having military supremacy in nearly every way, there will probably be no end to the bloodshed for decades to come.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ok, thought experiment time

What if instead of Senioritis this was a disease (a deadly one) and the action needed was vaccination/washing your hands/"magic incantation" before doing something?

On the other hand, what if this "totalitaran state" is pushing for something "cool and fun", I don't know, using Emacs (example). Because Of Course Emacs is the best editor, etc, etc (and since it's obvious _this is not questioned_ \- whoever questions this is shunned/alienated).

While the dangers of totalitarism are known (and see, we even have a name for this concept), the opposite, which might be anarchy(?), while it is individually an advantage collectively can be a disaster

I think people have been burned by one extreme and are maybe not aware of what lies on the other side (me included).

</comment><comment><USER9> This sounds similar to a real experiment: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(experiment)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_\(experiment\))

There is an amazing movie based on it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(2008_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_\(2008_film\))

> While the adults are complacent, jaded, and disparaged, teenagers are > ignited, spirited, and take no prisoners. ... Do not get in their way: they > will crush you.

This is scary. Do we expect violence?

Also, aren't millennials more pro gun than others?

[https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/12/are- mille...](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/12/are-millennials- moving-right-on-guns-215703)

 _According to Gallup's version of the question in 2004, the notion that concealed guns made for safer spaces polled at 25 percent; 11 years later, it registered at 55 percent nationally. The greatest support came from those ages 18-29, at 66 percent, a full 10 points greater than the next highest scoring demographic._

<comment><USER10> Most current teenagers aren't Millenials.

<comment><USER9> Ah, good point. So this will be a generational clash...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They'll save us from contrived and meaningless object lessons?

The real test will be if they oppose fascism and bullying that is on their side about something important.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am _staggered_ \- and I repeat - _staggered_ teens in the US are not doing more on this issue, especially now they have this platform.

If every single 14-17 year old across the entire country banded together they could fix this once and for all by the next election. With social and the internet it's not even hard.

Step 1: All those teens vow to vote the day they turn 18 and forever after - that's tens of millions of votes per election, easily enough to change the outcome.

Step 2: It doesn't matter if the candidate is Republican or Democrat (this issue is more important) - if gun reform is not their number 1 issue they will be voted against.

Step 3: Make a positive change for their country, forever.

<comment><USER13> That's a horrible and dishonest plan

<comment><USER12> What's dishonest about it?

It's extremely up-front and transparent, the opposite of dishonest.</comment></comment></comment>


BitConcierge.com, Bitcoin's Black Card? - <AUTHOR> http://bitconcierge.com

<comment><AUTHOR> What is stopping you from making purchases with Bitcoin?

</comment><comment><USER2> judging by the email reply, they're fishing for ideas.</comment>


Y Combinator's Versionate is Dead - <AUTHOR> http://tpgblog.com/2008/06/09/versionate-is-dead/

<comment><USER2> This is David from Versionate. We are not dead :)

I apologize for the lack of updates on the blog. We've been working hard to develop a new product that solves problems in similar space as Versionate called Zecter. It aims to make file sharing and collaboration simple, and directly from the desktop.

As for Versionate, we are still supporting it, and may integrate some of the features of Zecter back in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> The company's not dead. They just changed their name to Zecter. They're working on a new approach to some of the problems Versionate solves.

<comment><USER4> This is bad PR.

If it's not true, shouldn't it be deleted?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would recommend taking the time to read the article. If you did read it you would find the entire post to be 100% accurate.

<comment><USER3> "It has almost been a year without anything new from this start-up and no signs of life from within the company."

<http://mashable.com/2008/05/27/zecter-file-sharing/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That article discussing the new company to which the founders of Versionate have gone. That is _not_ an article about Versionate, the company, nor their product. On the Internet, if you do nothing for your product, say nothing about the product or company for almost a year, that is effectively a dead company.

<comment><USER3> _That article discussing the new company to which the founders of Versionate have gone._

Wrong. It's the same company. They just launched a new product called Zecter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The founder(s) have moved on to Zecter.

</comment><comment><USER6> Too bad, I've been hoping someone would come along and drive Confluence out of where I work. It is an "enterprise wiki", which is to say it adds tons of features that get in the way of work, but that management likes. It takes days of emails just to get all the permissions changed to allow someone to see a page you wrote.

<comment><USER7> Try Luminotes? It's not exactly an "enterprise wiki", but it certainly tries to avoid features that get in the way.

<http://luminotes.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I actually need this sort of service in a major way, so I hope they keep going!

edit: i need the file sharing thing Zecter is advertising, not the wiki thing advertised by Versionate.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Is TIME Magazine's Person of the Year - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-is-time-magazines-person-of-the-year-wheres-the-dislike-button <comment><USER2> in 2010.</comment>


Show HN: Two great .io domain names just dropped, who.io and track.io - <AUTHOR>

Consider this a PSA - I've got no interest in the names, have just been watching them during their 3-month redemption period. If they were $9, it'd be a no-brainer, but at $100, you need a purpose. :)
They both dropped in the last 5 minutes, so first-come, first-served:
http://nic.io/cgi-bin/whois?query=track.io
http://nic.io/cgi-bin/whois?query=who.io <comment><USER2> Thanks for this!</comment>


Why Germans Pay Cash for Almost Everything - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/262595/why-germans-pay-cash-for-almost-everything/

<comment><USER2> The side that nearly everyone forgets to mention: cash is anonymous and the situation in Germany is no better than in Greece.

I've worked in both gastronomy and construction jobs and the amount of "black money" and especially "partially illegal workers" (you're hired on so-called "450€ jobs", officially limited to x hours a month (x * hourly rate <= 450€), and employer saves tax and social security; but in fact you work fulltime and get paid in cash) there is _huge_.

The only difference between DE and IT/GR is that corruption of government officials is not really widespread.

</comment><comment><USER3> Payment systems online and offline are fundamentally different in my view.

Online, there are differences in payment methods. The relative anonymity of a system like Bitcoin; the speed of PayPal or a pre-filled checkout like Amazon; etc.

In person there is zero personal benefit in me using anything other than cash. The only reason for me to use anything else is if the merchant forces me (e.g. metro smart card - use it or don't use the metro).

I simply don't care about the seconds that it takes to pay and that contactless or a magic brain chip could be instant - I don't actually want everything to be perfectly efficient.

The same applies all over the place really. For example, there's a distinct difference between walking to work, cycling to work, and driving/taking public transport. Each one is a significant step in time usage.

But give me the choice of having a 5 minute walk and a 4 minute walk? I don't care. If my life ever became so busy that it mattered, I would know that I am doing something wrong. Regimenting your life in that way is a source of stress.

It all just seems like bikeshedding to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> My experience: impossible to find a Restaurant in Mitte (Berlin) that accepted Credit Cards.</comment>


Functional Programming For The Rest of Us [2006] - <AUTHOR> http://www.blogjava.net/zellux/archive/2007/08/24/139194.html

<comment><USER2> I like the didactic approach of this article, modifying a commonly known imperative language (Java) step by step to become a functional language, translating the usual imperative idioms to their functional style counterparts.

However, the introduction is too long. It is supposedly meant to encourage the reader to keep up reading, but since the introduction is mostly off-topic, I think it actually discourages the casual reader from reading more.

Also, the example code isn't indented properly, making in unnecessarily hard to read. Maybe this is a bug in the blog software?</comment>


Reversible computing - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing <comment><USER2> Generalized Reversible Computing and the Unconventional Computing Landscape-- talk by Michael Frank in the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium. [http://ee380.stanford.edu](http://ee380.stanford.edu).</comment>