Kill The Hamburger Button - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/24/before-the-hamburger-button-kills-you/ <comment><USER2> I've never understood the hate for the "Hamburger button". It's here, it works fine and doesn't hurt anyone.

Some options just don't need to be in the face of the user 100% of the time. Why do I need a "setting/more" button at the bottom of the screen all the time?

I can understand, it's often overused. Some applications would be better by using "tabs", some would be better by just placing the most-used buttons somewhere in the screen when you can always watch them. But why not doing both? Put your most-used features in an easy and discoverable position, hide stuff that the normal user don't need often in the hamburger button (A good example for that is the Play Store, the slide menu has a link to settings, an about, and the user picker to switch user).

Also, the proposed solution is to have an auto-hiding tab bar. Please, please, think twice before implementing this. It's really annoying to have something popping up and disappearing when I'm interacting with your applications, and not with your menu.

The Hamburger button has the advantage of staying to his place until the user decide to interact with it. This kind of tab bar instead is almost random. The user has to scroll up/down to show/hide it, which one already do when interacting with the applications. Also every applications seems to do it slightly different, so pulling up half of the screen might be enough in one, but not enough to show it in a different one.

So, the hamburger button might be horrible, but the tab bar is worse, at least in my opinion. The user interact with it more just because it's getting more annoyed by it.

As an additional note, see the recent Google+ for Android redesign, which removed the hamburger button. Now it has two bar at the top of the screen which disappear/appear while scrolling, occupying almost 1/5 of the whole screen. Plus a "+" button hovering the content all the time. The general consensus (at least, the one I've heard) is that it's a terrible upgrade.

<comment><USER3> In regard to the Google+ for Android "redesign".. Roman Nurik confirmed, this morning, that the navigation drawer pattern isn't going anywhere anytime soon. [1]

Also, if any devs are thinking of including a bottom tab bar for their Android apps, please don't. [2]

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/gF7TpEU.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/gF7TpEU.jpg)

[2] [https://developer.android.com/design/patterns/pure- android.h...](https://developer.android.com/design/patterns/pure-android.html)

<comment><USER4> The navigation drawer is ergonomically equivalent to the deprecated "dashboard," except for touching to the right of the drawer to dismiss it. It looks a bit better, but it works just as poorly, being a place where you can do nothing but go to some other place.

As for the warning against using a "bottom tab bar" that's an iPhone idiom that should not be carried to Android. BUT Android has a split Action Bar option that is an Android-kosher way of displaying commands along the bottom of handset-sized layouts, and automatically putting them in the top action bar on large tablet-sized layouts.

The screen shot next to the "bottom tab bar" discussion is a bit confusing. It does not actually show tabs in an action bar, as the caption indicates it should.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's funny to see these trends in UI, starting in the early 90s it seems they gained more and more toolbars and features and navigation elements while reducing content area, then in the middle of the last decade they started getting hidden more and more behind menus and layers of menus (it continues today) to increase content area, and now we're at a point where opposition to this movement is becoming more apparent.

For me, the biggest issue I see with the example hamburger buttons there is that _they don 't look like buttons_ \--- they look more like an air vent/grille, a stylistic thing rather than "touch here to get more".

<comment><USER6> >For me, the biggest issue I see with the example hamburger buttons there is that they don't look like buttons --- they look more like an air vent/grille, a stylistic thing rather than "touch here to get more".

Agreed, but if the trend continues eventually it will become known as the menu. It took my way to long to figure out what the hamburger did across all the apps and devices. I really disklike it in firefox and chrome on desktop, it seem unwarranted, but I guess firefox's change is just conforming to what the designers see as a common icon set.

I see two issues with menu / option icons.

1\. There is no universal icon. There is the 'up' arrow on some IOS and android apps, the '...' on android, and now the hamburger. The fact that the hamburger doesn't look like a button will become irrelevant once the general user associates it with a menu. I personally don't like it either, but all I really want is consistency.

2\. Related to this consistency, the hamburger button doesn't always perform the expected function. Both of these are UX issues that cannot be easily standardised. It really is noticeable when it 'breaks' the flow of the application by changing the state of the main window instead of offering a menu. I can't recall which apps I use do this, but I remember being frustrated, much like the abuse of the back button on android (I think google play breaks this on the My Apps sections).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with losing the hamburger buttons, but the Facebook example is terrible:

[http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/facebook...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/facebook- ios-7.png)

      Left: Facebook's old hamburger button navigation. Right: The new tab bar style

Looks to me like they just moved the same set of buttons from the top to the bottom, adding a "More" button.. which is a hamburger button!

</comment><comment><USER8> I apologize in advance for potentially thread-jacking, but this story reminds me of an issue on which I'd really like to get other HN readers advice:

I'm seeing more and more stories online including animated GIFs by default like this one does.

Even when they add value to the story, I find the constant motion distracting at best, and seizure-inducing at worst.

Does anyone have recommendations re: the best way to block animated GIFs from auto-playing in Chrome?

Quick initial searching turned up this Stack Exchange thread [http://superuser.com/questions/23655/how-to-stop-animated- gi...](http://superuser.com/questions/23655/how-to-stop-animated-gifs-in- google-chrome) but the user script listed no longer seems to be available, and there is a debate in the thread re the usability of the other extension options listed.

<comment><USER9> You've had a seizure induced by an animated gif? That is nasty.

<comment><USER10> Photosensitive epilepsy (seizures triggered by sudden changes in luminescence) doesn't affect too many people, but it's an awful condition and sooner or later one of your users will have it. The general rule here is "no more than 3 flashes per second." [1]

You probably don't have a good design reason to use strobe lights anyway. Slow those .gifs down, please.

[1] [http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING- WCAG20/seizure.html](http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/seizure.html)

<comment><USER11> The Military maintains MIL-STD-1472 which contains the duty cycle for flashing text. Here's an interesting (and occasionally submitted) discussion on jzw's blog: [http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/08/a-light-has-gone-out-on- the-...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/08/a-light-has-gone-out-on-the- web/#comment-132598)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The worst part about Firefox 29 was the hamburger button. I couldn't believe it when I saw it.

      Aw fuck! Et tu, Firefox?

...was all I could think. As I explored further, my worst fears came true: they had destroyed Firefox's extremely versatile and fully customizable toolbar, and re-architected it as a woefully inadequate and fully customizable hamburger.

      </first-world-problems>

P.S. The fact that a floating unicorn appears, when you elect to have an empty hamburger, is little consolation.

<comment><USER13> > _P.S. The fact that a floating unicorn appears, when you elect to have an > empty hamburger, is little consolation._

Haha! I had no idea. I just tested this and had a good laugh. I also didn't know this three-line glyph was called the "hamburger menu."

Since I have never used the new Firefox hamburger menu, I think I'll leave it with the unicorn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> (Sorry about the cynical comment)

Hamburger button or no hamburger button, this article is a pretty decent example of one that should be taken with a large grain of salt

Hyperbolic, thoughtless, and over-generalized advice, not based on any user stories/scenarios.

You really need to dig a little deeper before generalizing like this.

<comment><USER15> Not if you write for TechCrunch, apparently.

<comment><AUTHOR> The original article provides some more insight. TC basically took the good parts. [http://lmjabreu.com/post/why-and-how-to-avoid-hamburger- menu...](http://lmjabreu.com/post/why-and-how-to-avoid-hamburger-menus/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Actually, the original article the tc-story summarizes is at [http://lmjabreu.com/post/why-and-how-to-avoid-hamburger- menu...](http://lmjabreu.com/post/why-and-how-to-avoid-hamburger-menus/) .

And while I'm not a big fan of hamburgers as well, proposing a scrollable tab bar as an alternative is.. a bit strange.

<comment><USER17> From my experience, scrollable tab bars can be nice – but that is if the user actually knows that the bar can be scrolled. For example, in VSCOcam (image editing app) I discovered that the tab bar can be swiped/scrolled after two months of using the app, by accident. After showing this to a few other people, I can say that most of them didn't know that either. The fact that the part of the tab that was displayed by default already seemed to have enough options/tools also played a role, I guess.

And in the Twitter, they have this thing that from the timeline you can swipe to "Discover", and it's only shown by a small set of "pagination" circles on top – there's no explicit mention of this, and the circles are kind of easy to miss.

<comment><USER18> I think you'd have an exceptionally difficult time getting users to enjoy a scrollable tab bar. I've already had enough trouble getting the iOS menu to pull up from the bottom of the screen; can't imagine having to deal with the same for a tab bar in an app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wish developers would put words next to their icons more often. Too many glyphs feel cryptic to me until I just try them at random to see what they do. A big example is the copy icon on Android that pops up. The word "copy" could've fit well there, and as a "high-level" experienced computer user I didn't know that the two papers side by side meant "copy". I actually thought it was "paste" at first. The hamburger buttons with a "more" or something on them probably fared better.

<comment><USER12> Generally, the reasoning behind not using text on a button (or wherever) is related to internationalization and locales.

Nascent software projects usually don't have the manpower or the budget to translate their user interfaces into multiple languages early in the game.

When tasked with coding a button labeled with text, many developers will simply hard-code the label onto the button, unless explicitly instructed to code the label as a reference to a separate resource of constants containing appropriate label strings.

This can be murder to re-develop, after the fact, when tasked with developing foreign language versions of the same software. You'll find that a team of ten developers have implemented a hundred different button labels, ten different ways, and sprayed them in a thousand places across the whole code tree, leading to partial and inconsistent translations, that need to be tested and re-tested in painstaking and tedious incremental iterations, and then you still have to dive back in and fix bug reports after releasing the translated version because you missed a spot.

To side-step this pitfall, and anticipate the potential for internationalization, one tactic is to implement languageless icons that define the look and feel of the interface. The drawback, of course, being that all users are confused equally, regardless of their native tongue.

<comment><USER19> I don't think lack of manpower applies to the Android OS so much. And even so, even only having English next to the icon is better than nothing.

<comment><USER12> Not so much, Android itself, as much as the apps developed _for_ Android by third parties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hate the Hamburger Button, but every single iOS and Android app uses it, so it's not like it's undiscoverable. Consistency wins over absolute excellence, I think, and this is consistent. Unfortunately.

<comment><USER4> Android apps that use an action bar no longer use an option menu button, which, in earlier Android versions, looked like a "hamburger button."

They might still have an overflow pop-up for commands that don't fit in the action bar. That's shown as three stacked dots. That depends on screen geometry and how the app has configured the action bar. Apps can avoid having an overflow pop-up and use, for example, a split action bar instead.

The article's main complaint isn't about the hamburger button per se, but the fact that it often pops out what in Android parlance is called a "navigation drawer." That's what's bad. And Google is pushing that idea as a replacement for a "dashboard" screen which was even worse, and is now deprecated as an official design idiom. But, as the article points out, a navigation drawer is just as much a nowhere-land as a "dashboard." Avoid it.

The article advocates a tab bar as an alternative. On Android, you have the choice of Tab objects that would show different Fragment objects, or a split menu bar. But, better still would be to make navigation an organic part of selection within the app. This has the added advantage on Android of not requiring different tab bar behavior on multi-Fragment layouts.

Some Android apps might have a hamburger menu leading to a navigation drawer, but that is probably due to iOS port-itis, not a deliberate idiom using Android UI elements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A great example of how people think they can do better than Apple's Human Interface Guidelines only to backtrack later. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel!

<comment><USER22> Ultimately the HIGs are only meaningful as a starting point for a design. You should user-test your UI and figure out whether any changes you come up with are actually an improvement over the baseline.

In that sense, the only meaningful arguments in the article are that when they A/B and user-tested hamburger menus versus the alternatives, the hamburger menus were worse. Experimental errors and implementation errors in their hamburger menu aside, they were correct to stick with the UI that tested better, even if it defied Android or Apple's HIGs in one way or another.

Apple compiles and publishes their HIG because they benefit from platform consistency and it helps with branding & learnability, but third party developers don't benefit just from following the guidelines. The guidelines are a tool you use to try and get a consistent, learnable UI, and then you deviate as necessary to build something your customers actually enjoy using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Recently implemented snap.js on a site with the ability to drag the menu from the left as well as press the 'hamburger' button. On iOS I found that dragging from the edge of the screen leads to a hit and miss situation where the user may sometimes open the nav drawer but may also sometimes go 'back' to the previous page. How are people 'doing' navigation right now? I always liked the sliding navs on mobile sites, but where should I have the drag box. The bottom of the screen?

<comment><USER24> I would have it take up the bottom 80-90% of the page. For me, and most people I see using smartphones, you could get away with a drag box that takes up only the bottom 30% or so (the most comfortable place to perform such a gesture with one's thumb), but it makes sense to handle the edge cases. Also, if someone tries to trigger that gesture and miss, the default behavior is going to be "try it again, but starting closer to the edge and higher up".

<comment><USER23> In the case of having such a large drag box how should I be ensuring the user can still interact with the content of the page. E.g make sure the hitbox isnt over the top of links and that users can still highlight text etc?

<comment><USER24> I recommend using the excellent Hammer.js[0] library to pick up swipes (since that's the gesture you're looking for). I've put together a small proof-of- concept here[1]. Try it out on your phone.

Alternatively, if you wanted to have some slick dragging action (so that a user could swipe a little, and control the rate at which the menu drawer opens), you could put a smaller (maybe 10-20% width) dragbox along the left- hand-side of the screen, and keep your selectable content to the right of that.

[0] [http://eightmedia.github.io/hammer.js/](http://eightmedia.github.io/hammer.js/)

[1] [http://codepen.io/notduncansmith/full/sthyJ/](http://codepen.io/notduncansmith/full/sthyJ/)

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the reply. Great! I will check out hammer.js, I haven't used it before. Have you used snap.js / what do you think of it?

I don't think your demo works by the way! Doesn't seem to include the hammer.js file!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good UX discussion over at Stack Exchange about this a month or so ago.

[http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/55807/is-the- hamburger...](http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/55807/is-the-hamburger- icon-a-recognized-navigation-symbol)

The only problem I see is that we are getting closer each day to mainstream adoption and just when this is starting to happen it is getting yanked back by UX studies.

</comment><comment><USER26> One big problem on iOS is that Apple use the hamburger icon to suggest 'History'. iTunes and I think the podcast app at least use it in this context.

Not sure if they do this to try and push against the use of it by hijacking the meaning but still adds to the confusion none the less.

</comment><comment><USER27> Facebook seems to have been a poor example. The only item pulled out from the hamburger pane is the search bar. Which, while nice and all, is not as dramatic of a change as the article seems to make it out to be.

</comment><comment><USER28> Personally, I really love swiping from the edge of the screen to open the hamburger menu. It's one of my favorite recent UI trends on iOS, and it's never lead to any confusion for me.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think a mix of a tab bar and a hamburger menu is a good solution. Put the most frequently used items on the tab bar and then have a hamburger menu for everything else.

</comment><comment><USER30> Can we kill a subset of the gear buttons, specifically the "mystery" ones, as well? Especially in Mac apps and wannabe mac apps.</comment>


Snapcast – Synchronous multi-room audio player - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/badaix/snapcast/ <comment><USER2> This looks interesting!

A bit of a rant, but I long for a digital version of an FM transmitter. Multi- speaker playback with basically no setup and perfect sync _that also_ fails gracefully can already be done with an FM transmitter. I would love it if there was a solution for the digital era.

I have been forced into the bluetooth era kicking and screaming with my iPhone 11 and I constantly feel like I've taken a step back by being forced to use bluetooth. The constant pairing issues, even with Apple's AirPods (which are the most reliable by far) has been a constant pain point for me. Pairing, unpairing, and multiple device management is a UX nightmare for something as simple as audio payback.

<comment><USER3> And people pretend that Bluetooth is a replacement for the headphone jack. Not only is it a janky pain in the ass, but it can't be shared with a companion (watching a movie on a plane, for example).

We ARE going backward, partly because spineless apologists defend anti- consumer behavior instead of standing up for themselves and better.

<comment><USER4> I'll point out a new feature with iOS I recently discovered. It is now possible to share audio to other apple headphones (with their customer BT chip) [https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-audio-with- airp...](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-audio-with-airpods-and- beats-headphones-iph8ad1f667b/ios)

Very smooth UX and useful when watching a movie on a plane on an iPad.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that info.

Unfortunately useless for anyone not using Apple's mediocre-at-best listening devices. Like the huge number of people with Bose wireless cans.

<comment><USER5> I really don't understand why we can't just have the headphone jack back. Did it even take up any significant amount of space?

<comment><USER6> Sure, it takes up some space. But so does having to carry dongles. If Apple made an iPhone with the jack back again and a couple percent smaller battery, I'd take the jack. The phones has already been getting thicker every year ever since 6 (the 2nd last iPhone so far with a jack), so that's no argument.

<comment><USER5> Right? Not to mention the dongles break super easily and also I can't charge my phone and listen to music at the same time :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> matthew-wegner I've been running whole-home Snapcast for over a year now, controlled by Home Assistant. Some quick info:

\- Previously, I would use Raspotify/etc and automatically change sources as I moved between rooms. This is much cleaner

\- My automation server is a Linux VM, which is now my audio source for Snapcast. This means I just use the native, 100% unmodified Spotify client (or really, anything). Previously the various librespot/etc stuff would sometimes break or require updates

\- I run two streams: Music + text to speech, and just TTS. Some rooms switch to TTS-only when the room turns off. Other rooms mute completely. Really it just depends how peripheral the room is. i.e. my garage mutes completely when it's off, but more interior rooms still play TTS.

\- Pulseaudio junk is what manages the above routing. Linux audio really is gross once you try to do anything past-minimum with it. You can do complicated things, though--I duck music volume down a bit when house TTS is happening. I still have to regularly and automatically restart pulseaudio completely when nothing is playing, to avoid both horrid clock drift and/or crackle

\- Any audio you can play/handle on Linux, you can make into a stream. I could easily add a third stream for an aux-in line dangling off the machine, for people to plug in to for parties/hardware players/etc

\- Most clients are Raspberry Pis with USB audio DACs. My macOS machines also run snapclient. I only have one Windows machine (my TV box) I wanted to include, and ended up just running a Ubuntu VM with snapclient to make that happen. (The other option is to use pulseaudio in a VM, and then also an ancient Windows port of pulseaudio to actually take the pa data out to the speakers, but ugh)

\- Including all computers, I have 8 clients, I think? You can enable "send audio to muted clients" to avoid a re-buffer delay when rooms turn on and off

\- You can push latency quite low if you want, especially if everything in your house is hardwired. My desktop audio is almost always Spotify now, out of laziness, and really when I'm using the desktop client I'm actually controlling the remotely-playing VM. The latency doesn't bother me, and I'm pretty sensitive to that kind of thing

\- I use cheap 10-button RF remotes as "light switches" in all rooms. It's nice to have that many buttons to standardize some things. For music, two buttons are play/stop spotify, with some overloaded functions (pressing play while music is already playing skips to next track)

<comment><USER7> Have you considered the possibility that your Spotify "laziness" is related to the friction involved in playing your own music through Snapcast?

<comment> matthew-wegner Oh, that isn't what I meant. I meant in contrast to hunting around for new music more directly. I used to spend entire weekend afternoons looking for music--reading forum threads, browsing weird labels, going down related-artist rabbit holes in new genres. Lots of this was on OiNK and What.cd, which had tremendous forums and metadata. There are modern replacements, but they aren't equivalent. Lots of this is the diffusion of music lovers in general.

Spotify is reliably a B- source of music, once you've used it for awhile. My Daily Mixes are...fine. Never great, but never awful. So I fall back to it as background music.

But because it _isn 't_ awful, I'm not motivated to put in heaps of extra effort to move from B-grade to A-grade. Moving up that curve is diminishing returns.

On the technical front, it'd be quite easy to play your own files through snapcast, in a variety of ways.

<comment><USER7> Yes I'm picking up what you're putting down. I really wish What.cd had been able to continue as a metadata service if nothing else: the discoverability of music was at a level I have not seen anywhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have an extensive sonos setup for my business. I've experienced a lot of trouble with the system just cutting out, skipping tracks over and over, and connecting to Apple Music. Every couple of weeks it just totally shits the bed.

Would love speakers that could serve music off my Synology NAS reliably and without microphones in my speakers to spy on me.

With the whole google/nest fiasco I don't want to actively try to thwart a _speaker_ from collecting data on me and my family. It's exhausting.

Someone needs to start a company, like, Elgato Eve, where their primary feature product is privacy focused products. They would have my money every time.

<comment><USER9> Denon's HEOS is an alternative which I can attest works, it's far from perfect, but it does tick majority of your boxes.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not my project but I've been using it for a year on 3 Raspberry Pi and it has been rock solid. I highly recommend it. The synchronization is perfect and it only adds a small delay (500ms max) to the music. I've configured Librespot to use this as a Spotify Play speaker and control it from the desktop or mobile Spotify app.

<comment><USER10> Worth pointing out that the raspberry audio out has quite a bad rep quality wise:

[http://raspberrypimaker.com/cheap-quality-audio-raspberry- pi...](http://raspberrypimaker.com/cheap-quality-audio-raspberry-pi/)

<comment><USER11> Pimoroni has a line of £20 hats that help solve that: [https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pirate- audio](https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pirate-audio)

<comment><USER12> I bought a couple, they're really good, my only dislike is that the screen software is written as a Mopidy plugin, but I'd prefer a remote mopidy instance and the pis and hats are just clients with controls.

<comment><USER13> Did you find a solution to the remote mopidy instance yet? I'd like to do the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The encoded chunk is sent via a TCP connection to the Snapclients.

I wonder why TCP? For streaming media I would expect UDP, RTP or even RTMP to be better. Maybe even something newer like QUIC.

 _edit_ : in fact, isn't RTP/RTCP made for exactly this purpose? The streaming/synchronization of media?

<comment><USER15> Some elaborations here

[https://github.com/badaix/snapcast/issues/305](https://github.com/badaix/snapcast/issues/305)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There has also been some work on low latency audio this year via [https://gavv.github.io/articles/roc- tutorial/](https://gavv.github.io/articles/roc-tutorial/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Now what we need is a method to hijack the phone-home process new Sonos devices use, and have them controlled via this. It's amazing to me how glitchy and fragile the native Sonos network is. I have lots of zones, but wow.

</comment><comment><USER18> You may also want to try airplayhub with shairport-sync

[https://github.com/noelhibbard/node- airplayhub](https://github.com/noelhibbard/node-airplayhub) [https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport- sync](https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync)

</comment><comment><USER19> I always wondered why there aren't synchronous "audio conferencing" tools to allow play music and even improvise over the Internet.

Of course they would have to introduce a fixed delay of a phrase (or multiple) and people would have to play accordingly.

<comment><USER20> You can totally feel any delay above 5-10ms so that rules out quite a lot of things. I hear people still do it in some fashion.

<comment><USER21> I have trouble getting local latency below that at times with recording and live playback. Trying to sync together multiple people and keeping it below that is still a bit a ways off most current networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Got two Raspberry Pi with HiFi Berry HATs, and have been trying to use RTP over Pulseaudio, from my home server, but have never managed to get the synchronisation right.

I'll be starring this project and giving it a go as soon as possible. Can't wait!

</comment><comment><USER23> This looks cool! Has anyone used it with Airplay? Can you report on how well it works?

I'd love to be able to stream from laptops and phones -- without installing additional software on them.

</comment><comment><USER24> Any1 aware of any solutions to stream (let's say through pulseaudio) realtime audio? I.e. matching what happens on the screen. Is it even possible?

<comment><USER7> All streaming will have delay built in. Exponentially so when multi-room is involved. Audio has to be intercepted, encoded/transcoded, sent over the network, possibly endure packet loss, be received, and decoded, before it can be played through speakers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can someone explain why I would use this over Shairport Sync [1]? Setting up shairport is so easy, and it works great with iPhones and Macs as audio sources (which happens to be what I use).

Is Snapcast just more compatible with Linux clients, or are there any other advantages?

[1]: [https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport- sync](https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync)

</comment><comment><USER26> I've just started getting into Sonos because I want the full house audio, but I'm not sold yet. The worry I have with Snapcast is that sometimes it's worth the money for things to JustWork(tm). I know Sonos is super janky sometimes, but at least I don't have to build it from the ground up with a patchwork of technologies across my various computers and phone

</comment><comment><USER15> I use this in three ways: To stream from MPD, to stream from a DLNA renderer (gmrender-resurrect) and to stream from Pulseaudio. It is generally great, but the audio from Pulseaudio is not working well, quality-wise. The one remaining problem is sometimes that podcasts that I stream via DLNA plays much too fast. Seems to depend on circumstances in the podcast stream.

<comment><USER7> Is it possible it's the encoding of the episodes? Some audio workflows get all confused with VBR for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can't see any info of what clients are supported. I'm interested in serving audio to both "speaker clients" as well as mobile-app clients.

For mobile setup, I currently use soundwire (it has an android app as a client, and I serve audio from a linux server) but the sync is not very good.

<comment><USER12> It has it's own client binary, you can run it on anything you can build the binary for,there is also an Android client app but the Android app has never worked for me. You can't use standard clients with their own proprietary software, e.g. Sonos speakers etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Out of the box Does this support syncing audio from web streams like YouTube?

Also, is this trivial to set up and is there a web app I can use to test it out?

<comment><USER29> All your questions are answered in the README.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The project looks good. Would multicast be good for this kind of applications? How much support do routers have for multicast these days?

<comment><USER31> If you're talking home routers then I doubt you have multiple subnets at home, so just use broadcasts, there's no difference then. But if you do, OpenWrt should handle this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How long before Snapchat's lawyers send a letter, insisting that the name be changed to something less misleading?

<comment><USER33> Bad lawyers if so, would take a stupid judge to agree they are at all doing similar things. Only thing they have in common is the name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How does this compare to something like Airfoil?

<comment><USER35> Just quickly looked at Airfoil and it seems to pipe music to existing clients (chromecast, sonos, etc) whereas Snapcast gives you both the server and client software for you to run however you want. Also Snapcast is FOSS, so that's one other difference.

<comment><USER36> There's Airfoil Satellite and also Airfoil Speakers for Linux for the receiver ends.

[https://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/satellite/](https://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/satellite/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm so excited to try this.</comment>


Show HN: alltech.io, My Tech Discovery Project - <AUTHOR>

I tried to build a discovery-focused tech aggregator, where incoming articles are auto-evaluated for mentioned topics and then those topics are used to expose the user to other relevant people & concepts.
It'll be in perpetual enhancement but would love to hear what you think, especially any suggestions for improvement. Thx -c
http://alltech.io <comment><USER2> Are incoming articles just pulled via RSS and then a sorting algorithm decides what is displayed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the basic (scheduled, async) process...

* background threads continuously check source RSS/ATOM for new entries, respecting 304s (via TTL/ETAG/LASTMOD headers if provided); there's also a configurable throttle to limit the number of times any particular source will be checked, irrespective of anything else

* when new RSS/ATOM entries are found, the _full_ article from the host site is retrieved & parsed and evaluated for keywords to figure out what main topics the article's about; lots of feeds are partial, so being able to grab the full article content (w/out the header/comment/nav/footer cruft) is necessary for it to work

* then the full article is checked for a "suitable" (size/dimensions) image; if one's found, it's pulled down, resized/optimized, and stored locally for display alongside the entry when browsing the site

* then the (full article) text is added to the search index; again, w/partial feeds the full text is necessary to make search useful

* the "research" function leverages the YouTube, Wikipedia, Bing, Reddit, Slideshare (although I may be yanking this out soon; hella-slow responses sometimes), and Amazon APIs.

For display, the "grid" lists all entries in reverse chrono that had a suitable image. The "index" lists every entry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> definitely an interesting site. looks a little like rebel mouse but for tech in general.

What are your plans with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> More just a labor of love, at least @ this point. Thanks -c</comment></comment>


The Thickness of Napkins - <AUTHOR> http://contrast.ie/blog/the-thickness-of-napkins/

<comment><USER2> At the bottom of the article you show the bottom of a macbook against another brand of laptop, presumably as a an example of Apple's excellent product design.

However this is, I believe, possibly the worst example. The other laptop has many clearly marked and separately detachable parts. It also has a note with what I assume would be model and serial numbers, details about the hardware etc. All of which are very useful pieces of information and features, to both users and engineers. In contrast the bottom of the macbook is not at all intuitive, and just about all it tells you with the embossed Apple logo is that the product falls squarely into the Apple lock-in business model that all their other products do.

I agree with the main theme of the article, but very much feel that things can be 'over-designed' just as they can be 'over-engineered'. The former however is the complete opposite where all features and functionality are abstracted away.

<comment><USER3> How useful is that information to _users_, vs. engineers? If the Mac is running then all that information - and more - is available via "About this Mac." If it's broken, then anyone who is going to fix it can also pop open the case and figure it out.

The lack of replaceable parts is perhaps lock-in, but the overhead for supporting some functionality (replace the DVD drive with something else, or battery with a fresh one) detracts from other functionality (lighter, thinner laptop with longer battery life).</comment></comment>


Millennials to Small Cities: Ready or Not, Here We Come - <AUTHOR> http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2017/11/03/millennials-to-cities-ready-or-not-here-we-come <comment><USER2> I think about this a lot, mostly about Rochester, NY (where I went to college). It has world-class universities (and a renowned music conservatory[1]!), great history, festivals, relatively low unemployment[2] and the housing is dirt, dirt cheap[3].

The thing is, right now I make a pretty great salary in NYC and I don't know that anything in Rochester could come close, even taking into account cost of living. Even if everything is expensive here, and even if expenses might be lower on a percentage basis in Rochester, I think I'm still able to save more in absolute terms where I am now. Not sure about that though, would need to run the numbers to confirm.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_School_of_Music](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_School_of_Music)

[2] [https://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.ny_rochester_msa.htm#eag_ny_roch...](https://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.ny_rochester_msa.htm#eag_ny_rochester_msa.f.1)

[3] [https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Rochester,-NY_rb/?from...](https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Rochester,-NY_rb/?fromHomePage=true&shouldFireSellPageImplicitClaimGA=false&fromHomePageTab=buy)

<comment><USER3> Affordable housing and good salaries are usually on the conflicting ends of the same scale.

A place that has high-paying jobs will have residents out-bidding each other, driving up the prices of the housing market. Conversely, super cheap housing is usually an indicator that there really is no demand from affluent residents.

As a counter-point to what I just said, more and more information-based jobs can be done remotely in a very effective manner. This lets people enjoy these small towns and their high salary. Two things could happen, though:

\- this could form communities with enough remote workers to start altering the housing prices, and produce a similar effect to gentrification in that the locals end up outpriced of their own town;

\- or this could encourage a better spread of higher-paid employees throughout a lot of small towns, and end up not affecting those towns markets. And as a bonus, this might even help relieve the housing pressure on the larger cities.

<comment><USER4> I feel like if all work was suddenly remote, city residency would drop at least 50% in a week. I hope remote eventually becomes the norm. There are probably a lot more like me out there who even in their 20s only work in a metro area solely out of necessity. I have a hard time imagining that all these people I see on HN pining for city living and making suburbs out to be worse than prison are more than a vocal minority.

<comment><USER5> I don't agree. Super dense cities like New York might fall out of favor, but smaller cities will still be attractive. Being able to walk to wherever you want to go is very nice. In the suburbs you have to drive 10 minutes to get anywhere, which is quite annoying. Maybe that will change once self driving cars become the norm though.

<comment><USER6> If you want to go to an actual grocery store and you live in a city you're going to spend more than 10 minutes walking. Plus you won't even have access to Walmart, Costco, etc.

<comment><USER7> In the 6 apartments I've lived in in the 5 years I've lived in Seattle, I've never had fewer than 3 grocery stores within a 10 minute walk.

<comment><USER6> Well I lived in SF and in NYC presently. Unless you count corner stores (and I don't, because they are exorbinantly expensive) 10 minutes is better than average for those two cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I did not ever expect to see my old hometown of 30k people on HN. Growing up there in the 80s and 90s, it was a nice enough place, but basically 0 tech jobs outside of doing basic IT or support. My parents still live there (my dad an EE at the mentioned Cummins), but the fortunes of the town are tied to Cummins' stock price. They've done a lot to revitalize the downtown in the last decade, it used to be pretty run down. That said, its still in Indiana, with hot muggy summers and wet cold winters where you don't see the sun for 4 months. People are generally friendly, as long as you're "normal". There's a lot of casual racism and homophobia, I didn't even recognize it until I moved away and had my eyes opened.

I moved to Indy to get a programming job in the early 2000s, and then to Colorado a few years after that. I'm much happier with the climate, the people, and the tech out here. However, the house I close on this month cost 3x what my parents' place is worth.

<comment><USER9> I think you'd be surprised. I moved to Columbus in the early 2000s after college from another Indiana city. Perhaps I have blinders on, but I don't ever recall any casual racism or homophobia. If anything I'd say it's a more progressive city than many other small conservative midwestern towns. There is considerable diversity in the city, given that many of the engineers who live here have come from other countries. There was a recent presentation about the problems of "conversion therapy", and the presbyterian church a few weeks ago had a day of remembrance specifically for those who are transgender.

Not saying it's anything along the lines of Colorado, or the bay area, which I've frequented the past decade - but I think 2017 Columbus IN is vastly different than late 90s Columbus IN. The article really nails it.

<comment><USER8> Oh sure, Columbus is way more progressive than just about anywhere else in southern Indiana, save Bloomington (home of Indiana University). But still, my high school graduating class of 350 had one black kid and a couple Hispanics. There were more Japanese than any other minority, and that was because Cummins had hired their parents from the manufacturing powerhouses there.

Several of my friends had lived their entire lives in the area, the type of family where both of their grandparents lived within 30 minutes, and they had no will or desire to leave and explore the rest of the country. Most of them grew up in racist and homophobic families, so making remarks and jokes was commonplace. It didn't seem so at the time, but now having left I realize just how rampant it was, and I'm actually a little ashamed to have taken part in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's funny how deeply they buried the lead in this article. The real story of Columbus is: stable manufacturing jobs + corporate commitment to community = good quality of life.

This story is so alien to us now in America that we don't even recognize it when it's staring us in the face.

<comment><USER11> [https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bury_the_lede](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bury_the_lede)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "The 18- to 35-year-olds expect something like that, but they just didn't > have it," said Tyler Hodge, 32, who used crowdfunding to help finance the > shop. The same tactic was used for a rock climbing gym opened in September > by a group of young engineers who, like Hodge, spend their weekdays working > at Cummins Inc., the diesel engine company that is the city's largest > employer.

Crowdfunding for brick-and-mortar? Now that's interesting, any links?

<comment><USER13> A brewpub in Minneapolis crowdfunded about $250k, though the actual financial arrangement seems a little funky, as you'd imagine: [http://www.startribune.com/beer-for-life-brewpub-for- all/171...](http://www.startribune.com/beer-for-life-brewpub-for- all/171627341/)

If you invested $1,000, you got free beer for life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Surprised to see Cedar Rapids, IA on the list. I grew up in the area and it was not very appealing to stay in the area. Growing up, everybody's parents worked at Rockwell Collins, and not many of my peers had intentions of staying in the area. Few did.

In the last few years I have noticed changes around the city. Some big investments downtown, new developments for commercial and shopping space, etc.

I doubt Cedar Rapids would have been on the list if it it wasn't for the 2008 flood. Nothing could get done at a city level because people were always against it for some reason or another. It was a kick in the pants city wide to get stuff done.

Rockwell, the largest employer in the city, has always had a tough time recruiting. Perhaps it will be easier for them to get young talent in the coming years?

<comment> FLUX-YOU >In the last few years I have noticed changes around the city. Some big investments downtown, new developments for commercial and shopping space, etc.

I guess investors have the big cities' real estate markets locked down. Now they're trying the same gentrification game in small towns to get rents raised?

<comment><USER15> The people who raise rents ard the ones who limit the supply of housing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A little surprised to see my hometown, Bloomington, IL on the list. There's two universities in town, so I know they bring in a lot of young people, but unless you want to open a restaurant or work at State Farm your whole life, there doesn't seem to be a whole ton of opportunities there, especially now that the Mitsubishi plant closed down.

It is still a very affordable place to live, that part is certainly true.

<comment><USER17> Isn't the point that the "here we come" millenials are bringing their own startups with them, or working remotely? So you can live in a boring, inexpensive college town somewhere, but still have exciting, well-paid work.

<comment><USER16> Well sure. I do have a friend who's trying to get a 3D print studio startup going that lives in the area, even. But there's not a huge market there for new businesses outside of restaurants (seriously, it's a test market for new restaurants and it has one of the highest amount of restaurants per capita in the US), as far as I can tell at least.

If you work completely remotely that's fine, but at least the article was saying more that millennial were moving to these places because the existing demand for workers was there, especially knowledge workers, and that's just not really true here unless you want to work at the headquarters for a giant insurance company.

The scope of the article is generally true, I was just surprised to see my hometown included, is all. If you're just looking for cheap places to live and work completely remotely, there are tons of other towns nearby that are much cheaper. Hell, just go 20 miles outside of Bloomington and you can get a house at about half the price that you would in Bloomington, in much smaller towns. I have old high school buddies that do exactly that.

<comment><USER18> Do you have any more info on the restaurants per capita? Google isn't very helpful.

I ask only out of mild interest. The village closest to me has ~30 and just 1200 residents. However, it's a tourist town and there are zero franchise fast food places, or the likes.

Wait, mostly disregard this. I was looking for the wrong town and now have a bunch of information.

<comment><USER16> I don't have hard data, it's just something that's known about the city. With a google search I can find some people mentioning it online, but not with any hard data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm wondering where's the equivalent for California. Sacramento is too significant and big a city to be comparable. I'm thinking Bakersfield and Elk Grove.

[http://kedc.com/kern-county-fast-becoming-a-mecca-for- millen...](http://kedc.com/kern-county-fast-becoming-a-mecca-for-millennials/)

[https://www.marketwatch.com/story/4-cities-where- millennials...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/4-cities-where-millennials- actually-act-like-grown-ups-2017-01-10)

<comment><USER20> I don't think there really is an equivalent in California. I searched for a small town with affordable housing and some minimal level of infrastructure. I found what I needed in another state.

I work remotely, so my income is portable. I could potentially go anywhere in the US. I couldn't find anything in California that met my needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My town is on the list and still incredibly affordable. I guess it's time to buy up some properties so I can gouge these youngsters later. Not a bad retirement plan, actually. It will be nice to be on the other end of the transaction for the first time in my life.

<comment><USER22> Don't feel too guilty. Most of these small towns are in areas where people can move outside of town a bit if they don't care to be gouged. With minimal impact on commute times.

Though amenities like affordable high speed internet drop off pretty precipitously if you get too far out.

<comment><USER23> _With minimal impact on commute times_

That works up to a point, but eventually as more people move out of downtown to less expensive suburbs, roads start to clog and the community can't afford the billions of dollars it would take to build more freeways or public transit.

<comment><USER22> In small towns businesses are also often smaller and it's easier to get the boss or owner to OK a work schedule that avoids rush hour traffic.

<comment><USER24> [citation needed]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article is 5 or 7 years too late. We already moved to cities. Now we want to be married and do things that require yards. Or at least own a small piece of the city and no longer be at the mercy of landlords (non-rent controlled renters).

Most importantly, I've learned the joy and importance being near my family and spending time with them. These are all things I never cared about in my 20s.

<comment><USER26> Did you read the article? Pretty sure the vast majority of people living in Columbus, IN are in single-family homes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The financial crisis delayed the usual process of marriage, having children, and house buying for millenials. Instead of doing it in their mid/late 20's, they held off until late 20's/early 30s.

Everyone likes to be young and in the city. It's fun. You can go out and have unlimited options for things to do, places to eat, etc.

The exorbitant rent charges for luxury apartments is something that becomes unpalatable once you get sick of living with roommates, or want to have a family. As people get older they generally go out less and appreciate nature, personal space, and quiet more. (Obviously a generalization but in aggregate is true)

It's also easier than ever to take an Uber in to the city, should you wish, to avoid parking and drinking and driving.

</comment><comment><USER28> Move abroad. That's simple. Lots of places with much better quality of life. European Union is terrific place: multiple nations, different climates, various cultures, freedom of speech, parlamentary democracy, clean ecology, safety, good education, inexpensive housing.

<comment><USER29> Won't you have to pay taxes twice if you're from USA though?

<comment><USER30> No, you deduct the taxes paid in your place of residence from what you pay in the US. Since taxes are lower in the US than in most developed countries you end up owing the US nothing -- but you still have to file.

Of course, though your taxes may be higher, other expenses may be lower (e.g. telecoms, health care, housing) so you'll probably end up with more in your pocket.

<comment><USER31> This is correct, up to a point. Once you pass the threshold of around $90k, you can no longer write the income tax you pay on your foreign income off. For example, if you make the equivalent of $100k in Europe, you can write off the income tax on the first $90k. However, you then have to pay US income tax on that remaining $10k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My wife and I spent some time in the Bay Area in our twenties. It was nice and I'm glad we did it, but I am _so happy_ that we moved back to a small town in Ohio before beginning to raise a family. SF is a nice place to visit, but Ohio is home.

It definitely helps that programming can be done remotely, but I think I'd still prefer it here, even if it meant working for a local shop at half my current salary.

</comment><comment><USER33> Real estate is one of the biggest intergenerational scams ever. Be smart and just buy a cheaper house and then work less. pretty simple

<comment><USER34> "ever"? We live in an affluent neighborhood surrounded by Doctors and CPAs. Our kids see that every day. That's their normal.

And if/when there are major budget changes to the district, who do you think are the first parents in line advocating for their school?

You literally buy your kids a chance at a better future.

<comment><USER35> School funds should be distributed equally across the entire population. If we were a democracy, rich neighborhoods wouldn't have better schools.

<comment><USER36> The wealthiest school districts in the country tend to be the worst.

<comment><USER37> Definitely not the case in the Bay Area -- Palo Alto, Piedmont, Orinda are wealthy and have some of the best schools.

<comment><USER36> Not wealthy residents. Wealthy school districts. LAUSD spends substantially more than Palo Alto per student.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just open your own business (products or freelance) and move to Mexico to work remotely for US customers. Super cheap, better food, tropical climate. 90% of HN readers would be smart enough to do this and sustain themselves beautifully.

<comment> aaron-lebo Is that the same Mexico with 100k+ killed in the drug war since 2005? Maybe it's an unreasonable fear, but conducting business and sticking out as a foreigner seem like a risk.

<comment><USER38> I'm saying to conduct a 100% online us/eu based business. You get 6 months visa for Mexico anyway.

Get yourself an American style condo in Cancún and that's it. Mexico is not all uniformly violent, unlike US.

<comment><USER39> The violence seems avoidable but is bad Internet? I've heard its not so great down there.

<comment><USER40> No worse than the pitiful connections I had over the course of 7 years in Austin. American internet is not a high bar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What about Sacramento? The city is seeing more and more people moving to it, due to the warm climate and the location close to the Bay.

<comment><USER42> Sacramento has all of the disadvantages of living in California (high taxes, regulation, etc) but none of the advantages (great weather, scenery, awesome job market).

You mention the weather... Sacramento's is awful. The heat is unbearable.

You might as well just keep on 80 until you hit Reno.

<comment><USER31> >You might as well just keep on 80 until you hit Reno.

There's quite a few people who have done just that. I feel like every 3rd person in Reno is a California expat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I wouldn't have expected North Dakota, West Virginia, Idaho, or South Dakota..

"At The Pew Charitable Trusts, return on investment is not measured in profits but in long-lasting, positive, powerful change."

Is this one of those "philanthropic" tax dodges that very wealthy people put their money in?

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm from the Midwest, from the Cedar Rapids area, moved to Chicago, and I have to say I would NEVER EVER move back there.

People from these areas are extremely conservative and xenophobic.

The restaurants and any business you might frequent are of lower quality.

These cities are not world class cities. Claiming that they are is just ignorant. You end up trapped in a little bubble with nowhere to escape to, surrounded by boring white people.

There is NOTHING TO DO.

What if you want to go out on Friday night and see a rock show? Or get a decent dinner? I hope you like commuting to Chicago...

You will be surrounded by insurance salesmen with none of the diversity and vibrancy a larger city offer.

That is to say: These places have no culture. No diversity. They have nothing going on, nobody creating anything, no one performing anything. Just going about their little lives selling insurance.

Additionally: Their nature sucks. I hope you're fine with never hiking through any interesting terrain, going skiing, or rock climbing, or really doing any interesting outdoor activities. ( I guess hunting is popular? )

Also.. where are you going to work? I'm a software developer: Where am I going to work in Cedar Rapids, IA? Some insurance firm doing meaningless banking bullshit?

"But I moved there for my kids!"

What if your kid wants to start a rock band, or be a painter, or do anything creative or interesting? Or, what if they are extremely intelligent and want to progress through a decent, competitive school system?

I can answer this one from personal experience: They will be completely alone surrounded by mediocre, extremely homogeneous racially and otherwise, people with no community of peers driving each other forward.

There will be no friday-night rock shows, no musical culture in general, no museums or after-school clubs or protests to attend. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Nowhere to explore.

So, after all I've said: What's left to inspire you, or your kids, in these mediocre little cities?

So I guess if you're willing to do nothing and be nowhere and be nothing, wasting your days watching television, moving to a smaller city is a great bet. Personally, I'd rather live in a decent city than slouch though a mediocre one.

<comment><USER45> Oddly enough, I lived in Chicago most of my life and moved up the Bay Area. I'd be hard pressed to ever move back despite the network of family and friends there.

The weather is beyond awful. The crime rate is through the roof. Rents and house prices have gone through the roof, while comp has not. The city is broke and horribly corrupt.

Don't get me wrong... There's a lot of amazing things about Chicago and it will always have a place in my heart. And the food is indeed good (if leaning towards the super unhealthy and indulgent side). But I'd be hard-pressed to ever move back from my overpriced starter home in the Bay.

<comment><USER44> I agree with you, Chicago is brutal. I'm actually moving out west in a few months for the exact reasons you listed! But, as I said, I grew up in the rural midwest. I would caution people against considering it a cheap-land utopia.

Also, I would not equate moving to a small city in the midwest to moving to a small city in the Bay Area. You have at least a proximity to larger cities, and there is beautiful nature and weather to enjoy, along with better culture in general.</comment></comment></comment>


Who else prefers minimalist UIs like HN and (linked) the original Digg? - <AUTHOR> http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20041209040106/http://digg.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I've always loved content for content's sake, and seen design as a nice to have rather than an absolute necessity. HN is one of my favorite sites because it has highly targeted content, a large pool of contributors, and a wonderful forum of discussion.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is it enough to upvote this post if we agree, or must we comment and make our voices heard?

I love minimalist designs. And <you'll all kill me and downvote me for this one __cringe __> I hate javascript, most of the time. 99 times out of a hundred, javascript is used to make things "pretty" or "neat" or "flashy" or "cool" when all it does is make things slow and add bloat. I'm not saying it doesn't have its uses, but you REALLY DON'T need that 500kb library to move text around the screen or change an icon. But I'm a systems developer and I code in C and ASM, so what do I know about web development..

<comment><USER3> > I hate javascript, most of the time.

Yeah, I hate how easy and fast upvoting is on HN. It's almost...too fast.

<comment><USER2> Like I said, most of the time. No one is complaining that replies on HN aren't AJAX'd :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While the examples (HN and old Digg) are minimal, I also find them "un- refined". I prefer minimal and refined.

Like Delicious. Simple color palette, lots of white space, and no extraneous stuff like gradients, rounded corners, drop shadows, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a fan of minimalism, but I'd tend toward something of a middle ground.

e.g. in the case of old digg, I'd go for something that added color to headlines to more clearly separate articles, de-emphasized the category/posted-by line, and narrowed the summary column.

too-wide blocks of text, too-close bunches of paragraphs and too-strict hit- boxes for buttons are pretty common on 'minimalist' sites and those drive me absolutely crazy anymore.

Too-small fonts also used to bother me, but browsers have largely resolved that. So long as minimalist design plays well with dynamic font scaling, that doesn't bother me anymore.

</comment><comment><USER6> A lot of technical people love these kinds of UIs, but they can be unwelcoming to the average user on the web who might not be as technical or might be intimidated by the amount and presentation of the content, especially if it's mostly text.

</comment><comment><USER7> Mods: Please make sure that posts like this don't become common. Reddit has tons of "Does Anybody Else?" posts. They are a thinly veiled "Upvote if you like <some popular thing>". I'd hate to see the practice creep into HN...

</comment><comment><USER8> HN is a good example of how doing one thing very right (no clutter) can overshadow doing many things wrong/unsatisfactorily (no built in search, no instructions on how to use certain features...). Also Applies to a lot of Apple products

</comment><comment><USER9> This site's UI is basically perfect for my taste.

</comment><comment><USER10> Arguably anyone who uses Craigslist.

<comment><USER11> Not really a choice there - people use craigslist because that's where the people are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't prefer it all. I find the current digg UI to be most appealing.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like the UIs of HN and Craigslist much better than most sites.

</comment><comment><USER14> min deftnly

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not about minimal, it's about scope. I see HN as content-based system, where as, Digg and rest of the others went the route of social-based. The site where the content is the king, is still valuable versus the site where people are the king. There is a trade off with reputation of course, one has to first build the reputation and credibility before one can claim a solid content- based system.

If you recall, the problem started with Digg when people started gaming it. There were stories after stories of how people are gaming the system. This is when they first lost their credibility.

There is a fine line.</comment>


Nail Polish Bot - <AUTHOR> http://procedural-generation.tumblr.com/post/162985593328/nail-polish-bot-one-thing-that-immediately-sets <comment><USER2> i really like @brutal_exe</comment>


The Police Are Scanning the Faces of Every Single Person at Download - <AUTHOR> http://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/blog/download-festival-is-a-police-trial-ground-for-facial-recognition

<comment><USER2> Is this in any way legal? I'm almost totally convinced this sort of intrusion and violation of privacy without cause is totally beyond what the police are allowed to do, even with the current trends toward this sort of thing in the U.K.

</comment><comment><USER3> If one wanted to attend the festival without being subjected to facial recognition software, I might recommend masks from [http://www.urmesurveillance.com/](http://www.urmesurveillance.com/) or something similar. A number of sites selling "anti-facial-recognition" masks have opened in the last few years.</comment>


Jack Dorsey's two years as Twitter's CEO have not saved the company - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/10/4/16382954/jack-dorsey-twitter-ceo-progress-stock-tweets-140-video-live-users <comment> ajc-sorin A quick glance at Twitter's 2016 Annual report: 2016 Revenue: 2.5B 2015 Revenue: 2.2B 2014 Revenue: 1.4B 2013 Revenue: 660m

In the past 2 years, Revenue almost doubled. Over 700m gets spent on R&D each year - if they cut that they become profitable day 1.

The article says "by all metrics Twitter has failed," but only quoted the lagging (buy still positive) rate of new users and declining stock price.

The may have missed opportunities, but to say Twitter "failed" or "Doesn't have a business model" is ignorant of the financial facts: Twitter could cut R&D investment, stop acquiring companies or building features and have a return on assets almost 50% greater than Facebook's. Twitter may not be as 'profitable' as Facebook, but it sure as hell uses its assets better.

It does seem like Twitter is starting to reach an upward cap on its virality. If management doubles down on making a well-oiled machine instead of trying to be the next Facebook, they could be a great dividend investment. This isn't sexy, but it's definitely an enviable position.

</comment><comment><USER2> I think I've said this more than a few times now but TWTR and SNAP are very similar stocks.

Great ides, great management but very poor businesses. It's just too bad for SNAP that TWTR came first and wall street learned quickly and applied the lessons learned from TWTR to SNAP.

Both companies are moving sideways now in terms of stock prices as almost no one thinks they are going to turn into great businesses but they also have huge markets and no one wants to miss out on the odd chance that they finally figure out a business model.

I think they both have to find a way to segregate their own users into appropriate bins such that each bin doesn't have to associate with the others. I mean I use TWTR mostly for news sources for work, and personal and don't care about mixing the two.

Tweetdeck is one example of such binning that makes TWTR so much better than the default view that it really surprises me that its' not the default view.

I think the probe is that the advertising model like Google and Facebook use just isn't going to work well with Twitter. I can't think of a single add that they could server me that I'd have any interest in at all.

That's why I was excited by moves like streaming NFL games, that's something I would pay for and a revenue model that might work.

The fact that TWTR has been around for this long and still hasn't figured out a viable business model falls squarely on management and is a very good indication of just how poorly they have performed at their job.

They have to get this figured out or the money will walk away and someone else will buy them at terms that aren't going to be very fun for the existing shareholders and employees.

<comment><USER3> I am of the opinion that Twitter can't be monetized. If this were 30 years ago, twitter would be a technical standard/protocol like email (SMTP), not a private company, that anyone could implement and run a service off of.

Twitter (read: tweeting) is just another facet of human communication. You can't monetize it just like you can't monetize _writing_ or _speaking_ or _emailing_. If you try to, people navigate around it. Charge for tweets? Dead service, new one pops up that does the same thing. Can't get enough advertising dollars because the content is unpredictable. Can't get big advertising promotions because big money doesn't want to be seen next to racist tweets.

In short, twitter has a humanity problem.

<comment><USER4> Twitter made $574 million revenue last quarter. Clearly their is some demand for their monetization strategies. The problem is that their costs are so high; they lost $174m. Perhaps the real issue with twitter is inflated staff, overengineering, and excessive compute costs.

<comment><USER3> Could you imagine if one company tried to control and monetize _writing_? Your costs would be astronomical too! They need all those staff, and probably more, because controlling billions of people's communication style takes aallloottt of work.

<comment><USER5> Not just communication style. They police content, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IMHO, the problem with Twitter is that they haven't adequately embraced the noise. I think that's what really sets twitter apart from other big social products like Facebook and Instagram. It's the ceaseless cacophony of information flying by in real time. Their efforts to make sense of it somehow manage to feel slow, and yet also too superficial. I have assumed this is due to a confused attempt to incorporate marketing/advertising into the platform.

They should embrace the waves of human sentiment by giving users a way to ride it, and selling customers a way to follow it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I feel like media companies (like recode, cnn) are really going after social tech companies (like twitter, facebook) right now.

<comment><USER8> Given what social media companies have done to their businesses, are you surprised? A larger and larger amount of the population gets their news from social networking sites rather than media organisations nowadays. Stuff like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the biggest 'competitors' the likes of CNN have nowadays.

<comment><USER7> I'm not really surprised, but I also don't really understand the comparison. Facebook/Twitter distribute news, they don't create it.

<comment><USER8> Not directly. But their users create and post news, and for a decent percentage of the population, said users are more reliable/better quality than mainstream media organisations. This is especially true with specialist accounts on Twitter, which can be better news sources than proper websites.

So in the same way that gaming sites are now often losing to YouTube channels and Twitch streamers as a source of news/reviews/opinions, the media is losing to individuals sharing their stories online.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


China's Position on the China-US Economic and Trade Consultations - ezequiel-garzon http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-06/02/c_138110404.htm <comment><AUTHOR> .doc? Is this some kind of joke? A poorly disguised hack?</comment>


PornGate: What could a determined small ISP do? - <AUTHOR> http://revk.www.me.uk/2013/08/what-could-determined-small-isp-do.html <comment><USER2> The other option is to offer the same shitty filtering that everyone else is offering, with a big simple

        [ ]ON
        [x]OFF

option, and with links to sites offering information about democratic representation.

As always, people in the UK have left it far too late to do anything so we're stuck with yet another stupid pointless law.

</comment><comment><USER3> An ISP is in an ideal position to coordinate resistance to censorship. Everyone using your service to provide content should be able to opt-in to being a proxy for all other content. Then censors get to select between allowing all content, no objector's content or attempt to filter too high in the stack and/or violate copyright.

<comment><USER4> As I understand it, currently it's only the major UK ISPs offering this filtering, and they're doing so only as a result of political pressure rather than primary legislation. The big guys like BT, Sky, Virgin, etc, are just too scared of a bit of bad press or being called out by a politician, hence their craven (but voluntary) adoption of these suggestions.

There are plenty of smaller ISPs around and few of them are remotely interested in joining the filter party. There's no reason for them to do so if they don't wish to. At least currently. There's nothing to say that at some point in the future a new "crackdown" won't be announced by a politician looking for an easy headline and their face in the papers.

Thin end of the wedge, obviously - but currently these filters are entirely optional, both for ISPs and end-users.

<comment><USER5> BT, Sky and Virgin are also broadcasters. I wonder if their bending over for the government has something to do with their desire to retain their government granted licenses to remain broadcasters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> eriksank, you seem to be hellbanned.</comment>


Canonical/Yahoo revenue deal; Yahoo is the new Ubuntu search default - <AUTHOR> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2010-January/030065.html

<comment><USER3> The competitive landscape on search/browsers/os/user-engagement is getting fascinating:

Mozilla, who doesn't have an operating system/distribution and therefore isn't the last team to touch an app, has a revenue distribution deal with Google by making them the default search engine of the firefox browser, which has a 25th percentage or so share of the browser market.

Said Revenue Sharing deal, is now being undercut by Canonical, the Operating System Vendor, that uses the Firefox Browser, but who has now entered a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo, who uses Bing! as their search back-end. Bing! of course, is owned by the company that Canonical seeks to upend with its 2-3% market share in the Operating System Market. I wonder how Mozilla will feel about their "Branded" firefox browser having it's search engine (and revenue) reprogrammed to point at Yahoo by default? I wonder if they'll force Canonical into switching over to Ice Weasel?

Google, has decided to create their own browser, and is now working on their own OS (a linux distro). Google has the ability to do a full stack integration (OS/Browser/Search) - But is weak in everything but Search in terms of market share.

Apple, meanwhile, who has a both a Operating System, and Browser, and is now becoming increasingly competitive with Google, may be turning to Bing! for a revenue sharing deal on the browser. Apple has no search engine, has some (but not overpowering) share in the browser/OS market.

Finally, there is Microsoft, who, continues to move along with Dominant Operating System and Browser share, and, slowly, increasing their small share (in the teens) of search (though mostly at the cost of Yahoo).

<comment><USER4> If Microsoft were to announce tomorrow that they were shipping Windows with a copy of Firefox, but the default search engine was Bing, what would the reaction be?

<comment><USER5> Interestingly, it'd probably decimate Firefox since MS would no doubt feel no need to do a revenue share with Mozilla and Firefox users would feel no need to download a virgin Firefox, thus destroying Firefox's revenue stream.

<comment><USER6> Or Mozilla could revoke Microsoft's use of their trademarks, thus creating "Microsoft IceWeasel", a program I don't believe anyone would consider using. (Or they could brand it as IE9—but then people _would_ keep downloading Firefox, just to avoid the now stigma-saturated IE brand.)

<comment><USER7> Actually as long as Microsoft doesn't modify the program, isn't it the case that Mozilla can't revoke their ability to distribute it? It's released under the GPL isn't it? I guess that opens the question of whether a change in the configuration is a derivative work or just a compatibility change. I'm not a lawyer, though, it's above my pay grade.

Actually it's not. If Canonical can do it, I guess Microsoft ought to be able to as well.

<comment><USER8> This is precisely the problem that created Ice Weasel.

The code is open source, but the name "Firefox" is trademarked. The two are distinct.

<comment><USER9> Ice Weasel is a Firefox modified by Debian maintainers.

It's actually a good thing that they couldn't use the Firefox trademark ... since its rendering has been broken since a year ago when I first installed it (some problem related to Cairo or something like that) ... while Firefox downloaded from the official website worked fine.

Not to mention that a lot of people get tricked into buying open-source software through various shareware websites, and the big problem with such services would be that browsers like Firefox get "enhanced" with spyware abilities, while branded as "Firefox". Such actions diminish the trust of users in the brand, so Mozilla has to have a way to prevent that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So obviously only for the money. Seriously, Ubuntu users -- people who willingly changed their operating system to get away from a crap product -- are not the same people who would choose Yahoo search over Google search. Good for Canonical to make some money (so long as that means more Ubuntu), but lame.

<comment><USER11> I am a Linux user and I routinely choose Yahoo search over Google search. The primary reason for me to switch was that Google insists on sending me to their German variant of search results.

At the moment it has become quite convenient: if I want to search in English (most of the time), I use Yahoo, if I need German results, I just switch to Google with the said two clicks in "Chrome".

<comment><USER12> I realize you probably already know this, and perhaps even don't need this, but I often use <http://google.com/ncr>. The "/ncr" bit ensures that no localization redirection is done.

(At least with regards to the language for the UI and search results. I don't know if advertising is adjusted.)

<comment><USER11> I just wanted to try this with blocked cookies, and it seems FireFox doesn't even have the block cookies option anymore :-( Or I couldn't find it atm. I suspect it wouldn't work without cookies?

Anyway, I used to block Google cookies but I have become lazy. Still, how would I configure the /ncr in the FF search field ("Chrome")? Overall I take it Google doesn't really want me as a customer, so whatever.

<comment><USER12> I guess they use cookies, yes.

Personally I'm an opera fan, so I haven't tried getting it to work but a quick search brought up: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/51000>, <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12625> and <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11551> as plug-is. As for blocking cookies there are several options.

<comment><USER11> I've looked at those plugins a while ago, too. But then I wasn't sure if they don't do too much, that is, limit to english (or even US) results. I just want a general search - if the German result is better, give me the German result.

I would have to look further into the workings of Google to understand that, but as I said: why should I invest the time? They shouldn't be forwarding me to German Google without my explicit desire to do so (which I would state by visiting google.de instead of google.com).

Also, I don't like to install plugins in general - who knows who made them and if they are safe. So why risk it? Using Yahoo! seems the cheaper course of action for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how much money they'll really get out of this. Even Ubuntu, the most user-friendly Linux (and please don't try to argue otherwise; that's not the point of this comment. Pretend I said "a very user-friendly Linux" if you have to), draws a pretty tech-savvy audience. I think the vast majority will make at most one search with Yahoo, realize they're using an inferior search engine, and then switch.

<comment><USER14> I think that the predominance of 'tech savvy' users in Linux (especially ubuntu) will change soon.

This is only an anecdote, but when I whip out my ubuntu laptop, people don't say 'what's that' anymore, they say 'cool ubuntu, how is it?'

Up until fairly recently you had to hack around with text files in shell in order to set up simple things like multiple monitors and proper sound support.

That sort of stuff got a lot better with version 8, and with the current version, 9.10 i'd say that using Ubuntu is as easy as using windows (possibly easier).

The only barrier currently is 'can i buy an OS disk in the store', and 'can I get a computer with it pre-installed'.

<comment><USER7> Maybe. People have been thinking (wishing?) that the makeup would change, but that people believe Linux is close in usability to Windows or Mac is actually a barrier to that happening. And there's the whole "this probably doesn't work economically-speaking" thing.

> people don't say 'what's that' anymore, they say 'cool ubuntu, how is it?'

You and I must know different people. ;)

I know that it's the dream that Linux will one day be predominant, but I've been hearing about how Ubuntu is going to change the landscape since 2006 when I started using it and it hasn't happened yet, nor is there any strong evidence that a trend is starting.

<comment><USER14> Are you indicating that my belief that Ubuntu is close to the usability of Mac or Windows is false, or that being easy to use is a problem?

Ubuntu certainly is very easy to use, Linux as a whole is not.

<comment><USER7> > Are you indicating that my belief that Ubuntu is close to the usability of > Mac or Windows is false, or that being easy to use is a problem?

The former, of course. Being easy to use is wonderful and important. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think it's an accident that this announcement comes far away enough from the next release for there to be time for Google to make them a better offer. Even if that doesn't happen in the next release, this may be Canonical's way of showing their hand.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not while Yahoo! actively collaborate with the Mainland Chinese Government to imprison Hong Kong citizens without even the courtesy of a warrant request - <USER2> could not look my grandchildren in the eye - I call them out as collaborators and frankly they should be shot or at least interned without trial - Yahoo are dead to me.

</comment><comment><USER7> Solidifying my view that advertising is a plague, and it must be destroyed. It is the causal agent in so many anti-consumer decisions. Google or Yahoo or Microsoft or any of their agents (e.g. Canonical) need only do well enough not to piss off their current subscribers. To the extent that they manage that, they can encrappen their product with incorrect or useless shit in order to bring more revenue. You will get much better results if you pay for quality.

It kind of makes me embarrassed to work for one of those companies I decried. At least I can rationalize it by noting that our results are the best and we're really bribing other actors to not make decisions that harm their users.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm surprised by this, given Google and Ubuntu's previous relationship with Goobuntu.

Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but Google and Canonical do appear to have had some form of commercial relationship.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ubuntu users hopefully are savvy enough to change the default search engine, one funky thing about firefox and ubuntu is that an extension is installed by default and can only be disable not removed by most users.

</comment><comment><USER18> How does this help the users? Canonical is selling their user base to yahoo at the cost of user experience. This is kinda disappointing and shady.

<comment><USER19> You're assuming everyone is better off with Google as a default search engine. Seems like a pretty strong assumption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if they considered Bing. In a few years, that's what it will be, just with sanitary purple branding to keep people's heads from exploding.

</comment><comment><USER21> Noooo :(

</comment><comment><USER22> If it's making Canonical some money, that's great. It is easy enough to change the defaults to whatever you want after you install. It's a shame they couldn't cut a deal with a search engine that's actually useful, like Bing, though.

<comment><USER4> Well, it's a rev share, so it won't make them any money if you switch back to Google.

<comment><USER22> Yes, and that's why it's a shame.

I realize my message above was a little too cheeky and deserves the downvotes, but it's a legitimate concern. I want Canonical to have a firm financial footing, and I don't think this will help much.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there any benefit to having a professional Twitter account? - <AUTHOR> I am new to the industry and I have yet to join an online development community. I do not have social media accounts because I am a recovering information addict. Lately though, I have been feeling like I am missing out on the latest news, trends and discussions that could have given me useful professional insights. Is it just my fomo or having a twitter can in fact make me a better well-informed developer? Is being a part of the professional twitter community worth the hustle of having to filter out all that distracting twitter noise? <comment><USER2> I think it depends entirely on what you want from it. I utilise social media professionally, and my articles on LinkedIn have certainly opened some doors. Among the most noticeably was when I was awarded the great honour of working on a few of our national strategies for digitalisation. Social media can certainly do that, and beyond influence it can also make you an attractive hire.

I don't think I've ever had a conversation without underlying motives on any social media platform that puts your name one it though. People are always pushing some agenda, and that's perfectly fine, if that's what you're there for. We often get involved, buy products or hire people partly because of networking through social media ourselves. So I think social media can serve a purpose professionally.

I don't think there is a lot of value in social media when it comes to getting inspired though, and the shorter the format the worse it gets. It's certainly a great platform for FOMO, have you learned Rust yet? Heh, but in terms of real world value I think it almost always falls short. Take the Rust hype, it's probably a really great language, but I haven't seen a single Rust job pop-up on any job-agent for my entire country in 2019. Which means the hype and talk around Rust is relatively useless for most developers. In those cases I think it's much better to turn your FOMO into JOMO and just work on things that interest you.

Hell, even when you're successful professionally with Social Media, it is mostly standing at the box in speakers corner. No one really listens unless you say something they can benefit from by retweeting.

<comment><AUTHOR> > it depends entirely on what you want from it

The biggest appeal of twitter for me is being able to get insights into the technologies of my interest from the very people that develop and maintain them. Many of those developers, however, do not have the time or willingness to run a blog. And twitter, due to its short and straightforward format, is where they can easily engage in discussions and express opinions, from which I, the lurker, can extract applicable knowledge. The down side is that the same twitter format encourages the quantity-over-quality attitude, which results in me, the lurker, having to dig through layers of idle talk, announcements, and retweets.

> the shorter the format the worse it gets

I tried looking into longer-format platforms, namely medium, but much of the content there is either surface-level or does not instill confidence in its credibility.

Anyway, thanks for the great reply, it has certainly helped me build a clearer picture of what to expect, should I decide to join twitter. I guess, I should just stick to HN without needlessly dispersing my focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Is being a part of the professional twitter community worth the hustle of > having to filter out all that distracting twitter noise?

Not really. My biggest piece of advice: never tweet.

With Twitter becoming a social commentary behemoth, all it takes is posting the wrong thing to have a mob after you.

I have an account for reading and posting things related to my work. I never make personal posts because, frankly, who cares?</comment>


126.96.36.199 might lead to slower CDN performance - <AUTHOR> https://www.sajalkayan.com/post/cloudflare-1dot1dot1dot1.html <comment><USER2> What is wrong with just running your own instance of Bind9? According to the test on IsMyDnsFast.com it indicates that it is "fast" with the green yes button. DNS resolution on my linux boxes usually take only a couple miliseconds. 35 miliseconds on the mac for some reason. Installing Bind9 isn't as scary as it sounds.

<comment><AUTHOR> I currently run my own (DNSSEC validating) Bind. But it has some drawbacks. For occasionally visited sites/tlds, my bind would need to contact root more often than if using a shared resolver.</comment></comment>


How Twitter deploys its widgets JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/2016/how-twitter-deploys-its-widgets-javascript <comment><USER2> "Many bugs manifest themselves during deploys, especially when there are a large number of code changes."

I'm intrigued by this hole in the process. At Twitter scale, how is it that these bugs make it past testing, QA, CI, and staging?

I know the Dijkstra quote[1], but still: Twitter AFAIK has as organized and talented a code practice as any company of that size needs in order to do _any_ programming and maintenance, and still they get the kinds of problems that even freelance clients gripe about costing them thousand$/hour. I also realize that I'm playing a little No True Scotsman here, but again: still.

1\. [http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edsgerdijk201165....](http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/e/edsgerdijk201165.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do they clean up and minify first?

The devs at Pinterest and TripAdvisor are jerks about this. Try following this one:

        <script src="https://www.jscache.com/wejs?wtype=certificateOfExcellence&uniq=847&locationId=307144&lang=en_US&year=2016&display_version=2"></script>

After the redirects, they serve you a file that is unminified and with 20% comments. I'm not sure if the engineers at these places hate their users, or are just incompetent.

EDIT:

They do: [http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js](http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js)

<comment><USER4> While not minifying is a bit unprofessional, I'm not sure wasting 1.4 KB counts as "hating your users" in this world of large retina images.

<comment><USER3> > "hating your users"

You're right, I went to far. Not hatred, disregard and carelessness. Contempt maybe.

It would take them a couple of hours at most (testing included) to add minification to their build process if they have one (a this stage, one can't be too sure since they don't follow basic web dev best-practice).

> 1.4 KB

That is for one badge. This is even more madness; they make you download the same js file from a different URL for each badge you want to display. Resorts like to show as many badges as they have to show that they've been highly ranked for a long time. A client of mine who wants to show her little resort has been the topped rank in her area for the past five years has to add 7KB of JS to do it.

> This world of large retina images

Not outside the first world, and tripadvisor is a global company supporting multinationals and tiny little 2-hut resorts alike. It's very likely they made the same assumptions that you did... which is basically my point... that they have no respect for their users (resorts and web devs). A little internet cafe in Timbuktu doesn't have 7KB of data to waste.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have recently come across a bug in relation to this particular javascript widget. Once they dropped the requirement for widget IDs here:

[https://blog.twitter.com/2016/embedding-twitter-timelines- ju...](https://blog.twitter.com/2016/embedding-twitter-timelines-just-got-a- lot-easier)

Widgets no longer worked. So basically if you had widget IDs on data elements in HTML, the code no longer executed. Forced upgrade of the frontend code to match the JS requirements.

</comment><comment><USER6> How does this work along with browser caches ?

<comment><USER7> Cache-control headers. Browsers won't cache indefinitely unless you ask them to.

<comment><USER8> Am I insane or are cache-control headers unreliable? I always set cache- control: no-cache on my S3 files but still get complaints about people getting old versions with broken pages as result.

<comment><USER9> I don't rely on them. We set query parameters on new JS code to definitively bust caches.

src="foo.js?v=1", then src="foo.js?v=2", etc.

I'm sure people consider this a hack, so I'm open to hearing other suggestions.

<comment><USER10> It's not a hack at all for resources you control - in fact, it's encouraged to do so in order to use very long lived Expires headers while still being able to deploy new versions of your app.

It doesn't work for unversioned library code though where you want to automatically upgrade all users of your code as is the case with Twitter it looks like.

<comment><USER11> Problem with these is that many caching proxies consider all resources with a query string to be dynamically generated and won't cache them at all, which in the case of js/css/etc is bad

<comment><USER10> Sure, but that's easily solvable by versioning assets in the filename itself. That's how the `filerev` task works for both Grunt and Gulp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You can no longer embed their widgets on platforms that allow iframes but not script tags, like most learning management systems.

</comment><comment><USER13> This has now been posted 5 times: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blog.twitter.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blog.twitter.com)

<comment><USER14> But not discussed yet, so the reposts are ok. Please see [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

(We do say a 'small number' of reposts, which 5 is probably over, but not that much over.)

<comment><USER15> Probably because no one cares.

<comment><USER14> That probably underestimates the randomness of what gets noticed here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>