How Josh James built Omniture into a powerhouse & sold it to Adobe for $1.8b - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100301/how-i-did-it-omnitures-josh-james.html

<comment><USER2> _So we bought a 10-minute spot for $15,000 at a trade show. We had this sales guy say, "Everyone stand up, because we are going to play rock, paper, scissors. And the winner gets a Hummer. But instead of saying 'rock, paper, scissors,' we're going to say 'Om-ni-ture.' " So you got 1,500 people chanting "Om-ni-ture." Ever since that day, there really haven't been any RFPs that we didn't get an invite to._

Simply brilliant.

<comment><USER3> Looks like Josh James and Omniture does not forget its roots.

"World's Largest Rock, Paper, Scissors Contest Promotes Entrepreneurship"

"In an effort to promote entrepreneurship and raise money for charity, the BYU Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization hosted its 2nd annual Omniture Throwdown - the world's largest rock, paper, scissors tournament...

So when the club's director of membership services, Derek Pando, came up with the idea for a giant Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament, as crazy as it sounded, they decided to go for it...

As an additional way of promoting entrepreneurship, the competition was sponsored by Omniture, a leading provider of online business optimization software, which was co-founded by a former BYU CEO president, Josh James."

<http://marriottschool.byu.edu/news/release.cfm?article=383>

<http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,660209736,00.html>

<comment><USER4> He comes out to speak to us students on campus at BYU all the time. He brings a big-crowd because he's very authentic. Even though he's worth like $300 Million, he's very down to earth and real, which I think draws people to him. Here's one of his talks: [http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james- december...](http://byuebusiness.blogspot.com/2009/12/josh-james- december-8-2009.html)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for posting that video. That was 50 minutes of my time well spent.

<comment><USER3> I just watched the video. Excellent! Thanks for the thumbs up review. Here's a few nuggets (it's worth the entire 50 minutes and rewatching):

For three years, Omniture was the fastest growing software company in the world. And the 22nd to ever reach a billion total in sales.

"I think one of the problems that you see with..I've invested in a bunch of companies - it's really quite... appalling's not really the right word - that's being overly judgmental - it's interesting to me the number of people who don't understand and focus in on... Revenue Revenue Revenue. Like who cares if the desk isn't put together. Who cares if you don't have time to call that person back. Who cares if that persons mad about that and they want talk about it and they want to sit down and talk about when they get health care. Who cares if that guy wants to go to a Chamber of Commerce of Meeting. All that really matters is that you sell some stuff.

In 2002 we had a bunch of people we fired and they were saying really untrue stuff about us in the valley. It's a small valley. We were just a $4M business - who cares about a $4M business - investors don't. We were saying 'you know we would never do it - you guys know us but you know it was he says, she says. But you know what, the day of reckoning must come. You just build the business. The credibility comes with the quality of business. Then they realize that the stuff you were saying was true.

A lot of people when they start a business are worrying about way too many things other than sales. And that's really all that matters in the business is a sale. And if you can't get a sale, then you go back and fix the product. And as soon as it's minimally good enough to sell, then you sell it."

Another one: He would have a single meeting in SF and he would go and buy 15 books on marketing, branding, guerilla marketing - and find 5 after 10 min. sucked, 5 had a good chapter and 5 he read cover to cover. That is how he learned to build his confidence when going into big meetings "That idea is stupid.. well, Coca Cola didn't think so (snap!)"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love this quote:

      There were times when I lay down on the floor
      at night, close to crying, and said, "I'm done.
      I can't make payroll." Then my wife would come
      over and kick me and say, "Get up and figure it out."

<comment><USER6> That woman is gold.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _"Adobe wasn't the obvious match, but it was the one that was willing to spend the most money, and that's really all that matters._

 _In the last 13 years, I never had to go to a meeting internally that I didn't want to. Now there are meetings I have to go to. It's part of working for somebody else."_

Those last few paragraphs sound a little, I don't know, apologetic? Resentful?

<comment><USER7> Trust me, once you get bought out, the transition to "someone else runs the show now" is _super_ painful. Even if you are just an employee. _Especially_ if you were the founder.

Getting a buyout like Omnitures is the goal, but it really does feel like selling your soul when it happens. What once made sense and was fun, suddenly is run by clowns and is drudgery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If this was on Mixergy, the title would have been: "How a college dropout built Omniture into a powerhouse & sold it to Adobe for $1.8b"

Doesn't that read better?

All kidding aside, I've got to interview this guy.

<comment><USER4> I can put you in touch with his assistant. Email me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "My customers don't want to give all of their data to Google. So you say "Google Analytics," and I say "cost of free." "

This is a really important point to understand.

</comment><comment><USER9> A great interview but not only that.. a great _format_ too. The way Inc presented this is awesome for those of us with focus issues :-) I'd love to see more articles distilled into such a form.

<comment><USER10> You know, that _is_ a great format. I had to think for a few minutes what's going on. They just print his answers, and leave the questions out. It works amazingly well.</comment></comment>


An old Macintosh IIci 25Mhz running Apache under NetBSD - <AUTHOR> http://littledork.err0neous.org <comment><USER2> It's quite amusing that this seems interesting today. Apache works on really old, slow hardware quite well. E.g. here's Apache, MySQL and PHP for AmigaOS: [http://www.amigaos.net/software/77/aamp-apache-mysql- php](http://www.amigaos.net/software/77/aamp-apache-mysql-php)

My first job was an ISP I co-founded. In retrospect, the biggest mistake we did was over-investing in hardware, by buying two 120MHz Pentium servers when we could have gotten away with 486's and a leased Cisco access server or two.

But those two 120MHz Pentium servers with 128MB a piece, between them served up dozens of corporate websites, handled 32 dialup connections (we had a horrific setup with Cyclades serial port multipliers wired up onto a large wooden board with US Robotics Sportster modems wall mounted - the Sportster were cheap consumer grade modems prone to overheating, so stacking them in any way was generally a bad idea), ran a NNTP server with 30,000 USENET groups, mail for all our customers, and shell access.

We got 5-6 25Mhz or 33MHz 486's with 16MB RAM to use as X servers, and ran all the clients (Emacs, Netscape and a bunch of terminals was a typical session) on the two Pentiums.

<comment><USER3> Funny, my 2nd job was as employee #1 for a local ISP. We had a very similar arrangement (USR modems and all) for dial-in until we financed out and bought proper hardware, I wish I could remember the details. We hosted something like 3000 users, all their websites, shell access, Usenet, everything off of just 2 or 3 Pentiums with even fewer specs than what you describe. Everything ran quite well. We even ran a couple very high volume corporate websites for some rather famous television shows of the time off of this arrangement.

I'd point out that it appears even a high volume site like HN hasn't knocked this ancient system offline.

It drives me nuts when I read about figuring out how to handle some couple hundred requests a second on racks full of modern hardware with _Gigabytes_ of RAM. Any clearance bin laptop you can buy at Costco should be able to handle thousands to tens-of-thousands of requests per second. We're clearly doing something wrong these days.

<comment><USER2> The thing is, so much was static. It's easy to shuffle bytes.

There are a few problems: People don't know or care about profiling the basic stuff like context switches and data copies; people don't have a baseline idea of what _should_ be possible; abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions even when it complicates the code.

One of my biggest pet peeves in that respect is that people tend to not even know how many objects they create in many dynamic languages. Many people don't even know of any simple ways of finding out.

My most successful application speedup (EDIT: measured in speedup per hour expended - plenty of examples of much greater speedups, but they are rarely as quick) was spending an afternoon eliminating string copies in a late 90's CMS written in C++, and cutting page generation time by 30% in a system that was already heavily optimized (it provided a statically typed C++ like scripting language that was bytecode compiled at a time when most competing solutions were using horribly inefficient interpreters, and were often themselves written in slow intepreted languages).

My second biggest pet peeve is when people think system calls are cheap because they look like function calls. Sometimes you can increase throughput by an order of magnitude just by eliminating small read()'s (non-blocking filling of userspace buffer instead, and "read" from that). When I see slow throughput, the first thing I do is break out "strace" to look for unnecessary system calls...

But these problems are often a direct result of abstractions that means huge numbers of developers don't know or understand the cost of a lot of the functionality they depend on any more, and can get away with that "too often" because they work on hardware that is so fast it is extremely forgiving (e.g. my new "weird unknown Chinese brand" 8-core phone does about 10 times as many instructions per second as my ISPs total computing capacity in 1995, and it's nowhere near the peak performance of todays flagship phones), ignoring the fact that at "web scale", things are not as forgiving any more: server costs quickly start adding up.

But of course, most of us most of the time work on stuff that needs to handle little enough traffic that paying an extra $20k for hardware is cheaper than spending the developer time to optimize this stuff. Ironically this makes the optimization more expensive: Fewer developers ever get to obtain the experience to optimize this stuff at scale.

<comment><USER3> >My most successful application speedup ever... > people tend to not even know how many objects they create in many dynamic languages

One of my biggest speedup success stories was an internal inventory reporting tool for a large-ish online retailer. The code was written in Perl, with huge amounts of data aggregation happening in memory and using loads of Perl hashes pointing to other Perl hashes point to others (and turtles all the way down). On small subsets of the data, it would run for 4 or 5 hours then spit out some graphs -- this was acceptable performance for daily reports. But as the site grew, it started taking 8 hours, then 10 hours and then finally crashing when the system simply ran out of memory.

So I did a simple conversion, all the hashes pointing to hashes etc. into arrays pointing to arrays. Pretty simple in the code, only a few lines of code here and there and a couple functions to map hash keys into array indexes.

The next day the entire inventory system did a run (with this one change) and finished in 10 minutes and AFAIK they still use that same system even though the site and user activity has grown a hundredfold.

The developer (self-taught) of the original code asked why this worked. I walked him through the big-O complexity of arrays vs. hashes, and more importantly the amount of stuff the hash type was dragging around through memory. There used to be a fantastic site with visualizations of all the perl datatypes and we sat down and started counting bytes until he understood the difference.

<comment><USER4> It's excellent that you'd do that for him, and he was curious/receptive enough to ask and step through it all. So many times I've seen people stay ignorant to save face.

<comment><USER3> He's a great guy, really open minded and always learning. He taught me tons also, and he's moved far beyond where I could ever hope to technically.

<comment><USER5> You sound sane and very competent, what on earth is that guy doing today?

<comment><USER3> He works as a department head for a commercial tech contracting company. Not too sexy, but they get free beer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this a "load test"? It's certainly handling it quite well! Performance of the CPU is ~9 Dhrystone MIPS - comparable to a 33MHz 386 (9.9 DMIPS). Serving static content is really not CPU-intensive; most of the computation would probably be in TCP/IP processing. I think this, and other examples of old hardware commonly thought to be too slow for anything but still doing something useful, shows that much of the software we use today is really vastly less efficient than what's theoretically possible. I.e. how to make use of limited computing power efficiently can be more important than how much of it there is.

For comparison, here is a static site served by a machine with a _4MHz_ custom CPU: [http://www.magic-1.org/](http://www.magic-1.org/) (more details at [http://www.homebrewcpu.com/](http://www.homebrewcpu.com/) )

</comment><comment><USER7> This thread is going to contain a lot people complaining that even though today's hardware is orders of magnitude more powerful than twenty years ago, our computers seem to be just as slow.

<comment><USER8> I worked in a college lab full of Mac IIcis, and they felt ridiculously slow even back then. :) I think people's memories get funny and they forget that it took minutes to launch programs and you could even watch the windows redraw.

<comment><USER9> I remember setting up a IIci with a fast scsi drive and system 6. It booted in about 5 seconds. I don't think anything I've seen has come close to that fast until the era of SSDs.

Later, when I got my first DSL line, I had a different cast off IIci running netbsd doing NAT for my little network. That would have been 1997 or so, 640k symmetric, I think the IIci had 24 megs of memory or so. Old and slow at the time, but less powerful than this one.

<comment><USER8> IIcis had some sort of onboard video which made them feel sluggish compared to similar Macs. We retrofitted them with cache cards (?) which helped a little. But, yep, very slow disks, System 7, and they IIRC had 4MB of memory. (24MB would have been an unimaginable luxury.)

<comment><USER9> Yep, ci's had onboard video, the cx didn't. I think that they were the first color/030 machines with onboard video.

They always seemed fast to me, because I bought a Mac SE just before the classic/lc/si came out. That was when Apple did a massive sales push on campus in late August/early Sept, and announced new machines in October.

<comment><USER8> It was an era where you could "feel" things like a few CPU Mhz or a 32KB cache upgrade. And you had to pay hundreds or thousands for those little upgrades, so it had to be worth it.

I stuck with a IIfx until Windows 95 came out, and learned that the little things (e.g. disk and video) to some extent matter more than the big things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first Unix machine I used had 2 megabytes of RAM and was connected to two dozen terminals serial. It ran on a 68020. It probably wouldn't be able to run Apache, but it ran all our accounting and managed production for a large-ish corrugated paper factory.

A Mac IIci is ridiculously powerful in comparison.

<comment><USER2> A 68020 can run Apache just fine. A 68030 is only about 20% faster per cycle on a lot of stuff than a 68020.

Of course, with two dozen terminals active, things does change a bit...

<comment><USER11> The advantage the 68030 has is the PMMU. I don't think you can use virtual memory on a 68020.

My first Linux machine was a IIsi, the little-brother to the IIci. But I had to put NetBSD on it because the Linux keyboard driver was broken.

<comment><USER12> You can use virtual memory on the 68020, but you need a 68851 between the 68020 and memory. The 68851 is an MMU coprocessor, like the 68881/68882 is a floating-point coprocessor.

<comment><USER13> Or you could roll your own MMU for the 68020, like Sun and Apollo did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had a Commodore 64 with GEOS as a kid. It always amazes me what you can do without umpteen gazillioplex levels of abstraction.

<comment><USER2> Including surfing the web: [http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics- rock/surf-the-web-...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics-rock/surf- the-web-on-your-commodore-64/)

And some people have run web servers on C64's too.

Contiki OS runs on C64 and provides a full TCP/IP stack for the C64 as well as a simple browser: [http://www.contiki-os.org/](http://www.contiki-os.org/) (This site will apparently create a customized image: [http://contiki.cbm8bit.com/](http://contiki.cbm8bit.com/))

<comment><USER15> There used to be a quite persistent website hosted from a C64 running Contiki. The pages were probably cached in RAM, but I still like to imagine that a beige 1541 disk drive spun up every time someone made a request.

<comment><USER16> Or one of those weird cassette systems that I vaguely remember struggling with.

<comment><USER2> The thing preventing that is that the C64 "Datasette" couldn't trigger play/rewind/fast forward from software, so it'd require it to show a prompt to the operator for each file it needed to load... Someone should hack together an interface - the C64 has usable extra IO pins on the cartridge port that surely should be possible to hook up to them.

From a very cursory look at a diagram, it might actually be possible (don't know about safe) to hook the input that normally comes from the play/rewind etc. switch straight to suitable pins on the user port (or you may fry something, but the C64 is remarkably resilient to crazy people like me soldering stuff straight onto the PCB without knowing quite what we're doing, or replacing IC's with "mostly the same but not 100% compatible chips" just to see what would happen... it's a wonder I never broken my C64's)

<comment><USER17> Perhaps you could use a continuous loop of tape and just wait for the page you want to come around. A bit like how teletext broadcasts work.

<comment><USER2> Serve up a "Please wait, your page will load in 10 minutes" interstitial...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> ... and it still loads faster than most of the web today.

<comment><USER19> A single page load with no AJAX roundtrips, and no client-side scripts running helps a lot. Was reminded of that when I clicked on a search result to a mailing list archive today that happened to be hosted at Google Groups (vs the usual Mailman-style archives), and it took something absurd like ~4-5 seconds to load.

<comment><USER18> Basically I see it as an example of how we spend performance on complexity and overall stay at a similar net level of performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Macintosh IIci came out in 1989. Pretty good for a 24 year old machine! I pull mine out every once in a while to remind myself that we haven't advanced that much in a quarter of a century.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting!

I ran my first webserver on a Mac IIci at work, circa '94\. We didn't have a firewall and were right on the internet. I soon was able to apple? script up a page with a live QuickCam image, text-box, cgi-bin, and the speech synth and let my friends have at it!

I received nothing but innuendo and sheep noises, but it was a blast. This was a year or so before I started administering the definitive Quake server on the corporate network, and dare I say... internet. Up to twenty players at a time, some on dialup.

Ah the good ol' days, hehe. ;)

</comment><comment><USER22> In 1997 or so, I was running Apache under NetBSD on an SE/30\. Ran quite well and was very stable.

</comment><comment><USER23> Too many of you trying to see it. My requests are timing out every single time :(

<comment><USER24> They're still working on the Z80-based load balancer so they can bring up another server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Static page performance appears very high.</comment>


Man Remodels Internet as One Giant Computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/09/docker/

<comment><USER2> Article on Docker. Awesome Alan Kay reference.</comment>


Ask your customers to leave reviews without being creepy - <AUTHOR> https://www.notority.com/ <comment><USER2> As a seller this is a good service, reviews really do matter.

As a customer these types of services make reviews unreliable. Only targeting happy customers drives up your rating with no positive change to the product itself. Its also a very slippery slope ethics wise.

For example: Its very common for amazon vendors to gift products in exchange for 5 star verified purchase reviews via discount codes. You will see a knock off product magically jump to the top of the search results. This results in products with real reviews getting pushed off the first page of search results.

My father had an internet busi ess for 10 years, and he lost many hours of sleep over this.

It is also commmon for services to offer negative reviews on competitor products. The review scene needs regulation.

Nothing against OP personally, I just have pretty strong oppinions on selectively encouraging reviews.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the insight, I appreciate, and I see your point. My main assumption here (backed with some data and articles) is that few customers leave reviews spontaneously because it requires some time and energy to find the location on internet... find the review section... leave a review... so in the end of day, it is usually the unhappy customers who leave reviews which is not always fair.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I'm super excited to post my very first product on Hacker News. I spent the last 2 months building this by myself :D and I hope this can be useful for all those who run a physical business.</comment>


"Comment order: The development and the drama..." - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.usatoday.com/community/2007/03/rejoicing_follo.html <comment><USER2> Shows how far behind these guys are. There _are_ other ways of ordering comments.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can almost taste the mediocrity.</comment>


Cambridge physics prof analyzes sustainable energy debate - <AUTHOR> http://www.withouthotair.com/Contents.html <comment><AUTHOR> The conclusion: people (in the UK) could live on sustainable energy sources, but only with massive lifestyle changes.

<comment><USER2> Or (if I remember the book correctly) nuclear power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A better summary of the book would be people need to realize that sustainable energy is going to require sacrifices (greater than unplugging a phone charger), that energy sources like nuclear power need to play a role unless a country is willing to import energy. Or as a one-liner: There is no silver bullet, but a shotgun will work!</comment>


Microsoft's Azure Stack private cloud platform is ready for its first customers - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/10/microsofts-azure-stack-on-premise-cloud-platform-is-ready-for-its-first-customers/ <comment><USER2> Double clicking on Azure Stack: [http://www.actoncloud.com/blog/azure- stack/](http://www.actoncloud.com/blog/azure-stack/)</comment>


Which MIT hack is the best ever?  - <AUTHOR> https://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/2014/03/12/hack-final-round/

<comment><USER2> It comes to mind the excellent book "Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT" by T. F. Peterson. Highly recommended (and it does contain the two competing hacks of the link IIRC).</comment>


Gas selling for under $1 per gallon in 13 US states - <AUTHOR> https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-gas-prices-20200419-6uvja5pxbvaxtozm4l3372aewy-story.html <comment><USER2> We probably don't need both oil and gas on the front page.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22923025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22923025)

</comment><comment><USER3> Pro-tip, if you're driving very, very little look up an ethanol-free gas station on pure-gas.org and fill up there when your tank is nearly empty. It'll cost more but you don't want ethanol sitting in your gas tank, fuel filter, and engine for months. An alternative is fuel stabilizer but make sure you do your math correctly and don't add to much or or too little.

I predict a surge in cars that won't start when the stay-at-home orders are lifted.

<comment><USER4> This is 100% correct. After about 6 months in the tank, ethanol gas starts turning into sticky garbage that doesn't want to burn. I have a few classic cars that sit a lot. A couple times a year I drive an hour to my nearest ethanol-free gas station with a trunk load of gas cans. I'm sure it is incredibly dangerous, but I haven't had any fuel system problems since I started doing it.

<comment><USER5> From a science perspective, why does ethanol become sticky? Whiskey doesn't get sticky when it gets old...

<comment><USER4> sorry, "sticky" is wrong in the context of ethanol gas in a modern-ish tank for a few months. However, when any gasoline is exposed to oxygen it forms solids called "gums." My 1971 car has a tank that's vented to the air so it did form a layer of sticky gunk after about 15 years of sitting. Ethanol absorbs water which makes it "not want to burn," corrosive to metal components and it will deteriorate plastics and gaskets. Modern fuel systems are designed with this in mind. But, my '79 Porsche 928 with its mechanical fuel injection (an analog computer that runs on fuel and air pressures) really hates it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't check all of the states that are under $1, but here in NY all of the locations listed that are under $1 are Indian Reservations. Reservations here sell gas, and cigarettes (and a bunch of other stuff) without the state/federal taxes, so it's way WAY cheaper. I assume this is the same in all states?

In my area it's still around $2/gallon. I'm not close enough to a reservation to bother making the drive, but many people (especially smokers) make regular drives to get gas and smokes.

<comment><USER7> I paid $0.97 at a Costco in Wisconsin the other day.

That said, I'm not sure why it was so cheap there. The going rate at other stations was about $1.39 and they're usually closer together than that.

<comment><USER8> The other gas stations are profiting off of the spread until people realize they can get it much cheaper at Costco or other gas stations.

Costco reacts quicker because they probably don't care about making money on gasoline, and they have a goal to always be offering it at or near cost.

<comment><USER9> Costco doesn't care about making money on the things they sell, in general.

Costco makes more money from membership fees [1] and this is basically their stated business model. They try to sell everything at a small markup (just covering overhead) and the membership fees are basically profit.

[1] [https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/13/how-costco- actuall...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/13/how-costco-actually- makes-money.aspx)

[https://thehustle.co/costco-membership- economics](https://thehustle.co/costco-membership-economics) is a good read too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-i-l In not entirely unrelated news, some electricity providers in the UK have been paying you to charge your electric car[0] today. There have been other days recently where the "agile pricing" has also gone below zero, e.g. 5 April[1]. With the lockdown no-one is supposed to drive anywhere unless absolutely essential though (so e.g. the NHS doesn't have to deal with casualties from traffic accidents), and they're talking about banning cars on some roads for a period when lockdown is lifted[2] (to make it easier for people to walk or cycle).

[0] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/04/20/a-rare-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/04/20/a-rare- covid-19-upside-homeowners-being-paid-to-use-electricity/)

[1] [https://www.energy-stats.uk/agile-price-plunges/](https://www.energy- stats.uk/agile-price-plunges/)

[2] [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science- environment-52353942](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52353942)

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like a great time to shore up state budgets by raising the gas tax.

<comment><USER11> It's cheap because it's in low demand at the moment. You'd only be taxing essential workers (thanks for risking your health because we have no social safety net) and logistics, which would raise prices for the consumer.

I just don't think now is the time to raise the gas tax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The last time I remember these prices was 1998-ish. A quick online inflation checker tells me this is would be like $0.63 USD / gallon then.

</comment><comment><USER13> Price for Netflix monthly subscription: $12.99

Price for a barrel of oil: $11.50

If you simply cancel your Netflix subscription and store oil in your backyard...you'll be really bored and have a bunch of oil in your backyard

Source: [https://twitter.com/awealthofcs/status/1252206952064614406](https://twitter.com/awealthofcs/status/1252206952064614406)

<comment><USER14> It's better than that! Used steel barrels go for around $29 a piece. All you need to do is buy oil, dump it out somewhere, and then sell the barrel for $17 profit!

<comment><USER15> See, this is why we need a good EPA in the US and similarly good in other countries. To protect against capitalists like you who don't care about externalities. ;) Now go make a financial derivative so I can trade on used steel barrels.

<comment><USER14> With these profit margins I should easily be able to afford a fancy national marketing campaign to cover my ass. I can see it now.

 _Oil – It comes from the earth. We 're just returning it._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The US should buy the oil then pump it back into the shale. We can call it "in ground strategic reserves".

</comment><comment><USER17> I have been averaging a dollar per gallon for over a year now in Indiana. Just get a gas card. At my store [https://www.kroger.com/fuelfaqs?storeNumber=02900364](https://www.kroger.com/fuelfaqs?storeNumber=02900364) "up to 1,000 fuel points can be redeemed for up to 1 dollar off per gallon at Kroger Fuel Centers in a single transaction" So I buy my groceries, accumulate 1000 fuel points & then fill up once a month. Ofcourse, it all balances out - my wife has an EV & pays $150 back to the state :( [https://www.myev.com/research/interesting-finds/states- that-...](https://www.myev.com/research/interesting-finds/states-that-charge- extra-fees-to-own-an-electric-vehicle)

<comment><USER18> The downside (also from Indiana) is you have to go to Kroger. It's about the third chain in line of grocery stores I want to go to due to general dirtiness and high end product selection.

<comment><USER17> Sorry, I am relatively new to your state. This my second year in Indiana. I tried going to Meijer [https://www.meijer.com/](https://www.meijer.com/) a few times. imo clientele's too posh & everything felt too upscale, clean & stuck up. I tend to skew blue collar. When I think grocery I want a see an unkempt farmer pull up in a truck & dump 100 pounds of broccoli in crates so there's stalk and leaves all over the store, and that is exactly Kroger. I then get to pick up the broccoli for a dollar. If I go to Meijer they wrap the broccoli nicely in plastic & charge $5. I don't have that kind of spare change. For $5 you can rent a whole vm on linode & get a business going.

<comment><USER19> I know a guy that thinks Meijer is below him, and won't shop there. Likens it to a low-grade Wal-mart. And he lives near me and so I know which Meijer's he's been to, and there's nothing wrong with those stores.

I certainly have no problem shopping there, and I think it's cleaner than most local stores (that aren't high end, there's quite a few of those around here), certainly better than Wal-mart, although Wal-Mart does have a better delivery service, we just found out yesterday.

Meijer has cheaper Broccoli than that. Just checked their website, and you can get broccoli for $2 a pound, or a giant 32 oz bag of fresh florets for $5, which I guess is what you're referring to, but that's easier to cook with and prepare, so there's probably more demand for it in that form, and has similar prices elsewhere (my local Wal-Mart has that priced at $6 right now). You can also buy 12 oz bags of frozen broccoli for $1 each right now at Meijer.

And I'm near Chicago, which is probably more expensive than Indiana. Even the Whole Foods near me is only selling broccoli for $2.50 a pound.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Out of curiosity: How cheap does gas need to get to generate electricity profitably using a generator?

I know it is flat out a bad idea in principle to compete against a dedicated large scale producer. But still wondering.

Edit: Maybe I should ask r/theydidthemath

<comment><USER21> i wonder how fast power plants can switch from lng to gasoline? Man, just when you think we can't get further into bizzaro-world..

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why aren't people filling up big tanks? I don't get it.

<comment><USER23> Because gasoline goes bad eventually.

As far as oil: some are. Often times in the form of huge tankers floating off the coast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The website\app GasBuddy has a great US gas price heat map. Data is updated through in-app gamification.

[https://www.gasbuddy.com/GasPriceMap](https://www.gasbuddy.com/GasPriceMap)

A few screenshots - [https://postimg.cc/gallery/4YLTqLH](https://postimg.cc/gallery/4YLTqLH)

<comment><USER25> Use the website, not the app. The app is spyware and regularly sends them your location data in the background.

<comment><USER26> Oh... Oh no. If you don't like that then I have some REALLY bad news about literally every other app.

<comment><USER25> Nice whataboutism. Call out those apps too if they get promoted here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is not good news. Oil/energy is an economic lubricant. The depth and breadth of its reach and power exceeds The Fed.

In the USA, the 2007/08 recession was softened (?) by keeping energy prices low. Increase in domestic product - via fracking - being the key.

Without fuel prices as an economic tool the dynamic and predictabily of the coming recovery will be greatly limited.

</comment><comment><USER28> What I don't understand is why it's so much more in CA. It can't just be taxes; it's only 0.47c [1]. So why is it often $1-2 more?

[1] [https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/sales-tax-rates- for-...](https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/sales-tax-rates-for- fuels.htm)

<comment><USER29> Probably mostly supply and demand. People in CA might have more disposable income than those in Wisconsin. Texas isn't under $1 despite having low taxes and lots of nearby oil drilling.

<comment><USER28> So you're saying supply is restricted in CA? How can that be? We have now shortages of gas stations, and no shortages of gas. In fact we have many refineries here.

<comment><USER30> Tax is closer to $1 [0]. Gas stations are supply restricted in the sense that their storage tanks are finite in size although it seems to me most of the price is because they can.

[0] [https://www.ocregister.com/2019/04/16/californias-gas- taxes-...](https://www.ocregister.com/2019/04/16/californias-gas-taxes-total- nearly-1-per-gallon-and-include-a-28-cent-mystery-surcharge/)

<comment><USER28> The federal taxes are true for everyone. So you can subtract that from your difference across the US.

But there's no lack of competition, and plenty of apps like gas buddy that aid in that. That should put pressure to reduce prices, yet neighboring states can be so much lower. Something else is going on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Too bad I'm not driving at all now and don't have any place to store large amounts of gasoline.

<comment><USER32> Of course, the reason you're not driving right now is also the reason prices are so low.

You can't beat the system...

<comment><USER33> Not the only reason. Until last week Russia and Saudi Arabia was in a price war, which was/is a large part of the reason for the low gas prices, at least in the EU.

<comment><USER32> My understanding was that the price war was still, indirectly, caused by the Coronavirus. The price was dropping a little early on when the virus was mostly confined to China, and the OPEC countries couldn't agree on who should cut production... so they broke up and made everything worse.

[https://www.npr.org/2020/03/11/814529252/episode-978-coronav...](https://www.npr.org/2020/03/11/814529252/episode-978-coronavirus- oil-and-kansas)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I filled my car in Wisconsin for the first time in 2 months at $0.989 for 87 octane. I think the last time I paid that price the attendant filled it for me.

</comment><comment><USER35> The official reasoning for the current Fed's unprecedented quantitative easing is to prevent deflating prices like these from lasting long-term.

</comment><comment><USER21> I saw it for $1.17 in Sherman TX yesterday. The lowest i've ever seen gas was around $0.96 sometime in the 90s

</comment><comment><USER36> In other news: local restaurants are dumping alcoholic drinks out 'the back door' for a song. Because, dated.

Don't get used to low prices. It's gonna change.

</comment><comment><USER37> And yet in the sf bay area gas is still close to $3..

<comment><USER38> Here's a nice breakdown of the factors for that price. Taxes are around 72c of that gallon, on March 30th.

[https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/transportation_data/gasoli...](https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/transportation_data/gasoline/margins/index_cms.php)

I'd love to see updated numbers on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can not read this article from the EU.. But the headline amounts to ~ 0,24€ per liter.

<comment> purple-again The only real meat from the article:

The states on that list include New York, Michigan, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Ohio, Colorado, Missouri, Iowa, Virginia, Wisconsin, Kansas and Kentucky.

Keep in mind though that prices are not in any way shape or form set at the state level. This could just mean that one small region of the state has that price while the major metro areas where 95% of the states population live are 250% higher still.

<comment><USER40> >the major metro areas where 95% of the states population live

Do you have anything to back this up?

<comment><USER41> I live in one of the large metros in Ohio, prices are all still $1.30-1.50/gallon here. Like most of the locations in the article, I would guess the sub-dollar prices are very isolated locations or special circumstances (no-tax native american reservations like I saw in other comments?)

<comment><USER42> $1.07 in the Dayton area...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is this website about internal combustion engine fuels? Or it's just an aggregator of all american newspapers? I thought HN is something about software and programming.

<comment><USER2> That's mistaken. HN is about anything intellectually interesting: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

Of course, repetition is not intellectually interesting so we try to keep the front page relatively free of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> One of my cars is a long-range Tesla, the other is a plug-in hybrid that can go about 30-ish miles on a battery.

At the beginning of the lockdown, I looked at my wife and said, "let's stop touching icky gas handles during this whole thing and make sure we only charge at home."

So all of our distance driving uses the Tesla, and we use the plug-in hybrid for in town driving.

Haven't touched an icky gas pump yet!

<comment><USER45> Is Tesla the ArchLinux of cars manufacturers?

By the way, why are you driving long distance during a lockdown?

<comment><USER46> Tesla's the Apple of cars.

The Arch of cars: [https://ea0e05a6ffc83d5fb84e-cbd7b9ff6ab9d7e4de0720aa602bc9d...](https://ea0e05a6ffc83d5fb84e-cbd7b9ff6ab9d7e4de0720aa602bc9d7.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/vid23573776_v1AUTH_svc.pdoc00001PIX1119701564b-cf13-4dc8-9001-59e7da6bcdd1.JPG__275x206.jpg)

The Manjaro of cars: [https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c2/2a/eb/c22aebc3121882e6d54a12372...](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c2/2a/eb/c22aebc3121882e6d54a1237230cf058.jpg)

The Debian of cars: [https://barnfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/right- front...](https://barnfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/right- front-9-e1493572938347.jpg)

The Ubuntu of cars: [http://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2017/05/2018-Honda-...](http://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2017/05/2018-Honda- Odyssey-side-view-02.jpg)

<comment><USER47> The debian of cars would totally be a crown victoria.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alan Dershowitz rips into 'tyrannical' student protesters - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/alan-dershowitz-thinks-student-protesters-dont-want-true-diversity-in-colleges-2015-11 <comment><USER2> ""They may want superficial diversity, because for them diversity is a code word for 'more of us.'"

Exactly true. Case in point: that poor Asian girl who got booed by these people after talking about black racists.</comment>


Ruby and RoR jobs aggregator - <AUTHOR> http://rubyhub.io

<comment><USER2> "We're sorry, but something went wrong." The site is down and hopefully will up _soon_...

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems to work for me.

<comment><USER2> That is weird. I am accessing from Singapore. I believe the apps is tracking user location? Multiple location webpage testing, you can use [http://www.site24x7.com/check-website- availability.html](http://www.site24x7.com/check-website-availability.html)</comment></comment></comment>


The Flat Design Era - <AUTHOR> http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/32267022219/flat-interface-design

<comment><USER2> I can't help but feel like this is just the next obvious cycle in design fashion and as such it's not something to get so worked up about. "The Honest Design Age" strikes me as an absurdly grandiose term. I like the more prosaic interpretation, which is that certain graphical idioms have become so commonplace that in order to stand out visually, you need to do something different. Fashion.

In a few years, designers will start to get tired of looking at and creating flat designs day in and day out. They'll add little flourishes and write blog posts proclaiming "The Era of Living Design", where designs have all the spark and texture of real living things.

I mean, it's absolutely great that these folks are so excited, so passionate about design. But I don't think it has to be so cosmically meaningful for it to be exciting.

And this is not to say that Layer Vault is poorly designed. It's just that it can be a good design without every non-flat design being bad or dishonest.

<comment><USER3> This. There's been a lot of pseudo-shitting on gradients recently, and I don't understand it. Like you said, these things aren't inherently bad or should be avoided, they're often just overdone and done poorly to begin with, much like the grunge brush era of the late 90s & early 2000s and the ushering in of what people saw as shiny, bubbly "Web 2.0" thereafter.

Trends are not indicators of best practice, and they cannot be applied to just any site at random and work as effectively as they did on another. I love LayerVault and think Allan Grinshtein is a great designer, but this post was a little too much for me.

<comment><USER4> What is pseudo-shitting on gradients? Monochromatic noise?

<comment><USER3> Ha ;) I was referring to people that have made it a point to jump on the bandwagon and make Dribbble shots or similar blog posts referring to practicing/utilizing this "technique".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft seems to be the biggest current proponent of flat design, and I must say it's not so great for usability.

When I see this: [http://www.istartedsomething.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/...](http://www.istartedsomething.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/windows8metrostart.jpg) I have no idea what is and is not a button. I suppose it's _all_ a button. But there are zero affordances in this UI.

This is now finding its way to Microsoft's websites. On outlook, I can't quickly find the buttons to do key tasks: [http://cdn- static.zdnet.com/i/story/70/00/001893/eb-new-outl...](http://cdn- static.zdnet.com/i/story/70/00/001893/eb-new-outlook-three-panes-620.jpg)

I think the reaction to excessive skeuomorphism is well founded, but removing all affordances isn't the proper way to move forward either.

<comment><USER6> Oddly enough, the first thing that comes to mind when I see the new `Outlook` is: "all text is actionable."

Everything on that Outlook screen seems to be clickable, with the possible exception of the logo (upper left) and copyright notice (bottom left).

It reminds me of the `acme`[0] editor a bit; not nearly as flexible, of course, because it is executing pre-programmed commands, not arbitrary shell commands.

I bring `acme` up for two reasons: (a) it gives you an interesting perspective on "text as actions" and (b) look at that menu system... no buttons, no distinguishing marker, the menu is just text! The buttons are just text!

The editor itself is fairly nice to work in; a big departure, yes. Intuitive? Kind of; it only becomes intuitive once you understand "mouse-chording", after that the UI makes plenty of sense, even when it's almost entirely "flat."

\--

So, if you assume everything is clickable by default (which is true, give or take a few very specific targets that have no obvious action anyways), why then does the user need skeuomorphic hints?

If 90% of the non-whitespace results in a "button press", that fact should become obvious fairly quickly, even to the uninitiated.

If you cut out all the cruft and only leave the functionality, the functionality will inherently "float" to the surface. And that seems to be the case in Microsoft's latest bout of UX.

[0]: <http://acme.cat-v.org/readme>

<comment><USER5> Even if all text is clickable, not everything should have such a similar visual weight.

In Gmail, there's a big ass red button that does exactly what you think it will do. ([http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyrwjaXatd1qea4hso1_500.pn...](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyrwjaXatd1qea4hso1_500.png)) I bet I could use Gmail for the first time in Arabic if I had to. I'm not sure I could use Outlook.com.

<comment><USER7> And that big red button was only added much later. The first versions of gmail didn't have that.

MS is doing something very wise here. They are starting flat and then over time they will find a balance between what needs to be more obvious than other things. Just wait and see.

<comment><USER6> I should also point out that I only know what the "big red button" does because I use GMail.

If I was seeing GMail for the first time in a completely foreign language: I wouldn't associate "red" with Compose/New Message.

Colors carry significant cultural baggage.

Here in the U.S, for e.g: I associate Red with `danger`, `anger`, and perhaps `stop` or `caution.` [0]

At first glance, a red button (relying solely on skeuomorphic distinction, and not the text) is something I _definitely_ don't want to click. I would assume it would delete my selected mail, or perhaps mark it as spam.

At least with text you don't have that cultural baggage. You have the baggage of the language, e.g: you definitely have the steeper learning curve of learning the UI's language.

Though I'd rather it be grammatically ambiguous, as opposed to being visually ambiguous. For instance: if MS used slang or abbreviations in their Metro applications, it may throw off non-native speakers.

\---

While I agree with GP that MS could benefit from using a bit more distinction. I'd still steer away from using colors and gradients and such (rather: such distinctions wouldn't be my first choice). Cultural differences aside, you have to consider biological differences, such as color-blindness.

You can add visual distinction without necessarily resorting to skeuomorphism. For example: add some vertical lines, mess with font-weighting (which MS seems to use heavily), etc.

[0]: [http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/colours- in-cultures/)

<comment><USER7> I agree completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree with people arguing that flat design's run the risk of not giving users enough information to know what are buttons and what aren't. That is one of the biggest challenges to using a flat aesthetic. It's easy to take for granted how much information gradients and drop shadows provide to the user. Which is why I've appropriated your style of combining flat UI with drop shadows for depth. The drop shadows add just enough dimension that they can be used to express hierarchy without making the interface dishonest.

What I love most about flat design is that it forces you to simplify, since you aren't giving the user as much visual information. The flat aesthetic magnifies any clutter, because objects and shapes don't communicate their "possession" as much, so having too many pieces on the page at once doesn't work. Remove a line here or a drop shadow there. Make your text more succinct. It's awesome. It might even be a good challenge for startups, just because it forces you to focus your product more.

A huge bonus for me to flat design is that I'm not constrained by my earlier true-to-life decisions like gradients and drop shadows. Before I started using a flat aesthetic, I'd often run into situations where I couldn't place a button or a plane right where I wanted it, because it would contradict the other dimensionality that my gradients and drop shadows were creating. I'm glad to be rid of those constraints now (or almost).

Though, I'm always scared that we'll a/b test a gradient-filled button on our call to action and it'll crazily out-perform our flat one.

\---

It might depend on who the interface is for. But it also depends on what the interface is for. LayerVault is a perfect example of an interface that needs to recede when a user is viewing their own work. You don't want your flashy buttons competing for their attention. Similarly, with Segment.io, I don't want all of our UI to be competing with the data we show in graphs.

<comment><USER9> > Though, I'm always scared that we'll a/b test a gradient-filled button on > our call to action and it'll crazily out-perform our flat one.

That button can still be really good. It can be like reading pages of Hemingway longing for all the adjectives. When they show up, they're such a treat. The girl in the red dress in Schindler's list is another great example. It blows the flat aesthetic, but gives mountains of importance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Flat design certainly has it's place in the world but it's important to keep in mind that ultimately it's just another aesthetic. Distressed, Glossy, Flat, Matte, Woodsy, etc, these are all just styles that lay on top of what is good information architecture and interaction design.

It's not about flat design being right or wrong, it's more about whether it's appropriate for the job/task and audience/market.

There are good movies with special effects and good movies without special effects -- it's just a one element of the entire experience and by no means the most important.

<comment><USER11> "Flat design" is, yes. It's just a horrible label for a much broader concept, which is "form follows function", "clarity", "honesty".

Skeuomorphism is an easy target because it is dishonest by definition. Things that appear "cutting edge" or "high quality" today will, in a few years, seem dated, clunky, and pointless.

By contrast, pick up a copy of Die Neue Typography and see how well not just Tschichold's designs, but his ideas, hold up today. Skeuomorphism is a symbol of the Old UI. What we need is the New UI.

<comment><USER12> _> "form follows function", "clarity", "honesty"._

<http://byamt.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/dieter-rams/>

 _> By contrast, pick up a copy of Die Neue Typography and see how well not just Tschichold's designs, but his ideas, hold up today._

Dieter Ram's designs also hold up. Honesty is at the center of it all. This is also the reason why people still quote Confucius. Honesty is simply living and experiencing in the purest way possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How in this context is 'flat' honest? Honest to what?

These guys are confused, they're lying to themselves.

Honesty in the context of industrial design takes into account the materials, manufacturing and physical form.

And in graphic design, respecting the limitations of print.

Pixels are intangible. The 'honest' that's respected within industrial/graphic design, fields that have influenced this new 'flat' digital style do not translate due to the fact that pixels are intangible. The ideals that defined the modernism movement were based on the tangible.

What if a "non-flat" design improved communication/interaction? E.g. I touch this button therefore using 3D to communicate such interaction would make sense.

The designers that promote these ideals are confused.

Honesty for me in this context comes down to the HTML/CSS/JS crafted to create these visual and interaction elements.

<comment><USER14> Honest to goodness.

Wordplay aside, I completely agree with you. I think throwing in that an interface or scheme is "honest" is just another way to make one feel good about their decisions.

"honest" is the new "clean"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _We certainly didn't invent the flat style but arriving at it was a violent process. We tore through hundreds of revisions (we have the LayerVault timelines to prove it) to potential interfaces before arriving at the answer that now makes us say "of course." The desk at LayerVault's original headquarters (my Manhattan apartment) still has the battle scars from objects being slammed down in anger. At one point, while working on a mockup, a MacBook was slammed shut so hard it was nearly unhinged._

It sounds like that MacBook isn't the only thing that's unhinged...

</comment><comment><USER16> If your audience is developers and designers, a pure flat design is great and will likely work well.

But normal people need their hand held as to what a button is. Subtle drop shadows and gradients are the best way to instantly get someone to understand that yes, this element does something. Something important is lost in flatland.

On a side note, the vault and picture frame image on the main homepage for layervault.com is the height of skeumorphism and realistic design. Beautiful, but also kinda ironic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure I agree that normal people need a ton of hand holding, but even that's true, those people will eventually disappear.

As for the image on our homepage — that's our app icon. Pretty funny that it's quite realistic (done by the talented folks at SoftFacade). We didn't think it was a huge contradiction, since it serves as more of a pretty picture than an interface.

That said, we probably will end up throwing it out when redesign our rather outdated external site :)

<comment><USER16> You are in good company:

"According to various reports, when someone suggested to include a touch- typing tutorial in this intro as well, since many people did not know how to use a keyboard, steve Jobs simply said not to bother as those people would die out eventually."

* [http://orangejuiceliberationfront.com/theyll-die-out-eventua...](http://orangejuiceliberationfront.com/theyll-die-out-eventually/)

<comment><USER17> Define good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Email us and we'll add you to the list." The words "Email us" are not a link or anything, so I'll need to seek out this information. This was posted to Tumblr with links available for following LayerVault's Tumblr blog, or visiting another post within the same blog announcing LayerVault 2's release. While the announcement post _does_ have a link to email firstname.lastname@example.com, I'm not looking for press kits. At least _this_ page actually contains the link for LayerVault.com.

Visiting LayerVault's website, there's no immediately apparent way to contact the company other than signing up or contacting support; the Support link can be found in the footer navigation. When going to the Support page, I see a partial phone number (but pixelated because only premium customers get to call, haha!) there is an actual email for support, but I don't want support.

Usually the About page will have some contact information, so let's check that out. I see Twitter handles for the two founders, and a picture of NYC.

Why do you guys invite people to email you, then make that process as difficult as possible?

</comment><comment><USER19> Nowadays, I tend to avoid gradients because it's so easy to mess it up. It's not only about choosing 2 colors, it's about eveything that happens in between. Putting some text on top of it requires to be readable on both colors, and everything in between.

Buttons can have depth without gradients. Check the ones on <http://www.facebook.com>. A flat background color, a subtle 1px light on top, a subtle 1px shadow on the bottom, and a darker border all around.

Depth is not only achieved through "3D" gradients and shadows. It is achieved in flat design through size, color, spacing. It's hierarchy by balance.

It's like a well-balanced music mix: if it sounds good on average level, it'll even sound better on loud level. Flat design is balance before the lighting tweaks.

<comment><USER20> "A flat background color, a subtle 1px light on top, a subtle 1px shadow on the bottom, and a darker border all around."

This is exactly how Windows 3.1 was drawing its UI. :) (not that there is anything wrong with that)

<comment><USER21> OT but I have a theory that the 3d button (which "depressed" when you clicked it) is the entire reason behind Windows 3's success. I can't remember if System 7 predates it but certainly the 3d effect on its buttons were less pronounced, and GEM was entirely flat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not going to say designers should avoid "flat design" as an aesthetic style, but as I've already said here on HN I'm one of the designers who prefers some three dimensionality. Even more than that, I like texture. Always have. When I see a completely flat background color on a page it usually seems dull. There's a reason people build homes with a bit of texture on the wall. A completely flat paint on the wall with no texture at all just feels, well, blank.

</comment><comment><USER23> And on the "flatly" designed <http://layervault.com/> is a safe behind an open, hinged painting. Wouldn't that easily fit within the definition of skeuomorphic that everybody is railing on? After all, it isn't _really_ a safe.

<comment><USER24> It's a picture; a genuine illustration. It's not supposed to be any kind of context for or element of a user interface. It would be another story if users had to interact with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> LayerVault, Svpply & Art.sy have been a major inspiration of mine. When I first saw LayerVault 2 it was shocking and amazing and I hope others have the same reaction.

An upcoming (da da DA) Minefold release will convert the entire site to "Flat Design". One thing that goes hand in hand with "flat design" is clear simple writing. I've spent the better part of the last month brainstorming names and finding clear, simple ways of explaining what we do.

</comment><comment><USER26> I feel like on the overly skeuomorphism to overly flat / no affordances spectrum, Android Jellybean is striking the right balance.

It's modern and clean and flat but doesn't take it as far as windows 8 where everything is text, a rectangle or an icon.

</comment><comment><USER27> The thesis seems fair, but when you go to LayerVault's main landing you get this swirling, vertigo-like background canvas behind the main content. This hardly seems "cut ... down to the bone" nor seeking "the most impact with the fewest elements" as the article professes.

Granted marketing content has different usability requirements than functional software. But I'd argue that dizzying your prospective customers with swirling animations is counterproductive and not an example of "lean design".

</comment><comment><USER28> Flat design looks lazy more than anything. I appreciate the effort good design takes and sometimes it's best to just get something simple out there quickly but I'd rather see browser defaults than styled buttons that purposefully have no hover states and callouts that really don't call out.

<comment><USER17> Simple doesn't equal lazy. "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing else to take away" --Civilization IV voice-over guy.

<comment><USER28> I don't mean simple is lazy in any way, I mean what I said: "Flat design looks lazy". Not having hover states for your buttons looks lazy. Not making it clear to users what pieces of the page they're meant to interact with looks lazy.

<comment><USER29> For the purposes of making things clear, "not having hover states for your buttons" and "not making it clear to users what pieces of the page they're meant to interact with" have very little to do with flat design as a style, the exact same things can happen with skeuomorphic design as well(suggesting of skeuomorphic is the contrary style). Your 2 examples sound more like a lack of user experience consideration rather than a poor design style decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The advantage of 'psuedo 3d' in interfaces is that things like buttons stick out and make it obvious that they are intended to be clicked.

We experimented on a website a while back with making stylish "flat" buttons vs bog standard grey embossed buttons. Turns out the grey buttons made site navigation way easier, people who were given these buttons spent more time on the site on average.

Also for a company that talks about good design, I actually couldn't look at their home page for long because the rotating image at the top started to genuinely make me feel slightly sick.

</comment><comment><USER31> Interesting post! Some screenshots would have been awesome to enhance it.

Also, is this page ([https://layervault.com/payments?plancode=freelancer&sign...](https://layervault.com/payments?plancode=freelancer&signup=true)) an example of this flat design? For some reason, I don't find it as beautiful as the rest of the website (Such as <https://layervault.com/about>).

</comment><comment><USER32> Very interesting. I'm pulling a lot of interface design inspiration from Layervault right now and saving it in the back of my head for later.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think this trend is representative of the fact that technology got way ahead of itself for a spell, and it is now under renewed pressure to connect with people outside of the extra-savvy.

To me this trend comes really naturally when you're trying to expose the function of something, rather than make something appear to function in 'space' or with certain 'materials'

</comment><comment><USER34> Can't make a post like that without giving a demo. Example please!

It'll also help blank slates like me adopt this "flat design" faster.

<comment><USER35> Here's an example of a page designed for our open-source repository, along with a link to download the PSD: <https://layervault.com/permalink/t64izx8Jae>

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> You don't have to subscribe wholesale to either approach, and there are lot of ways to combine elements of all-of-the-above when the situation calls for it.

I like the idea of digital brutalism - celebrating the materials, if you will - but the damn thing still has to be easy to use. It'll always be a moving target and that's good.

</comment><comment><USER37> There's a balance to be struck between affordable and honest (not kitsch) design. To get it _just right_ is where the devil is.

For examples look no further than Apple's iOS (borderline kitsch) and Microsoft's Metro (reduced affordance). I think one UI that gets this balance done very well is Facebook.

<comment><USER38> iOS, taken as a whole may be "borderline kitsch" but there are sections (contacts, find my friends) that have both feet solidly planted in kitsch territory.

<comment><USER37> Yes, they crossed the border on a few apps, but most of the default ones use skeumorphisms positively (the page flip on maps is a good example).

The big damage comes from 3rd party apps that don't get skeumorphism right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> yet another trend that has its merits and draw backs. There will undoubtedly be designers and designs that go too far with this approach and those who do it well. I feel like this is well along the lines of minimalism for the sake of minimalism. Not enough differentiation can become very confusing and over minimalistic aesthetics which espouse "function over form" often end up doing the opposite.

I find it funny that the author refers to this as "flatland," when one of the most prominent uses of that word was probably by Edward Tufte when he was exploring how data visualizations allow an _escape_ from flatland. The same lesson applies here. Skeumorphism isn't necessarily the solution, but overly flat designs aren't either.... flatness is what you want to escape from.

<comment><USER40> I would submit that the most prominent use of "flatland" is probably the book of the same name. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland>

<comment><USER39> ah. I had no clue that's where it originated from. thank you for pointing that out!

I can still say that Tufte was probably the most prominent to use it in a design sense (but I'm probably wrong about that as well..)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> AHHHH!! How can you write an article about design when your buttons _don't have HOVER STATES_ [1]? AGH, am I the only person in the world driven crazy by this? UI should _respond_ , dammit!

1: <http://www.layervault.com/>

<comment><USER17> On desktop, yes, but how would a flat design respond on mobile/touch interfaces? I'm genuinely interested in approaches.

<comment><USER41> Obviously mobile browsers don't have hover states, but that doesn't mean that desktop browsers shouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Jon Friis (Co-Founder of www.kera.io) has also mastered this technique.

</comment><comment><USER43> +1 for BigHuman, they churn out some really great-looking stuff.

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't know if it's because I'm colorblind (red-green), but looking at this page gives me a headache... you might want to test it out with some other colorblind people.

<comment><USER6> Don't worry: I have nearly perfect vision. (I say nearly only because I haven't had a checkup in a while.)

And this site gives me a bit of a headache, too.

Just skimming it, it's a bit too dark and a bit of a strain to read; part of that may be the office lighting though.

The funny thing is: it's _very close_ to my terminal color scheme, just lacking a lighter shade of the background [which would differentiate content from the background], and a "brownish-orange" for highlights/accents [links and things].

The text in my terminal is also slightly "whiter" and a much bolder font-face.

So perhaps some of these suggestions would help make the site more readable in general, though I've never tested my terminal style with a color-blind audience so YMMV. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> <http://briefrelief.tumblr.com/post/32280507797/in-response>

</comment><comment><USER46> I freaking hate flat design. I was SO disappointed when Chrome did away with a nice 3D icon :/

</comment><comment><USER47> Cool.. cool.. and then suddenly: "Many of our customer's tell us that..."

</comment><comment><USER48> Flat design reminds me of magazine layouts. Which I see as a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER49> Could you make the design "pop" a bit more?</comment>


Many graduates earn 'paltry returns' for their degree - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-42923529 <comment><USER2> It is crazy and reassuring that this the problem is not just in the United States.

I still cannot believe that online education has not disrupted the higher education industry, at least in terms of price.</comment>


Soylent: A Word Processor with a Crowd Inside - <AUTHOR> http://projects.csail.mit.edu/soylent/ <comment><USER2> What a clever idea! The specific features here aren't that appealing to me but the idea of integrating crow-sourcing into an otherwise normal app is intriguing.</comment>


Design for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/Wolfr/design-for-developersonlineversionlong The goal of Design for Developers is to teach interface design as a set of rules: there are some good default values for a lot of design decisions that you should remember, there is a "scientific" way of approaching things like alignment, even though many designers will tell you it's something you should "feel". <comment><USER2> Thanks for making a presentation that's useful to readers. While I'd still prefer to see video, this stands on its own.

I see a lot of presentations hit Hacker News that aren't very useful on their own because they were meant to accompany a talk -- and a good talk usually omits the best material (or a at a minimum, important context) from the slides.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes I prefer video (esp. if the delivery is very good) but for learning purposes I prefer reading since then everyone can choose their own tempo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's another presentation from Idan Gazit who works with Django: Design for developers: Making your Frontend Suck Less

[http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2010/idan-gazit-design- for-d...](http://blip.tv/djangocon-europe-2010/idan-gazit-design-for- developers-making-your-frontend-suck-less-3704780) (video) <http://blog.gazit.me/doc/32311867/Design-for-Developers> (slides)

This is probably one of the best presentation about the basics of web design that I know. He also mentions the book, Designing for the web, in the presentation which is a good entry for typography, colours etc <http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/index.php>

</comment><comment><USER4> Just tweeted that this was the best presentation on design that I'd ever seen. None of the tips will turn me into a designer but they will help.

I've looked at lots of design for developers presentations, the topic must be guaranteed link bait. None of them really were all that helpful to me until this one.

I've only met two developers in my career that were were world class at both programming and design. People are looking for a magic shortcut to grokking design that just isn't there. The best solution for me right now is to use Bootstrap but there really isn't a great alternative to hiring the best designer that you can find.

<comment><USER5> > I've only met two developers in my career that were were world class at both > programming and design.

The one I know through a friend of a friend has had multiple apps in the top 100 overall, App Store. And he is a better designer! And so hard on himself (e.g. you see his design and you think it is done and he keeps on going...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Page 119:

"Just flipping the gradient direction is the equivalent of the environment light changing direction when you hover over/click a button, this makes zero sense."

Inverting the gradient for pressed down button can also be seen as a convex surface becoming concave; think a membrane button. (A flat button wouldn't have such a gradient.)

While that kind of "faux membrane" buttons are not very common in real world, the inverted gradient effect immediately gives me feeling of "popped in" button. Am I alone here?

<comment><USER7> That makes more sense if the gradient is radial. For a linear gradient, inversion gives the appearance of a changing light source - just like the example given shows.

A radial gradient, on the other hand, might more typically assume an 'oveerhead' light, which is why inversion makes sense.

<comment><USER6> For me the linear gradient hints that the surface is curved on one axis, i.e. is cylindrical, not spherical.

Of course the context plays a role too on the perceived illusion; the appearance of changing light source may be stronger for lonely button (vs. group of elements sharing the same light source).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this! As a developer who has been slowly learning design by trial and error, I wish I had access to this resource years ago. It's totally frustrating when you know something just looks awful, but don't have the knowledge or background to know how to fix it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice presentation with notes for people reading afterwards.

One thing I don't get is the font sizes. At one point, it says something like "notice we're using 24px to tie into the multiples-of-6 rule", but elsewhere recommends 16px as the main base size.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you use 16px, the 1.5 line height I use for paragraphs becomes 24px, which ties again with the multiples of 6 rule again. So your lines are actually 24px high, if you then use maybe 48px for spacing around your blogpost, things look balanced because they're even.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The author mentioned FamFamFam icons, but not Fuque by Yusuke Kamiyamane, which I've found to be much more robust (and not quite as overused).

<http://p.yusukekamiyamane.com/>

<comment><USER10> There's also <http://www.iconfinder.com>, which makes finding the right icon (and verifying its licensing) pretty easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "There are very little fonts in Google web fonts currently that are worth using." Amen!

I like this multiples of 6 thing, too. Most attempts to get a baseline grid going (like on Blueprint, for example) just look wrong.

</comment><comment><USER12> Good stuff to read. I got chance to learn things which I usually ignore while developing sites.

People who are recommending to hire a designer, I would add that its quite a cultural thing. Not every designer is good at UX. Most of the designers in my country are more into graphics rather than thinking of how to use good color combination and typography.

</comment><comment><USER13> The point about colors, specifically grays, on different screens is really important. I can't think of how many times I look at a website I'm working on at a friend or family member's house and am disappointed with how it looks.

Sufficient contrast is important. Worse still I have color blindness so for me contrast is critical sometimes.

<comment><USER14> It's also important to consider the opposite perspective, when you're working on design touches that usually _should_ be subtle. Some very common examples are lighting effects like gradients, drop shadows and cut-outs.

These effects need to have quite a gentle contrast between the darker and the lighter colours, and if you start throwing around 25%+ differences in grey level your results could become overpowering for viewers with decent screens.

Of course, in such cases, you also won't completely break your design for viewers with poorly configured screens or imperfect vision if the contrast isn't as strong to them, so you can afford to be more subtle than when choosing, say, foreground/background colours for body text.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is completely true, I often use #EEE or even lighter grays for "nonessential" or decorative gradients.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you can afford it, please hire professional designers. These posts are interesting and useful. But as in any industry there things that you can only learn through years of experience and education.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, this is also mentioned somewhere in one of the last slides.

As a designer I know about MySQL, the terminal, PHP, Javascript, jQuery, RoR, Sass, HTML, CSS etc.; if a developer knows the basics about color, typography and alignment and knows why the designer in his team does the things he/she does it's probably going to be much easier working together.

<comment><USER15> Good point. I hadn't actually considered that angle.

I tend to get instinctively defensive when people from other professions make assumptions about mine based on a limited understanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Odd bit of design problem on slideshare: if you change the page font size, all the characters remain in place, but change size, making the presentation look awful.

<comment><AUTHOR> You could download the PDF, weird problem though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great deck with a sly dig at ExtJS on slide 171.

Surely you don't mean that web apps that look like 1999 desktop apps are not good design?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. I think Ext is great for stuff like dynamic datagrids and they have some proper interactions (a lot of it based on the YUI! design library, which is one of the best resources out there). Unfortunately most of it looks very developer-y and doesn't really have good defaults. I can't recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For a slideshow about design, it sure isn't very pleasing to the eye: sticky notes, inconsistent formatting and image sizes, verbosity. The tips aren't exactly creme-de-la-creme either. You'd learn more from just looking at the Apple website (which actually looks good) or reading Spiekermann's Stop Stealing Sheep. OP would do much better at self promotion if he actually provided good tips and decent slides, instead of the heavy self-advertisement. Keep it lean.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like to read a lot about design tips, but this is the first time I got what is meant with "blending". Thanks for that.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ha, I'm quoted on slide 115. Thanks! Great resource, too. I'm about to tweet it out.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting slides and very much appreciated. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER22> Thanks for the presentation. It was awesome!

</comment><comment><USER23> This is sooooo good. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER24> Terrible presentation. Didn't learn anything, even though I'm a Developer always struggling with Design.</comment>


Did You Mean: Google Maps? - <AUTHOR> http://erickerr.com/did-you-mean-google-maps

<comment><USER2> The irony is that they already have a solution for this:

[http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/make- your...](http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/make- your-404-pages-more-useful.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's better to return the 404. I hate it when the Comcast DNS redirects me to their search page when I misspell a domain name.

<comment><USER4> You can meet all standards (http's 404 error) and still have links on the error page.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like Comcast is redirecting to a search page instead of returning NXDOMAIN for non-existing domain names. That is certainly not possible do to and at the same time be standards-compliant.

<comment><USER6> That's what they're doing, though only if the domain matches /^www\\..+/ which (along with their allowing you to opt-out) makes it a few degrees less evil than Verisign's infamous "Site Finder".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've always found Google's 404s jarring and retro in the worst way possible. They are in desperate need of a complete overhaul not the least of which should be the author's 'Did you mean?' functionality.

<comment><USER8> 404's need to be somewhat jarring, because the user needs to see a difference between a normal and an error page. Having "did you mean" suggestions would still be useful, though.

<comment><USER7> Eh, they could at least use their current logo and make it link back to google.com when clicked.

<comment><USER9> The logo they use never even was their logo. It plain old Times Bold with different colors applied. And they use tables for the layout.

There is no image on this page, it's all just a pretty small html file (1,359 bytes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just as an aside: Google's misspelling detection is so damn good that I find myself smashing keys without much care whether I hit everything correctly or not whenever using Google.

<comment><USER10> In case anyone is tempted to downvote the parent, I'll attest that is pretty much my searching behavior as well - in fact, it's often the case that I don't use the built in spell check of OS X spotlight (CMD-Space), but instead do CMD-T (new Tab), CMD-K (Search) - and then type some characters that _roughly_ approximate what I'm trying to spell, and then hit enter.

Google usually has my results as one of the first hits, or, alternatively, pops it as a "suggestion"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Counterexample: google.com/dumbass is a 404. Searching for google.com/dumbass returns results. "Did you mean: Google It You Dumbass" is not kosher.

<comment><USER12> Good point - this could me mitigated by only returning the results if there are matching Google products

<comment><USER11> Another interesting one: gears.google.com does not redirect to google.com/gears, which is a 404. Contrast with voice and talk. Discoverable URLs clearly aren't a priority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two potential problems:

1) I don't recall who it is, but someone who is not google holds a patent (sigh) on using the URL path after the host as the search string.

2) If it was my property to control, I would not want google.com/{*} to accumulate links on the internet. That is to say, before there was google.com/maps, one would expect some people to link to that URL directing their users to search for maps. Now that google is so big, that could be a dicey prospect, because substituting their own property for what would have previously been a search could reasonably be seen as anti-competitive.

<comment><USER14> In response to point 2, Google could still require that links to search pages still go to google.com/search?q=whatever. google.com/whatever would show a differently formatted page that shows a big error message at the top, with the search results as an extra, not the point of the page. This would mean that Google introducing new sections of the site would not conflict with links to search pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If google, in theory, determined that users almost immediately hit the back button when they hit a 404 page, it would make sense to have the page load & render as fast as possible. Right now, the page size is ~1.3k for me.

I also have a feeling that the 404 may be implemented in a different part of the stack than search. In a very unscientific test of data, the response times for 404 pages according to firebug are at least 10% faster than the normal response on the same subdomain. Also, of all the subdomains I tested, only m.google.com, picasaweb.google.com, and docs.google.com had different 404 pages.

Like I said, this is all blind guessing, but my feeling is that Google has reasons for not better utilizing 404s. Having better 404's isn't rocket science and there are google properties that have them (youtube) so there's certainly reasoning behind it.

<comment><USER16> You'll probably notice that the 404 pages across most Google properties is the same. For example:

<http://images.google.com/mapss>

And you might also notice that no matter what subdomain you hit, the path is all that seems to matter:

<http://images.google.com/maps> <http://maps.google.com/images>

It would be logical to conclude that there's some server you're hitting before you get to the service specific backend, and that maybe that is the reason the 404 pages come back faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As I live in Ireland I use google.ie. I often accidentally type maps.google.ie or mail.google.ie, to be greeted with a 404. Seems like a fairly easy problem to fix.

</comment><comment><USER18> If I had to guess, Google probably gets so many hits for bad URL's (from hackers and such) that it's not worth the processing power to return custom 404 pages. (Notice how it also has no images?)

</comment><comment><USER19> There are an awful lot of people who never use the address bar - they just go to google.com and type the URL into that.

So this kind of makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER20> Umm they don't want u to type in the URL they want you to Google even the URLs you visit daily. When people see the 404 I would fair to say they get frustrated and Google what they were looking for.</comment>