The modern web is becoming unusable - <AUTHOR> https://omarabid.com/the-modern-web <comment><USER2> Somewhat related series of PSAs:

Nitter is an Open Source alternative front end for Twitter that requires zero Javascript to run, and it's _really_ good, and is way nicer than Twitter's own UI, and yall should use it. I see Twitter threads hosted on HN all the time, and I kind of wish more of the posters would link to Nitter's public-facing instance instead of Twitter. I think its interface is just objectively better than Twitter's for browsing.

Invidious is an Open Source alternative to Youtube that is also really good and requires zero Javascript, but unfortunately it suffers from a lot of performance problems and videos will occasionally refuse to load -- Youtube is I think more hostile about throttling/blocking that kind of stuff, and proxying videos is probably harder than proxying tweets. You can donate to Invidious though, which might help them afford more powerful hardware.

In regards to Medium -- if you disable Javascript those popups will all vanish, and for the most part all you'll be missing out on is comments and occasionally a lazy-loaded image. It's amazing how much of the web (particularly news) works fine without Javascript, and getting rid of it gets rid of a lot of these annoying popups and requests. Use uMatrix, it makes it really easy to turn Javascript off by default and whitelist as necessary. And every person who disables Javascript is one more tiny audience metric to make it ever-so-slightly harder for news sites to ignore progressive enhancement.

<comment><USER3>
      > It's amazing how much of the web (particularly news) works
      > fine without Javascript,

It's amazing that any content would require Javascript. Web applications I understand, but content (particularly news) should have no need for scripting.

<comment><USER4> Infinite scrolling needs Javascript, and it's pretty useful for some sites that have feeds.

<comment><USER5> Fuck no it isn't. Infinite scrolling has no valid use case.

<comment><USER6> I use Reddit Enhancement Suite, and one of the features it adds is autoloading the next page when I get to the bottom of the current one. It's really nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The majority of content on Medium is low-quality, varying from personal blog post opinions stated as fact to yet another career-boosting tutorial on beginner React fundamentals. I advise most people to keep the content for their own blogs and let that site fall under the weight of hosting their crap content.

Twitter and Facebook are known cesspools that suck away your time and add very little value. I don't know anyone same that uses Twitter regularly. Facebook seems to be used most by those who understand their business model least.

Guard your time and be careful with what you feed your time.

BTW this also applies to modern journalism sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Use archive.is and let them rot from years of neglectful journalism.

<comment><USER8> I have found Twitter to be very valuable to follow machine learning researchers and find out about up and coming research.

<comment><USER9> I've also found Twitter to be very valuable in my own profession.

I've found it to be a toxic hellhole of shit for everything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can understand sites not wanting to give things away forever. I _cannot_ understand what is served by interrupting new visitors almost immediately, before they can practically do _anything_ with your site. All that does is remind me how little I really "need" your services.

<comment><USER11> The Firefox add-on "DOM Delete" often works wonders.

<comment><USER12> I usually just press F12 and delete it with the DOM tree inspector.

Is "DOM Delete" automated?

<comment><USER13> I guess that's the one:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dom- delete/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dom-delete/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > There is a solution: To buy a disposable phone number and use it to complete > the verification. But this was the breaking point. At this point, I no > longer bother.

This may not be enough. A case in point: two months ago my grandma decided to make herself a Facebook account to chat with her IRL friends. She had one made in 2014, but she only logged in to it few times. It was made using a fresh email, and never breached. So she logged in to that account on her phone, using the newest Facebook app on a brand new phone, provided real name, birth date and photo, and linked a real phone number, never used before. She got permanently banned within a week, by just chatting on Messenger and sending friend requests on Facebook. I suspect some of her IRL friends reported the friend request they received. Or maybe some AI decided she types too fast for an elderly woman, or uses too few emoji. We will never know.

The ban appeal form requires you to send photos of government-issued ID, and she decided it's not worth the risk.

<comment><USER15> It's especially bad because you can use Facebook to log in to countless other sites, which you will also lose access to. I even had to upload my photograph to Facebook once to 'verify' myself, and my photo was rejected with no reason given.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yes, it is true. The modern web really is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland, and also is very slow, very complicated, very messy, etc. The web developer tools help a bit, at least, but not quite. But better configuration for web browser should also be better. (Of course, there are also some good web pages too, but they are making a lot of bad ones too.)

But (as another comment says) documents should not be apps; they are should be separate. (Although there is the case where sometimes you want to embed apps in documents, such as to make an interactive demonstration of some algorithm, or to include inline currency conversion, to validate or autocalculate a form, or whatever. But the document needs to be readable even if the code doesn't run, and the code probably shouldn't run by default. Also, I think such embedded apps should perhaps be separate frames even if enabled, and do not need to do as much stuff as is now exposed to JavaScript interfaces.)

The modern web is also overused. Often, there are better file formats (e.g. plain text), protocols (e.g. IRC, NNTP, Gopher), etc, that can do as well, or better. Or even existing features of HTML and so on, which you can use but they use worse ones instead.

<comment><USER17> I can at least understand Facebook (that I'm on), the NYTimes (that I'm not on), or the twenty other big sites being paywalls, even if I hate it.

But random newspaper from random little place telling to subscribe to their meager content after three articles? What do they really think? I mean, even if I subscribed to my own local news paper in my own little burge, am I really going to be going to the trouble of logging on and so-forth?

All the paywalls seem more like excuses publisher make for their failings than anything they could reasonably expect to make money from. It's a lot like scholarly sites charging $25/article. My guess 0% percent of visitor pay this. It's not a price people, it's a price to justify other bullshit.

<comment><USER18> The funny thing is that the local burgh paper needs that subscription or it will not be there in a couple of years. They need it a lot more than NYtimes, perhaps who has a bigger global base.

My answer to this is yes, absolutely, I will log in and pay for good local news coverage, and I do every day.

If you don't live there but the story explodes for some reason, why not try to get some new subscribers? Asking for money is not a big deal in my opinion. Asking for it by compromising your UX or user privacy, however ("only paid subscribers can view in incognito") is terrible.

<comment><USER19> Why isn't there some sort of coalition between local news sites that allows e.g. a paid subscription to oregonlive.com to allow you access to m[ichigan]live.com, nj.com, and other "local" news across the country?

Sinclair Media already owns half the local news broadcasters around the country; why isn't such a setup already done?

<comment><USER20> Gannett has done that to an extent. You'll see the same layout and styling across a lot of local sites as well as usatoday dot com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know the "safe" decision in a boardroom is to suggest whatever makes the numbers go up, but this post is right. People push it too far and damage their products in the process.

Examples: I no longer click on Quora in search results. I've stopped using Reddit on mobile. I used to love Imgur, but now I hesitate because they force you to run 1MB+ of React and download 553 resources for a subpar experience of viewing a single image [0].

I understand that these are businesses and the lights must be kept on, but certainly there are better ways to do this. Maybe a more humane strategy wouldn't be as profitable in the short term, but it would certainly be better for building a sustainable business that actually lasts.

[0]: [https://twitter.com/csswizardry/status/1185604806901207045](https://twitter.com/csswizardry/status/1185604806901207045)

<comment><USER22> > I've stopped using Reddit on mobile.

"Slide" is a free (as in freedom) reddit client for Android. Needless to say it's much better than either the mobile website or official app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> One particular annoyance (present in this post) is the FB pages.

Many business only have online presence in FB and nowadays I think you can't even check reviews or e.g. the lunch menu (perhaps depends on the A/B test part you fall in).

I left FB many years ago and no way I'm creating a dummy account for the same reason shown in the post (requires a phone).

So I just give up and can't blame the business owner since the person probably went for the straight forward free choice and didn't have to learn anything new but FB, I truly hate it nowadays.

<comment><USER24> Is this really still true? I have not been in the US for a few years, but at least in many of the European and Asian countries I've been in, this just is not a thing. I have noticed that in places like Korea and Japan, local aggregator sites are still popular/crawled by Google as the results for search/maps, but even my colleagues, Tokyo natives, use the same aggregator sites when I'm visiting and we're looking for a place to eat.

Facebook feels pervasive, sure, but from my POV it's still contained to North America, and the influence elsewhere is waning.

<comment><USER25> I think he mean that for small business facebook is stadart nowadays.

A lot of small shop owners in east europe have only facebook page with location and hours and some updates.

And I can't blame them but there's fact that every platform becomes shit after gaining popularity or goes down if not. And people without technical skills are feeding facebook with this situation.

Would be nice for domain sellers to give free single page generator with basic info and free hosting for this html page attached to domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The big divide is between apps and pages. Pages are just documents and should not contain _any_ code. Apps are fine to contain code. The problem is that we now have pages that believe they are code and apps that have to be styled using the mechanisms for pages. This duality is here to stay for at least a while to come, and maybe for a long time.

But it would have been good security wise and privacy wise if this divide were made more explicit.

<comment><USER27> What I have been wishing for a while is having well-defined purely document- oriented subset of HTML5 standardized. In practice it probably would mean different levels or profiles defined. It could help with many usecases beyond just web, email coming to mind as an example

<comment><USER28> The real challenge here is that document and application tend to get mixed up on the web.

Looking at even a good old-fashioned blog, there are really three nested things on your screen: the blog post document, the blog post-viewing application, and the browser.

Why a blog post-viewing application? In theory you could skip it and just have a plain reader view, but in practice you do want to have navigation and comments, and that's what the application part is for.

Many modern systems surface that split in the form of an API: the API is what gives you access to the underlying document.

The challenge would be making that solid accessible to the user. For example, could a browser natively have two address bars? One for the document, and one for the application that is used to access the document?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This article is a great headline that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what's wrong. I'd say the internet has become an Amazon-style marketplace of fake do-do. Anything you search for results in nothing but endless fake domains with fake reviews designed to pitch you more ads and track you even more. Finding an actual original legitimate source of anything is essentially impossible at this point.

<comment><USER30> This is massively hyperbolic. The internet is full of great resources from authoritative sources.

<comment><USER31> I do find it incredibly hard to find anything resembling a trustworthy source of info on a bunch of topics.

Travel? Full of nonsense Diet? Don't even try Exercise? Maybe Health/Medical? No Anything I might purchase? Depending on the category, everything is an advert by someone who has barely done anything with the product.

<comment><USER30> Travel - depends what you want, but Lonely Planet has plenty of info that's reasonable. Travel safety - foreign office.

Health - NHS, NIH, American Dietetics Association... tons of public service bodies are out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The author is probably in the US, if you're in the EU you get a bonus:

The cookie popups that cover half or all the page, are usually dark patterned so it's very easy to opt in but hard to impossible to opt out and worse, come back every few days if you didn't opt in.

I simply can't follow some of the stuff that gets posted on HN because I'm not about to spend a day going through, for example, Yahoo->Oath->Verizon's popup about agreeing to tracking...

<comment><USER33> > The cookie popups [...] come back every few days if you didn't opt in.

Isn't that the expected behaviour?

<comment><USER32> Why would it be, I've already opted out once.

I bet if i opted in the popups would never come back :)

<comment><USER34> presumably they don't store a cookie indicating your opt-out choice because you chose to opt-out, that is a small price I am willing to pay as a reminder that I don't really need to read the article on their damn website anyway. There are multiple tech 'news' websites that are often posted on HN that I haven't read articles from in over a year. I find personal tech blogs to be much less invasive and more interesting anyway which is the silver lining to the current trend of news websites being so unusable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't have a Twitter account, so I browse it by going to mobile.twitter.com, which allows me to view tweets and replies. I assume this is an oversight by Twitter, and it will be locked down at some time, but it serves me for now.

Similarly, I only ever browse reddit by going to old.reddit.com. I don't expect that to be supported for much longer either.

<comment><USER36> The normal Twitter website works too.

<comment><USER37> When I try to read comments on normal Twitter, it prompts me to login.

<comment><USER38> Click the tweet itself, not the "conversation" icon button. That button is not "view replies", it's more like "write a reply".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I maintain a separate website for my sole proprietorship that is fairly tiny made with MkDocs. I have a blog running on ikiwiki. The sole proprietorship's Facebook page mostly points you back to one of those two sites. There is a tiny amount of JavaScript on the MkDocs site but it is manageable.

Living in rural Ohio with flaky cable broadband means uBlock stays almost permanently on. I'm sure high engagement ads are nice things. Waiting a couple minutes for them to load makes for a poor user experience out here on the fringe of the qualitative digital divide.

</comment><comment><USER40> _I mean it's only $2 /month. Less than what you'd pay for a cup of coffee. Or $340/year; here hoping you are very bad at math._

I suspect the 340 is deliberately designed to combine with the psychology of "bulk prices are always lower"; when shopping, I've seen plenty of examples where the larger quantity and more expensive item is shown boldly as "on sale" with a prominent reduction from a "non-sale price" when its per-unit price is still _higher_ than the smaller quantity one.

<comment><USER36> I'd guess the "$2/month" price has a catch.

<comment><USER41> Yes, it's $34.99 after 3 months. Currently, they've changed the introductory offer to $9.99/month (instead of 2).

<comment><USER42> Well, that's hilariously out of touch. I'd need to really _need_ their articles to pay that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Here is how I deal with the problem:

1\. Customize a decent browser eg Firefox to my own safety standard (disable cookies, Autoplay, etc.)

2\. Treat every website like an application. If a site is usable under my settings, fine.

3\. If a site needs an additional capability, e.g a login credential or cookies, only provide them for that site if it's compelling enough, otherwise blame the site and move on.

After customizing for a few dozens of sites, and not being able to use countless others, the modern web becomes a lot more manageable for me.

<comment><USER44> I do similar things and it kinda works for people like us. But, firstly, what about the rest of the world that's less knowledgable or technically inclined; and secondly, the fact that we (figuratively) have to put on armor and carry an arsenal of weapons before we can think of using the web still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I dislike the popups asking if I want notifications, I never allow them. Stop that now please!

<comment><USER46> I don't know what browser you use, but I'm not familiar with any that both allow notification requests and don't allow you to turn them off somewhere in settings.

<comment><USER47> I've noticed sites putting up a fake notification modal first, and then triggering the real browser pop up only if you click yes. I believe this is so they can ask you again on your next visit if you say no, which you can't do if you deny the browser pop up.

<comment><USER36> You can thank OneSignal (YC '11) for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This used to be called Pulling a Myspace. Usage down? Add more ads. Repeat. Eventually, all ads and tiny usage.

</comment><comment><USER49> When your only metric for success is growth, you have no choice.

<comment><USER50> Long term success is achieved by not behaving as a parasite.

<comment><USER51> Why was draw_down's comment killed? A quick glance at his profile indicates he is a 4 year old account with more than a 1500 karma, yet every recent comment by him is flagged/killed [1]. Yes, some of them appear trollish, but not all of them.

Does someone here have a grudge against him?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=draw_down](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=draw_down)

<comment><USER52> Comments which were killed due to flags are distinguishable: they say [flagged]. His comments are just [dead], meaning either they were caught by the spam filter or draw_down was shadowbanned; presumably the latter in this case. HN's policies around shadowbanning continue to mystify me.

<comment><USER36> In this case it doesn't seem all that mystifying why they are shadowbanned: they have a history of inflammatory, low-quality comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I liked this NYT series for a perspective on this:

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/14/magazine/inte...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/14/magazine/internet- future-dream.html)

<comment><USER54> And _this_ is why we need Javascript in certain webpages! :-) Great!

<comment><USER55> For a "log in to continue reading" popup? No thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> A couple of other mentions:

Looking for restaurants as I'm traveling is a difficult process. I used to land on Yelp and its imitators, thinking that I was getting a solid list of what was available, only to find that there is so much more that isn't listed. And the reviewers are generally awful.

People search sites. Years ago, I was able to track down quite a few people from my long-distant past for free. Then those sites were bought by companies like Intellius, which is about as helpful as classmates.com.

<comment><USER57> Early on Classmates.com had as pretty much their sole value proposition that they'd actually input insane numbers of class rosters and set up pages for the schools as gathering points. The social network side of things was actually more successful than I would have thought for a long time, but Facebook has pretty much eaten their lunch on that side so they're back to needing to be a good contact method. They're not.

Worse, they're getting creepier. They'd already collapsed into a nearly pure scam by 2010 or so, but apparently they're doing some very creepy stuff with their data sources now. I had to work with them trying to connect another site (ick) and never had an account that had both have my real name and high school (in fact my school was only in test data), but at some point in the last few years they connected the two and are trying to convince me that people are looking for me under a name they'd never know. I guess the inevitable devolution of something selling getting back in contact is selling the idea of contact without the reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> How come no mention of Pinterest in the mess hall? Talk about a website whose experience took this turn.

</comment><comment><USER59> It's gotten to the point where when I read an article, I will move my mouse around to try and trigger the "Subscribe to our Newsletter" popup, so I can close it instead of accidentally triggering it as I read the article.

<comment><USER60> This behavior drives me nuts. I'll be like 3 minutes into reading and, bam, a modal popup blocks out what I was reading and I have to click it away. The ones that really make me angry are when I move towards the back button and show a popup (nope, I'm not gonna spend another millisecond here after that).

Or even worse, the ads that come in from the top and push everything down the page then leave a minute later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's the browser vendors' fault - they not only failed to provide us with options for disabling/circumventing this abuse, they are complicit with the ad industry and actively support their interests rather than their users'. They've also made browsers so complex that it's impossible for small developers to provide a more useful alternative. This is where I am hoping we will reach the breaking point soon, so we can replace the whole mess with something simple and user-friendly.

<comment><USER54> It's just going to repeat history, then.

While I agree, that we need a Community's browser (one, that fully supports XML, ideally bringing back the original Seamonkey/Firefox way to do things), rather than a Corporation's browser, I doubt it could be made more simple. Today's technologies are here for a reason. It's always what you use your kitchen knife for. Change will not happen. But what we can do, is to keep "our" web alive and active, and communicate and socialise outside of the big corps wet dreams.

Just create your part of the web the way you want it to be, and as long as we keep up, we will not vanish. We need to understand, that we must support non- profits, like Archive.org, with our money, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> We are on a site which is not. And there are lots of other sites which are not. And Ublock Origin makes much of the rest of the web quite usuable.

<comment><USER62> Thats not a sustainable model though

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Its pretty concerning that lines between desktop and web are blurring and the oses are platforming. Some additional things I feel are pretty hostile.

* Paypal - defaulting fee based payment options rather than "free ones" or allowing user to set a default.

* Google maps - Searching for "jiffy lube" will show you the business entry and its reviews. If you search for "oil change" it will show you a jiffy lube "ad" that looks the same as the entry but if the reviews are bad they are hidden. In this particular case the location had several thousand bad reviews.

* Google maps - restaurants "menu" button takes me to a page of a bunch of customer uploaded images.

* Amazon app - why isn't "returns" a main menu item for amazon mobile app.

* Uber eats/grub hub/favor - app carts hide fee increases to account for minimum spends meaning you are loosing out on another item for the same amount, and make it harder than it should be to remove items from cart.

* Nordevpn desktop app - hides the logout button in right click -> preferences.

* Apple/Google stores - make it difficult to view recurring subscriptions, and to request a refund.

* Chrome - over the last year I've had to go into settings and tell chrome to not allow sites to offer me notifications so many times. I don't understand why I have to keep resetting it with sync and similar.

* google images - pretty worthless thanks to pintrest, and that I cant download images cause bs corp ip laws.

* Image sharing - still getting more difficult in 2019.

* App notifications - more and more apps push unimportant notifications or spam for engagement while lacking granular controls. I find myself disabling more and more notifications outright only to miss a notification that I actually care about.

Remember that we are techies, "hyper" aware of these decisions and their implications. What about nana? We are loosing digital agency.

</comment><comment><USER64> Web users are so used to signing up to stuff that they will do it almost automatically.

<comment><USER65> Is that true? Maybe I'm an outlier but I just bounce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> When the general web user finally revolts against sites handing them arb programs to execute, the people that rely on them running their code _ahum_ googfb _caugh_ will have a "next gen" HTML that just happens to also be turing complete.

The only solution is to refuse to execute their code, and in the cases where we actually want to, grind the GET response through a halting engine a-la BPF.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20806638](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20806638)

</comment><comment><USER67> What world is the author living in? Probably just the world of a web developer. Most people use the modern web all the time, it sucks, but sucks != unusable. Very clickbait headline.

<comment><USER68> I realized, while making a Christmas list this year that I don't know how to shop for things on the internet anymore. I am not a web developer, but I have grown up as the internet did and I've seen more of it than most people.

Amazon: Its tolerable if you know exactly what reputable-brand item you want, but if you don't you immediately find yourself in an unusable cesspool. Fake reviews. Chinese knockoffs. Low quality promoted items. I searched for "clamps" in the "tools and home improvement" category and there in my Amazon search results were trashy supermarket novels.

Amazon alternatives (e.g. Jet?): The selection is so poor that they are not usable for general shopping unless you are willing to settle for whatever one item is available.

Google/Bing/etc: Haha no. Sure you can find 1 bazillion retailers for any item you can think of, but they feel solidly sorted by "amount of money they pay google." Google shopping is more-or-less useless, and regular google search results don't allow you to compare products. Also, since it is not hard to find decent web developers, it is next-to-impossible to judge the reputation/quality of the bazillion retailers by their website polish.

Ebay/craigslist: Oh god no. Paypal hates me for some reason (it never accepts my perfectly ordinary credit cards) so payment can be literally unusable. All these sites feel like you're just selecting from a long list of scams. The amount of BS you have to manually filter out is completely ridiculous, and you are clearly competing with people who scrape these sites for items to flip for a profit.

Facebook: Unusable by anyone who actually cares about their privacy.

Chinese importers (ali/dx): shipping times of multiple weeks is unusable for many things. At least you know that you _will_ be getting cheap Chinese products, so you can plan accordingly.

<comment><USER41> I have a similar impression of the current Amazon experience, but what works for me is shopping at small-ish stores using Amazon Pay. Hassle-free, no registration needed and I get proper service if required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> ITA: OMG! I'm required at many huge sites to register for the site to view content! Some of them aren't even free, I have to pay!

If you don't like those sites, don't use them. Sites as described do not constitute the "entire web". There are plenty of great still free still usable websites. There is an entire internet of them.

Believing that the whole web is just the monopolistic giants is the problem here.

</comment><comment><USER70> Even simple stuff like the back button is now hopelessly broken on a lot of the news sites I frequent. The correct behaviour is to bring me back to where ever on the page I had scrolled to but that's no longer possible if you need to click a link to view the whole article. Even without that dark pattern it can still take 10+ seconds with all of the JS bloatware infesting the "modern" web.

<comment><USER71> I've started noticing in-page search breaking more and more, for the same kind of reason. Sometimes you'll see more search results reported than are visible and/or can be navigated to.

<comment><USER70> It certainly feels as though the core idea of sites having pages is dying or dead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I know it's unoriginal to attack the 'hypocrisy' of such an article, but I found it frustrating that the page includes a 'kudos' control which a) could just be a click but, for some reason, is a 'hover for a very short number of seconds' action which cannot subsequently be undone b) works with the mouse only.

</comment><comment><USER72> What we have today is: email addresses are valuable and people give them out.

The problem is that Gmail has failed to introduce one-time-use or per- recipient email addresses. That would immediately solve the problem of coerced email collection.

<comment><USER22> I use a subdomain for this. *@subdomain is forwarded to me. Anytime I need to give anyone an email address, it's a unique one (usually their name or a derivation thereof). Anytime I tire of email from a given source, I configure my postfix to reject the message with something like "550 Go fuck yourselves."

It's the little things in life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> >"LinkedIn that keeps sending dozens of emails despite unsubscribing multiple times; and somehow evades the Spam filter"

MLB is also guilty of this. Tantamount to cyber stalking

</comment><comment><USER74> This website doesn't work properly without Javascript enabled. Talk about modern web being a pain.

</comment><comment><USER75> the modern web reminds me of the days leading up to the .com bubble burst. Adverts being crammed every where, spying on users and other user hostile tactics to an attempt to make a dollar.

<comment><USER62> Talk about inequality. Faang absorb the bulk of online profits, leaving most websites destitute

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Facebook and Twitter aren't "The web", though.

</comment><comment><USER77> Engagement-focussed platforms and publications are of course trying to sign up as many people as possible using dark patterns and other annoyances to make people subscribe to their services to be spared from all the bullshit. I'm not surprised: They actually provide useful services for free and the bigger the audience the higher their revenue from advertising. Over the next few years content on the Internet will go the same route as music and video: It's free if you endure the ads and there's one subscription for a majority of the publications with each getting their share.

However, what the author describes isn't "the web". The web is about 2 billion web pages with just a couple of percent of them being actively maintained. I'd be willing to get that just a tiny minority of these pages are actually serving the annoyances this post highlights.

We've seen the abuse of new technologies come and go, people just don't think about what they're building, they simply use what's available: Blinking text, text with drop shadows, Comic Sans, pages full of GIFs, pages built with tables, iframes, pop-ups, link-hijacking ads, Flash-ads, embedded Java code - the web was never the clean and organized place make it out to be. Never. It's a romanticised notion that just doesn't die. It's the same rethoric as when people claim that life was easier at some point in the past.

It's all about finding common ground on what's necessary and what isn't and it usually starts with a couple of independent publishers trying out something new and the big players following their lead. HTML5 video killed Flash and Silverlight with WebGL/Javascript & modern CSS features being the last nails in their coffins.

The web isn't just a couple of hundred big players and we will probably survive annoying push notification requests, overly complex Javascript and EU- mandated cookie opt-in hints.

We will have to live with me stuff being abused for a while until browser vendors device that it's gotten annoying enough to do something about it.

I wouldn't be too surprised if we find that all browser vendors decide that they'll disable cookie support in their browsers with a clear prompt to allow 1st party cookies globally only to then do some local machine learning magic to click all custom cookie acceptance dialogues without user interaction or something similar. Of course we'll then have to endure our browsers asking for permission to access Bluetooth devices in our vicinity or to run advertisements disguised as tiny WebAssembly programs. But even that will sort itself out as some point.

The web has always been user hostile and that won't change. The level of hostility however, will.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's true. So why you use some third party for your blog?

Imo nowadays every platform goes to shit so static site generator is a must for every blog owner that it technical guy.

</comment><comment><USER78> > becoming

</comment><comment><USER79> amen</comment>


Advice to the Bright and Young - <AUTHOR> http://daniellefong.com/2008/05/15/advice-to-the-bright-and-young/

<comment><USER2> Dani, this is a wonderful essay, really. Thanks a lot.

I had many problems related to what you mention there. Long story short: some years ago I got to my nation's newspapers because of my own small game studio and of my work on the local game dev association, and I got to speak to lot of conferences with very prestigious people, but I always felt empty, and I always felt I was more and more of an imposter. I rushed doing activities not because of my interest on them, but because of how they could help maintain and enforce my own image... and so on and on. Also I actually was starting to feel more and more stupid, because I wasn't doing the things I love most, and that I think I need to feed my mind.

Finally I decided that was stupid, and I decided a first step to find myself would be to shut the mouth up. I stopped caring a lot about press and related stuff, and despite I eventually did some note most of the times I sent the media to colleagues that I felt cold talk better than me about the different subjects. I dropped out from forums and disappeared from communities which only helped my ego grow. I just kept working quietly with a few clients, and I even started filtering my clients only to do the most interesting projects, which could again give a boost to my brain and let me feel again that I was doing something worth, and not just something that gave me money while making the others feel I was actually worth.

This was a lot of time ago, and that was like a slow career reset for me. These days I'm much happier about my work, while being a lot more slow profile (now I'm rarely called from the local press, as a remnant of my previous career, and because of my current activity I'm now teaching and giving some conferences).

But I think I have a lot more to learn yet. I loved your article, and despite all my growth in the latest years, I found interesting ideas in your article which I think I could use to improve my life a lot more. Thanks again.

Only wish I had read this some years later (the more years, the better).

</comment><comment><USER3> "Prodigies [inevitably] become ex-prodigies."

There's some truth to that statement. One of the best pieces of advice I got was from a college professor whose course I took in high school: "You're headed for great places. Don't sacrifice your childhood/youth just to get there faster."

At the time, I didn't really appreciate the advice, but looking back, it gets truer every day. Take some time to appreciate the little things.

<comment><USER4> The irony of being a prodigy is that it is indeed a facade, because it's not that the achievements are new, just that the achiever is.

This is why it feels empty. Because although you did something a few years earlier than other people, lots and lots of other people already did it, are doing it, and will be doing it soon.

The rat race is one of relative achievement. One can pile on all the plaudits and laurels in the world and it still comes down to jumping through other people's hoops for approval.

The only thing that doesn't feel fake is absolute achievement -- when you do something new, regardless of age, and regardless of media coverage or getting puppy snacks from the outstretched palms of condescending adults.

<comment><USER5> I think it's ten orders of magnitude easier to say "do something new," than it is to actually _do something new_. It's tempting to believe that prodigies burn themselves out because they get cynical about the "rat race", but many burn themselves out by trying to revolutionize the world at a young age, without realizing that the world is a damned hard place to revolutionize. (You can see this phenomenon in the kid in the cited article -- he's ten, and already convinced that he's going to revolutionize a branch of astrophysics. That's a dangerous kind of immodesty.)

Obviously, it's good to strive for creativity and novelty in your work, but you also have to maintain a sense of perspective: if you've set your goals so high that your definition of "achievement" is isomorphic to "originality", then you're probably in for a lifetime of disappointment. It's a hard problem to be original -- there are a lot of other people in the world, and most of them are trying to be original, too. In fact, being original is a lot like being famous, because you can strive for it, but your success is largely determined by what other people do; it's probably bad to condition your self- esteem on the actions of other people.

For what it's worth, here's my half-formed philosophy: you have to do whatever it is that gives you a sense of personal satisfaction and contentment. Your accomplishments don't have to be great; they don't have to be original; they don't have to make you famous. As long as you can look in the mirror in the morning and feel excitement about the day, you're doing pretty well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I referenced Feynman at the bottom of my article. [http://scienceblogs.com/thescian/2008/03/what_are_worthwhile...](http://scienceblogs.com/thescian/2008/03/what_are_worthwhile_problems_f.php)

Perhaps I should have described another trap. It is too easy to grow up with the sense that one should work on only grand things.

"The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. [...] No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it."

<comment><USER5> That's a great pointer, Danielle. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's plain to see that the wisdom being passed on here was painfully earned. Some people never make it out. Congrats on surviving and coming through stronger, reclaiming your life.

</comment><comment><USER7> How prodigious do you have to be for society to push you along like this? I accelerated a lot, because I wanted to get to the good stuff, and I felt burned out occasionally when I did too much pointless work unrelated to what I liked, but otherwise was fine, even in the heavier semesters.

Basically, I figure there are two reasons to accelerate. One, it's dumb to waste time on things that don't matter (like the two years of high school math over which are distributed about six weeks of material, also known as algebra II and precalculus); you wouldn't want to waste your life in high school any more than you'd want to waste your adult life.

Two, you have only so many years of real productivity, I'd say between about 18 and 39 (upper bound varies by field and individual), and you want to spend as many of them as you can doing real work that has an effect on the world, rather than education.

</comment><comment><USER8> Beautiful article. As one who almost burned out, I can attest to the many truths that are seen in the article. Great article, Dani.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is exactly the opposite of my story.

My father taught me to read when I was 2 and from that point on, _everyone_ encouraged my parents to "fast track" me. I was tested, examined, and prodded by psychologists, doctors, teachers, and "experts". I even passed the preschool entrance exam before my older brother (he's been paying me back ever since lol).

Finally one day, my father, of all people, said enough. I would mainstream with all the other kids because he didn't want me to be a "freak". To this day, I really don't know if it was a wise decision or a snap judgement.

So I sat in class, bored to tears for the next 12 grueling years. Looking back, I had no choice but to "let my love of something pull me" as the OP said. So I learned a musical instrument, started several small businesses, made home movies, and published my own magazine. I excelled in everything outside of school and did poorly in class. I wonder what college admissions officers thought about a self-published C student with perfect SAT scores. I think my magazaine did more for my future that anything from school.

After a great college experience, I spent years of torture in corporate cubicles, bored to death no matter what the job was. Only when I found a way to do my own software startup, did everything fall into place for me. I'm finally living the life I was always meant to live.

So this would-be prodigy ended up being a late bloomer. I don't know whether this is better or worse, but I sure am glad I finally ended up where I belong.

Thanks for thought stoking essay, DaniFong.

</comment><comment><USER4> Alas that our minds learn by trial and error and not taking advice. In fact, the brightest people tend to be the ones who have a driving need to find out for themselves and not listen to what other people say about it.

<comment><USER10> "Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he'll believe you. Say a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it."</comment></comment>


Show HN: Hacker News for Preppers - <AUTHOR> http://preppernews.org/ <comment><USER2> Some nitpicking

\- Inside the threads, it tries to links to user accounts by username, instead of by ID, but that fails. The show page doesn't display the domain for the submitted site. If you're using Twig, have you maybe not dumped your template cache in a while?

\- Having user id 1 be Admin is just begging for trouble, if that account actually has admin rights.

\- The login/signup forms are behind http and not https, which happens all the time but still people are going to complain about it.

\- You might want to change your ajax requests to work through POST and not GET. One isn't necessarily safer than the other, but GET requests can be cached, bookmarked and indexed by search engines, which if they do anything destructive (that writes to or deletes from the database) can have potentially messy consequences.

\- You're allowing directories to be publicly visible, which means the source code for your templates are also visible. Nothing critical there but generally speaking, it's not a good idea to let people be able to poke around at all.

\- HN users might object to your using the orange theme, and to me it's kind of bright regardless. Wouldn't earth tones or something darker be more thematically appropriate?

\- I don't know why the username availability check is sending a response with html headers but it's not escaping anything. Returning JSON (with application/json headers) is almost certainly better than rolling your own serialization scheme - especially using PHP, which supports it natively (and, of course, _javascript_ which supports it natively as well.)

\- The contact email at the bottom isn't a link which people will find annoying.

\- Googling your domain leads Google to assume I meant preppernews.com, which may or may not be an issue if discoverability matters for you.

\- this being a Show HN I have to ask... source code?

That said, it looks alright. Not much else to say since there's not much content there. Good luck with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the excellent feedback. I have a few things to look into :)

<comment><USER2> And while you are, make sure you make the PHP universe just a tiny bit less terrible by handling database access and password hashing properly (PDO and prepared statements[0], and proper one-way hashing[1]), if you don't already have that covered.

[0][http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/why-you-should-be- using-p...](http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/why-you-should-be-using-phps- pdo-for-database-access--net-12059)

[1][http://www.sitepoint.com/hashing-passwords- php-5-5-password-...](http://www.sitepoint.com/hashing-passwords- php-5-5-password-hashing-api/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The db is covered and I was calling crypt with blowfish but this is cleaner. It shall be switched :)

Thanks !!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really don't like the orange. What is your reason for using that? Is it just to emulate HN? On HN, members can change the header theme. Mine is kind of a lavender and even when I used the default, it's a tiny strip of color. The amount of orange you are using is overwhelming.

Colors can have a certain amount of meaning. You might consider using some shade of green as a reference to this being an eco-friendly movement. But, do tone down the color.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it was just for the HN connection. I will look into letting the user decide what he/she wants. Thanks.

<comment><USER4> Another style thought: it seems like everything is bold. I would reduce the weight of some text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just finished it. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. It's my first attempt at anything like this so please be gentle :)</comment>


Ask HN: Outsourced SQL Providers? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
I've been asked by my boss to explore the option of outsourcing part of our data to an external SQL provider.  So I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations as far as companies they've worked with.
Our primary concern here is uptime and we're willing to pay a decent amount for it (e.g. a $20 shared hosting solution is not what we're looking for)
Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
Sam
P.S.  One thing I forgot to say.  It has to be either MS-SQL or MySQL.  We don't want to use something like Amazon SimpleDB because this experiment in outsourcing might fail and we want to be able to bring that data back to a local server. <comment><USER2> Have you thought about the latency increase inherent in moving your database across the city or state or country? You may be surprised by how large an impact this can have on overall application performance.

YC company FathomDB (<http://fathomdb.com>) set off on this path and have/had some interesting ideas about caching and such. I think they settled down to specifically providing service to EC2 users, so they could insure nearness and low-latency. The latency problem is an extremely difficult one to solve. I believe there have been a couple of other YC companies chasing similar dragons. I don't know their names off-hand. But, databases are an obviously large market ripe for change, so there's going to be some money made there...and so there are probably dozens of companies laboring away on the problem as we speak.

Why are you looking to outsource? You might consider just outsourcing the backup and data retention, instead, since backups as a service is well- understood and has lots of providers.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're looking at outsourcing a few of our non-secure applications because management is unpredictable. They will, without any warning, just decide they need to give x group of employees a computer and we'll have to add 20 computers to the network within the next week or so. Given that volatility we need to be able to scale quickly on the server side. That's led us to EC2 but we need a database for all those instances to pull off of.

Oh, and thanks for the suggestion :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Too bad you're not willing to consider PostgreSQL. I would have suggested <http://www.commandprompt.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> I just hadn't thought of it. I'll give it a look. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> what type of data are you storing and what type of application is retrieving it? i would imagine the latency between your network and the sql provider's would hurt performance badly.

most web hosting providers can give you a sql database but in those instances it works well because your website is probably running on the same local network as their sql server.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're doing this specifically to test but I don't see latency being a serious issue. The apps only pull text of about 1k at any given time and we have a 40Mbps connection so assuming we find a service in the U.S. I can't see it being a problem.</comment></comment>


Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work? - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1893946,00.html

<comment><USER2> I'm from Portugal. There's something important missing from the article which might be useful to explain why there were so many people using drugs in Portugal. Before 1975, the country was under a dictatorship and drug use was obviously low. Then there was a revolution and people were free to the outside world's culture. On the years following the revolution, young adults were pretty much amazed by all the things you couldn't see in Portugal before like Coke or rock music or, right!, drugs. I don't know many people with the age of my parents whom didn't try drugs, soft or hard, back then.

This behavior was also common on the generation which was born during the revolution, like my brother. There was more information on the end of the 80s and teens were still trying soft drugs but starting to avoid hard drugs. I can't really explain why this happened but I know bad stories about drugs were all the time on the news. For instance, in my house my father always said: "If you ever try drugs don't ever come back." He never knew about my brother but there was a cousin in the family completely addicted, he died recently.

I'm on my twenties so I'd say I'm from the generation after my brother's. I never tried drugs but all my friends did, no exception. They just aren't addicted, don't know why. It's pretty common for them to carry small dosages of marijuana which are allowed by law but there's one thing they don't know: it's legal, like the article states. It has to be a really small dosage but it's enough for you if you're not addicted. And that's what's funny: I never met anyone who knew it was legal (and I knew it because my brother worked at the courtyard) and everyone still looks at Amsterdam like the holy place for drugs in Europe. It's like a taboo, nobody is supposed to talk about it being legal, and it works I guess.

<comment><USER3> I am also from Portugal. After reading your post, I was wondering whether we lived in the same country. I suspect I am from a generation younger than yours, which may explain a lot.

According to your rationale, oppressive regimes lead to increased drug abuse. Well, Spain also had a dictatorship for decades. The entire "Eastern Europe" lived under Soviet oppression for decades, too. The USSR didn't have a sexual revolution in the 1960s. I would love to see data that suggests that oppression causes people to go crazy and indulge themselves with drugs once they are "free". I am not saying it's not a possibility, but there's talk, and then there's data...

Almost all my friends in Portugal smoked Marijuana. They were not all that open about it, but everyone knew. By contrast, none of them ever touched cocaine or heroine. They were not stupid. Everyone had seen heroine junkies dragging themselves around town, their lives destroyed beyond repair.

Personally, I think the ones drawn to hard drugs are the weak people who can't deal with reality. Many of them die, but then... perhaps the purpose of their lives is to serve as warnings to others.

<comment><USER4> USSR et al have never needed drugs other than alcohol, which is still abused today in incredible volumes - please look for numbers yourself. Still, plenty of poppy crops were destroyed after 1985. Hemp was and still is popular in the southern parts of the Soviet bloc.

<comment><USER5> Russia is the largest consumer of heroin in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm portuguese (lived there until I left for my PhD a few years ago) and I've always found this system a bit odd. You can own it and use it, but you can't produce it, sell it or distribute it.

Maybe the government believes in the spontaneous generation of drugs?

A couple of quick points, though:

         rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty
         needles dropped

This isn't directly connected with the decriminalization. There is a program that allows _anyone_ to switch a used needle by a new one (plus a condom, a bottle cap and instructions) for _free_ in any pharmacy/drug store. This program started years before the decriminalization and had a reduction of HIV infections as a goal (hence the condom and the instructions)

One of the main advantages of decriminalization was that is open the doors for a lot more treatments. Before, you had to admit to have committed a crime (with legal consequences) before you could be treated. The decriminalization eliminated these consequences and helped people find the help they needed

<comment><USER7> >> You can own it and use it, but you can't produce it, sell it or distribute it. Maybe the government believes in the spontaneous generation of drugs?

I am sure the point is for the Govt. to prosecute the producer, not the consumer. This is similar to some countries outlawing 'consumption' of prostitution services, but not offering of such services.

<comment><USER8> That's something I've never understood. How come the drug _buyer_ is the victim, and so is the sex _seller_?

<comment><USER9> When you learn how many of the women in prostitution are forced into that work by sex traffickers or sheer poverty, it's not hard to understand. The sex 'seller' often isn't the one who gets the money.

<comment><USER8> The law I was questioning assumes _every single prostitute_ is a victim, including the ones who are not enslaved. It also assumes _every single drug seller_ is not a victim, even the ones who are enslaved.

If the real issue is enslavement, why not just carve out a general exception in criminal law to acts which you are performing against your will? I.e., if you rob a bank because your wife/children are being held hostage, the person holding your wife hostage is criminally liable for that act.

(I'd actually be very surprised if this exception doesn't already exist.)

<comment><USER10> I think a good way to look at it is that it's not so much about right and wrong or about who's a victim but about average outcomes.

The average outcome of prosecuting a drug user or prostitute is you spent a bunch of government resources processing, trying and incarcerating the person in order to take someone off the streets who's not actually particularly dangerous.

So, why do it?

Drug dealers on the other hand frequently beef over territory, sell bad product that kills people, get into interesting sideline work, etc. And they're very few in number compared to the users. So as far as bang for the buck, it makes sense to prosecute them. Yes, there are exceptions, but you make policy for the average case and hope that your cops and DAs are smart enough to exercise some judgment when warranted.

<comment><USER8> I don't think you really believe that logic.

Hypothetically, suppose it turns out that black drug dealers are far more likely than white drug dealers to be violent criminals [1]. Would you then favor prosecuting drug crimes committed by blacks, but not by whites? Depending on what the numbers work out to be, you will get the same statistical "bang for buck" that you would prosecuting drug sellers but not sex sellers.

[1] Lets give this hypothetical a TV face: take Weeds as the average white drug dealer, and The Wire as the average black drug dealer. Of course, this is only statistics - there are violent white drug dealers and harmless black drug dealers, even in the hypothetical.

<comment><USER10> I was arguing prosecuting dealers as opposed to users, because it's a massive waste of money to prosecute the latter (not that that stops us from doing it, with 3 million people in jail and growing). Entirely different argument.

Regarding prosecuting black ones instead of white ones.. well we already do that, so I'd say the reality has surpassed both of us. However, as far as what I think _should_ happen, then yes, I would differentiate between gang bangers who own corners, run protection rackets, etc and the dude in high school who sells a little weed to his friends. But as far as consistency in the law, if you're decriminalizing usage and keeping dealing criminal, then you need to apply that consistently when you catch people dealing.

 __Anecdotally, I think the difference you're perceiving isn't so much black/white as it is weed/hard and suburban/urban.

<comment><USER11> "Regarding prosecuting black ones instead of white ones.. well we already do that, so I'd say the reality has surpassed both of us."

After this statement, I can't really take you seriously. Do you have any proof beyond this statement?

"However, as far as what I think should happen, then yes, I would differentiate between gang bangers who own corners, run protection rackets, etc and the dude in high school who sells a little weed to his friends. But as far as consistency in the law, if you're decriminalizing usage and keeping dealing criminal, then you need to apply that consistently when you catch people dealing."

If drugs were legalized, most likely, dealing without some sort of license would still be illegal.

<comment><USER11> "A citation ought to have been provided, but for most people interested in this topic the disparities in prosecutions and sentencing are so well known that it might not seem necessary."

Here is an excerpt:

"Whites are primarily sentenced to prison for violent offenses and white prison admissions for violent offenses grew in the 1990s, while drug sentences actually declined somewhat"

so does this mean that the system is being racist against whites in regards to violent crime?

More African Americans may be getting arrested for drug-related offenses, but there is no mention if they actually interviewed a cross-section of those people to see if they actually committed the crimes.

How do we know that there aren't more African Americans, on average, using more illegal drugs?

Some interesting points from the article:

"The second is more complex: high Black male imprisonment is associated with a rise over time in the proportion of Black children living with mothers who have not graduated from high school; this rise occurs despite an overall rise in Black mothers' education and a positive association between Black male imprisonment and the proportion of children living with mothers who are married college"

So it might not have anything to do with racism. A higher percentage of black families only have a mother..and a father in Prison. I heard stats elsewhere that said that this was the case with something like 75% of black families. Children of these broken families have a much lower chance of becoming successful adults and I would say a higher chance of getting involved with illegal drugs. Racism does still happen, but not nearly as much as you are saying.

<comment><USER12> > A higher percentage of black families only have a mother..and a father in > Prison. I heard stats elsewhere that said that this was the case with > something like 75% of black families.

75% of black fathers in prison? Looks a bit high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does the findings in this article surprise anyone? No? Good. I'm not a hippy, but let's get over this b.s. "War on Drugs" and begin to use our common sense when dealing with social issues and impeding on natural rights.

<comment><USER14> While I strongly support your conclusion in this case, I'm infuriated every time I hear a call for a policy change based on "common sense". As far as I can tell, this is just a euphemism for "I am unable to articulate a rational basis for my position", or even "I refuse to let the actual evidence interfere with my position".

<comment><USER15> Here is my understanding on why decriminalization of drugs is beneficial.

First, legitimate competition from suppliers would drive down costs, forcing high risk/high reward illegal operations from other countries out of the market. How can a Mexican drug cartel compete against grand-ma and her backyard?

Secondly, what is the violent side of drug activitey? Again my understanding is that it's mostly revolved around protecting/hiding illegal production, and moving the drugs to a dealer. If you eliminate that supply chain, that vector of violent activity would be cut off.

Thirdly, why do people use drugs. I see three distinct reasons, recreational, escapism, addiction. The first two can easily lead to the third. The second two could be helped/resolved through rehabilitation programs, or solving the cause to need of escapism. (8-14% unemployment can't be helping). The first case, there isn't much a reason to have otherwise productive members of society be in jail.

I don't believe that drugs are marked as illegal because of fear from pharmacy companies, or from paper/cotton companies. I believe it is that same reaction as prohibition, blue collar laws. Bad stuff can happen, bad stuff does happen, and government officials wish to prevent that from happening, on the immediate time line, without generally considering that the long term effects can be disastrous.

One additional thing. As part of decriminalization and in addition to rehabilitation programs, the government should be watching new recreational drugs entering the market, and doing studies to determine the health risks / benefits of these fringe drugs. I seems that like sniffing glue, kids seem to assume that just because a drug has not been classified as an illegal substance, it somehow isn't dangerous, when the case is really that the government is rather slow to address anything of relevance in a timely fashion. (Except steroid abuse in MLB, and communists)

<comment><USER16> Some of the current drugs out there need to stay illegal. Not because they get you high, but because they are toxic.

I do believe, if some form of decriminalization happens, we really need to up the penalty for crimes committed while under the influence. Maybe assume premeditation. I should point out I believe the same thing about alcohol. Killing someone while drunk should be considered premeditated.

<comment><USER9> _Killing someone while drunk should be considered premeditated._

This is crazy talk. In some cases it might be true, but the idea of applying such a broad judgment on an entire class of crimes would be a huge injustice.

Severity of punishment is not a good way to reduce the incidence of crime. Do you think someone who's judgment is so impaired that they're ready to drive while drunk is really going to stop and think, hey this is extra illegal, maybe I shouldn't do it? They're already putting their own lives in severe danger, so I doubt it.

The solution is better education, not increased punishment.

<comment><USER14> _The solution is better education, not increased punishment._

Without commenting on the question of a person's criminal liability for drunk driving...

How do you think education will help? Do you really think that today, in 2010, there is anybody who hasn't spent at least an aggregate 24 hours hearing the "don't drink and drive" message?

It seems to me that too often, people attempt to address problems with a knee- jerk "we need more education". But at least here in the USA, I've got to believe that we've _all_ heard the messages about drunk driving, your brain on drugs, AIDS, domestic abuse, etc., _ad nauseam_. What more education do you want?

<comment><USER9> There is a difference between being informed and being educated. Someone who has lost a friend or family member due to drunk driving is more _educated_ about the risks than someone who has been _informed_ about the risks from seeing the ubiquitous TV commercials.

I'm not sure exactly how to best go about _educating_ people, or I would be out doing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Incarceration rates in the United States today, which are due largely to the anti-drug get-tough policies of the last 30 years, should alarm anyone who believes in the principles of liberty that this nation was founded on, IMO:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate)

<comment><USER18> If you think the laws themselves are faulty, then argue against their merit. But arguments of the form "if we removed laws, less laws would get broken" have always seemed somewhat vacuous to me.

Edit: Given the downvotes, I'd love to have a discussion with someone who disagrees.

<comment><USER14> Well, here's one aspect.

Start with the facts that this is supposed to be a free nation, a republic with representational democracy, putatively making our own laws.

Now consider that a large fraction of the population is in prison for these very crimes, more so than anywhere else in this world.

This should suggest (although not prove) that the government is imposing its own will, overriding the wishes of the people whose right it is to determine the laws (through their representatives).

I'm reminded of the old 55mph speed limit laws. States would be tested by the federal government; if it was found that more than 50% of drivers exceeded 55, the state could lose federal highway funding. It seems to me that if more than half of the drivers exceeded the speed limit, well then, that's pretty much the same thing as having a referendum with a majority of voters saying that the speed limit is too low.

<comment><USER18> I understand your argument, but I don't think it's correct. In a democracy, there is no theoretical reason why 49% of the population wouldn't end up in jail. I certainly don't think this would be a good thing, but pure, untainted democracy does nothing to prevent it. You say "if more than half of the drivers exceeded the speed limit, well then, that's pretty much the same thing as having a referendum with a majority of voters saying that the speed limit is too low", but that's really a straw man, because nowhere near half of all Americans are in prison.

And in our case, those in prison are not drawn uniformly from the American population. Prisoners are disproportionately from a minority (intended in the "not majority" sense, not in the skin color sense, though I suppose in this case either applies) subculture, and unfortunately, that subculture glorifies many types of criminal behavior, most of which I imagine you wouldn't favor legalizing.

Again, it's perfectly valid to say that drug laws are wrong and here's why, and that if your ideas were implemented, incarceration rates would be much lower, and that this would be a good thing. All I'm disagreeing with is the general notion that saying laws should be abolished simply because doing so would lower crime rates isn't persuasive. I mean, we could get rid of _all_ the laws, and then the incarceration rate would be zero, but something tells me you wouldn't like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm in favor of sweeping decriminalization (and legalization), but the data in this article -- hand-picked, no doubt, by the Cato Institute -- _barely_ suggest correlation between decriminalization and declining drug use rates and stop way before causation.

The only conclusion you can legitimately draw from this, I think, is that decriminalization doesn't result in all hell breaking loose in at least the short term. Which is great! But I'd like to see a more substantial (and, if possible, more neutral) study.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is anyone else perplexed that the success metric for decriminalization is reduced drug use?

I'd think reduced crime (esp organized), reduced prison populations, savings in prosecuting housing drug non-criminals, job increases from local production/distribution, and/or tax revenue increases would all be more interesting / relevant metrics.

It sounds like Portugal took the path of "it's still illegal and bad, we're just not gonna punish you for it". Which isn't really decriminalization in my book.

<comment><USER21> No, that's decriminalization. Leaving the laws on the books but not enforcing them is decriminalization. Taking the laws off the books is legalization. The societal view of whether it's bad or not can't be legislated directly, but it could change as use patterns shift over the years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interesting tangental fact from the article:

 _As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners._

</comment><comment><USER23> I think the system is being overrated both in the article and in your comments. I'm from Portugal (but that doesn't mean I'm an authority on the reality of my country, as I haven't been involved in this kind of situations and didn't experience the system working) but I just think the whole thing just comes down to "you're not punished for having it".

But that doesn't mean that there exist government production sites or distribution stores. So there isn't any advantage for the goverment such as incoming tax money from the drugs or increse in job positions.

Also there is no mistaken belief that the goverment supports the drugs perceived by the youth because actually all the system does is not arresting you, the goverment doesn't provide the availability of drugs.

If the system ends up helping the addicted individuals or not, that is something that I don't know. Though it seems obvious that arresting someone is not the wisest first step for treatment, I end up figuring how does the system reaches the addicts then (I don't think getting help by themselves is something they would do without a great external help).

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm slowly coming round to this as a good idea - at least to trial. If you have the requisite support (like in Portugal) to go with it and are not just decriminalizing possession alone then it should work well.

The only problem I have is that it might encourage the use of drugs; which is potentially dangerous for people.

Worth a trial for sure.

<comment><USER9> Might encourage some people, and yet might encourage more to seek treatment. Risk/reward, have to do the math to figure out if it's worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting article as well I think: [http://www.badscience.net/2009/06/this-is-my-column-this- is-...](http://www.badscience.net/2009/06/this-is-my-column-this-is-my-column- on-drugs-any-questions/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Something for sure is that criminalization does never work.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'd like to agree with this study, but its from the Cato Institute...

</comment><comment><USER27> 2009 - old story is old. Flagged.

Edit: it's not that I don't like the story, which I do. It's that we already discussed it here when it came out in 2009.

<comment><USER27> FYI, _exactly_ 1 year ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580060>

Same time.com story, 220 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=828538>

Original article, 407 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516678>

It _is_ an interesting issue, and an interesting policy result, and one we should consider adopting here. I am wholeheartedly in favor of reducing government interference in people's personal lives, and I can even consider it hack-worthy insofar as it involves tinkering with legal rather than computer code.

But this particular story is no longer news. Not included are about 10 other HN threads referencing the same article, which you can find by going to google and searching for 'site:news.ycombinator.com drugs portugal'. This gets posted in some fashion every 90 days or so.

<comment><USER28> Perhaps HN should have a freshness date on all news.</comment></comment></comment>


Our Functional Future Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fugue.co/2016-01-27-our-functional-future-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-haskell.html <comment><USER2> It's not clear to me that functional programming really is "losing the war on adoption", as the article claims. Purely functional languages might not be making a lot of headway, but it seems that there are enough widely-adopted languages with enough FP features to consider that FP is becoming mainstream these days.</comment>


Ask HN: Do I do my masters in CS if it means staying an extra semester? - <AUTHOR> I can finish a "masters" (no thesis) in 2.5 years (as opposed to the 2 years I have left). I would only do it if the master would earn me more money quickly enough to justify the cost of another semester of tuition (~28k).<p>Thoughts? <comment><USER2> As I see it, if you have a 'hot topic' for your thesis and a suitably switched on thesis advisor then you are more likely to land a more lucrative job.

But there are a couple of considerations:

Do you have a specific area for your thesis topic and research? One which you are : (1) very interested in; and (2) you have identified several potential employers as requiring that skill.

If you don't have any solid answers to this question, then perhaps you need to get in touch with potential employers.

Your thesis advisor needs to be somebody who is well acquainted with what is in demand in industry. Most advisors are career academics and are more likely to pump for topics which are "lucrative" in academia but almost certainly not relevant to industry.

If you can drum up enough interest with a potential employer, then perhaps they will intern you to do the research for them and possibly pay some of the tuition costs. I did this twice, once for a honours thesis and then for a masters thesis. Mind you I did both on a part-time basis and was already employed.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the short term it might not seem too interesting; but if you plan to go on in this career for a long time (perhaps you won't have, if AI singularity occurs before you retire, or if you plan to recycle into another career at some point), then I would advise you to go as far as you can studying. After 20 or 25 years, it helps to have studied a couple of years more. There's a tendency for the study time to depreciate in time, new students being taught faster what you learned in time.</comment>


Show HN: Club Penguin for adults. New virtual networking app - <AUTHOR> https://app.cnnct.club/a/key_live_lbUKXoq5Mu4PgpAt7S4v8kceutij138R?room=5ea991f8a419a&pswd=f88cd8ea5d07b0c1&description=Product%2520Hunt&from=96&ref=producthunt <comment><AUTHOR> Connect.Club is a platform for online networking and virtual video meetings! Meet with friends and colleagues in an informal atmosphere. Gather 50 people for a Burning Man virtual festival! Or invite your community to a coffee shop to discuss startup ideas!</comment>


Zeronode – Zen for microservices - <AUTHOR> Zeronode is a minimal building block for NodeJS microservices. Reconnection, patter patching, advanced load balancing and more ... And it's ~ 5x faster and much more reliable than Seneca. I wish Seneca adds Zeronode to its transports list. <comment><USER2> Well, please allow me add the repo link then.

[https://github.com/sfast/zeronode](https://github.com/sfast/zeronode)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We made Github repo public last week but we are using Zeronode under production for ~ 1year. Its serving the microservices for a multiplayer card game with 1M+ users.

If you like it give us some Github stars</comment>


Perfect randomness does not exist (in a book) - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/review/R22D7C0DULO855/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

<comment><USER2> This is classic, although this is by far one of the worst comments. See the rest:

[http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0833030477/ref=cm_rdp_h...](http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0833030477/ref=cm_rdp_hist_hdr_cm_cr_acr_txt?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1)

One of my favorites:

 _Once you get about halfway in, the rest of the story is pretty predictable._

 _Still worth reading though._

<comment><USER3> _While the printed version is good, I would have expected the publisher to have an audiobook version as well. A perfect companion for one's Ipod._

<comment><USER4> Check out:

<http://www.kvrx.org/node/32430>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station>

Most likely encrypted spy messages, but the numbers seem random enough.

As a kid, I recall being able to pick up a few of these number station broadcasts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the purpose of that book? It's published in 2002, so computers had been able to generate random numbers for decades. It's worthless as an OTP book, as it's probably the only such book.

<comment><USER6> Based on the backcover flap and the existence of a "foreword," RAND probably republished this as a historical curiosity, not for serious use.

That said, having a book to flip through physically to a "random" page introduces a semi-non-deterministic element that most computer PRNGs lack, so it could have casual use in experimental endeavors in that regard. Also, since each line is indexed, it's a number sequence that reproducible for those kinds of simulations or projects that require the same (but at one time random+) sequence for each trial. (Probably for reproducing or comparing to experiments from the pre-digital era of 30-50 years ago.)

\+ See <http://xkcd.com/221/> for an example of this rationale

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like someone is doing it wrong.</comment>


This guy just stole pi, and Zazzle helped him do it - <AUTHOR> http://jezkemp.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-guy-just-stole-pi-and-zazzle.html <comment><USER2> I've tried twice to make a shirt on Zazzle, neither time using copyrighted material, and both times, having my custom shirt rejected for copyright violations.

Whoever runs that department is being compensated or measured the wrong way. They are overzealous, have a naive understanding of copyright, and make it complicated to appeal.

I wish Zazzle would pay attention to this and ease the reins here. The law isn't ambiguous with respect to copyright, and they are probably creating more liability for themselves by enforcing overzealously and erroneously.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7827524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7827524)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is not how trademarks work.</comment>


What the **** should I do with my startup - <AUTHOR>

I am a UK based IT consultant involved in a couple of start-ups over the last 4-5 years. In the last year, I decided to go it alone, but have no experience of programming. Having access to a great team of developer in Eastern Europe, I developed the idea of a video sharing start-up. Design were created by a very close friend and high talented designer. The iPhone app was deveopled and ready to ship, however, the web developer had a terrible bike accident and was out of action. I waited over 3 weeks before speaking to second developer and work restart after an additonal week lost. 4 week later, the second developer went AWOL. At the time, I had health issues so chasing was not an option. Another months passed and here we are, the developer, (Moroccan) had kidney issues and has been in hospital for a month in is also out of action. I have all but lost interest in working on a start-up due to my limitations as a programmer to pick up the pieces and it is very frustrating waiting for developers to get back to you. A fair amount of time (and money) has gone in to this project.
Am broke and tired (unwell), struggling to decided what to do next!
Should I sell the idea, design and software? (More to the point, would anyone be interested in buying it!) and if so, what would be the best place to do this.
Does anyone have any experience in selling half-baked projects with great potential?
Detailed image of project may be posted if requested <comment><USER2> Possibly you could put things on hold for a while and return to it when you feel more capable of giving it some time. Is there a great rush to get to market or could you ignore it for a month, enjoy the occasionally nice weather were having and come back refreshed?

I'd have thought (although could be wrong as I've no experience of it) that selling a project in the state you describe will be tricky/impossible. I'd also assume one of the big issues with a video sharing service is the bandwidth required and hence potential costs of running such a service. Unless you've got a believable revenue model to cover the expected costs anyone buying your project is still going to be looking at further outlay before they might see revenue.

Sorry, a pretty depressing summary, possibly you know something I don't about your situation which mitigates some or all of the above. Seriously though, if there's not a real urgent rush. Take a break, recoup, and come back with a fresh perspective in 2 to 4 weeks. It may be time to chalk it up to experience or maybe things will still be able to come together for you when you're better placed to face the challenges.

<comment><AUTHOR> firstly, THANK YOU for you reply.

There has always been a rush to market, unsure why but I wanted to get in on the act before others did. Justin.tv may have trialed a similar service although I am unsure what exactly they attempted to do.

I believe you are correct in saying the project WILL require further outlay. The hosting, iphone app and API's have been created, but the site will need to be re-created and additionally integration with a streaming provider will need to be setup/negotiated, which again may require some outlay and possibly long term OPEX.

On the positive front, the site API's have been built to accommodate a completely new revenue model. The model is the key to the update of this service. None of this section of the site is created, which will probably fall foul of abuse here as it is simply at the idea/design stage.

What I have decided is that creating such a start-up at this stage in my life and dedicating time to it will be very difficult due to other commitments...personal health and new child to name but a few!</comment></comment>