Will America's universities go the way of its car companies?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/16941775 <comment><USER2> I must admit that I am always a bit prejudicial when I hear an business person (or a business magazine like this) talking about universities.

They seem to view Universities as a business proposal: "How much do we invest? How much do we get out of it?", which it shouldn't be. Take this quote: "If colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with serious cost-cutting and painful reorganisations.".

My feeling is that the person who said it is thinking of streamlining it, removing subjects which bring little profit, and increasing those with profit. So out goes "geography" but also "gender studies", and instead more money is put into "pharmacy", "genetics", "economics and MBA".

The result would be great from a business perspective, but that's what companies and business are for. If there's plenty of money many companies will be investigating in those subjects just as well.

Instead Universities should also help the student become full rounded, more knowledgable even of things that may not bring money, and should let professors study subjects despite there being no monetary advantage.

Where has the passion for knowledge gone? Let the student have a place to get knowledge, and the professor have a place to expand it.

<comment><USER3> I teach at a community college. The price is quite low (and my pay). Society does not want to pay for knowledge. It does not see a benefit in having people who appreciate art, literature, culture, music, etc. It only sees a benefit from electrical engineering and other such subjects. It's a problem of society and it's short sighted goals.

<comment><USER4> No, it is that I do not want to be forced to pay directly or indirectly for someone else to appreciate art, literature, or music, especially not when there are kids down my block that are barely able to read and pot holes in the roads I drive on. That truly is not a high priority for a society with other more pressing problems.

I am however quite willing to pay with my own money so that I and my family can learn to appreciate literature and culture. I am also quite happy to support the artists whose work I enjoy. But I am not happy to have tax money support it until long after ever child learns the basics well and the local police department is fully funded.

[Edit, fixed typo.]

<comment><USER5> You seem to think that these are independent issues. I.e. if we just throw more money at basic literacy, road-maintenance, and policing, then society will be better. If we throw money at art and cultural education, then we're losing out on money for the above.

The fact is that a lot of social problems stem from cultural problems. You can keep throwing money and teachers at those kids down the street, but it won't get them to read. Instead, you need to change their culture (and their parents') to one of scholarship.

I find this "don't spend my tax dollars on anything that doesn't directly benefit me" attitude to be mean-spirited, but more importantly, to be one of the cultural problems that helps to foster the ills you cite.

<comment><USER4> Yummyfajitas said it quite nicely, but permit me to say it on my own behalf.

I am not at all saying do not spend my tax dollars on things that don't directly benefit me. I said that we should not spend it on things like art and literature until after we have taken care of things like basic education, infrastructure, law enforcement, and yes even universal healthcare and gaurunteed access to sufficient food.

I am a great lover of America and I think (with perhaps some admitted bias) that it is a truly great country. But I know kids on my own block that can barely read and I pass by a homeless shelter with large crowds outside it on my way to work, and there is an active police officer sitting behind me in law school class because he doesn't make enough to support his family comfortably. I strongly object to spending tax money on art and literature until long after those issues are fixed.

And no, throwing money at those issues won't fix them, but it would be a start. Money is not sufficient for a solution, but I suspect it is necessary (or at least highly helpful).

<comment><USER3> It sounds like you have the attitude of the government just providing the basics. I've taught you to read to go read what you want. But without access to a decent library, without training on how to appreciate literature it seems that your point of view is to utilitarian. The arts enrich us all in ways that can't be counted merely by monetary utility. I would like to live in a society that recognizes this and is willing to support it. It's not like it would cost a great deal or that the money could not come out of the budgets of other government agencies. It doesn't have to mean an additional expense.

<comment><USER6> Maybe my experience wasn't typical, but my liberal arts classes in college were a joke. They were crowded, hurried, narrowly focused, and taught by professors that didn't seem to have the time or the inclination to provoke the students into new ways of thinking at all.

I suppose it's different at schools that can afford to staff these classes at 1:15 student teacher ratios with good teachers but the money that was spent on making me a "well rounded" student would have gone a lot further if I'd just been given a pile of books to read and some time at a quiet desk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can you HNers think of a way to separate the teaching aspect of university from the research aspect?

They seem to serve two different customers. Teaching is really for students to educate them and season them up for life. Research is for the government or business and makes the professor and university money.

I think we can all remember a hard core research professor who could not teach a class worth a damn. On the other hand having students proximal to research projects is good for both; students receive early job experience and research projects have access to cheap educated labor.

What business model in the future should universities follow?

<comment><USER2> The model already exist: school vs. universities.

It is just---and this is just my opinion---that as human knowledge became bigger and bigger, what the people at the edge, pushing the envelope do, is further and further from what a 1st year undergraduate does.

Basically we would need another school in the middle for what is a BA/BSci for example, and use univeristy (and university professors) for masters and phds.

As for your example of hard core research professor, the problem is that at one point the number of professors who know a subject become very very small, and hence it's important to put the student directly in contact with those who are expert in the field. Alas it doesn't always work. But for very high levels (masters and phds) that's the only way it can be.

<comment><USER8> Right, but the school v. university model is breaking down for more than one reason. The problem has two edges. Just when you want, because of the expanding boundaries of knowledge, increasingly well-prepared undergraduates, you get the opposite. US universities typically have to teach a depressingly unchallenging hodgepodge of general education courses and remedial courses because students get fucked by the high-school system and because everyone and his brother these days simply must to go to college, no matter how dumb the brother is. A society that depends on universities to teach basic English composition, to take the most egregious example, is like ... well, I can't think of anything that's quite that ridiculous, but it's a massive waste of resources. But it's also a problem that no one wants to solve: It relieves high schools of the burden of actually teaching anything. It's lucrative for the universities, which just throw cheap grad students at the problem. And the four-year continuation of secondary education that the University has become for many is a nice (if hugely expensive, but who gives a fuck) way to keep down unemployment. End of Rant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is interesting just how much Y-Combinator itself resembles the business model of a university, except that it really can make a deal for a percent of a student's future earnings in a socially palatable way. Like a top university, much of its value seems to come from signaling and the hype generated just from the _label_ of being a Y-Combinator startup.

This may or not be correlated with the actual advice but it is certainly correlated with the difficulty of the admission process, and this forms a positive feedback loop. Top universities also have on their side the fact that having rich parents very much correlates with future success, which in term helps perpetuate their prestige and ability to charge more for admissions.

</comment><comment><USER10> In contrast to what this surprisingly uninformed piece claims, the top universities do compete on price. In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price. There actually is downward pressure on price, but this is because it's coming from the top schools, not from any disruptive force. Why? Because the top schools don't make most of their income from tuition, so they can afford to lose it.

<comment><USER11> _In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price._

I wouldn't say it's "incredibly good financial aid", especially in light of the nightmarishly high tuitions universities now charge and the fact that an inordinately high percentage of people have to take on _nondischargeable_ debt. It's price discrimination. I'm not saying this is a bad thing; it's arguably for the better that colleges do this, because if they didn't, poor students would have no hope of attending, but price discrimination is still what's happening.

Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles.

<comment><USER10> What I'm getting out of this is that you prefer the term "price discrimination" to "financial aid." The specific choice of words doesn't really matter to me if they're describing the same phenomenon.

> Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top > schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic > by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind > admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles.

Since we're talking about top schools, let's focus on Yale. Enough people with some degree of need are passing the "extracurricular hurdles" that _55% of Yalies receive financial aid_. Yale spends nearly $100 million annually on financial aid. And this is up from roughly $32 million in 2001. This is not just a "token" expenditure, nor is it a token growth in spending.

<comment><USER11> _Enough people with some degree of need are passing the "extracurricular hurdles" that 55% of Yalies receive financial aid._

The vast, vast, vast majority of people in that 55% are not even remotely poor. Most are of upper-middle income and of even higher socioeconomic status (e.g. progeny of diplomats, famous art gallery owners, and esteemed professors who make a _merely_ upper-middle income but are higher in social status).

 _Yale spends nearly $100 million annually on financial aid. And this is up from roughly $32 million in 2001. This is not just a "token" expenditure, nor is it a token growth in spending._

It "spends" that money by giving aid packages that can only be redeemed by purchasing their extremely expensive product. Don't get me wrong; I think it's better for universities to price discriminate in this case than for them not to do so. However, it's not accurate to claim that they're bending over backward to provide equal access to the poor, as they're demonstrably not doing this.

<comment><USER12> I can tell you from experience: people making upper-middle income don't get much aid from the ivies. If you're poor, it's free, and if you're rich, who cares, but if your family's income is in the low six figures, you're looking at big loans.

<comment><USER11> I know that. I was saying that in reference to his claim that 55% of Yale students receive financial aid, which is a bit of a red herring, because the vast majority of Americans qualify for some (but often not much) aid.

<comment><USER10> Why does the fact that most Americans qualify for some aid make the Yale's 55%-on-financial-aid stat a red herring?

(I suspect that, in what I write below below, I must not be responding to your actual point, but can you clarify what your point is?)

It's not like Yale is giving lip service to aid - it's giving $92,000,000 annually. This means that, on average, each Yale student gets $17,700 per year.

But since we know that 55% receive financial aid, it means that among those who do receive aid, the average package is $31,000 per year.

55% of Yale students get almost their entire tuition paid for by the university. This is not counting outside scholarships, etc. This isn't just "some" aid - this is a huge amount of aid on an annual per-individual basis.

<comment><USER13> Good parsing of the numbers here.

The stat that is traditionally used to show socioeconomic diversity (or lack thereof) is the % of students receiving Pell Grants, and in this department Yale remains weak, but it's not for lack of effort...

While median / average family income at Yale remains fairly high, financial aid is huge. I'm someone who gets crushed in the fuzzy middle range, but I still appreciate its generous policies. Wish that they were more generous, or that the cost of living in the greater Boston area was lower so that my family income was lower and aid was correspondingly higher. That's one big bummer - something reasonable in one part of the country might make you rich in Oklahoma, but that can't be, or isn't, taken into account.

:(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It appears that the US's top, world-class universities will survive relatively easily, and the affordable and profitable degree-factories like Phoenix may as well. State Universities will too in one form or another, depending on the finances of their state govt.

But the private ones in the middle that charge high tuition & fees, are not particularly renowned, and have come to rely on easy credit for huge student loans are going to struggle.

</comment><comment><USER15> Go to a state school. In California, the tuition for a California State University is about $5500 a year. If you can't afford that, you likely qualify for a CalGrant which is awarded based on need and are around $5400 per school year.

For example, San Jose State University here in Silicon Valley, doesn't have the reputation that a top tier school has, but you can still get a very good education, in some ways better than at a more prestigious school. In California's CSU system, teaching is emphasized over research. Perhaps due to practice or self selection, most professors at SJSU seem to be very good teachers. Professors have few (if any) graduate students so they have more time for undergraduates and there are more research opportunities for undergrads.

<comment><USER16> > doesn't have the reputation that a top tier school has

Thats the problem: The deal isn't go to university and learn stuff. The deal is go to university and you will get a better job, the extra salary you make will pay back the tuition and lost years of income.

As more people go to uni the more the market segments - it becomes go to Harvard/Yale, you will pay 10x as much in tuition but earn 100x as much in salary. But go to nowheres ville U and your extra salary is 0.

The problem is that for this (and the previous) generation the extra salary no longer pays back the costs.

<comment><USER17> Actually College is different from Trade School. Its not clear salary is the goal. Becoming a person better able to function and contribute is the goal. Sometimes that means, yes, gender study papers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder why the author didn't try to draw an analogy to cheap, high-quality Japanese imports. Oh, probably because there isn't one. Due to cultural differences, disruptions in higher education will most likely be homegrown and hopefully create downward price pressure on traditional higher education.

</comment><comment><USER19> If you're reading this and assuming it means the end of the value of academic credentials, I have some bad news: the Valley is one of the most credentialed places I've worked. And with few exceptions, the people you hear about in the Valley entrepreneurial echo chamber went to _great_ schools, or got advanced degrees from schools with great research programs.

In my entire life before moving to SF, I knew only a handful of Ivy League graduates. Here, nearly every other person I meet is an Ivy grad, or a grad from a top-tier research school, such as MIT, Stanford, etc. It's gotten to the point that I'm fairly surprised when I meet people here who went to lesser-known schools. Credentials are still important, even in the so-called egalitarian world of technology.

Call me cynical, but if you're reading this and hoping that the imminent collapse of the university system ushers in an egalitarian utopi, you might be waiting a while. Credentials will continue to matter -- they just won't be accessible to anyone but the rich.

<comment><USER20> Reading this one could think that university is a good source for entrepreneurs. Credentials can become a signal that you are a capable people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I do agree with this in some points.

My main complaint with US universities (from my experience) is lack of focus on producing the brightest people possible. It's simply too easy to be "undecided" for 3 years and end up with a wishy-washy degree that doesn't prepare you for much.

Once I realized that grades were a low standard, I started setting my own standards and put in a lot of extra time and effort that ended up getting me a good job right out of college.

So the comparison of universities (at least undergrad) being lazy, like the car companies, I can agree with (again, from my experience). Higher standards and expectations of student performance are needed.

<comment><USER17> I set my standards early, quit looking up my test scores, got out of college what I wanted and skipped the rest. I figured I knew better than my Professors how well prepared I was, the test score was not adding information, so I refused to look at it. I was honestly wondering if I would graduate, but I did.

MSEE Stanford

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are there really diminishing returns on STEM research?

<comment><USER23> I think so. At any one point in time, at the frontier of human knowledge, there are many research proposals floating around for what direction we should next expand the frontier. Some of these proposals will lead to valuable gains in knowledge, and profitable technologies. Most will amount to nothing, or at most a footnote in a more important work. It becomes clear after the fact that the funding money should have been invested elsewhere.

So if you are a funding agency, you rank the proposals from best to worst. If you continuously added money to the agencies budget, the quality of the proposals would get lower and lower. I believe that is what one means by diminishing returns.

<comment><USER11> "Diminishing returns" also means next to nothing. Technically speaking, it means that the _second_ derivative of output with respect to input is negative, when we care about the first. For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day.

What actually matters is not whether returns diminish, because this tends to happen right away if inputs are allocated to the most efficient projects, but the point where the marginal value gained is less than the cost of the input.

<comment><USER24> "For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day."

No, but it _does_ mean there exists a point where you should stop eating more calories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> But why are American universities placed so highly in the cited ranking if everything is ashambles as the article author claims?

The university prices are obviously on an inflationary course, but how else do they compare to the world outside?

<comment><USER10> This happens because the rankings cited are a function of the academic output of the faculty. In contrast, this article is largely worrying about undergraduate-specific issues. In other words, I think you've identified a _non sequitur_ committed by the author.

<comment><USER26> I agree, these are only vaguely related issues.

An undergraduate gets into Univ A and Univ B. Which one does he choose?

A highly promising young researcher is recruited as a faculty member by univ A and univ B. Which does he choose?

The difference between these questions also explains why some ratings place large, public research universities in the top few spots, and why in others (like us news), none of them crack the top 20.

Of course, top faculty and research can be a draw for undergraduates, so they aren't totally unrelated, but grad (especially phd) students are far more influenced by the second question as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> American academic system should ideally create employers and not employees

</comment><comment><USER28> In the UK we said, "We don't need manufacturing, we have our scientists and R&D".

Then when our Universities and our R&D started to decline, we said "We don't need our Universities and R&D, we have our Service Economy".

Then when our Service Economy went offshore, we said "We dont need all our Service Economy, we have our Financial Services Economy".

Everything outside London is a wasteland. The average wage is subsistence living, if you make one at all. But the Alphas live in a magical city, where cocaine and girls are all easily affordable on multi-million pound salaries.

The UK once ruled the world. The US couldn't be following us down to ruin better if we'd given them a map.

<comment><USER29> Do you have ideas for a solution? What could "we" do differently, given that the US is really a collection of individual businesses each acting in their own best interests.

<comment><USER28> The problem is the prisoners dilemma. It is in businesses own best interests to manufacture, design, etc, in the USA, but only if their competitors also do so. Instead they are engaging in destroying the purchasing power of their own customers (direct or indirect).

As a result, the only way this could be achieved would be by government intervention, but big business has that in their pocket, and the populace firmly convinced that globalization is good for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These are completely different markets. The majority of car consumers just want reliable transportation; the car is essentially a commodity. If Japanese cars are of higher quality, people will buy them instead of American cars.

With university degrees, quality of education is second and prestige is first in importance. These are correlated but not always the same, and this is one of the reasons why academia is not vulnerable to upstarts, unless there's a radical shift in how to evaluate prestige (and I doubt there will be).

Both are vocational necessities for most professionals in the U.S., but the "prestige" of the car one takes to work is irrelevant whereas that of the degree is essential.

<comment><USER30> This can change quickly. American cars in the 60'ies were not commodities, design was much more important back then.

There is nothing intrinsic in education which makes the university's prestige the most important. Look outside USA, e.g. at northern Europe where the prestige of the university is not important, but the grades and (esp.) the person are.

For some professions the university and grades is all that's considered when employing someone. But for others (e.g. programming) you need to test the person yourself because the university and grades doesn't tell you (reliably) how good the candidate is.

<comment><USER31> > But for others (e.g. programming) you need to test the person yourself > because the university and grades doesn't tell you (reliably) how good the > candidate is.

In many small programming shops I know of, whether or not you even have a degree is irrelevant for pretty much this exact reason. A healthy GitHub portfolio & a blog with some reasonably insightful articles > any CS degree you can name (including MIT).

If a 16-year-old asked you, sincerely, what the best past forward for a programmer was for them, would you unhesitatingly recommend uni? I have my doubts.

I have felt for some time that the best education in CS is a macbook pro and a 2 year backpacking holiday and this conviction is only growing over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If university are a source of education, knowledge, research and innovation and not a factory for making cars, why should they be managed in the same way?

If people were like a car, you could push the accelerator to make them move quickly, but there is no accelerator to push to achieve the goals of universities.</comment>


I'd like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IdLikeToUseTheWebMyWayThankYouVeryMuchQuora.aspx <comment><USER2> I think Adam's mistake here is to go too much by the numbers. He presumably has numbers that show that Quora ends up net ahead if they force people to create accounts to read answers. He grew Facebook very effectively by following the numbers. But he may not realize how different this case is from Facebook's. It may well be that for a site like Quora, at this stage in its life, users are not all equal. It may be a mistake to alienate the sort of people Quora has been alienating by doing this, even if they end up numerically ahead in the short term.

I'm one of them. Quora has now spent several years training me to be bummed out every time I click on a link to their site. Every time it happens, I dislike them more, and become more resistant to creating an account. I now think of it as a site for other people, who are willing to put up with the stuff they do. I'm pleased to find there are others like me.

I like Adam, but I wish he'd stop doing this.

<comment><USER3> Here comes the mob. Really? Are we all gonna throw up our arms because of this? We use _their_ service, we consume, read and digest their content like blood-suckers and now we get mad they're asking us to sign up? PG you've been reading Quora for "several years" and you think it's unjust they are asking you to sign up?

Quora has let us eat at their house for years and now all they're asking is we take off our shoes before entering. Let's not forget, we're in their house!

As an entrepreneur, how will we ever convince users to actually pay for products when the mob and pitch forks come out when they ask us to sign up?

We are so entitled it's sad. Really hope Quora doesn't bow down here. They aren't asking for your first-born. If you wanna be a member of their community, then be a member. Nothing unfair about that.

<comment><USER4> I agree with this argument, but not necessarily the tone of it.

Quora is a business as much as it is a consumer facing service with a strong mission to uphold. But the reality is, if Quora didn't keep its numbers out of the red and into the black by doing "annoying things" like forcing app downloads or account creation, then they would run out of capital and cease to exist. So, take your pick. Or better yet, just stop complaining.

Also, their mobile website isn't fully functional or in some cases usable. I beta test it, and it's riddled with bugs and missing features. Frankly, a lot of services today are skipping mobile web all together, and focusing on driving app downloads to provide a richer experience.

Bottom line: Services valuable to end users are also running a businesses. We must learn to give and take.

<comment><USER5> The StackExchange network does very well without resorting to any of these tactics.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Assuming what GP wrote would be true about Quora going out of business, maybe it would be better to just let them die? At some point someone will come who will strike the right balance between providing quality, earning money and not being annoying. They will survive, and we'll be better off. StackExchange network proves that it is possible in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Once Quora started blurring answers like Experts Exchange, I had no use for it. You're holding user-contributed content hostage? Go away.

Complaining about usability on Quora is like complaining about not having privacy on Facebook.

<comment><USER8> I forgot about Experts Exchange! I used to love them, but when they broke their shit all I had was a medley of frustration and rage every time I bumped into their site until they went away. Shame they screwed up so badly.

On a side note, what does Quora achieve by forcing people to view the data using a native app rather than through the browser? It seems a little ... pointless, or perhaps I'm being unduly myopic with regards to their strategy.

<comment><USER9> Quora is an iPhone-only app. Too bad for all those retina iPad users, you paid for all those pixels in vain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. Such tricks is exactly why Stack Overflow originally went against Expert Exchange, promising never to hide user-contributed content, and explicitly licensing it as Creative Commons.

Quora is its content. Its content is user contributed. Hiding such content from other users is just plain evil.

<comment><USER11> StackOverflow does _modify_ user-contributed content and have very serious moderators issues.

Which is why I'm sure there's going to be something new coming along one of these days: something where users are in control of what they post (e.g. _not_ a wiki _unless_ the user who did post does accept _himself_ others' edits).

Collaborating to answer questions is fine. But modifying and closing questions artificially (due to very serious moderators issues) isn't acceptable either.

So I'm waiting for the next big thing and I'm sure it shall come.

<comment><USER12> The difference is that SO mods are actually trying to improve the quality of the site, or at least that's their purpose. Whether people perceive them as doing that in all cases, that's another issue.

Quora is hiding answers to make you sign up.

<comment><USER13> Furthermore, SO makes it very clear when someone has updated a question, so it couldn't reasonably be misattributed to you. (It shows the editor's avatar and date.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My only experience with Quora has been Googling for a question, seeing they "blurred" the answer, and immediately closing the tab. Was I really expected to make an account? I don't have time for that, there's a dozen other search results I could be checking instead.

My first and only experience with them, and I assumed they were just another scummy ExpertSexChange type of site. We have open platforms, no need for this nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have been hating Quora all along for this, and wondered whether this constitutes cloaking (because they serve different content to Googlebot and the user), which is against Google's TOS.

The following are excerpts from Google's First Click Free (FCF) program page[1]:

        If you offer subscription-based access to your website content, or if
        users must register to access your content, then search engines
        cannot access some of your site's most relevant, valuable content.

        Implementing Google's First Click Free (FCF) for your content allows
        you to include your restricted content in Google's main search index.

Apparently Quora's answer to this is: "Wrong! We don't need to implement FCF to get our restricted content into Google, we simply cloak!"

        To implement First Click Free, you need to allow all users who find
        a document on your site via Google search to see the full text of
        that document, even if they have not registered or subscribed to see
        that content. The user's first click to your content area is free.

So clearly the program applies in Quora's situation, yet Quora doesn't follow the program's guidelines to show "the full text of that document". I see this as strong evidence that Quora's actions violate Google's TOS, because otherwise what's the point of the FCF program?

[1]: [http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536)

</comment><comment><USER16> I just can't understand why Quora continues ... in an existential sense (why does it exist). I also find it odd when anyone in this sort of community has anything but derision for it. They want to play this identity game and control their users like little children. It's just too much. At least Experts Exchange, in the old days at least, didn't basically ask me for my social security number to figure out why my winmodem wasn't working or whatever.

<comment><USER17> Who would have thought we'd be nostalgic for Experts Exchange.

<comment><USER18> At least EE had the funny mis-pronunciation -- "expert sex change" going for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm hoping that Google will penalize them someday. They download all the content in the page so that they'll get indexed for it, but they don't offer it up without an account to the user.

<comment><USER20> How would google determine that the content being served to other users differ from what the crawlers see?

<comment><USER19> Probably if enough people report them for cloaking: <https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en>

<comment><USER20> Well, I did my part in reporting quora. I wish there were a way to track the progress of this report. The process makes me feel as if the message was lost in the ether

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yep. In the past month or so, I've been conditioned not to click on Quora links for disappointment-avoidance.

"Oh, look at that, someone had my exact problem on Quora!" ... "Fuck this nonsense, I'm going back to Stack Exchange/Google."

...Which then prompts this response: <http://xkcd.com/979/> The answer might as well be that far away.

This drives me up a wall. I hate it when websites try to restrict their readership so brazenly.

On the one hand, I respect that the website has the authority and right to control its own information. On the other hand, it was submitted by a collective pool of users, and I just don't have the time to bother with side- stepping the shitty blurring mechanism. I just learned not to click on Quora links anymore.

<comment><USER22> Worse than <http://xkcd.com/979/> is when the only answer is the OP saying "never mind, I figured it out."

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> To steal a quote from Chris Dixon (<http://cdixon.org/2010/01/22/techies-and- normals/>):

"1. If you are loved first by techies and then by normals you get free marketing and also scale. Google, Skype and YouTube all followed this chronology. It is startup nirvana.

2\. The next best scenario is to be loved by normals but not by the techies. The vast majority of successful consumer businesses fall into this category..."

This is a case of #2. I know many "normals" who really don't care and just sign up or download the app. It is probable that Quora alienates some percentage of its content writers by doing this but probably not enough to account for the absolutely massive increase in lift it is seeing as a result (I would guess 3x minimum conversion improvement to account creation from just this one change.) If they don't break out of the tech minority the company is not going to be valuable anyway so it does not seem to make sense to optimize for that audience.

All comparisons to Experts Exchange (where you had to pay to sign up) are totally overblown, signing up for Quora takes less than one minute and its free. It's just not that difficult to even be worth complaining about. You are not entitled to the Internet your way as the user of a free product. As the saying goes "if you are not the customer, you are the product".

<comment><USER24> That's an oversimplification of the situation. A Q&A based site like Quora can be compared to it's predecessors like Experts Exchange or Stack Overflow because the content is simply enhanced by greater participation of experts. The early adopters could be techies or otherwise, but they _will_ notice the increase in friction for sharing and using content.

Also the problem is not really "signing up". As the article points out, downloading another app just to read content on the web feels like a overkill to most people (even non techies). Especially when the most common means of searching for answers remains Google which is usually found in the browser.

<comment><USER25> Frankly speaking I don't see the problem at all. If you are a rare user/reader at Quora not installing the App won't hurt you or Quora. If you are a regular user you will install anyway!

Besides these days who worries about login's when there is unlimited supply of free email accounts.

<comment><USER26> Most frequent users start off as infrequent users. By discouraging infrequent users, you prevent formation of frequent users. That's the business argument.

Personally, I just hate it when I click a google link and land on a blurred page. It's deceptive to promise an answer and then make me jump through the hoops before telling me what it is, all of which happens before I even know if the answer was good.

<comment><USER23> That is secondary to my point which is that people like you, a founder & developer who cares about cryptography (just guessing from your profile), are not like most people ("normals").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hit this on Android the other day and quickly closed the page and put Quora out of my mind. I'll never use it again.

<comment><USER28> It's funny because (on Chrome at least) you can select the "request desktop version" option from the menu and this goes away completely (although you do still have to login).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's one sucky business model. Force people to sign up in the hopes that they'll stick around. It sounds fun, but the existence of services like BugMeNot says otherwise.

<comment><USER30> I don't think that's the plan at all. This is so user hostile that they _must_ be at the point where they don't feel they need to grow any more (I find it very hard to believe they are still growing with these moves).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't agree with the author's opinion on the New York times's block being inherently evil. I am unsure of how else they could make money. The block is not hard to circumvent if you know enough to clear cookies. It is designed to give you just enough discomfort that you will probably cough up and pay for the articles (which are incredibly well written) than the Quora style which makes me want to rage and delete my account.

<comment><USER32> the "evil" bit is not that they have a paywall, it's that they both want to have a paywall and use the organic google search results for free advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I close the tab _immediately_ and without a second thought every time I get their "you must be a registered..." page after following a link there.

This is like forcing a girl to say "I love you".

</comment><comment><USER34> I completely agree with the article.

Apps are just fancy web bookmarks with some advanced abilities (interruptions, native code, state). I prefer to have as little apps as I can get away, so anything that can be viewed in a browser, I view in a browser.

I just want to know if you can get around this forced solution by picking "Request Desktop Site" in Chrome for iOS?

<comment><USER35> you give them too many rights when you install their app

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've never understood how anyone thinks they can be successful by making the web worse.

<comment> T-hawk Because "successful" is defined as baiting users into yielding their personal information in order to force-feed them ads and other marketing junk. Success isn't defined as users finding what they want or otherwise having an informative or pleasurable experience.

The ur-example: Zynga and their addiction-center manipulators that masquerade as games. Zynga succeeds if they pay, not if they enjoy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I also noticed they force you to login on the desktop version in order to read answers. Maybe this works, but the friction was seriously annoying and as a really active social media they probably missed out on a Facebook post or tweet I would have made about what I found.

I feel like it is a bait-and-switch, because as an early user I LOVED LOVED LOVED Quora and contributed a ton. Now I'm just annoyed by them all the time.

<comment><USER38> If you could redesign Quora, what would you come up with?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> How much money does Quora have left, and what is their burn rate? Are they making any revenue? It seems not.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't understand how it is comparable to the NYTimes at all. Times pays people to write articles, not appropriating random people's free content.

</comment><comment><USER41> Even worse are mobile sites that ALWAYS display a full "download our app!" page.

The New York Times handles this rather gracefully I think. Go to a mobile page and they have a swipable banner that says "hey we have an app, but you can easily ignore me."

I wish more sites would do this. I understand you want conversion to your app. I get it. But stop undermining your mobile experience. Sometimes it's what I need / want.

<comment><USER42> The worst part of the "We have an app" div/interstitial is that sometimes I have that app - and I'd love for the page to redirect me.

Instead, that's too hard, and they can't detect installed apps on my phone, so I get the spam every time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> A second "feature" of Quora that is an absolute deal-breaker for me is that they require real names for the accounts. And I imagine that I'm not the only one who doesn't want to use their real name on just any site on the internet.

And am I the only one who finds the whole interface totally confusing? Navigating the site is anything but intuitive, and I never even found a list of topics/tags.

</comment><comment><USER44> The desktop version basically begs you to login with facebook or google account. Sign up with email is a much smaller link. Basically, the site screams "We need your data so much! We're begging for your data! It's our only monetization scheme" and if someone is that desperate for your personal data, chances are they're not going to do good things with it.

</comment><comment><USER45> > [nytimes paywall measures] These techniques are wide and varied. They appear > to look at your IP, use cookies, use HTTP_Referer, use URL querystrings.

"Appear" what now how? Nope, it's just cookies. Very easy to defeat for anyone who cares on the desktop -- somewhat harder on apple walled garden mobile. But apparently good enough for their revenue, so.

<comment><USER46> Hm, I looked into this, and as of recently you could get around it just by changing the QueryString: [http://twitchy.com/2013/02/12/paywalls-are-hard- new-york-tim...](http://twitchy.com/2013/02/12/paywalls-are-hard-new-york- times-attempts-to-plug-paywall-leak-fails-miserably/)

The cookies are for the number of times viewed, yes.

The HTTP Referer header is used to tell if you came from google or twitter: [http://www.labspaces.net/blog/1258/Thwart_the_NYtimes_paywal...](http://www.labspaces.net/blog/1258/Thwart_the_NYtimes_paywall)

They definitely look at IP address for geographic reasons: [http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2011/03/on-the-new-york-times- pa...](http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2011/03/on-the-new-york-times-paywall.html) but you are correct, they don't appear to use it for the paywall.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I will admit my bias: paying NYT subscriber, here.

The article has two main issues:

Nagging to install an app: yes, I hate this also. Quota, Techcrunch, etc. have been pretty bad about this.

NYT trying to pay for 300+ staff: reasonable. I sometimes use their app and sometime just use the email news summary they send me every morning. Works well for me.

</comment><comment><USER30> This was posted an hour ago and still no one has released a bookmarklet to circumvent? Come on HN!

<comment><USER48> That's not a bad idea. Here is some bookmarklet code that retrieves and displays the actual answers when hovering over the blurred out answers. The downside is, it cannot do anything about the answers that do not have a permalink (clickable datestamp).

      javascript:(function($) {
        var $answerTextDivs = $("div.answer_text:has(.blurred_answer)");
        function heal() {
            $answerTextDiv = $(this);
            $answerLink = $answerTextDiv.find("a.answer_permalink");
            if ($answerLink.length === 0) {
                showError($answerTextDiv, "could not find answer - no permalink.");
                return;
            }
            $.get($answerLink.attr("href"), function(d) {
                var $permaAnswerDiv = $(d).find(".answer_text");
                $answerTextDiv.empty();
                $answerTextDiv.append($permaAnswerDiv.first());
            }).fail(function(e) {
                showError($answerTextDiv, "ajax call failed - " + e);
            });
        }
        function showError($container, message) {
            var $errorDiv = $("<div>");
            $errorDiv.text(message);
            $errorDiv.css({
                'background-color': 'red',
                'color': 'white',
                'padding': '2px 6px',
                'position': 'absolute',
                'margin-top': '38px',
                'z-index': 2000
            });
            $container.prepend($errorDiv);
        }
        $answerTextDivs.one('mouseenter', heal);
        $.ajaxPrefilter(function(options, originalOptions, jqXHR) {
            /* this is to prevent annoying UIX usage tracking POSTs to Quora */
            if (options.type === 'POST') {
                jqXHR.abort();
            }
        });
      }(jQuery));

<comment><USER49> I have a bookmark on my iPhone that scrolls to the bottom of the page using Java. Is it not possible to hack something together that takes the hidden data (since the OP says it loads the actual info behind the white blocking screen) and reveal it instead of the white?

It's another couple of button presses but if it fucks them over for this scummy tactic I'm all for it.

<comment><USER48> The iOS version should be easy since they actually send all the answers to the client and hide them. This works with my pretend iOS 5 iPhone (via Chrome):

      javascript:(function($) {
    	$(".app_promo, .app_install_dialog").hide();
    	$(".answer_text").css({'margin-left': '110px', 'width': '88%'});
      }(jQuery));

<comment><USER49> I tested it - it reveals the text just fine but the text sits off to the right of the page and you can't scroll or zoom to reflow the text in to the screen size.

Thanks for the first-pass at it though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Quora does the same thing in chrome when you aren't logged in ...

PS: I can't think of ExpertsExchange without being reminded of the url fail.

</comment><comment><USER50> Quora is irritating in this respect; they're always so _pushy_. They keep sending me weekly digest emails even after I asked them not to and repeatedly tried to unsubscribe. As it happens, I then started reading them and found them quite interesting, so I guess it worked -- but I still resent the tactics used.

<comment><USER51> You've made those tactics succeed. It is _your_ fault that sites keep using them.

<comment><USER50> I thought there was a legal requirement to have unsubscribe links that work? I was charitably assuming the unsubscribe function was broken by accident rather than by design. Furthermore, this tactic only works if the site has content interesting enough to overcome the extreme irritation that ignoring my attempts to unsubscribe: this is not only rare, but the site is shooting itself in the foot. There's no way I'd ever let a Quora app have access to my phone after pulling that kind of stunt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is not just about Quora, its more about Apple.. Apple is funny, cause its innovation creates the technology of the 2010-20, but with the old-fashion corporate mentality of the 80's.. it wins in the short-term because of its innovation quality, but lost in the long-term because of its yuppie/greedy pig style management: "Im a shark, i want all the market for myself and i will crush the competition trying to bite my cake"

This is also why Google in the long-term are winning, and this is also something to worry about, because its becoming more and more a monopoly colossus of technology; and as Andreessen use to say; "software will eat the world"

Quora are just replicating the bad/wrong side of Apple.. like a lot of old- mentality companies are doing.. trying to surf in the Apple's vacuum

Just bad for them. Just another company to be forgoten because of bad(greedy) decisions

</comment><comment><USER53> I am on Quora, but I can't for the life of me remember how I signed up. One day I got an e-mail saying that somebody was following me.

There seem to be some interesting debates going on there, but I haven't used it that much.

</comment><comment><USER54> Stack Exchange > Quora in every way possible.

Also, what quora is doing here REALLY seems like a black-hat SEO technique. They're baiting you with the link and then switching on you to download their app.

If I were Google, I would blacklist their whole domain for this crap and explain again what cloaking is if I were pressed on for an answer: [http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355)

</comment><comment><USER55> Maybe I'm the exception but I really like the new "download this app" banners. Much less intrusive than the standard splash screens and integrating them with the OS makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER56> Hmm ... it seems like it's a replay of the web circa the late 90s. <http://boston.conman.org/2013/02/07.1>

</comment><comment><USER57> Who owns the content on Quora?

Could someone just scrape all the user contributed stuff and start a new site? Even if it was just all flat text I'd use it. Would this be legal?

<comment><USER58> Quora's terms of service allow for republishing[0] of any amount of content posted after April 22, 2010, so long as the user didn't mark it as not to be republished. There are a few caveats around attribution and a requirement to update content on request if Quora's copy changes, but it's actually fairly liberal.

0: <https://www.quora.com/about/tos> (search for "Quora's Licenses to You")

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Totally agree with the article also. I've run into this in the past when getting there from search results, and it makes me really hate Quora.

</comment><comment><USER60> <http://blog.intercom.io/if-its-important-dont-hack-it/>

</comment><comment><USER61> I have no issue with quora wanting you to sign up to use their site but to allow their pages to be indexed by search engines and then hide content on those pages to humans unless they sign up (with their "real name') is ridiculous. With $61 million, you would think that they could hire someone to tell them that this is a bad idea.

I too have been trained to avoid quora search results.

</comment><comment><USER62> Nitpick on the NY times stuff: In my experience at least, they do not paywall you for links that come from an email, as the author claims. It's only links that originate from clicking to articles when you are already on the site that count against your monthly limit of 10. Links from Google, Twitter, email, etc all take you straight to a paywall-free article.

<comment><USER46> Ah, good nit, I'll double check. Maybe I've met my limit on all my browsers.

<comment><USER62> Nope, I'm wrong. I think actually nytimes has been changing stuff recently, but I just reproduced a case where I was blocked even by emailing myself the link. Pasting the link into Google still works tho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I've generally written off Quora because of their poor growth hacking techniques. What struck me about this article is the the data usage. I didn't realize they load the entire answer onto your phone, only to cover it up with the "use our app" junk. I know it's not a lot of data, but this still appears like a pretty big lack of respect for users.

</comment><comment><USER64> It's even a little worse than loading the whole page. Quora has some sort of poorly implemented background process constantly polling the server for updates. Look at the page load indicator -- it never stops. This drains battery like hell, even if you just have a quora tab open in the background. For a page that can't even be updated.

</comment><comment><USER54> You know what happens when I'm clicking through a SERP link and you give me a pop-up asking me if I want to download your crappy app? I hit the back button in mobile safari and find an alternate source of information.

No one wants your crappy forum reader app. Stop bugging me about it _every single time_ I visit your damn site.

</comment><comment><USER65> Something in same lines, recent xkcd strip, <http://xkcd.com/1174/>

</comment><comment><USER66> I've landed many times on Quora but then left site because they allow me to read only one answer without siging in.

This has been something that really irritates me. They are doing same thing on phones now. I don't know about others but from me, they are not getting any visits now.

Remocing Quora from my Google search results in 3..2..1..

</comment><comment><USER67> I really don't understand why people are so up in arms.

First everyone was in love with Quora, now everyone hates them? What changed?

Yes - they want you to join their community because their ecosystem depends on people signing up. I signed up for Quora once and since then it's never forced me to sign in again.

<comment><USER68> Because people hate being coerced to do something. Stackoverflow didn't need to force people to do so. A Q&A site only purpose is to give you the best possible answer. FAST. Anything else degrades your experience.

If quora breaks me out of the flow to register to their site ... they have cost me way more productivity than they could possibly bring back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> The day this happened was the day I stopped contributing to Quora.

I did not delete all my contributions, but almost did.

</comment><comment><USER12> Another thing I dislike from Quora are their annoying "Kumar asked you to answer this question" style emails that come in addressed to you. Its probably their way to increase the answer rate. I think I did actually contribute an answer on the first one of these I received.

</comment><comment><USER70> The mobile quora experience is pretty horrible. The site has some gems of information but at the same time a vast amount of questions go unanswered and there is a not insignificant troll ish community growing. Hopefully they can find a way to turn it around.

</comment><comment><USER71> I concur. The first time I saw that "you need to register" sign I laughed and noted to myself "these guys will never reach the popularity of stack exchange with that dumb restriction". I never opened Quora again.

</comment><comment><USER72> When viewing a site's content that shows up high on google's search requires me to break out the inspector and hide divisions, or to spoof being a different user agent, something is wrong... very wrong.

</comment><comment><USER73> I used to like Quora a lot but always hoped it would grow out of its Silicon Valley cliqueyness... I think a lot of these recent changes ensure that it's going to continue only serving that niche.

</comment><comment><USER74> The amount of sites I have to use View Source to get to the content is slowly, slowly creeping up...

But then I also get to paste it in vim or gedit and don't have to deal with all the visual spam...

</comment><comment><USER35> scrape quora's content and share

</comment><comment><USER75> There is still a need for a good general-purpose Q&A website, that doesn't do this stuff or close half of the good questions like SE does.

</comment><comment><USER76> I hate when they say "Log in to read the answers".

</comment><comment><USER77> I am fine with iOS smart app banner. Real problem to me is "view in app" never deep link to the content I originally intended to read

</comment><comment><USER78> Does anyone else think there might be a correlation between the amount of anti-user stuff at Quora and Charlie getting kicked out?

</comment><comment><USER79> So do you think I should black list them on Nuuton? I'd rather not waste my time with a site that does this.

</comment><comment><USER80> bth, i have no idea how Quora achieves anything. The service is kind of okay I guess, but I was thoroughly turned off by my first visit. I got to read one answer 'for free'... I cant remember what the price was I had to pay but 'far too much' is how I remember it.

</comment><comment><USER81> Download our app!! <http://xkcd.com/1174/>

</comment><comment><USER82> The real problem is Google not throwing them out of the index

</comment><comment><USER83> This reminds me to get around to removing my account

<comment><USER84> Good luck. They don't allow you to delete your account unless you write them an email, which they don't seem to answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Amen to this post! This is SPOT ON!

</comment><comment><USER86> Quora is a horrible site.

</comment><comment><USER87> Try telling the manager that.

</comment><comment><USER88> Just opened Quora to see if my user was still there:

User name: Alsfkj Alskfjaslkfj

E-mail Quora probably sends weekly e-mails: email@example.com

(sorry if any of you owns x.com)

<comment><USER89> This is a good place to use email@example.com

With example.com (which cannot be registered) you know you are not potentially smacking around the domain of a poor company

<comment><USER90> I usually use the site's own domain -- so a fake account on quora gets an @quora.com domain.

<comment><USER91> I do that too! I felt bad for the postmaster at fuckyou.com. It's weird but this technique has not yet been rejected, whereas mailinator gets rejected all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> Seeing things like this makes me want to punch a hole in the wall.

</comment><comment><USER93> Important expression of opinion

</comment><comment><USER94> Look, I love Quora and what they are doing. You like quality answers and want to get access to the community of users providing it? Then, at the least make the tiniest contribution back to that community by creating an account. Simple!

<comment><USER2> How does someone merely creating an account contribute to the community?

<comment><USER95> If you create an account, they have another user which makes it easier for them to raise money and/or figure out a way to monetise in the future, which means they are less likely to die, which means you have contributed life to the community.

Of course, actually having a business model might be a better plan for them, but there have been plenty of QA sites that have not found a model that works, so that sounds harder than just getting more users.

<comment><USER2> What investors care about is how many people used the site last week, not how many people have accounts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beginners iOS Development: Objective-C Guide for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://ios-blog.com/tutorials/beginners-ios-development-objective-c/

<comment><USER2> Great Resource</comment>


Ask HN: How much traffic does your tech blog get? - <AUTHOR> For those who have a personal blog related to tech, how much traffic does it receive per month?
If you have any stats related to your to the traffic patterns of your blog, feel free to share.
How much traffic does your blog receive when it makes the front page of HN?
How much traffic does your blog receive when it receives substantial attention on one the tech/programming related subreddits?
How many users as a percentage have adblockers enabled?
Would tech related blogging and including ads from google adsense make money considering tech/programming related content is a sort of niche and also presumably a lot of users have adblockers?
Disclaimer: I am planning to start blogging with ads. <comment><USER2> IMHO, don't put ads on your website until you build some traffic, something like > 500 pageviews/day. You will make a few cents per month until you have consistent traffic and there is no point in annoying your users with ads.

Most important thing is to put good content on your website. Blogging consistently, as in 2 - 3 articles per month, is another good tip.

Promote your articles on HN and Reddit, but don't spam these every day, just when you think you have something good to share.

To give you an example, for a technical blog with an average of about 2500 pageviews per day you get around $50/month from AdSense.

AFAIK, for technical blogs you can potentially get more money from affiliate links, like Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER3> _How much traffic does your blog receive when it makes the front page of HN?_

Not a tech blog, but when I hit the front page, even briefly, it tends to go to between 5k and 10k page views over the course of a couple of days or so. My best, most overwhelmingly successful page has a bit over 20k total page views currently. I think something like 15k of that came from hitting the front page when someone (not me) posted it, much to my astonishment.

I have reason to believe this is not even very good in the grand scheme of things for hitting the front page.

</comment><comment><USER4> I get 100-200 a week. Once in a while I see some referral spam on my GA.

When I post to a subreddit or get on HN I usually see several hundred visits for the day. But then things calm down after a day.

</comment><comment><USER5> For my personal blog (raed.it/blog): Very little traffic, around 50 visits per day.

But I don't publish that often.

I used to have another blog running on a shared hosting plan; it went down when it got to the front page [0], so I'm guessing a fair amount of traffic.

[0] : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8339841](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8339841)

</comment><comment><USER6> I chose very broad competitive niche. So it gets very little traffic around 500 visitors per months.

Find the pain, and then start with a very specific niche to cure the pain.

</comment><comment><USER7> I get around 3.5k visitors a month; most of my articles are code snippets or brief tutorials to do with code.

I make around £2 a month from ads on these articles, so it's not exactly lucrative :)</comment>


… but we are all Facebook users - <AUTHOR> http://blog.onyxbits.de/but-we-are-all-facebook-users-715/ <comment><USER2> For those on cable service with long lasting IP addresses..

You don't use FB, right? But you let your friend you your wireless off his phone, and he had the FB app and location services on. Well, FB now knows exactly where your IP is, for a while at least.

<comment><USER3> No. I block all FB domains at the router, and force all dns requests to redirect to it.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't matter. As long as a single smartphone with GPS enabled roams past your WiFi (and sees its advertised MAC address), any app on the phone can associate the user's GPS coordinates with your router's MAC address. Do this with enough users, and enough routers, and you've got a nearly perfect geographical mapping of WiFi routers.

This isn't a conspiracy; Apple and Google have been doing this sort of triangulation for a long time, and even use it as a method of saving battery while avoiding the GPS radio.

Any app on your phone, including the Facebook app, can see nearby WiFi networks (maybe this is a gated permission now?). If the app has enough users with GPS enabled, its developer can easily build a GPS/WiFi map.

<comment><USER3> Well what you described has absolutely nothing to do with GP's premise, and to which I was replying:

> But you let your friend you your wireless off his phone, and he had the FB > app and location services on. Well, FB now knows exactly where your IP is, > for a while at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Courtesy of every idiot who (illegally) uploaded their addressbook, with my > contacts in it, to the service.

I know your address is PII, but seriously it's _illegal_ to upload that info to FB? The post office does this with your snail mail info, and anybody could pick up a discarded envelope at the dump, or see a forwarded e-mail message with your address in it.

I am not saying that people should be blithely uploading their address books, but is it illegal?

And, come to think of it: does google track the address graph of gmail users? They could do this entirely with envelope information (SMTP MAIL FROM and RCPT TO), though message headers would be a richer trove.

<comment><AUTHOR> > but seriously it's illegal to upload that info to FB?

In Germany, it is.

Relevant quote from the Whatsapp TOS (Whatsapp belongs to Facebook):

> Address Book. You provide us the phone numbers of WhatsApp users and your > other contacts in your mobile phone address book on a regular basis. You > confirm you are authorized to provide us such numbers to allow us to provide > our Services.

Relevant german court order:

[http://www.lareda.hessenrecht.hessen.de/lexsoft/default/hess...](http://www.lareda.hessenrecht.hessen.de/lexsoft/default/hessenrecht_lareda.html#docid:7876045)

It's a bit lengthy (and difficult!) to translate. In summary it's a child custody case about excessive smartphone use in which the court orders the mother, among others things (limiting smartphone usage) to get written consent from all contacts in the child's addressbook. The issue is that in Germany, your contact data is "copyright" be yourself. You don't have to put up with people freely resharing your contacts and theoretically, the child could have been "sued"(+) by anyone in the addressbook who isn't also a Whatsapp user.

(+) There is a "light version" of "sueing someone" in Germany, called "Abmahung", which is frivously used by some law firms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> lol "illegally uploaded contacts" contacts are public knowledge. you dont want someone to share it dont give it to that person .

<comment><USER7> What's your full name, phone number, email address, and home address? Or alternatively, how do your presumably extant friends know how to get in contact with you, given your impenetrable policy of never sharing any contact information?

<comment><USER8> I give this information to my friends, I do not expect them to share it with the rest of the world. If someone who knows of me from a common friend wants to contact me they can ask that friend to pass on their contact details to me.</comment></comment></comment>


Brexit vote site may have been hacked, MPs say in report - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-39564289 <comment><USER2> I was 'in the room' when this happened. From the people monitoring the site and getting it back online there was no suspicion that the amount of traffic was high enough to be considered a DDOS, it was just a small, low-traffic service that got unexpectedly crushed a là many that get suffocated by HN.

I suspect other reasons for bringing this up now.

<comment><USER3> You expected the registration site for a national referendum in which 45 million people voted to be "a small, low-traffic service"? No surprise it collapsed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Directly from the report[1]:

"We do not rule out the possibility that there was foreign interference in the EU referendum caused by a DDOS (distributed denial of service attack) using botnets, though we do not believe that any such interference had any material effect on the outcome of the EU referendum."

This is not hacking, this is a statement that says we can't say for sure that the additional load wasn't a DDoS attack.

[1] [https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/...](https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmpubadm/496/496.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> 'There is no evidence of malicious intervention'

Becomes

"OMG BREXIT WAS HACKED!!!" in the hands of a BBC clickbaiter.

Nice work.

<comment><USER6> Also no actual notion of why preventing late registrations would have benefited one side or the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why should somebody go through the hassle of register himself for voting? Where I leave all the persons eligible for voting receive the voting certificate one month in advance. An ID card and the certificate are all you need to enter the polling station.

<comment><USER2> Because people move, and you need to be registered to vote in the right constituency and polling station (and those need to be well positioned/balanced so that too many people aren't voting in once place - which could mean some are unable to vote due to queues).

Being able to vote anywhere is not an option - it would required digital voting, which we _do not want_.[1]

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI)

<comment><USER8> I wish that you could explain that in Estonia. Around here, anyone doubting e-voting is viewed as part of the fifth column and mocked like a 9/11 truther even by fellow techies, who really ought to know better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ignore anything from the bbc with brexit in the title, they are clearly biased.

<comment><USER10> "Ignore anything from the NYTimes with New York in the title, they are clearly biased"

<comment><USER6> Not really, there are two sides to the debate, and the BBC is clearly taking one of them and not the other.

<comment><USER9> they could have been a lot more balanced as half of their viewership that pay for a tv licence voted out, they are promoting their own downfall. they are highly pro immigration, whether immigration is a good thing or not they are siding with their own downfall as immigrants don't pay for tv.

<comment><USER11> >> as immigrants don't pay for tv

Wait, what? Why wouldn't they? I'm an "immigrant" in the UK and I pay for the TV licence.

Unless you just make a blanket statement that is designed to make to lump all immigrants into one bag of people who don't pay tv licence?

<comment><USER9> i meant non-english speaking immigrants.

<comment><USER11> Then post some data to back this up!

Everyone watching live TV in the UK has to pay the TV licence fee or they will be heavily fined - and I'm 100% certain the enforcement agency doesn't give a damn whether you speak English or not, they will fine you anyway.

I'm also extremely curious what % of immigrants to UK doesn't speak English, if you really want to follow your line of logic.

<comment><USER9> it used to be that if you watched any British TV you had to pay for a licence, but now it has to be live.

<comment><USER11> It has actually changed recently so watching any content made by BBC requires a licence, even if it's not live.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twitter May Have Found Its Business Model - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_may_have_business_model.php

<comment><USER2> Hmm. I can think of several ways for Twitter to make money: use pull instead of push. Harness the wisdom of the crowd to extract value from them.

Because what Twitter is, essentially, is a market researcher's goldmine. And access to real-time opinion. Why drop ads on people, when you can extract from them opinion that is probably more "valuable" than the small change from advertising?

Right now, they ask one question: "What are you doing?" Why not ask other questions? Rotate them, mix it up a little bit. They could even, for example, have a "word of the day" (or something) and ask people to tweet about that: in 140 characters or less, of course. Anything from a brand name to something like shoes. Re-package and sell that data to companies or competing companies. "This is what people are saying about ________ (you, your competition) today."

But that's just one idea; there's a lot of room to play with it. There's definitely a lot of untapped power/profit to be had in the collective.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I remember seeing a site around the US Presidential Election time that used the mass of tweets to form a consensus of opinion on a number of topics.

Surely mining this collective intelligence provides invaluable market insight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Really? Advertising? Can't anybody come up with a better business model than advertising?

How about this: Charge for API keys. There's already a crap-load of Twitter apps, and some of them are not free.

<comment><USER5> I agree advertising is boring, but it works and there's a ton of money to be made with it. Even creative ideas like yours for the API would pale in comparison and put the load on developers which isn't exactly super nice unless they are profiting. Unfortunately (or fortunately for some) _consumer spending_ continues to power our (US) economy. Therefore platforms to get people to buy are worth a ton.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but not everybody in the world has to sell directly to consumers...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The main problem I have with this potential business model, is the overt focus on adding friends as a part of the revenue stream. I think the focus should instead be on 'what we can do right now, with our userbase to make money?'. There is a large pool of current users that would gladly pay if twitter had attractive premium features. Maybe they should focus on extracting revenue out of their existing user base first and then move on to a more dynamic business model second?

<comment><USER7> Yeah, and then what happens when Burger King comes out with something that challenges your revenue stream that is based on making connections by encouraging you to break connections?

Alternatively, if the monetary value of the network is defined by the edges, rather than the nodes, and everyone is connected to everyone else, how do you determine the valuable connections from the meaningless ones? As the number of connections goes up, their individual value would seem to go down. Beyond that being basic economics, you're setting yourself up to be limited in the kinds of additional things you can do as the meaning behind the individual connections approaches zero.

If twitter added some metadata behind the ability to create connections, like allowing users to group their connections into buckets (initially preconfigured to encourage meaningful use) like "co-workers", "friends", etc and let you filter what you publish and what you subscribe to in different ways, it could work. But then they'd have created FriendFeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't like the idea of being given a basket of people and then cherry picking who I'm going to follow and who I'm not. Because I only follow people I either know personally, or are local to my area who I'll probably meet anyway at hackathons.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't have a problem with the concept necessarily but I don't think it would work. If you think about this logically people on the web actually go to great lengths to avoid ads. This idea relies on people willingly staying subscribed to ad-based-twitter accounts. Doesn't seem likely to me.

The article suggests that advertisers will just "have to remain interesting" but put in traditional terms that would be the equivalent of making a new commercial each time you needed one (rather than just replaying the same one like companies do now). I'm not sure many companies have that level of creativity available to them.

<comment><USER10> I don't think traditional advertising works in a twitter model. Remember, the 140 character limit doesn't look like it'll go away any time soon, so companies will have to either broadcast their message in a concise string or link to an external site; who in their right mind would actively browse to an ad.

I can see coupons and viral ads doing well, as well as games and novelties like the BK Whopper Sacrifice doing well, but you're right about those being hard to pump out on a large scale

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> this is just stupid noone will pay for friends. I more or less have one of those blank accounts, I just follow people, but I get a few requests here and there by random people who want to follow me...and the account doesn't have any information in the profile, nor a picture.

They should work on adding new features that businesses are looking for...and then create a separate level of accounts for businesses and charge a monthly fee for that.

<comment><USER12> I agree no one will pay for friends. You can get them easily enough without paying, just by interacting with people and searching for users that Twit about relevant stuff.

As much as people here think advertising is boring, I think Twitter could actually have a great contextual ad business. As long as the ads are relevant. If someone Twitters about HD TVs, would they not be especially be engaged by an ad for TV's? What about people who tweet about flights seeing ads from airlines? There is a lot of potential there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would you pay for followers on Twitter? How much? Tipjoy could make this happen pretty easily <http://tipjoy.com/twitter>

I've been debating doing it for <http://twitter.com/tipjoy>

$1/new follower? Too high? Lame?

</comment><comment><USER14> Companies might follow potential customers or opinion formers for a fee, but how many do they need? 1,000? That's £1,000 - not exactly big money.

Getting individuals to hand over a buck for 'good' followings ruins the whole point of twitter and I can't see people doing it.

Bring back display advertising.

</comment><comment><USER15> one cool consequence is that twitter-using consumers will be slightly more empowered to give feedback to companies. it's only a matter of time before social and environmental grassroots aims become just as important as boardroom bottom lines.

</comment><comment><USER16> Do people really have a problem finding friends to follow? Doesn't sound right to me.</comment>


AltJS - A list of compile-to-JavaScript languages - <AUTHOR> http://altjs.org/ <comment><USER2> Although somewhat newer, TypeScript ( <http://www.typescriptlang.org/>) is not included.

<comment><USER3> Wish is weird, because they copy pasted from the list of Jash Kenas where it is included: [https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of- lang...](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-languages- that-compile-to-JS)

<comment><USER4> A common misapprehension, but it's actually "Jeremy Ashkenas". Sorry about the confusing handle.

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry JS master; but well, at least "Jash Kenas" sounds really cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the original ([https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List- of-lang...](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-languages- that-compile-to-JS)) is preferable to a static page, since it's in a wiki format.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great! a half dozen new languages for backbone.js tutorials to be written in.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do _any_ of these languages solve the debugging problem?

I'd love to write my client-side code in something other than JS, but I'd still be debugging it in JS, and I have trouble believing that's going to help ...

<comment> iso-8859-1 That's what Source Maps are for. Currently supported in a superset of {CoffeeScript, TypeScript and GWT}.

<comment><USER8> Sadly very few browsers support them.</comment></comment></comment>


State of comp.lang.lisp, are other groups this bad? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/Kmn9x.png

<comment><USER2> comp.lang.scheme ([http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.scheme/topics?lnk=s...](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.scheme/topics?lnk=srg)) is OK; at the time I posted this, of the last 50 messages 1 in 10 were spam. And there was a _lot_ of signal in the legit messages.

</comment><comment><USER3> I still look at <http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/topics> comp.lang.tcl from time to time, and it remains a polite, friendly, helpful group of people. Occasionally a wave of spam washes through, but it's not that bad.</comment>


From Broke To $3M+ Raised In A Year - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/09/plain-vanilla-scores-2-4m-series-a-to-turn-its-multiplayer-quiz-games-into-something-more/

<comment><USER2> For those interested, we're creating a multi-platform trivia game. We'll have many satellite apps which will help us bring in new users, and one main app where people can create a profile and discover many topics. Further down the road we intend to open up to user submitted trivia and hopefully have a healthy community of trivia fans. If this sounds interesting to you please have a look at our site www.plainvanilla.is and look at the available jobs.

</comment><comment><USER3> "But then came twilight." Oh for all the souls it devoured I can now rest knowing it saved one company.</comment>


6 reasons I'm skipping Christmas this year - <AUTHOR>

1. I'm a grown adult. It's my choice. And in a year of running experiments (therapy, going on retreat, writing from the gut, being more honest than I'm comfortable with) it seemed like an interesting experiment to end the year with. The less Christmas-y things I did this month, the more I noticed how people around me were only doing things because they felt they had no choice not to. Christmas parties, getting pissed up for 5 or 6 days on the trot with work colleagues they didn't even like that much, etc etc.
2. Although I love them very much, my family are a pain in the ass to spend time with. And the pressure for everyone to "just get along" on Christmas Day makes things even worse. If I had my own family it wouldn't be a problem if I wanted to spend it with them — so why should that change because I'm single?
3. After a month of 7 day weeks, I need some quality me time. Just been on a solo bike ride around London. Not sure what I'll be doing with the rest of the day. But solitude is a fine gift to give yourself.
4. Christmas Jumpers. Is it just me or have they reached a new low this year? More moronic than ironic. For me they are seem to be symbolic of the hollowness of Christmas.
5. I'm £6,000 in debt and have boxes of unused items all over my bedroom. I don't need more stuff, nor do I have money to buy any. By opting out of Christmas I won't be receiving another stack of things I don't need.
6. The whole celebration of excess thing. With or without the religious layer on top of that. <comment><USER2> >* I'm a grown adult. It's my choice.*

Don't know about this "grown adult" thing. Sounds more like a choice an adolescent would make, more like a "teenage rebellion" kind of thing.

<comment><USER3> That's so incredibly disrespectful!

<comment><USER4> Really? I though it was funny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An alternative perspective...

1\. I'm a grown adult, so I have responsibilities like work, it gives me a chance to ignore some of those for a short while, and relax.

2\. I love my family very much, and don't see them enough. It's a great time to see them.

3\. After several months of solid work leading up to a recent deadline, I need some quality family and friend time.

4\. Christmas Jumpers, and the paper hats from crackers, and socks with Santa on them. These all make a welcome change to the monotonous routine of everyday life.

5\. I can't actually turn this one around. I have lots of student debt (thankfully manageable), but I enjoy giving presents to others.

6\. I don't often get the chance to splash out, but I enjoy it when I do, without 'celebrating' excess.

I don't disagree with your reasons at all, and I can see the attraction of skipping Christmas to some extent, I just look at most of these things a different way.

</comment><comment><USER6> Right on. I am 100% with you and you definitely do not sound like a rebellious teen.

I had a very similar year to yours regarding personal reflection and I think ending your's off this way gives so much more meaning moving forward. It's not a perfect choice because there are some good things about Christmas to enjoy, but there are compromises either way you go.

Wish you all the best for the New Year.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a Christian and I don't celebrate Christmas either for many of the reasons. The big one though for me is Jesus wasn't born anywhere near Dec25th and we are never told in the scriptures to celebrate his birth.

Funny thing is I get more flack from my Christian friends than I do from my non Christian ones. Irony.

<comment><USER2> > _I 'm a Christian and I don't celebrate Christmas either for many of the > reasons. The big one though for me is Jesus wasn't born anywhere near > Dec25th and we are never told in the scriptures to celebrate his birth._

Well, I'm not really a believer, but in my culture's version of Christianity, the historical traditions amassed by the body of believers are just a part of the religion as any. That is, "the church" is the union of believers first and foremost, not merely what was written down. So, being true to the spirit doesn't mean being true to the written word. In fact, Christ himself never wrote anything: he taught people, to teach other people. And he emphasized how imporant the body of believers is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something tells me a few folks are happy to let you skip Christmas, Grinch.

<comment><USER9> I find that the people who object to those deciding to skip xmas are the grinchiest.

<comment><USER10> Ignore the denigrations to conform. Be generous and thankful all year long and skip the retail holidays.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I'm a grown adult. It's my choice. [...] I noticed how people around me were > only doing things because they felt they had no choice not to.

Stop doing things that you don't want to do. I'm a grown adult, so I opted out of every party that I didn't want to attend. I attended the parties that I would have attended had they been thrown for any other reason that wasn't Christmas.

I enjoyed Christmas more this year than I ever have, not the least of which because I got fantastic gifts, and also gave some pretty good ones, but because nothing was forced.

> My family are a pain in the ass to spend time with.

I declined Christmas with the family. When asked, I just informed them that "We're just doing a quiet thing at home this year." Zero pressure.

I don't mean to critique your Christmas opt-out in the least. It sounds like your situation is different from mine in that (it seems that) you're single, while I've got a wife and 12 year old. Whether or not opting out of Christmas is an option for me isn't really my place to say, but we did do a much quieter affair than usual, but do recognize that there are alternatives between "Bah humbug" and "full-on Christmas", and you're free to pick anywhere in the middle that you like, as well as opting out altogether, as you have done.

Either way, Merry Christmas. I hope your time off was as good a gift as you hoped for. Sounds like a good one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers! Merry Non-Christmas to you too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I applaud this. I actually never remember when Christmas is exactly because I simply do not care. I know when it ends, and I feel better.

Just because everyone is doing it doesn't make it special or have some intrinsic meaning. _l 'existence précède l'essence_ so to speak.

Besides, Christmas has become all about material gifts. I think spending time family is a good thing, regardless if it's holiday or not. Try to set apart some difference, at least spend a bit of time, like have dinner together and such.

Never mind the rest of the world as it carries about what was the holiday about anyway? Some dude that was born, grew up to be crucified, defies the laws of universe and physics to rise up from the dead?

I don't hate Christmas but I pretty much regard it like any other day of the year. For other's it's Christmas day but for me it's just Wednesday with more food and family time and christmas tree. I admit I really like the christmas tree.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment.

"I don't hate Christmas" \- agreed. I am labelling experiment simply as non- Christmas rather than anti-Christmas.

My only regret is not finding some people to share my non-Christmas with.

Maybe next year!

<comment><USER13> let's start on the internet. i'm in. i have almost exactly the same complaints flying around my head for the last 5-6 years but just don't get around to say "no" to this crap.

<comment><USER10> Long year with family, losses and bad news abound. For my 'celebration', I spent the last two days at a deserted lake in the desert. Was windy & cold the whole time, but it was solitude. A pair of bald eagles fished the shore by me for three hours. A coyote got bit by a heron he was sneaking up on. The ravens tried & failed to steal something... anything. I read half of "The Fractalist".

Best Xmas Ever!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Samsung Bixby: A New Way to Interact with Your Phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.samsungmobilepress.com/2017/03/20/Bixby:-A-New-Way-to-Interact-with-Your-Phone <comment><USER2> A demo video would have made things a lot clearer</comment>


Phone-Usage Patterns Could Determine Unemployment Rates - <AUTHOR> http://insights.dice.com/2015/06/17/phone-usage-could-tell-if-youre-unemployed/

<comment><USER2> I have a friend at NICTA who is building a predictive tools that considers your bank activity as learning sets and classify you as adequate or not to receive a loan. Pretty much anything can be used to train a svm or the like:)</comment>


The impact of AI on inequality, job automation, and skills of the future - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/the-impact-of-ai-on-inequality-job-automation-and-skills-of-the-future-fe89c21e34bc <comment><USER2> My problem is I can't see how higher value jobs like developer aren't devalued a few years later after the "low tech" jobs

If you can get AI to read a newspaper could it read an API spec or ask a few questions and generate a website.

And if it's doing all the work why wouldn't it conclude humans are uneconomic and eliminate the welfare program that supports them.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to build an app when the API is not finalised? - <AUTHOR> What is the best way to start building a mobile app when the API is not finalised?
My company makes native Android and iOS apps for our customers. A regrettably large percentage of the time, the customer will insist on 2 things: 1) that they will take care of the API/backend architecture and data for the app 2) That we start development on the app BEFORE the API is done
I feel that #1 is quite reasonable, as the customer often has ingested their own user data somehow and wants to keep control of it. The problem comes with #2, which has caused no end of headaches for us.
Things we have tried: -Making our own quick'n dirty internal test servers that returns mock data that we guess is reasonably close in format to what will actually be provided by the actual API. Often, we guess wrong. A request that returns multiple objects is often broken up by the customer API into several requests, or vice versa. The end result is a LOT of refactoring, headaches and wasted time once the real API is available.
-Creating static views that just show mock data from the app internally, and not even messing with requests to an internal test server because this is bound to change (see above). The problem with this, of course, is that there is a lot of work to be done once the API is actually set up. Crunch and stress ensues, as the customer will often deliver the API close to the deadline.
So, my question is, what is the best practice for dealing with this kind of situation? Obviously, in an ideal world, we would simply not start work on a project until the customer has delivered a working test server, or at the least some API documentation.  I have been told by the sales guys that this is not a reasonable expectation, so a better technical solution is needed. <comment><USER2> Technically speaking, I'm a big fan of [http://swagger.io/](http://swagger.io/), especially since it's turned in to the Open API Initiative. You (or your client) define an API in YAML, and then you can use the Swagger Codegen tool to automate building a client SDK and a mock server based on it. API changes are handled by simply rerunning the generator. I've found that the NodeJS/Angular code that's generated is good enough to use in production if you're sensible.

As far as managing the process, the only way to do it is to make sure the customer understands that the lack of a working API test server (with good stubs to start with, and actual data further on in the project) will delay the project. Make sure that you tell them the app development will lag behind the API by at least a month.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, I will look into swagger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why not create a wrapper service that calls their api. The wrapper could be very screen dependent similar to a ViewModel type data structure. Then do all your Model to ViewModel mapping from the wrapper api on the server. In fact, if they own the server they could be the ones responsible for changing the mapping code.

</comment><comment><USER4> My recommendation is to reflect the difficulties in the price of services and terms and conditions of the proposal.</comment>