Write HTML Like It's 1999 - <AUTHOR> https://bradleytaunt.com/2019/06/08/html-like-1999/ <comment><USER4> As someone who has a pretty serious visual impairment, I find the attitude of so many of these comments really... disappointing.

You wouldn't believe how much effort people with poor vision have to go to, to consume the modern web.

You can't even take simple things for granted like being able to zoom. So many websites pollute their page with pointless navigation elements that block most of the content when the page is zoomed.

Or say pages that try to be elegant, centering everything with some margin. Sure, it looks "great" if no one zooms it. If you do, you wind up consuming the content in three or four word chunks...

Or even worse: Elements that have hardcoded minimum widths. When you zoom, nothing reflows and you wind up having tons of content "off screen."

At best, this is annoying because you have to constantly scroll horizontally.

At worst, you're screwed because for some bizarre reason, scroll bars never appear.

I'll wrap my rant up here but I'll leave this:

Do you really want the web to be like reality, where the needs of a few are so often ignored simply because of some trait?

"Oh, there are so few of them, why bother..." "Oh, they don't matter because <whatever>"

Sound familiar? I'm sure you can fill in the blanks.

The web gives us a unique opportunity to improve on the real world in so, so many ways.

Don't waste it.

<comment><USER5> +++

I'd like to throttle the first person who ever decided that if the window width would not 'comfortably' accommodate their vision of the page, certain elements would just DISAPPEAR. Like GONE. When you have to zoom out to make hidden elements (not just hanging off the edge, as in never drawn) appear... someone has been naughty.

<comment><USER6> Just a week ago I wanted to factory-reset an old router before dumping it. Because my modern laptop doesn't have a LAN-connector, I used my old Eeepc with a 7" display.

Everything worked just fine until I was on the page where I was supposed to press the 'Confirm' button for the factory reset. It just wasn't anywhere and I was wondering what I was missing. So I started to dig into the framesets and finally found a frame where the code looked like there was that button.

Took me a while to find out how to press it (simply opening the frame in a separate window didn't work because there was some JS magic involved). The solution was to zoom out. So much fun when a task that was supposed to take 15 minutes takes 2 hours because someone built an over-the-top web-interface.

<comment><USER5> > my modern laptop doesn't have a LAN-connector

I thew a head banging spittle-fit when laptops no longer carried RS232 ports. Then my boss handed me a 'modern' laptop without an Ethernet port. The theme seems to be, let the things evolve forward with LSI/VLSI/ChipsetBuiltins until the port costs a mere 19 cents... then drop it... to save 19 cents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Was I the only one who clicked this expecting React components for modern CSS layouts using markup like  and Last Updated: June 1999 Otherwise you're not writing HTML like it's 1999, you're writing HTML like it's the web standards movement of the early 2000s before AJAX and Web 2.0 started trending.

If you really want to write HTML like it's from 1999, read this blast from the past: [https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD- html32-20180315/](https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD-html32-20180315/) Remember image maps? That's real  (which is HTML5 a decade later, iirc)

But to address the point of the article, you can use JS or backend code to enhance accessibility, such as by disabling focus on parts of a page when it should be disabled, or setting h1-h6 tag levels dynamically based on nested heading tags. If your aim is accessibility, this list may be useful: [https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/accessibility...](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/accessibility/a11y-for- teams)

<comment><USER8> While the spacer.gif made me really nostalgic, this is one of the things I don't miss.

However, layoutwise HTML is at the moment much like it had been in 1999: The basic structure with banner, nav, main, footer is much like the standard frameset, if there had only been role/landmark-markup for frames, and CSS-grid in its basic form is much like table-layout (less those Daliesque "poles" for positioning). Where there had been those fancy CMS templates with modular components, there are now frameworks… (However, JS is "a bit" more powerful and has grown out of `document.write()`.)

That said,landmarks and aria-markup are really a great deal when it comes to accessibility and are probably the most underrated additions to HTML.

<comment><USER9> > However, JS is "a bit" more powerful and has grown out of `document.write()`

Wasn't innerHTML still settable back then?

<comment><USER7> InnerHTML arrived as a proprietary IE 4 feature and IE 4 launched in 1997, so yes. In Googling to double-check, I came across this little incompatibility: [https://gist.github.com/jakearchibald/4489851](https://gist.github.com/jakearchibald/4489851)

<comment><USER8> On the Netscape side of things innerHTML didn't arrive until NS Navigator 6.0. For Netscape's dynamic HTML model with NS 4.x, it was still a matter of opening a document stream and writing to it (`document.open()` … `document.write()` … `document.close()`), in this case the document of a layer or ilayer element (`document.layers[<layerName>].document`).

There was an interesting bug with `document.write()` in early versions of Netscape Navigator: If you wrote to table cell (td) or row (tr) code containing any embedding elements (like images or form elements) and there was adjacent whitespace around the script tags, the embedding elements (images) would show up twice. This was one of the more obscure bugs in the browser, which likely prohibited a broader use of `document.write()` with dynamic layouts etc at the time. However, if you knew the quirks, you could load data objects in an invisible frame and render/update regions (frames or later layers) much like today.

What was initially setable: Beginning with NS 2.0 (JavaScript1.0) the state of form elements and window locations. Later (NS 3.0, 1996) also href and src attributes of images and anchors (links), the document title, and you could navigate the history, or call print() and find(), as well as manipulate a few other things, like keyboard focus. Of course there were event handlers, but they were quite specific for a few elements. (E.g., onclick or onmouseover were available for links and images only.) More complex interaction (including playing sound!) was possible via a proprietary Netscape Java/JS-bridge, called "LiveConnect".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While I agree that semantic HTML is a nice thing, I am also confused because the HTML I saw in 1999 didn't look like what the author suggests. If I am not completely mistaken, nav is an HTML5 element that didn't even exist back then.

Instead, we used tables inside tables insides tables inside iframes to structure our navigations. CSS was still some mystic magic that only a few wizards knew how to use effectively. And in many cases, the result was actually less semantic than what we see nowadays.

So the arguments seem a bit odd, although I support the spirit of the message.

<comment><USER10> > tables inside tables inside _framesets_

FTFY

<comment><USER7> I was just about to say that. I also found that a surprising number of sites that used framesets would also embed midi files as entertainment...

<comment><USER11> I guess there's some logic to that. If you want the ability to navigate within a website without restarting the music all the time, you need to implement some kind of hack. Back then, it was frames. Nowadays, it's SPAs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really almost all of this comes down to, "don't use JavaScript to replace HTML". Everything else on this post derives from that one guideline. For example, "Implementing custom div layouts for forms while removing items like select or radio" is only possible if you're replacing native functionality with JavaScript.

Which is perfectly fine advice if you aren't doing anything really novel. You probably don't need a custom library for dropdowns or forms or whatever else and would gain performance, accessibility, and stability by hooking into the native versions instead.

The one part I disagree with is necessarily using
 in place of divs with CSS Grid. The latter is native and is a perfectly legitimate replacement, with some added benefits like responsiveness.

Also the title is a bit of a misnomer, because lots of the HTML features that allow you to forego JavaScript are pretty recent:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/HTML/Forms/Fo...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Learn/HTML/Forms/Form_validation#Using_built-in_form_validation)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/da...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/datalist)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/In...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Input/color)

<comment><USER13> > Content being heavily reliant on JavaScript "injection"

Salient point right here. Being served a blank white page (when JS is disabled) can deter a person from ever visiting a site again. Some peope out there want to vet a site before allowing it to run arbitrary code on their machine.

<comment><USER12> > run arbitrary code on their machine

That's a bit of an exaggeration. JavaScript is strongly sandboxed and has a pretty good permissions system. The only malicious things it can really do are 1) based on cookies or 2) crypto mining.

Personally I think it's unreasonable to expect today's sites to work without JavaScript completely. The real benefits of using it sparingly are:

\- Pages load faster

\- Pages are more responsive

\- Applications are less stateful and call out to systems that have a larger number of eyes on them, making them less fragile and lowering maintenance complexity

Minimalism is a virtue in any programming context

<comment><USER14> 3) Fingerprinting and tracking in general are heavily javascript-focused. Less common in practice (I assume), but still possible, are 4) Rowhammer or Spectre/Meltdown style attacks that break out of the permission system. Finally, there's general trickery, manipulation, and malware, like trying to embed a frame from Facebook and steal user credentials or so on (I'm fuzzy on these sorts of attacks, not an expert).

<comment><USER12> 3) Right - and I guess "fingerprinting" goes slightly beyond cookies - <USER2> when people say "execute arbitrary code" they typically imply something has free-reign, which JavaScript generally doesn't.

4) True, although it's my understanding that the exploits are hard to implement, doubly-so from an abstracted layer like JavaScript.

> trickery, manipulation...like trying to embed a frame from Facebook and > steal user credentials or so on

This falls under "cookies-based", and I'm pretty sure no JavaScript is necessary for these kinds of attacks.

<comment><USER14> Good point on 3. I guess the main point is browsers at least disallow reading and writing arbitrary files directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Instead of a _border_ I tend to have a debug helper that adds a 1px _outline_ of cyan or pink. To get the "bones" of a component or page.

Good advice. Definitely sounds like captain obvious but it's also something I think needs to be said.

<comment><USER16> And for anyone who isn't familiar with (what I would consider) the most important difference in this use-case: borders affect the positioning of other elements, whereas outlines do not. You don't want to be using a temporary border, since it can significantly affect the layout of your site when you remove it.

<comment><USER17> * { box-sizing: border-box; }

I have never wanted anything other than this behaviour, so I pretty much always include it when starting on a fresh project.

<comment><USER18> Borders still affect the positioning of things even with box-sizing set to border-box. For example, here "Block 1" is still two pixels taller than "Block 2":

 Block 1

 Block 2

[https://jsfiddle.net/t4rkvfzx/](https://jsfiddle.net/t4rkvfzx/)

<comment><USER19> Does that really matter though? A difference of 2px for something temporary doesn't seem like much concern. While I understand the implication is that these can accumulate and cause larger layout issues, the purpose of this practice is to highlight those areas to remove that accumulation anyway

<comment><USER20> The bigger issue is that you don't know if a UI inconsistency is a bug or a side-effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So many people seemed to have forgotten what HTML in 1999 looked like. Layouts done with
s. Extreme
 nesting to get layout just right. 1px spacer gifs everywhere.  tags. Very little CSS. Despair in the messiness of HTML and hope XHTML or whatever XML-based alternative was going to eat your lunch.

Semantic HTML only came back in the 2000s. Remember CSS Zen garden? Write HTML once and style it differently to achieve completely different looks. Even then, you had huge amount of CSS bugs. Like the voice-family hack or the

        * > html

selector. Reading up on standards mode and quirks mode.

</comment><comment><USER22> It would be more convincing if you had provided examples, why bad HTML practices are bad. For using nav element good example is screen reader use, which will read all items if not using nav. Custom form controls usually make developer life harder as they need to re-implement all functionality, that browser already provides with standard form elements. There was a good article about custom button implementation a while ago. Building tables from divs and using "display: table" probably has been done to solve some complicated responsive layouts. I have no examples here. Deep nesting usually makes debugging harder and sometimes leads to unclosed tags. Javascript injection is usually a bad thing and you should prevent it with CSP.

</comment><comment><USER23> My biggest gripe with how modern html is written is not using  tags for link-like things. I often center click to open links in new tabs (Chrome and Firefox support this), but the way links have changed to <spans> with a listener attached that navigates to a new page--sometimes in a new window-- really annoys me.

<comment><USER24> That's one of the underlying messages of this article. We're replacing elements with semantic meaning, such as
, with poorly implemented alternatives. Discarding  is part of that.

Some web designers just really want full control, even if that makes for a shoddy user experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is all well and good but front end devs often don't code semantically because frequently the designs we are asked to build aren't idiomatic to the web. It's less about wanting to use a div and more about not being able to style a frigging select box easily in a cross browser way (or add more advanced things like multi select and what have you...

In other words, our first concern is making things easy to change. The semantic web (at least some of it) just isn't there yet.

I'll finish by saying, that there are certain semantic elements that are safe to use. In that case, by all means.

<comment><USER26> id settle for front end devs not abusing flipping h tags

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> My God that page is beautiful. Over half the vertical space is content without me touching anything. No banner bar asking me to install some bullshit mobile app. No 800-pixel panel at the bottom telling me what a cookie is. No incredibly obnoxious warning that I only have one more free article before the wisdom of the ages is lost to me so I'd better cough up five bucks.

<comment><USER28> Agree. Is it a Jekyll theme or some totally customized template?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just FYI - I've open sourced this Jekyll theme: [https://github.com/bradleytaunt/taunt- jekyll](https://github.com/bradleytaunt/taunt-jekyll)

<comment><USER28> Cool, thanks a lot for that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I want my website to work on any device you happen to have around, not just the top 99% of the stats, but also the other 1%. Your 486 with Opera 3.62? Come on by. iPad 1? You're welcome. You are allergic to JS? You still have the basic features. JS is pepper and salt, used sparingly and best left up to the diner. Netscape 3.04 Gold is on oldversion.com, runs on Wine without any issues (ironically not on Windows 10), and there's no reason not to test with it. So does Opera 3.62. Both are decent browsers capable of doing most things a website needs. And yes, that means supporting HTTP, not just HTTPS. Are you really that worried about your blog being mitmed?

</comment><comment><USER30> It is embarrassing, but I only know how to write HTML like it's 1999. The last new thing I learned was an iframe, the kids tell me CSS something I should learn...

<comment><USER31> nah, newfangled stuff, cross browser compatability issues, not worth it - <USER3> won't catch on

<comment><USER32> Keeping up is an endless treadmill. If your primary work is in some other domain, say backend infra or some non-coding profession that writes a line every blue moon, the investment may not pay off.

If you are a front-end dev it's of course a no-brainer to keep up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > I've found a pretty simple starting point for testing the bones of a website > by using the following single line of CSS

Or just use Firefox. The built in CSS-designer/debugger has a button to do just this on demand.

Browser-suggestions aside, I really agree with the sentiment of this article. That's how I like to build sites and solutions when not forced to use some other framework or approach.

</comment><comment><USER34> Using the correct semantic element goes a huge way for people using screen readers and other assistive tech. One of the things I hate most about react/vue is how casually people use divs for everything from inputs to images. Over 20% of people use some assistive tech, whether that be zoom, contrast controls, screen readers, etc. Even if you can't test all this, being aware of it when building/coding is a huge step forward.

<comment><USER35> I wrote a small tool to test for this [https://github.com/prettydiff/semanticText](https://github.com/prettydiff/semanticText)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I hope there will be a return to simple web pages where HTML is used for content, not apps. That's the way the web was intended. Web assembly is nice and all, but it does smell an awful lot like Java applets in 1997. Proprietary, slow and hard to grok.

<comment><USER37> I'm interested in hearing what is proprietary about wasm? It's a standard[1] implemented in most browsers.

[1]: [https://www.w3.org/TR/wasm-core-1/](https://www.w3.org/TR/wasm-core-1/)

<comment><USER38> You can't see the source code which I think is a huge step backward.

<comment><USER37> I think that ship sailed a long time ago. With transpilation, minification, and source mangling, the JavaScript ecosystem is largely opaque when trying to view sources anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I feel like there's strong friction between HTML trying to semantically describe the structure of a page page and JS frameworks where you try to build custom reusable components which might not fall into the rigid structure defined by classic HTML.

<comment> cljs-js-eval The spec authors would have done better to make the semantic stuff attributes. It's difficult to tell what CSS rules you're going to have to apply to any given semantic tag, which makes people instinctively reach for
s and s. React native gets this right, with <Text> and <View> and just a handful of others, with attributes like testID and accessibilityLabel driving automated software that needs to read the screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm a little confused by the title. Wasn't nav introduced in HTML5?

Anyway, agree with what's being said here. K.I.S.S.

<comment><USER41> The XHTML default namespace URL is [http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml](http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml) in W3C's HTML5 documents (the link resolves to a page that lists references).

<comment><USER42> There's no reason to "resolve" it. It's just a name, not a gettable resource.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43>
        I've found a pretty simple starting point for
        testing the bones of a website by using the
        following single line of CSS:

           * {
               border: 2px dotted black;
           }

Another nice way to find obsolete elements is to simply type this in the console:

        $$('*:only-child')

Elements with only one child usually can be optimized away. For example here on HN, it shows that every  element is wrapped in a
 element. I would think the same could be achieved by just setting the right styles on the  element.

<comment><USER44> That wouldn't necessarily be correct.
 is for preformatted.  is for code. The first tells the browser it's preformatted (which, to your point, is style related); the second tells you and the browser why that is -- it's code.

A poem might be a good example of something else you'd want to preformat.

Also,
 is a block element, while  is not.

The real issue is that there's something to be said about suggesting to write
 and
 etc., or for that matter
 or simply
. The real wtf here is that  has a special status in html while <poem> and other things that might want to be preformatted don't have their own tag. And that
 merely is a special type of
 with some styling (which suits code just fine, but not poems) attached to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> In 1999 I think I had just switched from HotDog to HomeSite. Honourable mention to HoTMetaL and Microsoft FrontPage, which I tried then abandoned for various reasons. Eventually I started using a plain text editor (BBEdit).

<comment><USER46> Oh my God, FrontPage, I used to edit pages built with it by hand for money. Having flashbacks now.  everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Reach out and chat with me on Twitter. That way your thoughts aren't lost forever on this site."

Funny I feel the other way. Twitter is rolling html flypaper with people stuck to it. You can hear their muffled voices and see their wiggling legs as they go past. Pages static'd with comments are forever, like web.archive.org forever.

</comment><comment><USER47> Any reason it is bad to use divs with aria attributes over <input> for a radio button choice? Because radio buttons are a pain to style and require all sorts of hacks to look nice. And in a real job you sometimes get asked to brand things, not just let the default styles come through.

<comment><USER48> Aria attributes aren't enough to make an element accessible. You still need to set up listeners for keyboard navigation, you need to make the element focusable, you need to remember the aria attributes for labeling, etc. Chances are you are going to miss some of these. Better use a battle tested third party library for these, or—better yet—the native `<input type="radio">`.

Edit: Radio buttons are _not_ hard to style[1]. Just use `appearance: none`[2] and style them as you wish with custom background colors and svg masks and whatnot.

\---

1\. [https://codepen.io/anon/pen/qGeJWL](https://codepen.io/anon/pen/qGeJWL)

2\. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/appearance](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/appearance)

<comment><USER49> Yes, the First Rule of ARIA Use is first for a reason. [0]

Also for styling, visually hiding the <input type="radio"> and using a custom radio-like icon with its associated  can be a decent option. Use a CSS selector like this to "check" an icon with the label: #radio1:checked + label::before

[0] [https://www.w3.org/TR/using-aria/#rule1](https://www.w3.org/TR/using- aria/#rule1)

<comment><USER48> Yes the `input[type="radio"]:checked + label::before` selector was for sure used a lot in the past for greater browser compatibility.

But in 2019 I think it is safe to style the radio element directly along with vendor prefixed `appearance: none;` possibly inside an `@supports` rule so that IE users will fall back to the native style while users of modern browsers get a custom style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Don't get me wrong, I used to write as semantic HTML as I could; nav for navigations, table for table's, aside for well asides, etc as the author suggests, but ultimately it just really doesn't matter. nav and div render exactly the same. In fact, I find zero value in using ul/li's for lists that aren't bulleted. I know it's an unordered list of items, but really, what _is_ the value in writing semantic HTML if the devs/browser/users don't care or know the difference? Especially if you're changing the "semantic" element's default behavior in order to get a look and feel or behavior that is far from the original "semantic" intent.

<comment><USER51> > I find zero value in using ul/li's for lists that aren't bulleted

Browsers don't care. You may not care either. But people with disabilities attempting to make sense of your website do, very much so.

There's absolutely no reason __not__ to use semantic HTML, and many reasons to do so.

<comment><USER50> Are you suggesting you can't write accessible Web applications without using semantic HTML?

<comment><USER52> If you use semantic HTML you get a lot of accessibility for free, since screen readers etc. all speak semantic HTML.

That doesn't mean you can't write accessible web applications without semantic HTML, but it does mean you have to spend time adding the accessibility after the fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've never understood the purpose of "semantic" html. It seems to be bandied about as some sort of unquestioned good, but why? If the code is easy to understand who cares that the "correct" tags have been used?

Obviously there are some benefits for screen readers and search engines, but these uses should be explicitly checked for as part of a QA process instead of relying on some vague standard of semanticness.

<comment><USER54> Honestly, there isn't, except for a small subset related to screen readers.

At one point there was a kind of hope that semantic tags would make web content easily machine-parseable, unlocking a bunch of meaningful content reuse somehow that better semantics would make possible. (Big data, ML and all that.)

The two canonical examples being that lists were important so software could extract meaning from list items, and not using tables for layout so software could trust tables actually had meaningfully tabular data.

But... that never really happened, it's not clear it ever will, and it doesn't benefit the content author directly anyways, so... yeah.

(Like you say, screen readers are the main thing, so use the tags and attributes that are important to screen readers, like buttons and alt text... but that's a very specific subset. A screen reader certainly doesn't care if you use a
 or an
 or a .)

Edit: I stand corrected on my example, for  specifically I forgot
 lets screen readers navigate vertically and also read column/row labels.

<comment><USER55> > A screen reader certainly doesn't care if you use a
 or an
 or a > .)

It absolutely does. Try firing up a screen reader before you make such comments spreading misinformation.

For example, it's maddening to see people now making tables out of flexbox grids and such. In a screen reader you can navigate a
 in two dimensions (rows and columns). The flexbox variety completely breaks navigating up/down columns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Also: It's not just for blind people using screen readers; but also to improve end-to-end testing.

Yes, nowadays we hook into React components themselves, or even if not we can use those frameworks to strongly simplify writing selectors, because testing libraries have some magic built into them to use the component hierarchy directly...

... but depending on the amount of legacy and old in the app (and there will be legacy, and old stuff), and how strongly E2E you want to go (like "survive adding stuff from our team in that other city"), a "nav ul li[id='something']" will work ok for the developer maintaining the code, even if it is not the shortest possible selector; whereas a "div[...] div[...] div div + div" will catch up with you, even if you think you abstracted it away.

</comment><comment><USER57> The author is arguing for semantic markup, but prior to HTML5 the concept barely existed. Everything was kludged together. Site layouts were tables. Later divs/spans ruled. Eventually sanity reigned and semantic elements were introduced.

So while I don't disagree with what they're saying, the title is a bit of a misnomer.

>[Don't] create tables built out of custom div elements

Tables aren't responsive. Those fancy div tables are used because they work better on mobile. With a splash of JS (or overly-clever CSS) you can also introduce interactivity, tabbed layouts, etc.

Unless dealing with a very small amount of tabular data, it's really hard to recommend tables anymore.

Otherwise, yeah, fair advice. Nothing really too controversial in there.

<comment><USER58> > The author is arguing for semantic markup, but prior to HTML5 the concept > barely existed

Not really. The concept existed and was well known in many developer circles (e.g. List Apart Issue 268 from 2008 [http://alistapart.com/issue/268/](http://alistapart.com/issue/268/)).

<comment><USER57> That's fair. Semantic markup did exist pre-HTML5. I guess I should say that HTML5 emphasized it and drove adoption.

This article is from 2008, but I think it would be quite challenging to find something similar from 1999.

<comment><USER59> Semantic HTML was already fashionable in late 2004, when I was a graphic designer arguing against table tags. But my own exposure is a bad measure, just as is anyone else's. One of the most famous groups pushing for well- written HTML was WaSP, and it turns out that it was founded in 1998, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Project)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'm a huge fan of the `* { border: 2px dotted black; }``` snippet he uses to debug the flow of his content. I've been doing this for years now (albeit my snippet is a bit different) but it helps so much for understanding the document.

</comment><comment><USER61> I didn't find this particularly insightful, and disagree with many of the points made.

First of all the post is arguing for more semantic HTML and says nothing about using semantic HTML5 tags over
? AFAIK semantic tags didn't even exist before HTML5 which is definitely not the 90s.

I also find using the
 element generally be bad practice. There are much better/easier ways to build responsive tables using grid or flexbox than dealing with
/
/ everywhere.

<comment><USER55> > I also find using the
 element generally be bad practice. There are > much better/easier ways to build responsive tables using grid or flexbox > than dealing with
/
/ everywhere.

Try using that monstrosity in a screen reader. You completely break vertical/column navigation. Hardly better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Ironically, the lists on this page are paragraph tags.

<comment><USER63> Since the page is built on Jekyll, I'm guessing the article's HTML has been generated, thus explaining why paragraph tags are used.

Otherwise, one must explicitly use HTML to specify lists which is more laboriousa nd not as neat because of mixed content. In the end it works either way ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.

<comment><USER62> I think I get what you're saying, but let me repeat it to make sure I understand: Jekyll, and of course Markdown, sites can use unordered lists, but you would need to specify explicit HTML _for custom bullet points_ because there's no obvious way to generate list elements with a specific class in Markdown.

That makes sense. I initially was confused because unordered lists themselves are very easy in Markdown, and indeed will generate
s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> After reading the title, I thought I would see a proposal to use mostly tables instead of divs for designing websites again...

<comment><USER65> I still use tables. Always when I need to position things relative to each other and have them squish properly. I tried really hard to use/like divs but they are not helping me most of the time.

<comment><USER66> What I'll call 'table layout' can be done via CSS on any tags, you don't need to use `<table>` elements to make use of the 'table layout' you like. Lately CSS has added two new 'layout' modes you might like even better: Flexbox, and CSS Grids. Both of these take the ideas from table auto-layout, using constraints and content to help size things.

Separately from how you want things to look (CSS), you shouldn't be putting content into `<table>` elements that aren't the sort of thing you'd put into a spreadsheet. That's not using HTML well. Keep in mind you can still use the table layout with other tags via CSS. Always wrap your content in the most- fitting tag HTML has, then worry about the layout after :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Using `outline` instead of `border` won't actually affect the layout.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/outline#Bor...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/outline#Borders_vs._outlines)

</comment><comment><USER68> If you want to write HTML like it's 1999 then you should use [http://www.ihtml.com/](http://www.ihtml.com/) on the server side. I did. Somehow this didn't scare me away for life from web development. Somehow.

</comment><comment><USER69> This is not how people wrote html in 1999

</comment><comment><USER70> The article is completely missing an argument for why you should code pages this way.

</comment><comment><USER71> If we're writing HTML like 1999 then where's my <blink> tag?

<comment><USER72> To be fair, <blink> is more 1994: [http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag](http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> > To be clear, I'm not advocating for creating projects that look like they > belong in the 1990s.

Funny enough, only changing the body's background color to "lightgrey" and the font face to "serif" makes it look exactly like that.

<comment><USER74> it's better than "mid-2000s teenager"—purple on black with glitter gifs

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> i like the border idea

</comment><comment><USER76> zombo.com</comment>


Amazon.com sues North Carolina over customer data demand - <AUTHOR> http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/04/amazon_sues_north_carolina_seeking_to_block_demand_for_customer_data.html

<comment><USER2> From a related CNET article (<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20002870-38.html>):

 _In a 2002 decision, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protects "an individual's fundamental right to purchase books anonymously, free from governmental interference." The justices tossed out a subpoena from police to the Tattered Cover Bookstore asking for information about what books a certain customer had purchased._

 _And in a 2007 case, federal prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to force Amazon to identify thousands of innocent customers who bought books online, but abandoned the idea after a judge rebuked them. Judge Stephen Crocker in Wisconsin ruled that "the subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their prior knowledge or permission."_

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an important issue in online shopping. However it is really technical and boring, so nobody pays attention to it. But if you live in a state with sales tax and buy stuff over the internet, you should.

Here is the issue. State governments are allowed to levy taxes against their residents. A common one is sales tax. If you are a resident of North Carolina, or New York, or California, or lots of other states, then you owe sales tax on everything you buy. However experience has shown that individuals don't keep track of what they buy, and won't calculate or pay that tax. Therefore it is easier for the government to get vendors to charge the tax, and then they collect from vendors.

The problem here is that it would be unfair for any state to be able to compel every merchant to think about their local laws. Therefore the legal principle that has been settled on by the Supreme Court is that a state may only compel a company follow its laws if that company has a physical presence in that state. Otherwise that company can ignore anything that the state says, even if said company is actually doing business with residents of the state.

Please note here that by law the tax is owed by the citizens of the state. Collecting it from the merchant is merely a convenience. But in practice the tax won't be collected unless the merchant does it. So the question of whether the merchant can be compelled to collect tax is really a question about whether that tax will be collected.

The argument that has been brewing is what "physical presence" means. In particular Amazon is careful to avoid having employees, warehouses, etc in states that collect sales tax. But a number of states are trying to claim that Amazon affiliates, private people who are paid for promoting Amazon, are part of Amazon, and can represent a physical presence that are grounds for suing Amazon. Amazon, unsurprisingly, does not agree.

This is Amazon's latest salvo. They claim that the information being requested invades people's right to privacy. And therefore they can't be audited. However North Carolina doesn't actually want to know what people are reading. They want to know how much people paid, and therefore how much tax people failed to pay.

At stake here is billions of dollars of uncollected taxes.

<comment><USER4> This was a great summary, thanks. As I'm in the process of starting my own online business, I've been wondering why some merchants apply sales tax, while others forgo it.

On a related note: Does anyone have experience with sales tax for online businesses in Canada?</comment></comment>


P2pchan – Peer-to-peer imageboard - <AUTHOR> http://tslocum.github.io/p2pchan/

<comment><USER2> Docs for pussies.

<comment><USER2> At first sight of man, who knows nothing about Python it uploads all pics to imgur... What kind of p2p is this?</comment></comment>


Hubble's final servicing mission - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/05/hubbles_final_servicing_missio.html

<comment><USER2> A BIG PICTURE article. Some great pictures.</comment>


Ask HN: Startup employees, what was your exit event like? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> They tried to fire me - actually in a rather underhand cowboy manner that I was quite unhappy with for some time after. I gently let them know that they'd actually made me redundant and I allowed them to negotiate a smaller payment than the statutory requirement as a gesture of goodwill. I had another offer with in an hour. I threw the (still worthless some years later) equity away for tax reasons.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very straightforward - the founders were good people; I was not diluted at all throughout our entire 7 year run (I was employee < 10). We were also acquired by a huge scandinavian company which helped avoid icky shenanigans usually pulled by US companies.</comment>


Ask HN: Getting back to engineering in an ageist industry? - <AUTHOR> I'm near 50, have a tech sales job, and have been constantly miserable for the past year and a half, to the point where I'm a doctor appointment short of being officially clinically depressed. A decade ago I was an engineering director at a local company (I'm in Europe), but left due to an acquisition and joined a major tech company for a pre-sales gig that pays well, but has become a major source of frustration due to the company's money-grabbing ethos.
I have deep systems, networking and hardware expertise, deal with cloud services on a daily basis, have a live (weekly updated) GitHub profile with the stuff I still build, know my way around data pipelines, etc.
Every time I interview at a startup for a tech leadership role (and I've gone in several times, after jumping through various kinds of hoops/evals/screenings) I'm cast as "too corporate" as soon as they lay eyes on me on an age/background basis alone, and it's been driving me insane.
I want to go back to Engineering and am willing to take a pay cut so that I can actually help people build stuff again rather than bleed out in meetings, and I just can't figure out how. <comment><USER2> Don't apply for leadership positions.

The entry point into startups is part time advisory roles.

Mail the CEO/CTO directly and talk about your experience and that you are looking for a part time advisrory gig.

Whether it's 4 hours a week or 20 hours a week (to work on a specific problem). Focus purely on the problem and make a serious contribution to solution. Don't blame anyone or expect anyone other than yourself to own it. Avoid giving people lectures on how things worked in thousand man orgs (the time for that will come later). Just get the problem fixed. Once you do this you are in. They will automatically pull you in and expand your roles and responsibilities over time.

Key is to get your foot in the door and make things happen for them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Keep interviewing - if you have the chops you say you have, you'll come across the right situation sooner rather than later. There is too much of a talent vacuum for good people to sit on the side lines for too long.</comment>


How "Starship Troopers" Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-starship-troopers-aligns-with-our-moment-of-american-defeat <comment><USER2> For those wondering, it is talking about the movie, not the book. For those that are confused about this comment, the book and movie are very different stories though the movie takes place in essentially the same universe. The director, Verhoeven, claimed "the book was too boring to finish." The movie has a lot of Nazi symbolism.

As a sci-fi enthusiast I love the book. As a lover of bad movies, I love the movie. I recommend both, but for completely different reasons.

Edit: If you're leaving a downvote care to explain? Do you want me to cite that Verhoeven didn't finish the book? (which is in the article here!) That the book and movie aren't different? Or what? I'm very confused. I'm just trying to say that the article is talking about the movie and not the book.

<comment><USER3> Starship Troopers isn't a bad movie.

<comment><USER4> What's good about it? I don't know much about movies I'm just curious why it's good.

<comment><USER5> The movie is a brilliant, satire of an over-the-top fascistic, militaristic society. It takes a similar tack to Huxley's Brave New World but puts the focus on glorifying strength and violence against the enemy instead. It illustrates a society completely saturated in war propaganda, with all of the negatives of war being instantly dismissed. The pace at which the fictional society switches its media-directed gaze is frenetic. It's like orgy-porgy meets Triumph of the Will.

<comment><USER4> That's a pretty good analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I thought it was a parody of the first Iraq war.

I seem to remember the irony being completely missed at the time, and it simply being panned as a not-very-good action movie.

</comment><comment><USER7> Or did it just happen to be released a few years before 9/11?

</comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one who thinks it is a circular waste of time to try do explicitly draw lessons from movies and books. Of course the universe the author created generally comports with their beliefs or the point they are trying to make. It would be like trying to convert a skeptic to Christianity by citing The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. Lewis's Christianity had a large influence in how he crafted the literary universe, and thus trying to use events from that literary universe to convince people of the truth of Christianity is circular logic at best.

But I have seen it done so many times. Writers take a work of fiction such as a book or movie where the author generally has a similar outlook and use that to draw lessons. You see that a lot on the left, as well as on the right with Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I don't think it is convincing anyone. Anybody can write a book where the people they admire become heroes and the policy they espouse has a good outcome, or the people they despise become villains and the policy they are against leads to bad outcomes. How close the book universe is to the real universe is a different story.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you that its circular logic, but I disagree that its a waste of time.

Books, movies, and other consumable media (songs, poems, etc. etc.) present perhaps the strongest arguments from various "camps". They are strongly representative of the ideals and ideas of large groups of people.

<comment><USER10> Strongest in terms of persuasive power, but rarely (if ever) in terms of any kind of reasoned or scientific approach.

<comment><USER9> There are three kinds of arguments: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos.

Just because Logos is effective on you, doesn't mean its the best methodology in general. Arguments towards authority and emotion must be understood as such, and provide greater insight to the crowds you're discussing with.

If you're going Logos-only into a discussion, you've effectively disarmed yourself. Your debate opponent will use Ethos, Logos, and Pathos to get a rhetorical advantage against you.

Therefore, its important to learn the Ethos-based and Pathos-based arguments that members of a crowd will make, in preparation before you discuss matters with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a hard time taking an essay that discusses the philosophy of the movie starship trooper seriously when the book of the same name was so much better developed.

It's a bit like dunking on libertarian idiots on facebook, but refusing to engage with Richard Epstein[1]. Sure, it's a thing one can do, and it's good for laughs from time to time, but ultimately, engaging with a weaker version of an idea betrays a weakness in the interlocutor, not the subject.

___

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhqXIc5CEpU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhqXIc5CEpU)

<comment><USER2> The book and movie are completely different stories. Verhoeven prides himself on that he didn't even finish the book and if you watched the movie it is pretty clear he read less than half and then wanted to write a movie that was a satirical take on the book (which he claims was promoting fascism, but readers are confused by that take).

<comment><USER12> > if you watched the movie it is pretty clear he read less than half and then > wanted to write a movie

No, the movie was written before someone noticed some superficial similarities and suggested seeking the rights to the book for marketing purposes. Veerhoeven read less than half of the book, sure, and thought it was advocating fascism and incorporated some cosmetic elements from that portion of the book into the film, but the book wasn't the basis of the film, even in a hostile response kind of way, just a bystander that got dragged into a canned rant by a ranter who didn't read it before deciding it was promoting what he was already ranting about, an all too familiar phenomenon to anyone who has spent much time in lightly moderated online discussion groups, if not the most familiar origin story for a licensed film "adaptation" of a book.

<comment><USER13> > No, the movie was written before someone noticed some superficial > similarities and suggested seeking the rights to the book for marketing > purposes.

Source? The Wikipedia article states that the screenwriter was a fan of the book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember it being a not very good film, mostly because it's way too on the nose. I like my irony with a little subtlety. But since our current POTUS has killed irony[1], maybe it works better now. I haven't seen it in years. I'm willing to give it a rewatch.

[1] "We will not allow anyone to divide our citizens by race or background. We will not allow them to foment hate, discord and distrust" as just one recent example.

<comment><USER2> This is why people put it in the "bad movie" category. It is very campy. But if you like bad movies, Starship Troopers is great. That said, I also love The Room and Birdemic.

<comment><USER15> If you were told the gag before you watched it, it might seem too on the nose.

But check the reviews when it came out -- most of our enlightened, educated cultural critics missed the gag.

<comment><USER16> I'll admit I came in expecting "Aliens" and was deeply disappointed. Even in retrospect, the movie might be good commentary, but it doesn't have good characters or good storytelling.

<comment><USER15> The bad characters are part of the gag. Mindless attractive teens in this horrific society.

You even wind up with the two most vapid characters, after having found love elsewhere, winding up together because why not, those other, better people died. It actually works really well as an unconventional character arc that the actors may or may not have been in on.

<comment><USER2> > The bad characters are part of the gag.

This is why I like the movie. This is also why I call it a "bad movie" too. It can be bad and good. I'm learning that a lot of HN users don't know what the bad movie genre is. See [https://www.reddit.com/r/badMovies/](https://www.reddit.com/r/badMovies/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clear Linux on a $199 Wal-Mart Laptop - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=clear-199-laptop&num=1 <comment><USER2> After reading the last thread about it I tried to do a "real-world" test to see if these benchmarks mean anything for me.

Have a simple vue-cli app (think webpack) that takes roughly about 3200ms to compile on the first run.

So I first installed Linux mint on my laptop (asus i5 8th gen) and tried it. The time was always about 3100 to 3200ms.

Then I erased it and installed Clear Linux on that and lo-and-behold the time was just 2000 to 2100 ms this time.

So it effectively gave me a boost of 34% by just installing a different distro. Not bad I would say since I didn't change anything else.

Unfortunately, I found this distro to be quite alien since it won't run cinnamon or apt or anything I'm familiar with. But I definitely believe their speed claims now.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know much about Clear Linux; is this a contingency-entry by Intel into the software world in case other core businesses struggle? And how is it as a user's distro?

Anyway the 6% increase over other distros seems worth exploring. Admittedly I would look at refurbs right out the gate instead of a $199 new model, but I am sure in matters like gifting to a child, such a method might not be well received, for one.

</comment><comment><USER4> previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22257337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22257337)</comment>


Show HN: Unmusic – Free Premium Music for Your Projects - <AUTHOR> https://alpha.projectium.network/project/unminus <comment><USER2> That's not unminus, this is:

[https://www.unminus.com/](https://www.unminus.com/)

<comment><USER3> thanks! I thought I had to sign up which made no sense.</comment></comment>


Show HN: SKLL, a utility to run scikit-learn experiments without writing code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/EducationalTestingService/skll

<comment><AUTHOR> I gave a talk on the subject last year at PyData NYC: [http://vimeo.com/79511496](http://vimeo.com/79511496)

Hopefully I can give an updated one covering the upcoming 1.0 release at this year's.

Also, SciKit-Learn Laboratory (SKLL) was recently featured in the new O'Reilly book, Data Science at the Command Line, by Jeroen Janssens.</comment>


McAfee 'Boggled' at 'Hubbub' Over Admission to Buying Sex, Drugs Using Crypto - <AUTHOR> https://www.ccn.com/john-mcafee-boggled-at-hubbub-over-his-admission-to-paying-for-hookers-drugs-and-porn-using-cryptocurrency/ <comment><USER2> Uh I don't think it's the purchases that cause people to create a hubbub but rather the sticky situations he finds himself in every now and then [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/the-bizarre- tale...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/the-bizarre-tale-of-john- mcafee-spymaster/)</comment>


Russia Is Poisoning Western Dignitaries and Nobody Seems to Care - <AUTHOR> http://danfrank.ca/russia-is-poisoning-western-dignitaries-and-nobody-seems-to-care/ <comment><USER2> why would Russia poison viktor? sounds like the author is wearing a tinfoil cap

<comment><USER3> Well what about the reason that Putin was just called out recently for that spy you died on 2006's death? And the same thing goes for Boris Nemstov who died last year

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mad man talking.</comment>


History of Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP

<comment><USER2> I am speechless.

Not because of LISP, but because this history preservation effort really deserves all support we can give them. Unfortunately the mailing list and volunteer forms are 404'ed. The contact form works just fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm the editor of the History of Lisp web site at the Computer History Museum. I'm sorry about the 404s, but if you email me, I will be happy to answer questions, and help you get involved.

Paul McJones (paul at mcjones dot org)</comment>


Young people are screwed Here's how to survive - <AUTHOR> https://pando.com/2013/01/09/young-people-are-screwed-heres-how-to-survive/ <comment><USER2> Young people are in fact growing up with more opportunity than anyone in the history of the world.

> unemployment for young people is about double the national average

18-19 has 12% unemployment, 20-24 has 6%, and 25-34 has 4%.

This is how it works. That 18 year old will one day be that 25 year old with 96% odds of employment.

> Student debt

That does suck. I would advise young people to be avoid large educational debt. Rising education costs are unfortunately a natural of free money, but an capital-efficient education is still possible.

Note that education debt -- while high -- still pales in regards to housing debt.

> you kids are paying for it by inheriting trillions upon trillions in > Medicare bills

Indeed a problem. Same with Social Security.

> [Your parents and grandparents] grew up in a world so unbelievably different > from your own, that they couldn't possibly understand what things are like > for you...They don't know what it's like to watch entire career paths > suddenly disappear or become far less desirable

Hardly. My grandparents watch farming jobs disappear in the largest labor shift in the history of the world.</comment>


Show HN: NotePlan for iOS Beta – Daily Planning with Markdown, Calendar and Notes - <AUTHOR> Link: http://noteplan.co
Hey, Im the creator of NotePlan. The macOS version is done and out in the wild. The iOS version is on TestFlight and will launch in a few weeks.
NotePlan is a simplistic text and markdown-based app for managing daily tasks using Todos, Notes and a Calendar. Now also on iPhone and iPad. It syncs with the Apple Calendar and soon Reminders.
All data is saved in human-readable text files in your iCloud Drive. The user interfaces is super simple and distraction free - perfect for plain planning.
It's made for
- managing daily tasks,
- planning ahead using the calendar and
- making notes all along.
Especially useful, if you struggle with paper notes and physical planners as a professional. I made it initially for myself and digitized the way I planned with my moleskin calendar.
Visit http://noteplan.co and get on the TestFlight list (see beta badge top right). Let me know if you got feedback or any questions! <comment><USER2> I have an idea of what the response will be but I'll ask. Plans for an Android version?</comment>


A Tool That Would Be Rather Nice To Have - <AUTHOR> http://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/05/a-tool-that-would-be-rather-nice-to-have/#.T6BBEnEn8Ts.hackernews <comment><USER2> Maybe this hypothetical tool could tell you if your code will halt on all inputs, too. That would be really helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I must apologize on the lack of content ... however thats kinda what I was thinking... I just didn't know how to express that in words. This would be more for maybe encouraging random inputs [within the bounds of the parameter as well].

<comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem>

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't believe that it could address EVERYTHING, but at least suggest a sample of relevant tests.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Band Protocol builds up data offering to compete with Chainlink - <AUTHOR> https://decrypt.co/10694/band-protocol-builds-up-data-offering-compete-with-chainlink <comment><USER2> Literally who?</comment>


Ask HN: How long does open-source project approval take at your company? - <AUTHOR> How long does it take for your company to approve the use of an open-source software (e.g., maven artifact, GitHub project) and why? <comment><USER2> An eternity because of the stigma that comes with confusing the old "free speech" not "free beer" argument and people attempting to defend their IP fruitlessly.

Meanwhile, I visited China on business. CEO of a very profitable startup explained to me that the lack of IP laws and copyright has actually caused a boom in open source culture. They know that if they release something, their product will be shared and adapted anyhow, so why not just ship a product that's essentially unlocked to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Instant. I suspect that the form submission backend detects certain licenses/usage criteria and automatically approves it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does it also check the quality of the OSS being imported (e.g., how many issues are open, how many active users, etc.)?

<comment><USER3> No. That's a decision for the team/user. I assumed the question was about legal approval.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 12-ish person dev team: CTO has a filter on copyleft licenses for projects intended for distribution. And I don't blame him.

I've been warning the other new people since I've been asked. I'm also new- ish.

</comment><comment><USER5> Couple of weeks, usually legal and technical reviews.

</comment><comment><USER6> Depends. One extremely popular tool with an open source license took 1.5 years.

</comment><comment><USER7> Approximately zero seconds.</comment>


Nothing inside infinity - <AUTHOR> http://danielcolquitt.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/nothing-inside-infinity/

<comment><USER2> I don't quite buy his argument. A fence in the shape of a Sierpiński triangle would have infinitely many enclosures each of infinitely small area. Not one enclosure of infinitely small area.

Doesn't that make a difference?

∞•0 is not necessarily the same as 1•0</comment>


Let Students Sell Equity in Their Higher-Education to Finance It - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21661678-funding-students-equity-rather-debt-appealing-it-not <comment><USER2> In Australia, one can obtain government funding to pay for higher education -- this is a heavily regulated system of government loans.

For example, suppose after your studies you have accumulated a "debt" of AUD $X. There are a few options available:

1) you can leave Australia and never pay it back

2) if your annual taxable income remains in a very low bracket (< AUD$54k / year), you never have to pay it back

3) if your annual taxable income sits in a higher bracket, the tax department takes a chunk of your income in addition to the usual income tax. This scales from 4% of your taxable income through to 8% if you are earning > AUD$100k / year.

The debt itself is tied to the consumer price index and has no further interest applied.

I do not have much knowledge of the grim details of this system, or alternatives, but from my perspective it seems pretty reasonable. Student debt can be okay, if it is appropriately regulated.

More information here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Aus...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Australia#History)

<comment><USER3> That is pretty much it. I would guess that most people pay back their debt in the end, so it is not entirely equity-like, it is more like a mix of debt and equity (the interest rate is below market, so lower income people end up paying back less in net-present-value).

I guess this is the economically efficient solution. The main problem is that it needs to be administered by the government, for practical reasons as well as adverse selection. In Australia it also happens that the top 5 universities are of roughly equal quality, and the next 5 are not far below, so that a one- size-fits-all approach makes sense (there are no good private universities in Australia). I don't see how this system could work in the US where there is such a wide range of qualities in universities.

<comment><USER4> A key feature that seems to be missing is that the people making the decision about what course to take and even what students to send to university are still the students themselves who are notoriously bad at deciding that. With a proper equity system, the decisions would be influenced by people who are actually trying to be most efficient.

<comment><USER2> On the other hand, when you say "most efficient", I'll ask naively -- "most efficient at doing _what_ , exactly?".

If the answer is "generating profit within the current economy" then that clearly isn't always a positive thing. In many cases there are some very negative effects.

I think there is arguably more value in having an additional well-educated poorly-paid person reflecting upon society and suggesting alternative objectives (provided that this can eventually be translated into public debate) - who perhaps never earns very much, and never pays off their student loans - than an additional highly profitable person who is (at best) making us all incrementally more efficient at doing whatever it is precisely that we're already doing (and at worst just reallocating wealth to themselves).

<comment><USER3> Generally "efficient" means maximizing social utility, which in practice for economists means GDP [0].

I agree that there are benefits to an educated population (in spite of disagreeing with the progressive bias in university education). But you are wrong that "efficiency" is meaningless or means "making us all incrementally more efficient at doing whatever it is precisely that we're already doing". Efficiency means increasing the size of the "pie" so that however we choose to divide it up, there is more pie to go around. We could divide the GDP from the year 1800 as evenly as we liked and not reach the standard of living of 2015.

[0] and no, the broken windows fallacy does not apply here, no one is trying to literally maximize GDP, but GDP represents the _kind of_ thing that economists care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Despite things like Upstart sounding cool, selling equity in higher education is actually a horrible solution to the wrong problem.

The problem in higher education is _not_ that it's hard to get loans, it's that doing so is far too easy thanks to government subsidies on both sides. (Like healthcare, spending other people's money is a great way to guarantee runaway costs.)

A much better idea would be to eliminate the subsidies and guaranteed public lending entirely, thus removing the funding for negative-return for-profit universities.

<comment><USER6> For-profit schools also target recent veterans for their GI bill. Should we get rid of that as well?

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. It's a poor use of taxpayer money to pay a for-profit school and it's a poor use of the veteran's time.

In my view, the ideal way to structure these subsidies would be as tax credits. If you can successfully convince private lenders to invest in your education, taxpayers will help to foot the bill. But we shouldn't pay for arbitrarily poor programs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What an incredibly bad idea!

How do you underwrite the sale of female equity? My wife has taken about 3 years off to raise our kids. This would have a negative impact on a bankers ownership of her.

If this is the future, let's skip the bankers and form trade guilds. I'd rather payoff somebody to get my kid into the IT Guild than sell a piece of him to some banker. This is the kind of excess that sparks revolutions.

<comment><USER3> There is nothing in the article that suggests that the bank would be entitled to anything but a fixed share of your income, female or otherwise. In theory [0], if women on average earned less than men because of taking time off to raise children, then they would have to pay a higher percentage of their future income for their education. But on average they would pay the same total amount (in an efficient market). I'm not sure why you think this would be unfair. This would not differ from the present market where women and men also pay equal amounts for education.

[0] Personally I don't think that selling equity in oneself would ever be possible for practical/legal reasons. As mentioned in another post, the only thing that comes close is Australia's higher education loans.

<comment><USER7> I'm just thinking about the practical aspects of such an idea. Bankers like their cash flow. Shouldn't people who work more and make more get a better deal? It's only fair!

<comment><USER3> Bankers like their cash flow, but they also have to compete with other bankers. My claim (and the claim implicit in the article) is that people will get an actuarially fair rate for their education. And given this, they will not pay back more (on average) than if they paid up front, or if they took out a loan under a competitive loan market. I don't think your parody of how bankers think makes sense. Our economic system is not perfect, but it has a certain logic to it, and refusing to engage with that and instead making up nefarious motives, is not productive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The punchline:

> To help limit adverse selection, the government might also gradually > withdraw subsidised loans, which the best students will usually prefer to > equity. The main role for government would then be to help to collect > payments through the tax system, as the administrative burden of monitoring > incomes would be too great for investors to bear.

"Ultimately, this would only prove profitable if the government didn't compete with us & instead did all the legwork on our behalf."

<comment><USER3> Charitably, that would read "the government already has enough information to collect payments anyway, so it might as well do this, but should let private industry do the rest". Personally I don't think this is an appropriate use of the information the government has, or the government's power. In Australia they do it this way, but the government also does the loans. However your critique lacks substance as it ignores the legitimate reasons why some tasks are more appropriate for the government, and some for private industry, and repeats the tired old "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" schtick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sure investors will be lining up to invest in poor minority first- generation college students.

<comment><USER10> I'm quite confident JP Morgan would invest if they saw a bargin in a under- valued minority student. Banks want money and returns; they don't have time for casual racism.

<comment><USER9> Poor kids have a much higher risk of not finishing their degree, even adjusted for scores on aptitude tests: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who- gets-to-gradu...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to- graduate.html) ("Take students like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation.")

A rational bank would charge much higher rates to a kid from a poor family than one from a rich one, and would be justified in doing so by the statistics. The question is: do we want to live in that kind of society?

<comment><USER10> Sure, they would probably charge higher rates. They may also provide other support to make sure the kid actually graduates, since they are invested in that happening.

All I'm saying is, the parent post that "nobody will invest in minorities" doesn't really properly reflect the incentives.

<comment><USER11> The problem is that using that system for financing education would directly promote existing class privilege. Children from wealthier families would have more opportunities for education than children from poorer families to an even greater extent than they already do.

Personally, I would prefer a system that lessens the effects of class privilege rather than one that increases the effects of class privilege.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yay! Indentured servitude! It's the next best idea if we can't have slavery!

</comment><comment><USER13> A better idea is to force schools to underwrite student loans and keep at least a substantial portion on their books. And get rid of the rule against discharging student loans in bankruptcy.

Then schools will have a disincentive to saddle students with giant debts in exchange for degrees that make it difficult to pay them off.

<comment><USER14> What if things like education, sociology, art of the middle ages, African studies or paleontology don't average as well paying jobs as finance, law or cs?

<comment><USER15> the question is, do you need a four year degree to study art of the middle ages, if you decide you want to? But suppose you do. First of all, there are private foundation which can sponsor this. Secondly, some people will do it simply because its fun, regardless of payoff, but then you don't need to sponsor them either via govt programs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great idea, although the article highlights the biggest problem: adverse selection. Students who want to slack off will choose equity, whereas go- getters will choose debt. Given this, no provider of equity could be sure that they would be getting high-quality income streams, so they would charge more, worsening the effect, etc. etc. I doubt that all the analytics in the world could counteract this effect.

To get this off the ground, you'd need some sort of coordination, either at the school or government level, to enforce risk pooling. How about free education at state colleges coupled with a higher lifetime marginal income tax?

</comment><comment><USER17> And watch colleges raise their prices even more.

<comment><USER18> Yes. We need to move to a system of paying market prices for education and end all this easy money. Let colleges compete for the dollars and a diverse market of educational choices at many price levels will appear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I believe it was tried already with My Rich Uncle [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyRichUncle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyRichUncle). They folded in 2009.

<comment><USER16> MRU looks like they pivoted to private student loans, and then got caught up in the credit crunch, so I don't know if it's a perfect comp. It was probably just a lot easier to latch onto the largest-growing consumer finance sector than to try and sell an actually innovative product against a heavily subsidized existing alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problem with the system is not that it's too hard to get more money into it. That's actually the opposite of the problem.

<comment><USER21> Very right. Education, homes- all get more expensive as you make taking loans easier.

<comment><USER22> It's almost as if the further the asset price gets disconnected from the amount of labor it takes to own it, the more expensive it gets.

<comment><USER21> Yep. If your neighbor is willing to enslave their-self to buy a home, then you are going to have to do the same to buy a home on salary (unless you strike it rich).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Various European and Scand. models (I like Denmark's especially) would be ideal by a large margin, but that's very unlikely to happen in the US, so this at least attempts to deal with the problem in a way that might actually happen.

The advantages of this over the current system could and _should_ be:

\- Your family income is not considered, so you never wind up in the "donut hole" where they make too much to allow you to get much in terms of loans, but too little to get you full-rides for having tiny income.

\- Your own savings shouldn't/couldn't be considered, so if you've managed to save up some money (emergency fund, etc.) as an adult (because we need our personal safety nets in the US) it doesn't vanish in a semester. With the current system, the amount you're given is dependent on your own savings as well as income. Everything is considered. That's a huge risk.

\- The money is guaranteed to be there when you need it. Not subject to shifting political winds or anyone's variable income. No yearly reapplication.

\- The amounts calculated with the current system are sometimes laughably low, particularly when it comes to housing costs. You should be able to ask for what you need based on actual extant reality.

For the investors, it could potentially be very lucrative. Most of the students would likely go on to make decent money and so you'd get paid back plus extra, but in cases where students hit it big, you could make a windfall (I'm sure Larry Ellison's school wouldn't mind 10%/year of his income.)

As someone who had to leave home as a teenager and has had zero family support (but would still love to go to NYU or Columbia: [https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers- should...](https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-should-still- choose-to-go-to-university-if-someone-else-is-paying-45091d22acc1)) - if I could take out $300k or so for 10% income for 30 years, I would do it in a second. They'd probably wind up with 450k or so.

</comment><comment> bro-stick There are some alternatives to continue shifting the burden onto students in various disguises:

\- Government subsidies as an investment into reaping future taxes and economic prowess. Many countries already do this.

\- Co-op ownership of universities which allows students (or govts on their behalf) to invest in institutions.

Perhaps a combination of fair equity exchanging between universities and students would "align interests" so-to-speak, so that institutions and students are positively motivated to help, rather than exploit, each other. This gets students thinking critically about balancing the two inseparable aspects of education: the actual education and "keeping the lights on."

<comment><USER24> > Many countries already do this.

I don't think I could name a 1st world county that doesn't do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I see this as an attractive way to establish an apprenticeship. At least for software engineers, it is rather common to move around every 2 to 4 years, which makes it hard to maintain and nurture a mentor relationship.

If I were to invest in a student, my advice and attention would help secure my investment and would probably be worth more than the principle to the student.

This type of Money and Mentorship scheme would be especially valuable for poor, minority, or first-generation college students that come from a community or family unable to offer them informed direction or advice.

</comment><comment><USER26> After college in America, I went to study in Sweden where education is free. So if money is an issue you can just look outside your comfort zone and try a new studying in a new country. Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER27> College is not job training. This would be an excellent way to fund trade schools and coding bootcamps. College is for something else entirely.

[0] [https://aims.uchicago.edu/page/2000-robert- pippin](https://aims.uchicago.edu/page/2000-robert-pippin)

[1] [http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal- arts/1/](http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/1/)

<comment><USER13> Given that the battle has been lost, why should we continue to subsidize the hollowed out shells and the armies of deanlets and deanlings swarming over them?

<comment><USER27> The battle has been lost only in political discourse, not really reality. Small liberal arts colleges and places like UChicago and the Ivy League continue to uphold those values; most state schools still have liberal education programs - even if their enrollment and funding is declining.

Why should we continue to subsidize them? Same reason we subsidize art, or space exploration. Because it's human progress, and it shouldn't only be available to the rich.

What are you expecting the vast and growing population of economically unnecessary people to do all day? In an economy that doesn't need people to work at production anymore, we can move up Maslow's hierarchy to something more interesting, like what the wealthy in academia have been doing all along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The idea is interesting, actually, it's better to sell your student equity than to get into debt.

However, it's not something that would allow people to evolve economically.

It would be financially rewarding for people searching for low-risk investments, but it's not something that will increase the life standards of the poor and the middle-class in comparison to what exists today.

Instead, we should just accept that that the formal education system is fucked up and that efforts to empower informal education should be done.

Society would undoubtedly benefit.

<comment><USER5> > The idea is interesting, actually, it's better to sell your student equity > than to get into debt.

Only if you don't expect to make a high income.

I personally would _never_ sell equity in my income when debt is available.

<comment><USER28> How is that different from selling your startup's equity? Would you prefer to start a business on a loan?

<comment><USER5> > Would you prefer to start a business on a loan?

Absolutely, as would almost any entrepreneur. If I could fund my startup with a long-term low-interest loan that requires no collateral I'd jump at the chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Diploma loans sound like they would bring all the benefits of title loans and payday loans to a younger group of consumers in an age when credit card debt does not really offer high enough returns on capital.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Let students study for free. Germany did this, why not your country?

<comment><USER30> Because higher education in the US is considered a privilege, not a right. If you can't afford it, you're not entitled to it, in many cases. There are scholarship programs and things for some low-income or special needs children, but the idea of universal education, like universal healthcare, is still considered too socialist to be acceptable here.

<comment><USER31> If they want to consider education a privilege, then it's not wise to spray student loans to every potential student, including ones who only study to access student loans, to pay for living expenses.

Either make it a right, or make it privilege. The rampant student loan is the worst of both worlds, directing money into the pockets of university administrators (and bankers, for now). It's like socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> equity is like debt, but you can write it off (when the biz fails). The better solution would be to allow student debt to be written off. That's a much cleaner solution.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think it is fairly clear at this point that student loans have worsened the problem they were supposed to solve.

<comment><USER3> That's not clear at all. Education fees have gone up, but it's not clear that the cause is student loans (and the subsequent increase in demand for education), and even if they did, we would expect at least _some_ increase in education as a result of loans that allow more people to get an education. Should people who have the cash up front be expected not to compete?

But I think the main difference is a shift in jobs where higher education becomes a requirement, and this is not just because of competition among employees, but because the supply of jobs is changing. Low skill jobs are moving offshore or taken by (sometimes illegal) immigrants who can live more cheaply. In order to obtain the (higher) standard of living of today's America, people need to create more value which requires more skills. A perfect example is the IT industry. Company's like Google create huge amounts of value[0], and employees who contribute this are rewarded.

[0] no, not selling ads, but the service that people use in exchange for the micro-payment of viewing an ad.

<comment><USER33> The fact that students, most of whom have no assets and have never worked, and cannot prove their future earning potential, can get over $100k in loans that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy just by signing their name, has clearly caused massive distortions in the education market.

During the past few decades, the number of administrators in American universities has grown significantly, tuition has risen dramatically, and even public universities are investing in luxury amenities to attract student money, and raising tuition to pay for them.

The past few decades have also seen a proliferation of for-profit universities which are being investigated by the government for exploiting students by encouraging them to take out huge loans to pay tuition for programs without any value. They are taking advantage of flawed student aid policy by using the students to take money from the government.

None of these things have happened in any other wealthy country, even though those countries have also seen the same shift in the job market that the United States has. This is not a consequence of the changing job market, because if it was, it would have happened elsewhere. It is a consequence of policy choices.

The incentives for bad behavior are abundantly clear. In other developed countries, it is harder to get student loans, and easier to pay them back, and college is more accessible to poor students than it is in the United States. That's because public universities in other developed countries have caps on tuition, and students have caps on how much they can borrow, so universities can't use students as a vehicle for diverting government money to themselves.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Kihapp - Tournament Organizing for Martial Artists - <AUTHOR> http://www.kihapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a long-running weekend project I started for my own use in ITF Taekwondo. I've been generalizing it little by little to cover other arts.

It's still a little rough around the edges and a lot of obvious things are missing. (I'm partly submitting this now for the added motivation to finish it up.) Looking forward to your feedback.</comment>


Antidepressants do Not take weeks to work - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/04/myth-antidepressants-take-weeks-to-work.html

<comment><USER2> Yes, weeks (one to two), as opposed to seconds, minutes, hours or days, which are other timescales over which drugs can act.</comment>


E-paper with Photonic Ink - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19337/ <comment><USER2> A key driver to e-music's growth has been the availability of slick portable devices. E-books, in contrast, have no decent rendering device and have to contend with a wonderful physical alternative, the book. (Sorry, PDA screens don't cut it.)

Now imagine an Apple iBook -- polished exterior, hundreds of e-paper sheets that can dynamically update to your current book selection, autosyncing with iTunes -- and what that would do to the e-book market.

Would you migrate some portion of your physical library to an e-library? Would you start to explore the long tail of fiction outside the traditional publishing venues? Do you think there is a fundamental difference between books and music, say length, required concentration, or home decoration?

</comment><comment><USER3> Actually, Sony has a pretty neat e-paper ebook reader.

See - <http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/itpd/reader/>

I played around with one and it seemed to be pretty easy on the eyes.

I would port all of my physical library to an e-library. The convenience of such an idealized device would probably obsolete the book.</comment>