Carol Bartz Out at Yahoo; CFO Interim CEO - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20110906/exclusive-carol-bartz-out-at-yahoo-cfo-interim-ceo/ <comment><USER3> An ex-Yahoo here, using a throwaway account.

Yahoo's biggest problem is the creamy middle layer of managers. They are usually lifers (as in, been at Yahoo for a decade), or fresh MBAs with a Stanford degree who think that just because they sat through Management-101, they know how products should be designed.

This middle layer is like a Turkish harem. They're busy backstabbing each other, politicking and fucking things up. BUT NO ONE HOLDS THEM ACCOUNTABLE! Some dick will screw up a project, and then when the team gets laid off, happily move to another one to fuck that up too. Too often I've seen engineers just get disgusted and leave; or they'll go into a depressive "I don't care" mode. Passive-aggressive behavior is the norm.

Blake, when he joined, said that "we say 'no' to nothing, and 'no' to everything". What he meant was: in a meeting, the manager will say 'yes' to everything; but the moment he steps outside, he'll think "I'm not gonna do that!".

Innovation is also hampered by these middle morons. Someone tries to do something innovative, and a middle cockroach will crawl out, whining that his 'team' is working on it, and they'll have something ready in (some future quarter). So you're told to back off. Then you wait. In the meantime, that middle manager will use this opportunity to ask for more reqs and expand his little fiefdom. Time will pass, and nothing will get done. And you'll be waiting, agonizing, watching competitors eat Yahoo's lunch as this middle manager fucks around.

And then there will be cycles of outsourcing to Bangalore and Beijing. Some middle beancounter decided that 3 engineers in India can be hired for 1 engineer in the US. (Never mind the quality of people; it's just the 3:1 ratio that matters). So now they're busy outsourcing to Bangalore. Even critical support tasks are outsourced to Bangalore. So what used to take a couple of back-and-forth emails and get fixed in an hour, now takes 3-4 days.

The list of Yahoo's problems are long; and C-level people are not high on that list. "Vision" is also not a problem for Yahoo, if they'd just let the engineers just _do their fucking jobs!_

Carol's biggest mistake was pissing Jack Ma off and losing Alipay. A person at that level should never, ever, make such a blunder; and she had to go.

<comment><USER4> I am from Bangalore, And I seriously don't understand this Bangalore and Beijing hate.

Why do Americans assume all Chinese and Indians are fools? Aren't you people shooting yourself in the foot by assuming your competition is weak? Outsourcing works for a lot more factors than mere money. But money is a major factor.

Here in India, we have usual set of good and bad engineers _like everywhere_. There a lot of very good talented and hardworking folks here, sure they don't come cheap. But they come cheaper than what a similar guy in the US would cost. I have myself seen a lot of quality work getting delivered at almost 1/10th the cost it would have taken in the US.

The US taught us ideals of capitalism, didn't you guys want the world to follow _your way of life_. Now when we actually do, you guys frown.. withdraw turn your back on the same principles you have taught us for nearly half a century now.

You have nothing to fear from the bad engineers here, trust me they are loosing out very quickly. What you must fear is good hardworking folks coming at cheap prices. That will be a big problem, because when some one sees quality coming for cheap they will go for it.

Also, Indian is a huge buyer of military equipment from the US. We spend billions buying stuff from you. But we never complain that those jobs are being outsourced to America. In fact we love America for the help they offer us.

We live in a globalized world, this is how its going to be in the future.

<comment><USER5> OP is right. I am worked at yahoo till recently and I am an Indian and I don't think people in Bangalore or Beijing are bad. During my career in India and in US I met quite a few good engineers . In early days of Yahoo! India the quality of Indian engineers are pretty good. Off late they are just hiring whoever send in a resume. I know people who are interviewing these candidates even when they say no the manager is hiring because they have fill up the req. Its really sad state you hire these so called "programmers" who can't understand basic things and its frustrating deal with and explain every small details and the work that comes out is completely different from what you wanted and than some more delay. No one complaining about American or Indian engineering quality I seen bad engineers on both sides. Its about getting quality engineer. If you remove pretty good engineers or team here and try to hire below average engineers from India only because they cost less than its really fucked up you are not really saving up anything in this only to realize your product is delayed for an year and it turned to piece of crap. Don't be so defensive about these comparisons not everybody in India are great programmers nor they are fools

<comment><USER6> Partly true, however there is another aspect to it as well. It's just that Yahoo and other blue-label firms have an exalted notion of who should work with them. They tend to go for the fashionable set; the english speaking, high fiving crowd of self labelled developers who cant code themselves out of a paper bag.

I know of at least one "dynamite" programmer whom Yahoo! India rejected because the guy didn't have a graduate degree. As usual, he was too busy coding to go get a degree. Well guess what, it's been pretty interesting working with him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was a great diatribe against Carol. If you guys missed it from a couple of months back an angry shareholder confronts Bartz. He's dead on and with this now happening – absolutely right.

<http://soundcloud.com/erickschonfeld/yahoo-sharehloder-rant>

<comment><USER8> Is there a transcript of it anywhere? Never mind, just found it: [http://www.alacrastore.com/research/thomson-streetevents- Yah...](http://www.alacrastore.com/research/thomson-streetevents- Yahoo_Inc_Shareholders_Meeting-T4011721)

It's at the end, I believe he was the last speaker...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem is that Yahoo was born as a product that became obsolete quickly. It has no DNA anymore, it's just a collection of various media services. It's not a computer, or a piece of software, or a social network. It _was_ a directory of web links. A library.

It's doubtful that a Steve Jobs could come back to Yahoo and get it back in touch with its roots. IMHO, their best bet is to sell.

<comment><USER10> I've always seen Yahoo as a "me too" company - the Carl's Jr of the online titans. If they've ever been the best at something they've never stayed there for long. The decline began when they decided search wasn't their core business and portals were the way to go. Who would want to work there? Even Microsoft are more innovative these days.

Having said all that, thanks for buying Viaweb off PG guys. At least some Yahoo cash went to good use...

<comment><USER11> At least Carl's Jr is good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if Yahoo! lacks the vision of a founder to compare with Gates, Jobs & Woz, Branson, Larry & Sergey, even Zuckerberg?

It's been described as listless and without vision or a clear direction for several years now. Particularly with more macro economic trends, now is a good time for CEOs and business owners to re-engage themselves and their teams with the original vision or intent of their business, to help confirm a new vision moving forward.

I've just never felt that Yahoo! had that baton handed to them by the original founders (I even had to search for their names - Jerry Yang and David Filo). Plenty of companies grow to enormous success without the founder having to drive it, of course, but there's usually some connection that links the CEO to the company's founding principles. Yang is still on the Board I believe - <USER2> anyone point me to where his thoughts on the direction might have been shared?

<comment><USER13> Don't forget – Jerry Yang actually _returned_ to Yahoo! for a period. And completely fucked the dog, screwing up a potential acquisition and being replaced by Bartz. Say what we will about Valleywag, they covered this period pretty well:

BSing the troops:

[http://gawker.com/valleywag/tech/yahoo/jerry-yangs- fireside-...](http://gawker.com/valleywag/tech/yahoo/jerry-yangs-fireside- chat-translated-314162.php)

Ballmer writing a polite letter killing the acquisition prospects:

<http://gawker.com/386898/>

"Hey guys, uh, Ballmer's very public proclamations notwithstanding, Microsoft didn't actually want to buy us:"

[http://uk.gawker.com/5020835/yahoo-ceo-tries-to-convince- sha...](http://uk.gawker.com/5020835/yahoo-ceo-tries-to-convince-shareholders- microsoft-never-wanted-to-merge)

<comment><USER14> implying microsoft acquisition of a big competitor is a good thing.

<comment><USER15> He screwed the company's owners out of many millions of dollars. Microsoft may well have killed and gutted the fish, but the CEO's responsibility is to the shareholders.

<comment><USER16> I see what you mean. But let's say he would have sold to Microsoft and then Microsoft would have killed and gutted the fish, you'd probably be criticizing him for having no vision by selling Yahoo to MS and letting it die like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yahoo needs someone who can clearly articulate what Yahoo does. There is no "product" to draft behind, just a disjointed set of technologies which individually are great (as someone pointed out, YUI and Hadoop, etc), but holistically don't have any focus.

Google had the same problem, but they are now shedding this.

<comment><USER18> So how is Yahoo still number 4 in ranking (according to Alexa).. Honest question - what drives so much traffic? Search?

<comment><USER19> Yahoo produces a ton of content. I believe their Finance and Sports sites are #1. Autos is huge. Their news site is big. Their front page gets massive traffic. They have a ton of other sites as well. And this isn't spammy content farming. They really do have a ton of original as well as quality licensed content (e.g. AP stories). They do extremely well in the realm of content, and with audience engagement around that content. Add in Yahoo Mail, Personals, Answers (ugh), etc. They have a lot of very successful sites.

<comment><USER20> Yahoo Sports is an excellent sports journalism outlet and probably the only serious competitor to the ESPN monopoly. They broke the story on the Miami recruiting scandal, one of the largest NCAA violations in history, after doing extensive in-depth research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Finally. Carol may have been a decent operations manager, but Yahoo needs a product driven leader. You can't cost cut your way to new users.

<comment><USER22> Funny, isn't that a description of Tim Cook and Apple now?

<comment><USER23> I disagree. AOL and Yahoo don't have someone like Jonathan Ive who is, for all intents and purposes, Apple's "product guy". Jobs was just the guy that focused and drove them all to excellence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I used to work at Yahoo during the whole Microsoft debacle. I have to say that this is a disappointing development, namely because it really sounds like the board is giving up on Yahoo, and they will package up Yahoo to the highest bidder. It certainly sounds like the board is getting bored (pun intended) of trying to resuscitate Yahoo and would rather move onto newer and fresher companies with richer rewards. This unfortunately means more rounds of layoffs as they try to increase margins and profitability by hacking and slashing employees. I think in hindsight being sold to Microsoft was probably the best thing for the Yahoo, the employees, and for the shareholders.

<comment><USER25> A Microsoft acquisition looked attractive, but I would argue that a Google acquisition would be far better for both.

Google would foster a culture totally different from Yahoo's, and at the same time thrill the existing Yahoo employees - which means they would stick around. So much opportunity for both.

Microsoft is a great company, but their online businesses are losing money like crazy, and I suspect that many Yahooers would not be super excited about joining Microsoft.

<comment><USER26> What would Google gain from acquiring Yahoo? Yahoo has little search technology of its own and many services that overlap with existing Google services.

I think Yahoo's properties (and users) might be a better fit with Facebook.

<comment><USER25> For one, Yahoo would obtain significant talent. And they would gain an enormous amount of users that use Yahoo's services.

I'm curious, why do you think Yahoo's properties would be a better fit with Facebook?

<comment><USER27> Why would Google buy Yahoo so that Yahoo could obtain Google's talent? There is no way Google would water down its engineering pool with Yahoo's engineering staff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Saw this on twitter and couldn't agree more:

Yahoo needs to hire a CEO focused on their core competency - Fantasy football.

[http://twitter.com/#!/MatthewJBrown/status/11123353526378086...](http://twitter.com/#!/MatthewJBrown/status/111233535263780865)

In all honesty, Yahoo! does a lot of things right, I hope for the numerous DOers still left at Yahoo! that they hire someone with the vision and effectiveness to make something out of the once great service.

</comment><comment><USER29> I remember using Yahoo! way back in the days of Mosaic. Yahoo! has a long history (in Internet time) and many long-time and loyal users of it's email and other entertainment and lifestyle services.

Yahoo! has to break out of the "portal" mindset of trying to be all things to all people. When portals were the all the rage in the late 90's, options were limited in the online services space -- which is clearly not the case anymore. What Yahoo! currently brings to the table is talent, experience, traffic and a loyal user base of it's core services (e.g. Mail, Messenger, Finance, Flickr, Stores, Fantasy Sports, etc.). They need to integrate these services better by focusing on one core demographic and offering a more cohesive experience.

The first step is to identify their core demographic and build around their needs. They should raise cash for acquisitions through the sale of existing properties that do not service their primary audience. The Yahoo! brand and user base is strong enough to make a comeback, they just have to look at their company from a slightly different perspective and play their best hand in the current market.

</comment><comment><USER30> She was dealt a tough hand. Very few firms have second lives and very few innovation firms can cost cut to greatness. Motorola is a more frequent outcome than Apple.

</comment><comment><USER31> Can someone explain the timing of these switches?

Jobs resigns, Arrington resigns, CmdrTaco resigns, Reddit is spun off, and now this. (did I mis one?)

Is there something about august/september? Is it just my personal filter?

<comment><USER32> I can't say for sure, but possibly fiscal quarter/year ends?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I worked for Sun in the Bayarea and for Yahoo from their Bangalore office. I found lot of similarities between Sun and Yahoo. Similar to Sun, the engineers at Yahoo were really really good. It was really disappointing to see engineers of so much quality not being used to their full potential.

If there is one good thing that could come out of this, it would be, if those awesome engineers were freed up to help create real value to our economies. I would hire an ex-yahoo engineer in a heartbeat.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think the greatest example of what Yahoo! could have been is Yahoo! Japan. They own the auction space and as part of the juggernaut SoftBank group pretty much own a big part of the space (even more if you count the spun off Soft Bank Investments).

It's sad that lack of vision and truly ingrained technical innovation prevented the company from truly realizing the advantages of being a first mover in the space but they sure had a nice run for what started as a collection of links.

</comment><comment><USER35> That was a couple of years late.

Yahoo! can still be turned around but it will take something more than a cost- cutting and downsizing mentality to achieve that. Under a leader with vision with buy in from the various department heads combined with the current traffic base of Yahoo as a launchpad would still be a force to be reckoned with.

Just recovering from the Bartz years will take a while, lots of talent has been discarded or they've left seeing the writing on the wall. Before Yahoo will manage to undo that damage there is a lot of work that needs doing.

</comment><comment><USER36> First, the board should decide: media company or tech company.

If Yahoo! is a media company -- which is more conservative since its peers would be AOL, Viacom, et al., and not Google, Facebook, et al. -- then merge/acquire Netflix ($11.5B market cap) and anoint Reed Hastings CEO. Let him navigate Nethoo through the transition to new media. Combining distribution and content failed for AOL-TW, but with the media industry in flux and with more content surfacing from the grassroots, perhaps now is the time for vertical integration.

If technology, then Yahoo! needs a new culture and a bold vision to attract the most talented engineers. No ambitious engineer wants to slave under PMs when they could flourish in engineering-oriented companies like Google and Facebook.

Yahoo!'s mission? Help users discover, personalize, and consume content.

Be the service -- mobile or web -- people turn to when they have nothing to do, when they want to find a cool article, deal, song, video, picture, restaurant, conversation, or event.

Today, Google is where you go when you know what you want. Yahoo! could help people upstream of search -- before people know what they want. Which, conveniently, is most of the time.

Lots of companies tackle the problem in different areas: Digg with news, Pandora with music, Yelp with local businesses, Instagram with photos, Groupon with deals.

With content proliferating faster than ever before, there is a need for some service to help people discover and consume content. Users don't want to hunt for content. They want the coolest deals, music, shows, restaurants, and news to come to them.

Analyzing the web for the most relevant content -- no matter the type -- at a personalized level is non-trivial. Because it's a daunting technical problem, it will attract smart engineers.

Despite the naysayers, Yahoo! occupies an enviable position with massive assets: hundreds of millions of users, deep advertiser relationships, and an iconic brand. The question is how to organize these assets into a sustainable and promising company.

Yahoo! has the cash flow to acquire some pieces, perhaps go private, and execute against some vision.

There is an opportunity to once again innovate with compelling technology and recruit talented engineers. There is an opportunity to help users navigate the explosion of online content in a smarter, more natural way. There is an opportunity for Yahoo! to reassert itself as one of the premier companies in Silicon Valley, one led by pioneering technology.

</comment><comment><USER37> Another nail in the coffin for the "A successful CEO's skills can easily transfer to any company" idea! From the top of my head (other than Bratz): Zander at Motorola, Sculley at Apple, etc. You just can't graft them on like that.

<comment><USER38> It might be true, though, that there is a large equivalence class of companies that can trade CEO's well, and interesting consumer tech companies are just not in that equivalence class. It seems like Coke and Levi Strauss could trade, for example, and be fine, or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> What Yahoo _could_ be:

A social graph that's not a walled garden.

Want to add Facebook stuff to your page? Sign the Facebook ToS, lube up, and get ready to get shafted. Want Google+ interaction? Same deal.

Facebook (and to a lessor extent, G+) don't want you to run apps that involve them. They want you to create content for users to "like".

Yahoo could create a great identity system - multiple identities (so you don't need to use your real name for everything), notifications (replacing email for web apps), payments, micropayments, advertising, the works.

Want to make a web app? Check out (the fictional) Yahoo.js, and the (fictional) native client for your server (or just make it all run on JSON as a fallback).

It could work like that. They just need to ask a bunch of people making _new_ web apps what the pain points are, solve them, then use that to push people to a Yahoo Notifications page, and from there to Yahoo's other properties.

</comment><comment><USER40> Fired over the _phone_? Is that common at that level?

<comment><USER41> Supposedly the CEO and the chairman were on opposite U.S. coasts. Must have been pretty urgent though...

<comment><USER42> Agreed. There is more to the story we don't know yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Stock is reportedly up ~6% on the news. Too bad the board couldn't have figured this out months ago. All she did was sell search to Microsoft. More or less the same as here modus operandi at Autodesk. At least that MS sellout gave ProEngineer a nice batch of customers. Her search sale helped nobody but did reduce the competition for Google's search monopoly.

IMO any Yahoo CEO who can't fix their flagship webmail within a year should be shown the door. Of course fixing webmail means fixing middle management, and that's a rather more difficult problem.

</comment><comment><USER44> Im surprised it took so long to fire Carol. As I saw Yahoo selling off all of its cool properties that were distracting to its core, I wondered what exactly their core was. It seems like yahoo was eager to become a bunch of links and licensed content...someone must have relied too much on an excel sheet to figure out how yahoo could become a valuable company. Though Yahoo lost many valuable properties like yahoo dating while others like yahoo maps failed to innovate, I look at what Yahoo did with the news on its front page as indicative of the company philosophy. They put sensational news on the front page begging for people to click the links. Many of the headlines are deceptive as the articles themselves are a let down. Its almost as if the yahoo content team waas trying to trick users to get a few more pennies out of banner ads and lose clientele. Many times I have read comments of users making fun of the writers. Im not sure what yahoo's plan is but if I was the bored I would donate 25% of the company equity to Mark Zuckerberg and another 26% to the Page and Brin and send a box of chocolates and a plea for help. :) I wish Yahoo the best but its going to take a lot to change their culture.

</comment><comment><USER45> Not holding hope that the next person will do much better. It sad considering how talent they still seem to have. Looking at the Yahoo UI people and the people behind hadoop. I'd like to see them push web applications more. They seem to have the people to build good web apps. They never did anything with Zimbra an awesome product and instead sold it to VMware. Those kinds of things are what they could I my view do well in.

</comment><comment><USER46> Carol never clearly defined her strategy as CEO. It wasn't clear to her employees and it wasn't clear for investors. She may have had some big picture plan that would taken many years to achieve, but it didn't look that way.

It was clear that board wasn't willing to wait to find out. Which ever direction they go with a new CEO, here's hoping for an actual plan.

</comment><comment><USER47> The sad thing is they have all the parts to make a great competitor to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Some sort of messaging to strap their news, financial, flickr, etc. together into something compelling. They still have amazing front page traffic.

</comment><comment><USER48> Employee approval of now ex-CEO Bartz [http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/yahoo-employees-carol- bart...](http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/06/yahoo-employees-carol-bartz/)?

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder if Yahoo! needs old Jerry Yang (the one with fire in his belly in his early days) back as Twitter did with Jack Dorsey.

<comment><USER13> Yang already had his shot at a Jobs-like return and he botched it miserably. Worst of all, he messed up Yahoo's chance for an acquisition, which at this point seems like the only way it can actually generate some value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Speaking from experience there, Yahoo! will do better without that kind of "leadership" up top. Let's break Yahoo! up into its valuable components, sell it and shed the rest.

I'll be buying Yahoo! stock in the morning.

</comment><comment><USER51> "CFO interim CEO".. yeah, those guys usually have a vision.

<comment><USER52> Well, at least a CFO has a good chance of keeping the lights on for a few months while the board finds a new CEO.

<comment><USER51> "Keeping the lights on" doesn't sound too nice, although it's likely exactly what he's going to do..

<comment><USER53> Is Yahoo in danger of going under, it looks like they bring in about $1billion a year, do they need more than that? or are the profitable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I would never dream of selling a company to Yahoo.

I don't build to flip, so seeing what they did with Flickr, Delicious and dozens of other projects (internal ones, too: SimpleGeo is proof that FireEagle should have gotten a major push out of the gate) makes me feel a little bit like Joss Whedon contemplating doing another show with FOX.

Does anyone have any compelling counter-arguments, or believe things will ever get better? Is Yahoo in AOL/NAMBLA territory at this point?

</comment><comment><USER55> relevant link: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20102379-93/revisiting- yaho...](http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20102379-93/revisiting-yahoos- blown-$44.6-billion-sale-to-microsoft/)

</comment><comment><USER56> Carol Bartz deserved to be fired this very way as she did a lot of harm to many people.

justice

</comment><comment><USER57> Maybe Steve Jobs left as CEO of Apple to run Yahoo???

<comment><USER58> Not to many people would want to punish Jobs in this way but it is the only important question. How would Jobs run Yahoo? Well, he wouldn't have mortgaged the search; he would have demanded that it be the best.</comment></comment>


Google's New Service to Speed Up Your Website - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27046/?p1=blogs

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I got 1.8 seconds off my site load. Wonder how this would affect seo.</comment>


Hash-based Signatures: An illustrated Primer - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/04/07/hash-based-signatures-an-illustrated-primer/ <comment><USER2> This is a pretty good primer, and I think Matt Green is generally good at tutorials that reduce the technical complexity to make material more accessible.

I'll add a couple of notes:

1\. Hash-based cryptography is not capable of providing public-key encryption, so unfortunately these are only useful for quantum-resistant digital signature schemes. But they're still very good at that.

2\. Since collision resistance is a stronger notion of security than preimage resistance and second preimage resistance, achieving collision resistance achieves all three. I just wanted to make this point explicit. Likewise, _indistinguishability_ is an even stronger notion and subsumes all three.

3\. The current state of the art in quantum-resistant hash-based signatures is the SPHINCS family and its variants, including SPHINCS+ and Gravity-SPHINCS [1,2,3]. One of the really interesting innovations here is a transition to trees with _few-time_ signatures instead of _one-time_ signatures underlying them.

A good, reasonably up to date source for a technical overview of the current research landscape is the PQCrypto Conference's 2017 Summer School, specifically the two "Hash-based signatures" videos/slides [4].

____________________

1\. [https://sphincs.cr.yp.to/papers.html](https://sphincs.cr.yp.to/papers.html)

2\. [https://sphincs.org/](https://sphincs.org/)

3\. [https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2017/12/01/our- submiss...](https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2017/12/01/our-submission- to-nists-post-quantum-project-gravity-sphincs/)

4\. [https://2017.pqcrypto.org/school/schedule.html](https://2017.pqcrypto.org/school/schedule.html)

<comment><USER3> >Since collision resistance is a stronger notion of security than preimage resistance and second preimage resistance, achieving collision resistance achieves all three.

Under what assumptions and definitions is this true? For instance the function f(x) = x is not preimage resistant but is very collision resistant. I've never heard the claim that collision resistance implies preimage resistance, although clearly collision resistance implies second-preimage resistance since a second-preimage is a collision.

<comment><USER4> It's true as long as the function f is sufficiently "shrinking." The domain of the function (where the x's live) must be sufficiently larger than its range (where the f(x)'s live). For example, if the domain is size N, a range of size 0.99 _N is enough to guarantee that collision resistance implies preimage or second-preimage resistance.

Said another way, if there are many collisions and you _still* have a hard time finding them (collision resistance), then you can prove that it's also hard to find preimages or second preimages.

Your example, f(x) = x is not shrinking at all: there are no collisions.

A fundamental property of hash functions is that they're shrinking---so much so that it often goes without mention in informal settings. Hash functions are typically defined in two ways: shrinking arbitrary length inputs to a constant length (e.g., n bits to 256 bits) or shrinking arbitrary length inputs by some constant amount (e.g., n bits to n-1 bits, or n/2 bits). Even shrinking by one bit serves to halve the domain, guaranteeing many collisions and ruling out counter-examples like the one you gave.

<comment><USER3> Rogaway and Shrimpton specifically used collision resistance not implying preimage resistance as an example of the importance of definition and assumptions:

>Informal treatments of cryptographic hash functions can lead to a lot of ambiguity, with informal notions that might be formalized in very different ways and claims that might correspondingly be true or false. Consider, for example, the following quotes, taken from our favorite reference on cryptography [..] "collision resistance does not guarantee preimage resistance" \- [0]

They go on to show the definitions under which collision resistance does and does not imply preimage resistance.

[0]: [http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/relates.pdf](http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/relates.pdf)

<comment><USER2> The paper you cite is a good one, but it's actually demonstrating that the person you're responding to is correct (and you two are agreeing). In fact, Rogaway and Shrimpton specifically state that their constructions may appear somewhat contrived; this is because collision resistance _does_ imply provisional preimage resistance, and in the real world it's quite difficult to construct (useful) collision resistance without preimage resistance.

So to answer your original question succinctly: collision resistance implies provisional preimage resistance, which is the setting for most real world hash functions, including post-quantum hash-based signatures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this focuses on the wrong reason for why signatures are important. Sometimes, you can't or don't care to secure the channel you are using to communicate. A signature doesn't hide the messages, so it is unsecured, but it does give a guarantee of who it came from.

I know this is touched at the beginning. But the odd shift at the end to "quantum will break all crypto" seems out of nowhere and makes this sound like a hypothetical tool.

<comment><USER2> This article isn't focusing on why _signatures_ are important, it's explaining why _hash-based signatures_ are important. In other words it's not discussing the difference between message confidentiality and message authentication/nonrepudiation.

The reason Green talks about quantum computers is because hash-based signatures are one of five or so primary research areas for developing quantum-resistant public-key cryptography. They cannot accommodate public-key encryption, but they are one of the oldest forms of digital signatures. In fact, blockchains and post-quantum resistance are the two major reasons for the renewed research interest in hash-based signatures.

<comment><USER6> "They cannot accommodate public-key encryption"

I take it you mean that there are no known hash-based public key encryption systems. I assume you don't intend to say they are provably impossible to construct?

I remember when I first learned about hash-based cryptography I was amazed how hashing was the only cryptographic primitive used. Ever since I regularly (once or twice a year) try to google "hash-based public key" and other combinations in the hope that someday someone will have worked out how to found public key encryption on cryptographic hashing...

It feels impossible but so felt hash-based signatures before learning how to sign a single bit and then generalize to more...

<comment> Ar-Curunir Impagliazzo and Rudich proved that one can't construct PKE from one way functions in a black box manner:

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Russell_Impagliazzo/pub...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Russell_Impagliazzo/publication/2477849_Limits_on_the_Provable_Consequences_of_One- way_Permutations/links/09e41511133b689298000000/Limits-on-the-Provable- Consequences-of-One-way-Permutations.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I am reading the paper now, and had a weird thought, but probably it is a brainfart:

Keep in mind Monte Carlo algorithms versus Las Vegas algorithmms.

Keep also in mind that since cryptographic one way permutations are available, both Alice and Bob can sign their messages on the public channel, and Eve can only read them (for injecting a message would require forging a signature).

Consider the following (absurd) Las Vegas algorithm: both Alice and Bob seperately generate a random secret key. Then they sign the hash of the secret key and inform each other with this <Hash(secret),Signature(Hash(secret))> message.

The Las Vegas secret key exchange protocol succesfully finishes if they read the same hash as they generated, and returns the bottom element or failure if they don't match.

So provably with a (very) low probability they can establish a common secret in a Las Vegas protocol, which begs the question if a dual (necessarily interactive) Monte Carlo protocol can slowly grow an n-bit common secret.

I suspect you can confirm that this is just a brainfart indeed?

<comment> Ar-Curunir If by the hashing operation you mean application of the OWP, keep in mind that inverting the OWP is supposed to be hard, and furthermore, since it's a OWP, if Alice and Bob start with different secret keys, they won't hit the same "hash" as the output of the OWP.

For this to work, they'd have to start off with the same secret key already, which makes the key exchange pointless.

You mention using this approach to slowly grow a secret key, by performing many iterations of this protocol, but if you do it bit-by-bit, the adversary can easily brute force invert the OWP over {0, 1}, and thereby learn the secret key</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Games don't (all) have to be fun - <AUTHOR> http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2009/11/23/migs-brenda-brathwaite.html

<comment><USER2> The story of the little game she made and played with her daughter to explain the horrors of slave trading is awesome and I will certainly file it away in my "education examples" cabinet to use on my own kids if I ever get into such a situation.

(And if one of my kids is reading this 15 years later: hi! :-) )</comment>


Crispr enters its first human clinical trials - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/crispr-gene-editor-first-human-clinical-trials <comment><USER2> wasn't there something about how it ruins dna unintentionally?</comment>


Ask HN: Is there such a thing as a WiFi keyboard driver for Linux? - <AUTHOR> I'm wanting to talk to Linux via WiFi and send commands to some sort of keyboard driver.
The goal is to have a keyboard for example on a smartphone display but it's connected to Linux via WiFi.
Not Bluetooth.
Does such a thing exist? <comment><USER2> Wouldn't an SSH app be doing the same thing?

Once you're using wifi you're using the Internet's TCP/IP protocols anyway.</comment>


Corporate companies killing geeks - <AUTHOR> http://andrei.serdeliuc.ro/article/corporate-companies-killing-geeks/ <comment><USER2> "My point being, corporate companies look for money and large numbers of staff. Web development agencies on the other hand look for quality, code is poetry."

HA HA HA

Most (not all) "web development agencies" are bodyshops, they bill their clients hourly and the one metric they care about is the utilization rate of their people. Been there, done that. It is beyond ridiculous to suggest that corporations hire web agencies because their code is so much more advanced than that of their internal developers. Body shops are hired so they can be easily gotten rid of when they're no longer needed, full stop.

<comment><USER3> Isn't being able to easily "get rid of" bodies the whole point of looking for outside help?

I guess I come to the same conclusion, but without the cynicism. It isn't exactly profitable to not care about utilization rate of bodies, but then a small web dev house has to pump out better stuff faster than the other guy (and there is always an "other guy").

I mean, if your product isn't selling, then you should probably find a new product, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "corporate companies look for money and large numbers of staff. Web development agencies on the other hand look for quality, code is poetry."

This is a very naive statement. Web dev agencies are looking for the same thing as corporations: to make money, and maintain size or preferably grow. They are just smaller and earlier in the business lifecycle, which means less bureaucracy. Many cater to larger corporations anyway, and face the same political challenges by proxy.

The bottom line is that work experience will depend on _your team_ much more than your company. There are just as many tight knit and creative groups who their love code poetry at big companies as at small.

<comment><USER5> > work experience will depend on your team much more than your company

I have just discovered this for myself. I went from a very closed-off, conservative, and staid team to a newer, more open, and more flexible team. The team-change was more significant than the initial job change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the sense of web design that went into that page.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think the problem is more with non-technology businesses killing geeks. When a business doesn't fundamentally understand technology at its highest level they don't understand how best to employ the skills of geeks/developers/engineers/hackers.

I've seen too many great engineers getting turned off working with technology because of the time they spent working in traditional businesses that just don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Um. Barf. Also, that randomized buzzword-y bold text makes my blood boil. Poor, precious little developer. He's probably making his colleagues crazy.

</comment><comment><USER8> No matter where you're at, you need to find a way to decouple the "what" from the "how" in the mind of your boss/user/customer.

As soon as they start telling me what tool/framework/algorithm to use, I put on the brakes. "You decide the what, I decide the how. That's how it works around here." If they don't agree, work somewhere else.

This doesn't fix everything, but goes a long way toward quality and job satisfaction.</comment>


The Story of the First Microprocessors - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/the-surprising-story-of-the-first-microprocessors <comment><USER2> Masatoshi Shima deserves more credit than anybody. He was responsible for most of the logic in the 4004 and the 8080. Should write an article that summarizes what goes on in these oral history discussions:

4004: [http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/08/102657974-05-01-acc.pdf)

8080: [http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/08/102657974-05-01-acc.pdf)

z80: [http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Zilog_Z80/102658073.05.01.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Pasted the wrong link for 8080: [http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/05/102658123-05-01-acc.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here is a factoid for the youngins ... the Internet/Arpanet was created BEFORE the first microprocessor! In fact, Intel was originally founded to make RAM ICs. They only later created the first microprocessor (the 4004)!

<comment><USER4> Back then, it really was a bunch tubes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a PDF describing the system that Lee Boysel demoed during the TI case:

[http://corphist.computerhistory.org/corphist/documents/doc-4...](http://corphist.computerhistory.org/corphist/documents/doc-4946dbc7a541f.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Boysel's demo is an amazing hack, but in no way is the AL1 chip a microprocessor. The demo seems convincing - he hooked up an AL1 "CPU" with RAM, ROM and I/O and ran programs on it. But I looked in detail and there are some problems.

The AL1 chip is an 8-bit arithmetic/logic chip with some registers. It does no instruction fetching, no instruction decoding, and doesn't have an instruction set. It doesn't implement any control functions. It doesn't perform memory or I/O operations. (It's similar to a 74181 ALU chip with registers.) So how can it operate as a CPU?

The trick in the demo is the ROM has a "ROM memory address registers", which seems like an innocent latch. But this latch is under the control of the ROM, not the "CPU". The ROM and latch form a state machine that is controlling the system, performing RAM and I/O operations and directing the AL1 chip to perform ALU operations. The ROM is not sending instructions to the "CPU"; the ROM is running the show. The ROM doesn't hold AL1 instructions; it holds crazy microcode-like sequences that get the system to stumble through operations. There's no program counter as such, just the ROM jumping from address to address.

In other words, if you think of a microprocessor as ALU + control, the AL1 chip has only the ALU half, not the control half. The ROM-based state machine provides the control half.

I'll also point out that the AL1 die photo [1] from the demo is kind of bogus. Near the bottom is the label "instruction register 23 bits" \- the chip has no instruction register and the label is dropped on top of some clock lines. Saying the chip has an instruction register makes it sound much more like a CPU, but it's just fiction.

To conclude, I am extremely impressed that Boysel was able to get the demo working. But don't be tricked into thinking the AL1 is a microprocessor.

[1] [http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/digital- logic/12/2...](http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/digital- logic/12/282/1523)

<comment><USER7> Aha! Thank you for the explanation. It works a bit like the Apple II disk controller, then.

<comment><USER6> Ha! That's not an analogy I would have thought of, but yes, it's the same ROM + latch state machine architecture as the Apple II disk controller. The demo's state machine generated a lot more control signals (24) and controlled the RAM, I/O and the ALU chip rather than a disk drive, but the concept is very similar.

(Background: Wozniak's design for the Apple II disk controller used very few chips. A ROM and latch implemented a simple state machine that did much of the control sequencing. The CPU also did a lot of the low-level control.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Federico Faggin went to the University of Padova. I guess that's not of interest to most people, but having spent much of the past 15 years there, I always thought it was kind of cool.

</comment><comment><USER9> The transistor was invented in 1925 by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (a FET). The first one built was in 1947 (a BJT).

A metal-oxide (MOS) transistor is a FET. Commonly known as MOSFET.

</comment><comment><USER10> No mention of Mostek, RCA, Rockwell, Motorola, or Signetics.

<comment><USER11> They do mention MOSTEK in passing, but this article is literally about who created the first single chip microprocessor. Those other companies aren't even in the running.

<comment><USER12> At least Pico/GI got a mention. I grew up in that area during this period, and my Dad knew a few of the engineers through his work. Also I rode the train to school with a girl around my age who I (much) later discovered was the daughter of the lead designer for their CPU. If only I had known how cool she was ;)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor#Pico.2FGeneral_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor#Pico.2FGeneral_Instrument)

[http://www.spingal.plus.com/micro/](http://www.spingal.plus.com/micro/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Or Zilog.

<comment><USER12> Zilog the company wasn't founded until 1974, years after the first microprocessors were made.</comment></comment>


YouTube's makeover continues with redesigned mobile app, logo and more - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/29/youtubes-big-makeover-continues-with-redesigned-mobile-app-new-logo-and-more/ <comment><USER3> Also currently defeating my ad blocker. Soon youtube... I will be blocking your ads again soon...

After not seeing ads for so long, actually getting an ad is insufferable - <USER2> closed the window and just didn't watch the video and set a mental note that I might go back and watch it once my ad blocker is updated. Immediately after the ad started playing was a pop-under that asked if i wanted to upgrade to youtube red. If they actually defeat ad blockers, I actually would subscribe if it meant no more ads again.

Do people on the internet actually watch these ads? I thought to myself why in the world would anyone want to go on the internet if it meant having to view this garbage. I'm really getting spoiled and conditioned with my mostly ad free existence.

<comment><USER4> For those who use YouTube a lot I HIGHLY recommend playing for YouTube Red. A much easier way of getting rid of the ads if you can afford $10/mth.

<comment><USER5> Unless you don't live in United States, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea.

<comment><USER6> A few years ago they forbid apps on the Play Store from having background playback for YouTube, in anticipation of the release of YouTube Red, which would offer it as a paid feature.

Still waiting.

<comment><USER7> Wait no more, just install F-Droid and NewPipe ( [https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/](https://f-droid.org/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/) ).

Bonus feature: it does not use the API so Youtube can not track what do you watch.

<comment><USER6> Oh neat, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who was a full-time YouTuber in the past, I have not been very happy with YouTube's new direction.

I believe a large part of this new UX push is to integrate more ads in an organic way. I was a beta tester, between me and my friends we saw lots of scummy fake ads being inserted in our subscription feeds in an organic way:

[http://imgur.com/a/wWKHG](http://imgur.com/a/wWKHG) was one my friend sent me.

Also, livestreams appear in your recommendation feed directly along videos with minimal clear distinction.

Also please do your research into YouTube's recent censorship of monetization (circa 2017) and changes to monetization algorithm (circa 2015, 2016). They do not care about the content creators or users anymore, only the money.

At least that is how they act.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anybody gets these three things reset every time they open a page on an enabled youtube.com/new ?

1\. dark theme ON (back to OFF) 2\. auto play OFF (back to ON) 3\. sidebar hidden (back to shown)

Also does anyone know of a way to get those settings to stick like they did on pre-new youtube?

<comment><USER10> I'm sure that's intentional on their part, those are all features that get you watching more videos, driving up their ad revenue

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> logo looks dumb bold</comment>


Do Web Developers Ever Learn? - <AUTHOR> http://bitroar.posterous.com/does-web-development-really-progress

<comment><USER4> _In the late 90s the majority web of developers seemed to believe that the only proper way to link to a webpage was by running some messy JavaScript code_

No, the majority didn't. _Bad_ developers did stuff like this, and some are probably still using the same tricks right now.

The majority realised how stupid it was to do so, and therefore didn't create links like this.

I've seen some crazily bad website code in my time, include sites outputting their HTML using nothing but hard-coded document.write() calls. That doesn't mean the majority of developers were following suit.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, also I think it's naive to assume it's always the developers fault when something like this happens. (In the 90's) more often than not it was some douchebag marketer clamouring about people 'leaving' their site and convincing management to open new windows for outbound links.

There's always been a divide between what developers encourage, and what clients ask for and want. This is one of the better arguments FOR developers creating javascript-heavy single page sites (for themselves, or demos)... if they had to rely on their clients they'd probably be years behind the curve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm going to take this opportunity to list a few of my biggest web develeper peeves

1\. Forms that auto change fields

99% of the time using a computer tab goes to the next field so it's muscle memory to press tab after filling out each field. Then some dumb add web dev decides that for zip code, once I enter 5 digits he'll automatically move me to the next field. This has at least 2 problems. Either my muscle memory had already moved me one field too far or, I made a mistake on one of the last digits and backspace does nothing because it's been moved to the wrong field.

2\. Credit card or phone number fields that require a certain format

Many sites insist on 1111222233334444 or 1112223333. Entering 1111 2222 3333 4444 or 1111-2222-3333-4444 and they complain. Just filter out the digits on submit or on the server! Stop making me do things the computer can do so easily.

3\. Auto formatting fields

Stop trying to be clever with a form that shows one field that looks like (111)223-3333 but doesn't let me type the (, ), or -. Apply #2 above. Stop messing up my keyboard usage by making it different than every place else I type.

4\. Forms that ask for city, state and zip code

Ask for the zipcode first and then fill in the city and state (the let the user change them)

What are your web dev pet peeves?

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately, your credit card format may not be a problem with the webmasters, but the lawyers. I worked on credit card processing applications once upon a time. We were contractually obligated by our clearinghouse (First Data Corp) both to only submit credit card numbers in the exact format they were provided by the user, and also without spaces or dashes. So while it's a stupid limitation, it may not be the faults of web developers everywhere.

This was true a decade ago and may have changed, but that industry can be pretty slow to update.

<comment><USER8> Amazon.com seems to get by without messing with credit card input forms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is bullshit. One-page JS apps exist because there are a few big advantages to them. There are also disadvantages.

Take my site: <https://circleci.com>. Doesn't work in IE8 or less, and it has some bugs. But when you click a new page, it happens immediately. Properly immediately.

Inside the app, when you click a new page, it takes 1 AJAX request to load. Not 50 JS/CSS/img assets. No white flash. Just 1 click and it loads _instantly_.

Now, that's not to say that the majority of sites like this couldn't be done better. They could, and so could we. We need to sort out our SEO story for a start. But we made a conscious decision to do this because it makes sites fast, and much easier to write.

<comment><USER10> If you're saying that the only way to build a fast website is to use single- page design, you're wrong. Having reasonable amount of images and CSS, as well as efficient server side components does way, way more for noticeable performance than being single-page.

But I think the real issue at hand isn't about being single-page, it's about using single-pageness as an excuse for ignoring certain usability and architectural issues.

 _No white flash. Just 1 click and it loads instantly._

Unless you're using IE9.

Also, I couldn't click any of the top links on my Galaxy S.

<comment><USER9> It's not the only way, but once you optimize everything in a static app, the only place to go is one-page.

> But I think the real issue at hand isn't about being single-page, it's about > using single-pageness as an excuse for ignoring certain usability and > architectural issues.

Agreed. Funnily enough the architectural issues are easier with one page apps, IMO. You just expose a REST API, do your asset caching, and don't need any HTML caching at all!

> Unless you're using IE9. Also, I couldn't click any of the top links on my > Galaxy S.

Thanks for the reports. I think those are orthogonal from the one-page JS app though, and are more due to building a PaaS with 2 people. We'll fix it though!

<comment><USER11> _Funnily enough the architectural issues are easier with one page apps, IMO. You just expose a REST API, do your asset caching, and don't need any HTML caching at all!_

Let's say I want to build a new search engine. How do I crawl your website without having Google-esque budget? More importantly, if all websites were built like that, how would anyone could build a new search engine?

 _That's_ also architecture. How do things interact? What is possible and what is not? What kind of things would happen if technology became popular?

The real issue here is not that the page is not crawlable _right now_. I know there ways of addressing this. The issue is that it's not semantic and that you need to do extra work (separate from normal development) for search engines.

<comment><USER9> With absolutely no offense intended, your search engine is very low in my priority list. I care about how my customers experience Circle.

If you were to create a new search engine, and it didn't take into account one-page-apps, I'd say you've built the wrong architecture too.

Finally, it's not that we don't have the time, it's that we dont have the time _right now_. Web apps suddenly became hard in the last 3 years - people expect a lot more than they used to. But our priorities must be to deliver the kind of experience that customers desire. Technology should be our servant, not our master.

<comment><USER12> Presentation does not trump content, and the spread of this attitude will destroy the web. If nobody can reference and repurpose that content in ways you never thought of, it ceases to be more useful than print or even television.

<comment><USER13> CircleCI is an application, a tool, not a collection of documents. It has no use being crawled, since there isn't much content, and what you have is not for sharing. This applies to 90% of web _apps_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree strongly with this article, but I think it's overstated some of its points.

Yes, if I go to a Web Design commuinity like /r/web_design on Reddit I'll see pages of unusable web pages with hundreds of HTTP requests, 2-8MB of assets and "support" for legacy browsers using Modernizr. Some people view this as the future, but I view it as a site built by an entry-level developer that will be unusable by most of its clients. If you ever want some free comment karma on Reddit find any submission, complain about the file size of the site and watch the upvotes from conflicted developers fly.

However, these things have context.

If this website were for a typical business then yes, you'll have "bugs" flying in from everywhere from the client. They'll not be able to view it on IE7 because that's the only browser their IT department will allow, their users will also be running this site on an ancient computer that cannot handle a dozen jQuery plugins running on a single page and they'll start making demands that you, the developer, will find unreasonable because "that's not how HTML5 works!".

However, if you're creating a new business with a set market of people with newish machines running modern browsers then you can afford to use "new" technology and to sacrifice your precious page size for some creativity. For some markets it is a good thing if a site will heavily utilise JavaScript. For some web applications, it's almost necessary to rely on JS.

Regardless, a good developer will be able to get a modern site working well in legacy browsers even if the user is on IE6. I'm no senior-level developer, nor am I solely a front-end developer, but I can at least do that much on a large- scale client site without any trouble. If I can do it then I fail to see how so many developers can.

Yes, developers will not learn. The average developer is happy to throw as much jQuery at a problem as they can, and they're happy to go nuts because they own a decent computer, use the latest browsers and have a fast connection. The best front-end developers I've ever known understand these problems and can provide similar or better results in an optimised way.

</comment><comment><USER15> I agree on some points, yet I believe the author exaggerates during most of his article.

PushState, for example, is not a bandaid, and for those not-so-modern browsers there are hashtags (let's be frank: 99.9% of users don't care about how beautiful or ugly their URIs are and even less about one particular character).

In many cases such as WYSIWYG editors, which he mentions, Javascript is the only way (HN users might prefer Markdown, but for most average users, that's already too complicated). New HTML5 input types are awesome, but they are in this case the advanced fragile technologies that currently lack a broad support base.

I particularly disagree on the last two points: These days, Javascript and CSS is minified, sprites are used on basically all popular sites and content is gzipped. Many people even use a CDN for their JS frameworks. Loading time optimization is a topic more important than ever before. The same goes for mobile versions: I see a lot of people even offering a mobile-optimized version of their portfolio.

He is certainly right saying that these aspects are all very important, but I don't really see the lack thereof in practice. Any examples, perhaps?

<comment><USER16> > PushState, for example, is not a bandaid, and for those not-so-modern > browsers there are hashtags (let's be frank: 99.9% of users don't care about > how beautiful or ugly their URIs are and even less about one particular > character).

Keep in mind that using the history API (push|replace)State is not so much about making the URL pretty as it is about page refresh semantics.

With a hashtag the page refresh loading the correct content requires at least one more trip to the server to load the content represented by the hash and relies completely on your JavaScript not breaking.

With a url "fixed" by (push|replace)State the server can respond directly with the content speeding up the response time and removing a point of failure.

<comment><USER17> Can the server be set up so pushed states can work with any arbitrary path, as you can do with hashtag addresses? Can you get the same level of flexibility in handling bad URLs? I'm still struggling with getting PushState working, since I implemented hash routing as a slash-delimited query rather than a reflection of any actual directory structure on the server, (I.e. domain.com/#category/group/item loads an item, with various graceful fallbacks if it's not found, such as loading the group instead, or suggesting items that do exist). If I can avoid a 404 in most cases, I think the user will be happier. I'm not sure if I can get the same level of flexibility with PushState.

<comment><USER18> The server has nothing to do, pe se, with pushState. That just manipulates the client. If on reload/next visit, you don't want the link to break (which seems like a reasonable requirement), just set up a route in whatever web server you're running that maps to the url schema you're generating in the client.

<comment><USER17> Any thoughts on avoiding generic 404s in case of typo or removed content, in the hope of returning something more useful? Can we use context info from the URL given to personalize the 404 response, or maybe route to a different resource instead for certain contexts? This all seems so simple with client- side hash routing.

[Also, would that mean that I would need to maintain a list of every single possible route in the whole site?]

<comment><USER19> You can do whatever you want. You have the URL and can return any arbitrary bytes. The way you look at the hash in JS on the client would be the same way you look at the URL on the server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "The ingeniousness of a construction is based on its simplicity - <USER2> can construct complicated."

Sergej P. Koroljow (1907-1966)

<comment><USER21> My humble home page now uses just html with very light css, no javascript. Renders fine on mobile (blackberry and WAP on an old Samsung B130 I keep just for testing). Loads fast. _Suits my content_. And the client is me, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> You can become a web developer without pretty much any knowledge(how computer is built, how it all works etc.), so it's not a big suprise here that there are many badly designed and/or coded websites.

Flash websites or one page JavaScript clusterf*#ks come from developers, who want to achieve cheap cool looking effect in order to cover the lack of real value in their product. They also want to have limited amount of technologies in their stack: Backend -> Server app -> JSON -> Web app, because it gives them false feeling of coding their projects faster.

Web development is like playing football or any other sport for the masses, everyone can do that, but only few can achieve good results.

This makes the article sound like a bullshit linkbait from Captain Obvious.

</comment><comment><USER23> Speaking as a web developer I can tell you the days of my "bad" code lasted all of one year as I was learning.

After that, the bad behavoir this article describes that I happened to code is crap I didn't want to do but was forced to in order to satisfy a clients desires.

Most of the horrible decisions that occur in software development are not the fault of a developer - look to their managers or clients for blame. In my case at least I argue quite voraciously to adhere to standards. I almost never win.

<comment><USER24> Yes, but there are lots of new developers and not all of them learn as fast as you do. Their managers are always looking at a way to cut cost and the easiest way to do that is to hire cheap, inexperienced people and then train them on the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think we don't see countermovements because they are boring. The exciting things that get shared online and get talked about are new but fragile techniques that you can't actually use in your day-to-day work. The well- trodden, stable way to build web applications are used every day without incident or fanfare. There is no need to write a blog post about graceful degradation or javascript-aided navigation that doesn't break the back button anymore because it's standard practice.

</comment><comment><USER26> The crux of this is that there is increasingly a fundamental difference between "websites" and "web apps".

If your site is essentially a collection of documents, then I expect it to work with standard browser navigational tools, be easily linkable and function without Javascript being enabled, it should also work in old browsers.

If you are doing an application on the other hand, It's far more reasonable to expect an upto date browser and JS etc. I almost don't want to know that it is running in my browser, because the navigational toolbar in my browser is probably a bad fit for whatever it is that your application does.

Of course there are blurry bits and grey areas here. But as a rule, the front end of your blog is a website and the "admin panel" is a web application.

</comment><comment><USER27> Yes, nothing to combat spaghetti Javascript.

Oh, except for JQuery, node.js, etc., etc.

Face it - we have SO MUCH MORE POWER now than we did just a few years ago, and so many more tools for managing and abstracting that complexity. In fact, there seems to be a trend of abstracting complexity while focusing on lightweight codebases. Sounds like progress to me.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm just happy that "100% Flash" sites seem to be on the decline.

<comment><USER29> "100% Flash" is not that bad - I'm using FBSD at work and never bothered to configure flash plugin (it's possible! really!) so "100% Flash" sites are just completely under my radar. I think sites which use flash exclusively for navigation, as in top/left/right menu are worse. I can see those, but to be able to do anything (like go to other page!) I need to use google. Thankfully, I didn't see such a page in quite some time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I believe there is indeed a countermovement that the author overlooks. It's a generation of tools beyond HTML, CSS, and JavaScript directly where content is distributed in slide decks or a similar presentation-like format. It's great for readability, it's relatively interactive, and it's flat. Surely you're not making an app in PowerPoint, but the Web is not the only/best way to consume content.

For examples see Issuu, Slideshare, and especially Prezi.

I'd be lying if I didn't mention that I miss the days of HyperCard stacks and MacAddict CDs.

Oh, and for the most-distracted among us... there are always books.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have to agree with this. Abusing Javascript and CSS has become fairly common, and it's annoying. Example: altdevblogaday.com does not open in firefox. It just shows a blank page. But if I disable Javascript, it will work as expected. Go figure.

But why does it have to be that way? Those are just some blog posts that I want to read. Plain simple text. There isn't anything interactive there. It's not a web app. Why do they need some obscure javascript that messes up everything and makes the website unusable?

</comment><comment><USER32> TL;DR - All of these problems could be found and solved by proper testing.

I enjoyed parts of this article and was left with one overarching theme - <USER3> developers really need to learn proper testing techniques (and their employers/clients need to learn why QA is important).

How many ad agencies have taken to calling themselves interactive agencies? How many of these have dedicated QA teams with different devices and a good array of testing tools? How many of the developers who work for companies like this get time to test their sites? How many hear "if you were better at your job, you wouldn't need to test sites"?

I'd also suggest that business schools start teaching marketing students to build simple web apps. A pint says that many of these problems stem from young marketers who want to be edgey, despite having no clue where the edges lie. My University has an Online Marketing course, but they don't teach anything more advanced than building a spreadsheet with multiple worksheets in Excel. Maybe this just proves that marketing is too important to leave in the hands of marketers...

</comment><comment><USER33> Bad developers never learn.

Progressive enhancement is the best design pattern for web development, and more developers need to design in this way.

</comment><comment><USER34> One of my biggest pet peeves is still being perpetrated today: Using a Javascript onclick event to open a new page instead of (or even alongside), you know, an anchor tag.

If you've ever tried to middle click a bunch of links on, say, a big corporate news site and had your current tab change unexpectedly, now you know why.

</comment><comment><USER35> Most web sites suck - or at least implement one of the flaws described in the article.

But by the standard laid out in the article most smartphones suck, most desktop apps suck, etc.

But web sites, like smartphones and apps, aren't built by a single amorphous group of people called "developers". No, no, no, the development process is defined by executives, marketers, IT, designers and yes developers. Saying "Do Web Developers Ever Learn?" is misleading. It's like placing the blame on the engineering staff at Nokia for creating sub-par phones - when there's plenty of blame to place on Nokia's executive management.

A broken and stupid product is evidence of a broken and stupid company culture. Bad developers can be replaced. But a broken culture can force good developers to do bad things.

</comment><comment><USER36> Lets take twitter, for example. Right now I'm dealing with a weird bug. I have about a dozen followers, but none of them show up in my Enligsh language dashboard. But, if twitter recognizes that I'm on a Spanish speaking area then it translates all of the UI and the followers show up. Here is the funny bit. If I set my default language to Spanish the followers never show up!

Dear Twitter,

I love the service. You guys seem to be a great bunch. I use bootstrap a lot. But, if your most basic functionality is buggy, how do you expect people to use the service (and not abandon you)? I know, I know. You are having front- end issues. But you seem to be stuck in an endless re-factoring loop. Please fix it. And stop trying on languages as if they were hats. Pick one, and live with it.

</comment><comment><USER37> "And yes, I know what PushState is. It's a bandaid on a gaping wound, which doesn't get used most of the time anyway"

This is precisely where I finally understand that the article is merely an opinionated piece (i.e. it doesn't state facts) and a pretty misinformed one at that.

</comment><comment><USER38> It would go all away if people used the browser for what it is meant for, documents.

All these things are plain hacks to try to bend the document shown by the browser into an application of some sort.

</comment><comment><USER39> The answer to all of these (legitimate) concerns: Gopher.

<comment><USER40> But then you'd need some sort of very easy rodent-oriented netwide index to computer archives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Completely agree with you on the bad flash and links point. Not sure I agree with you on the webapps points though. Would have been nice to have some depth on why you feel PushState is a "bandaid" rather than a full solution.

You also seem to have not taken into account how new HTML5 is. Sure generally a semantic solution exists now but when the vast majority of sites were written this wasn't the case.

<comment><USER11> It's increasingly difficult to build a solid foundation for a modern progressively enhanced web app in pure HTML/CSS. It's still perfectly doable, but difficult enough that a lot of developers simply don't want do it, justifying it by saying they save a lot of time. (Usually that's short-term savings and long-term losses, but I don't want to debate that right now.) PushState does not address this critical issue.

To put it in a different way, current web standards encourage people to abandon page model entirely. When they need SEO, the thought is "oh, damn, I need to re-implement my wonderful JavaScript on the stupid server". That is backwards and is _not_ progressive enhancement.

What we really need is an update to core standards (not JavaScript) that allows for building dynamic applications in declarative way and without abandoning the page model. Such updates are possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> _Arbitraty limitations imposed on GUI, such as opening things in modal windows._

I'd like to see some additional examples of this arbitrary limitation in the GUI. It seems to me that many design choices can be classified as limitations. If the user doesn't understand the reasons behind the design choices, then the user might mistake them as being arbitrary.

<comment><USER43> Fixed-width columns. They drive me up the wall; I've got a 1920x1080 screen because I like fitting lots of text on the screen, not because I want 75% of my screen to be white margins.

Links/buttons that open on middle-click. I middle-clicked because I wanted to open in a new tab, this page should stay where it is.

Sites that don't work at a DPI that isn't 72.

Those are the most immediate things that annoy me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you ok with reading text with ~1900px width?

It's way too wide for my taste and not very readable.

<comment><USER42> Maybe a better solution would be to progressively add more columns as the screen resolution allows, keeping each column at a fixed width. Doing this would be more challenging, though, than just using a single fixed width column that supports most of your users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> * Assigning keyboard shortcuts reserved for browser actions to something else

* Disabling copy and paste in web forms

I would just use ELinks all day if I could get away with it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Now we have advanced frameworks like Bootstrap and Zurb, and HTML5 boilerplate, that serve boilerplate css, js, and other components, Open source is working very very well, but people still seem to focus on the negative and make rants using blogging platforms like posterous and wordpress that basically contradicts what you are saying because these sites use different fonts and techniques that you said were "bad". We live in a sub-par world with continuous deployment running free, are people going to complain and complain over literally words, because code is made up of letters! The energy is better served contributing to the cause

<comment><USER46> "continuous deployment running free"

This phrase caught my eye. Have any concrete examples? I generally feel like continuous deployment is a good thing but am open to having my mind changed. Like anything else, it can be abused & misused but assuming there's a quality gate (tests, etc.) then why the generalization?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I agree a great deal. I miss the flat Internet.

I don't think we'll ever get that back, though. It's all about engagement and interaction, these days.

<comment><USER21> Chocolate orange is the new black. Simple content will come back. My students have Afros and vinyl is _very_ cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Ha! I'm a web developer and I always learn. Every day.

</comment><comment><USER49> Do Users Ever Learn? Sometimes, yes.

</comment><comment><USER50> Too broad of a question-title considering the scope is: "Why are there bad web developers?" and/or "Why do some websites insist on having complexity?"

<comment><USER51> I'd also comment on his speed/mobile concerns: The web is both big and small, fast and slow, dynamic and static. Most developers have a hard time accomplishing both aspects of the duality, but at least they try.

You can praise the small, slow, and static sites, because of what they're good at, but let us also point out that they aren't optimized for desktop browsers to date, don't utilize the speed of their upper clientele of users to offload processing and handling to the front end, and also don't accomplish as much as possible without the need of a state change.

I like what you put regarding complexity, because let's be realistic, as web developers, are jobs are constantly shifting from technology to architecture to agile to scrum to etc.

The author is complaining about mistakes in hindsight, and tries to complain about modern web apps having the same problems? There's always a new frontier in web development; if you can't handle the fact that certain api's become deprecated or that certain features a dev used aren't completely implemented, then do it better yourself. Update older tutorials, evangelize the correct approaches to problems, then, you'll do you part to remove some misinformation of outdated solutions that others are using.

<comment><USER42> Well said. Responsive design has been around for a while, and I've seen it used well. But not every site has a need to support every combination of big/small/fast/slow devices.

<comment><USER51> I agree with everything he mentioned up until he started criticizing the today's standard and practices, he ignores the issues you run into in today's environment based on what you've said:

media queries vs two separate projects - responsive and flexible one site fits all approach vs less resources served for smaller mobile version and reduce complexity(?).

web fonts / assets management - this is a growth issue or a design issue focusing on either OECD/Fast Internet or Server Load. It is somewhat an issue, but not something to cry over really.

his complaint about his textarea box are ill founded. He's using posterous' system, and should build his own if he doesn't like it so much. Isn't it a free service?

modal / gui decisions - usually client/manager driven. Can't blame me on this one. I'm all about pages and lightboxes.

his complaint about mobile browsing is one that is justified, but one that isn't any _modern_ developers fault. My first 10 sites were all responsive. Now some clients don't want it. How is this my fault? This does take extra time and consideration, unless a client wants a very simply mobile site only.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why designers hate Powerpoint - <AUTHOR> http://blog.varunarora.com/2012/5-reasons-why-designers-hate-powerpoint/

<comment><USER2> I'm a designer and I don't hate PowerPoint, I hate the fact that most users abuse PowerPoint by cluttering up the screen with endless novels and too many graphics that don't illustrate a point. A good designer can clean up a well done PowerPoint show in minutes by changing themes and picking the right typeface. However what's often really required is an editor to turn volumes of text into a story -- and that's a task that shouldn't be done at the last minute.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is completely true, as well. But the software does nothing to discourage mindless design, which is some reason for worry

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What designers hate might be what makes what other's (most of them) job easier.

that said, I myself have a "reset.css" template so that I don't have to deal with the defaults...

<comment><AUTHOR> Please do share - I am sure a tonne of us would benefit</comment></comment>


TED: The World's Coolest Conference - <AUTHOR> http://www.dutiee.com/blogs-aljazeera-net/europe/2011/07/09/ted-worlds-coolest-conference

<comment><USER2> TED used to be awesome. 5 years ago when its talks page was dominated by scientists, philosophers, futurists and entrepreneurs, it was the best source of videos on the net.

Now the front page has some woman and her cello, some guy who survived cancer and someone talking about "a circle of caring". TED no longer represents people like me. It represents the politically correct and the boring.</comment>


The Power of Ridiculous Reasons - <AUTHOR> http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_power_of_ridiculous_reasons/ <comment><USER2> Scott Adams was hilarious back when nobody was making fun of corporate culture yet and I was working at Eli Lilly, but when he tries to be funny about international politics, somehow that just doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER3> He's not trying to be funny.

<comment><USER4> I hope you're wrong, but I suspect you're not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The "ridiculous reason" scheme works, and Cialdini would probably agree, because people are always looking for the easiest route to a decision. If there's a situation in which they can legitimately turn their brain off because they can defer to a pre-established rule or convention, they'll do so.

A non-human analogy given by Cialdini (see <http://www.bainvestor.com/Influence.html>) is the mother turkey who simply responds to the cheep-cheep of its young to determine what nearby moving objects needs to be taken care of. The turkey, of course, can be tricked (by human researchers, usually) into responding the same way to an inappropriate animate object by spoofing the sound.

BUT - and this is where Scott Adams's analogy goes awry - in humans, this automatic response to "because X" generally only applies to inconsequential situations.

The marked contrast between the situations he compares (restaurant conundrums and territorial conflicts) is what gives away the flaw in his argument. If the outcome of a bad decision is just a cold bowl of soup, you can risk making a thoughtless choice. If the risk is continued territorial angst and loss of life, a decision is likely to demand a little more scrutiny.

He's either making a poor attempt at humor (which is very possible, since he probably feels compelled to try to write something at least mildly funny every day), or he's not aware that he's coming across as very disingenuous.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the book referenced (no referral fee links, btw):

[http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion- Busine...](http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Business- Essentials/dp/006124189X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241313058&sr=8-1)

I've read it and even bought a second copy to lend out. It's that good.

<comment><USER7> I am still trying to figure out why people dislike affiliate links like these(if you were to put one in) It costs the person buying the book nothing and the person providing the link did some work to find the product and link to it thereby making my life easier. I am all for free and making my life easier.

The only reason that I can think of is that it detracts from the strength of the recommendation because of monetary concerns but since this is not the original person recommending it that should not matter.

Am I completely off on this one?

<comment><USER8> It raises (founded or unfounded) suspicion that the recommendation is not genuine, but was only offered to collect the affiliate fee.

<comment><USER9> True, but I'm more interested in a link being genuinely useful than in knowing whether the motivation for providing it is genuinely altruistic.

<comment><USER10> If you consider all of the non-affiliate links to Amazon and all of the affiliate links to Amazon, I would hypothesize that more of the former are "genuinely useful" for their audience than the latter.

<comment><USER9> I agree with that. But the real question is if there were no affiliate links, would there be more or fewer useful links overall? It may be that money is an incentive to dig up useful links that nobody would provide otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I stumbled across an interesting blog posting:

"Generalizations, Truth, and Rationality" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592468> <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1396>

that bears a striking thematic relationship to Scott Adams posting on "ridiculous reasons".

When an experimenter gave a "ridiculous" (aka "placebo") reason for butting in line at the Xerox machine, "because I need to make copies", the person already at the machine would often let the experimenter in front to copy a "few pages", but would often refuse a request for "many pages".

So giving a ridiculous reason can smooth out socially awkward situations, whether butting in line or paying for dinner, ... but when Scott Adams tries to generalize this very minor behaviour to solve problems on a world scale, such as nations being occupied by invaders, ... he is being truly ridiculous. What he may have intended as humour, just comes off as being naive and deeply offensive to people around the world who have been brutally oppressed for decades.

... and there is experimentaly data to show that his "ridiculous reasons work" hypothesis clearly falls apart as soon as the request becomes non-trivial.

</comment><comment><USER12> i think there are other factors involved also. e.g. in the first example, if he were to say "you should pay because..." instead of "I should pay because..."

or in the second example, if he were to say the exact same thing but to a table full of his teenage son's friends at a birthday party vs saying it to a table full of professional acquaintances at a high profile event.

i think the responses would probably be diferent.

<comment><USER5> Very good point - in the dinner examples, if the parties involved agree with the proposal, everyone involved "wins" in some form or another:

The person paying builds up "you'll owe me later" points; the rest of the table saves money, at least in the short term.

The people who've already been served get to eat immediately, which they probably want to do anyway; the others who haven't received their food yet can stop feeling guilty for stopping the others from eating.

Overall, a whole lot of uncomfortableness is avoided by agreeing to the ridiculous reason.

Compare that to the the territorial conflict example, in which one of the two parties wins nothing, and instead, loses something very important to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article is a good example of the use of Ridiculous Reasoning: "We should decide that occupation becomes automatically legitimate after 50 years because that is how I resolve awkward moments at dinner parties."

<comment><USER14> I don't even get the dinner party reference. Does he actually expect anyone to say "no we can't eat because that's an arbitrary reason"..?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Another situation in which the ridiculous reason works is when a large dinner group is being served and only half of the people have their dishes. Everyone sits there staring at their food as it cools, trying to be polite."

Thank goodness we never really honored such pointless rules in my family. Unfortunately when we receive guests it's sometimes the case that we'll have to choose (or should I say guess) between doing as usual and risk appearing rude or doing the waiting just in case.

<comment><USER16> A much more sensible rule (if you're at a long table) is that you start eating if everyone around you has food.

<comment><USER17> That's just as arbitrary (and even worse, inconsistent).

Consider the following:

      xxxxxxxxxo
      0123456789

Where 'x' represents a person who has been served, and 'o' represents someone who hasn't. Your rule suggests the person at position 8 can't start eating but the person at position 7 can, correct?

I suppose the theory is that the person at position 8 shouldn't start eating out of deference to the person at position 9, but in that case the person at 8 effectively doesn't have food (they have it but can't eat, which is equivalent to not having food). So, if 8 should defer because of 9, shouldn't 7 defer because of 8?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is ridiculous to draw a connection between (a) giving a ridiculous reason to persuade my close friend to accept my offer to pay for his dinner, and (b) compelling an oppressed population in an occupied territory to accept their fate of continued suffering because, you know, it's been 50 years. My father killed your father, and we've managed to dominate you for half a century, so, you know, give it up. We won.

<comment><USER18> I reject your "out of hand" rejection of this idea.

If not 50 years, than how many years is the proper number? If the people fighting the conflict were not even born when it started, what exactly are they clinging to?

I assume that you would say 200 years is too long for something like this to go on. Pick a number, however ridiculously huge, that you would be comfortable with. Make it 200 years, I don't care. At that point, we can begin a logical discussion of your number. Perhaps after that occurred, I could get you down to 100 years, and you would feel vindicated. Yes?

He's picking 50 years. Don't like it? Would you agree to a compromise between 50 and 100? 75 years is rapidly approaching.

<comment><USER11> Scott Adams write his blog from the perspective of a person in a position of power and influence. Notice that in his anecdote _he_ is the person paying for dinner. Also, he is the person persuading the subjugated to accept their horrible fate ... for an admittedly "ridiculous" reason.

Accepting a free dinner is easy to do. Accepting a lifetime of domination from an oppressor is "not the same thing".

I wonder if Scott Adams would be so willing to accept a ridiculous justification if he was the one being tormented every day of his life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Guys tend to argue over who picks up the check after dinner._

What guys? Normally, say 5 people, the bill comes and it's $50, everyone chucks in a $20 and says they don't want change...

</comment><comment><USER20> The whole reason you don't start to eat before everyone has been served is if you have been served the wrong person's food.

<comment><USER19> Or if it's poisoned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In some circumstances, an arbitrary decision >> indecision.

</comment><comment><USER22> Vote me up because I read the dilbert strip today</comment>


Why nobody is going to be out of a job in the digital world - <AUTHOR> https://gigaom.com/2016/03/23/10-reasons-why-nobody-is-going-to-be-out-of-a-job-in-the-digital-world/ <comment><USER2> Airy fairy.</comment>


PaaS: Present and Future - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docker.io/2013/08/paas-present-and-future/

<comment><USER2> From the author: Thanks to voxoz, Flynn, and Deis for your support .

<comment><USER3> And now "Cocaine", apparently! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226993](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226993)</comment></comment>


Conway: There Needs To Be More Debate About NSA, But I'm Not Who Will Lead It - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/09/ron-conway-there-needs-to-be-more-silicon-valley-debate-about-nsa-but-im-not-the-guy-who-will-do-it

<comment><USER2> Disappointing. Whenever I hear people say "there needs to be a balance", what I hear is "I'm with NSA/the government on this one" \- because that's _exactly_ what everyone saying that are actually saying. It's what Nancy Pelosi said when asked about it, and she meant the same thing. Same with Bill/Hillary Clinton. If they're not _outraged_ about what the NSA and the administration are doing, then they most likely support it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everyone already knows by now. And no one cares.

They do care about secret courts, ... rightfully so.

</comment><comment><USER4> _Ron Conway, one of the more powerful investors in Silicon Valley, today defended his position of not getting involved in issues around national security and consumer privacy, saying that he was already busy with too many other causes like gun control and immigration reform_

== Wow.

<comment><USER5> Yeah. I'm really surprised he thinks cheap labor is more important than keeping the government from spying on his deals and all of his companies' deals.</comment></comment>


Why We Buy: Redesigning Referly to Focus on Experiences - <AUTHOR> http://refer.ly/blog/focusing-on-what-really-matters-experiences/

<comment><USER2> Is it me or does it look a lot like AirBnB?

<comment><AUTHOR> It should, we loved their layout and used it as a design inspiration. What I have found as someone doing a lot of design work (but I'm not a designer) is that if I start from something similar to other designs I can work my way to something that works and is more unique.

To be clear, this process will never produce truly great design work but it is way better than we staring at the blank screen and producing nothing. I'm getting better every day.

<comment><USER3> True. I've used the same technique when doing Balsamiq mockups. Though I'm pretty sure the UI/design person I'm going to work with will make it fairly different.

I'm certainly liking what I'm seeing, though hopefully down the line the typography can be worked on a bit more. It's not very "warm" -- the whole layout is a little hard-hitting on my eyes. But still pretty solid!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesomely done. Easy of Discovery and Recommendations nail the user experience.

</comment><comment><USER5> Design looks nice but a few comments:

1) The above the fold graphic is way to large. (And I'm on a 30" monitor)

2) The featured items are also to large and the arrangement doesn't allow for the eye to flow correctly from one box to another.

3) Might be an idea to try to have items pop up instead of another page.

4) The site response for me is way to slow.

<comment><USER6> I agree with this and logged in to comment on the same issues. It makes for a very difficult user experience. I went through the site for some minutes, and it was very hard to use.</comment></comment>


NAFTA Renegotiation Will Resurrect Failed TPP Proposals - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/nafta-renegotiation-will-resurrect-failed-tpp-proposals <comment><USER2> I am not surprised large corporations are lobbying to enforce strict copyright laws onto even more countries. The problem with trade with Mexico, though, is not the copyright laws, but the cheap labor. When Mexico's minimum wage is $0.48, there's no way American labor can compete. And once the jobs are shipped there, Mexico has no incentive to raise wages for Mexicans. In fact, they have an incentive to keep the people poor so they can keep getting foreign jobs.

What we need to do is to extend our labor and environmental protection laws to the countries we trade with. If we don't do that, then our labor will continue to be uncompetitive, people will be unable to unionize, middle class jobs will continue to disappear, and the capital owners will continue to be the only ones to benefit from globalization.

<comment><USER3> Seeing this written here was pretty hilarious to me, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but one of the central parts of the TPP was exactly the point you're making: To expand tighter labor and environmental laws into places like Vietnam so American workers aren't competing against foreign workers whose government is willing to destroy their health and environment to undercut them in price.

The expansion of American copyright laws that the EFF is so against, is mainly there since selling America IP ( both cultural and intellectual) to foreign customers is one of the biggest sources of export income for American corporations and thus a big source of wages for their American employees. You of course can't sell a Disney DVD or a software solution to someone in Vietnam if it's legal for them to just copy it whenever they want.

<comment><USER2> Judging from the effect Mexican and Asian imports have had on America's manufacturing industries, I feel it's pretty smart to be skeptical. The middle class lost tons of jobs because of NAFTA, and the low demand for labor is a major cause of the currently stagnant wages. IP may be an important subject, but I'd say the stability and equality of our society and economy should be our #1 priority right now.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple May End Mobile Phone Contract Era - <AUTHOR> http://seekingalpha.com/article/290109-apple-may-end-mobile-phone-contract-era

<comment><USER2> I'd really like to see this happen, and have cell phone providers start going towards the direction of cable companies slowly losing monopoly over their content.

Unfortunately, it will be quite some time before several major hurdles are removed before carriers are out of the picture:

* Infrastructure. You would need a major WiMax installation covering your city. I'm lucky if I find a reliable hotspot now at Startbucks.

* 911 access. It will be some time before WiFi is reliable enough to handle all 911 calls.

* Standard messaging/SMS platform. Most non-carrier messaging methods need the same platform running on both ends (BBM, iMessenger, WhatsApp, etc.). While it's overpriced per MB, but does work pretty much everywhere.

Unless law forbids it, carriers will get creative and charge extra for these essential services to keep their bottom line going (i.e. AT&T $2 forced long distance fee).

</comment><comment><USER3> Not when the phone costs hundreds of dollars less with a contract.</comment>


Optimising Django on Dreamhost - <AUTHOR> http://sharebear.co.uk/blog/2009/03/12/optimising-django-dreamhost/

<comment><USER2> I kinda feel that in this day, you just shouldn't be running Django on DreamHost. New Xen hosts (like <http://prgmr.com/xen/>) are popping up a lot now and they're offering real capacity at DreamHost prices. DreamHost is fine for certain things, but more advanced hosting has come a long way since 5 years ago where DreamHost offered a lot.

Even if you want a shared/managed solution, WebFaction offers a much better environment for Django since they don't kill long-running processes and officially support Django.</comment>