US cable giants calls on FCC to block cities' expansion of high-speed internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/29/us-telecoms-fcc-block-high-speed-internet-chattanooga <comment><USER3> > Chattanooga has the largest high-speed internet service in the US, offering > customers access to speeds of 1 gigabit per second – about 50 times faster > than the US average. The service, provided by municipally owned EPB, has > sparked a tech boom in the city and attracted international attention. EPB > is now petitioning the FCC to expand its territory. Comcast and others have > previously sued unsuccessfully to stop EPB's fibre optic roll out.

I did a quick search to see pricing for EPB's internet service and wow is it cheap[1]. The two plans listed on the site are 100 Mbps for $57.99/mo or 1Gpbs $69.99/mo. Oh and both plans are _symmetric_ so you get that for upload as well.

I don't know of any city where the local cable co offers anything like that, let alone at those price points. No wonder they want to block this through legislation; competing in the market would not be pleasant for them.

[1]: [https://epbfi.com/internet/](https://epbfi.com/internet/)

<comment><USER4> Cable could easily offer these rates by using the bandwidth currently occupied by their tv channels. If comcast had a unified digital backbone it wouldn't be a problem. It is only because they have monopoly power. I find it completely distasteful the number of laws that prevent other entities from passing laws in certain domains. Washington state has a law that prevents cities from legislating any form of rent control.

We need to clean out these bullshit laws.

<comment><USER5> > I find it completely distasteful the number of laws that prevent other > entities from passing laws in certain domains. Washington state has a law > that prevents cities from legislating any form of rent control.

Are you serious? Rent control laws are awful, destroy the incentive to maintain housing stock or build new housing stock, and ultimately raise rents for everyone except the lucky few who can get rent controlled apartments.

Municipalities are just organs of the state, and state legislatures are entirely justified in preventing them from enacting myopic legislation.

<comment><USER6> Honestly I think you're way off base on rent control. I'd love to know what experiences you've had with rent control that have led you to such a negative POV? Perhaps living in Philly, as you profile mentions, has blunted you to some of the benefits of RC in housing-crunched cities.

The biggest fallacy I hear from people who don't live in one of these housing- crunched cities is the line.. _everyone except the lucky few who can get rent controlled apartments_. Rent control laws in SF, for example, are very inclusive. I mean, RC apartments can't be both rare AND pervasive enough to "destroy the incentive" to invest in housing, right? And every RC law I know of (which is only a few) has exemptions for new construction. In SF it's anything built after ~1980. In NYC I know it's back much further than that. So it doesn't do anything specifically to depress new construction.

Fundamentally, the question is do tenants have rights or are they at the mercy of the property rights of the building owner? In SF we believe tenants DO have rights. And you know what? RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br apartment will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are doing quite alright. They don't seem too desperately in need of expanded protections under the law.

<comment><USER7>
        everyone except the lucky few who can get
        rent controlled apartments

No, that's not the problem. As you say, rent control can't be both pervasive and rare at the same time. The real problems with rent control are:

* It's hard to move. Say you change jobs and now work in a different part of the city, or your kids move out, or you'd like to move in with a partner. Normally one of the benefits of renting is that you can move, but with rent control that means switching to a place that's much more expensive.

* Landlords benefit from having their long-time tenants leave. Without rent control landlords love long term tenants because they're reliable and they mean less work finding people for the apartment. Rent control reverses this, and the landlord loses the incentive to upgrade the apartment and otherwise keep the tenant happy. Yes, the landlord is being a jerk when they do it, but sometimes the best fix for widespread jerk-ness is changing the incentives.

* It keeps out outsiders. People who want to live in your city enough that they're willing to give up their existing local connections and start over in your city are really valuable, and rent control means they pay a lot more than people who've lived in the city longer.

* It depresses new construction. Yes, I know new buildings aren't subject to rent control, but in a place where everything is already built out you can't put up a new building without taking down an old one. Rent control means you either have legal restrictions saying you can't replace buildings, or you have protests against people doing this and displacing existing tenants. But in a growing city, without new construction housing is going to get more and more expensive.

* Rent control puts off dealing with the problem of housing costs. If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more affordable. Rent control means that the long-time community members who would be best at this political change don't really feel much urgency because they have nice cheap places with rents set a decade or two ago. (But to be fair, homeownership is also a problem here, because rents and property values move together and homeowners want their property to become more valuable.)

        RE investors here, where a rent controlled 2br apartment
        will set you back at least $3k a month in the city, are
        doing quite alright. They don't seem too desperately in
        need of expanded protections under the law.

Rent control hurts renters. I don't care about real estate investors. That $3k isn't why we need rent control, it's because we have rent control.

<comment><USER8>
        If everyone in SF rented, and everyone had to pay market rates, then there
        would be the political backing for changes that would make housing more
        affordable.

This is demonstrably not true in London where rent just keeps on going up and hardly any new housing is being built. For example, an MP has just resigned his £130k+ (total remuneration, that's $215'000) job because he can't afford to rent a 4 bedroom house anywhere near Westminster [1].

Sometimes the state just needs to step in and actually help people (by directly building high quality housing and selling it to people below market value). Currently if you buy a new build in London it is priced so high that you can expect it to be under water for a few years (the builders provide special mortgages because banks refuse to do them directly in many cases - <USER2> flats are not worth what they are being sold for).

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/11/tory- foreign...](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/aug/11/tory-foreign- office-minister-quits-intolerable-expenses-rules)

<comment><USER7>
        This is demonstrably not true in London where rent
        just keeps on going up and hardly any new housing
        is being built.

[http://www.london.gov.uk/priorities/housing-land/renting- hom...](http://www.london.gov.uk/priorities/housing-land/renting-home/rents- map) claims only a quarter of people in london rent? So the "if everyone rented" bit isn't being met. Because property values and rents mostly move together, as long as most people own their homes you have more people backing policies that push them higher than lower.

I don't know the London political situation very well: what makes it so expensive to build new units? Are there strict historical preservation laws? Rules that let neighbors veto or slow nearby construction? Permits and taxes?

        He can't afford to rent a 4 bedroom house
        anywhere near Westminster

"Anywhere near Westminster" apparently means "within walking distance". A 30min public transit commute covers areas where renting a 4br would be ~£26/year.

        you can expect it to be under water for a few years

I'm not sure what you mean by this. You're saying if you build a flat and sell it then people are buying them at prices at which they wouldn't be able to resell them? Is this just because there's a premium for new construction? (Cars in the US, for example, lose ~20% of their value when they're bought for the first time because they stop being "new". So you could say that if you buy a new car you expect to be "under water" at first, but no one would say that.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My opinion of those companies is so poor at this point that my knee jerk reaction is to assume that whatever they want is the opposite of what's good for me.

<comment><USER4> At least they are consistent.

<comment><USER10> word

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think by now it's hard to deny that Comcast & friends are stifling the progress of the US economy. The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which really can't be explained by the US's size alone), consumers and businesses are complaining across the board about high pricing, bad service, and lack of options.

These companies do the country and its inhabitants a big disservice. I think the only reasonable option for the FCC and the government would be to increase competition, and remove existing roadblocks.

<comment><USER5> > The US is 31st worldwide on bandwidth speed (which really can't be explained > by the US's size alone)

By what measure? Certainly not Akamai's ([http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai- soti-q114.pdf?WT.mc_i...](http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai- soti-q114.pdf?WT.mc_id=soti_Q114)). The top 10 U.S. states (much of which are in the Northeast and are Comcast territory), would appear comfortably in the top 10 of the global rankings (compare page 14-15 with page 18).

On Ookla's ranking, the U.S. is quite comparable to other big western countries (France, Germany, UK): [http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries](http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries). Compare the U.K., at 29 mbps, with comparably-dense northeastern states like New York (35 mbps), Massachusetts (33 mbps), etc.

Indeed, if you look at Ookla's rankings, you can see that density/wealth is a driver of internet speeds: [http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United- States](http://www.netindex.com/download/2,1/United-States). Sparsely populated or poor states like Wyoming or West Virginia are down in the 15-20 mbps range. Rich, dense states like New York and New Jersey are at 35+. The U.K. and Germany are ~600 people per square mile, somewhere between New York State and Connecticut in density. The U.S. as a whole is only 90 people per square mile, and states like Wyoming are less than 10 people per square mile.

EDIT: I don't normally get annoyed at down votes, but I point these facts out every time someone repeats the trope "the U.S. lags in broadband speed!" but I never get a real answer, just down votes. The narrative that the U.S. lags behind in broadband speeds seems pretty central to criticisms of U.S. broadband policy, but the surveys I've seen that measure actual speeds (as opposed to advertised speeds), contradicts the assertion that the U.S. lags behind its counterparts. Can someone explain why they disagree with this analysis?

<comment><USER12> I have challenged you about this topic several times and backed it up.

I still think the best public data is the FCC international broadband survey and report which I have previously referenced. The Ookla "promise" figures can be used to validate the advertised speeds in that dataset versus actual speeds.

The issue is not merely of availability of very high speed (>25mbps) connections but its price, an area in which the FCC study demonstrates the US is not competitive. [This information cannot be obtained from the data sets you mentioned].

Moreover, most people, certainly most people here, don't care about nation- wide or even state-wide averages, and they distort the figures, in favor of the US no less (rural Wyoming probably has better access than rural Romania, nobody cares about either). What are the figures for the main urban centers? As a datapoint, based on the FCC data I don't think there is a major US city which is competitive with Warsaw, Poland except possibly for Austin due to Google Fiber.

What would help settle this issue is if someone like Netflix , Google or Dropbox incorporated a speed test (they don't seem to test beyond their stream rates currently) and made the granular data public.

Finally, it is anecdotal but I have found those who have lived in Scandinavia (or Eastern Europe) and the US say pretty consistently that the broadband is much worse in the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really good example of how lobbying works. On one hand, these telecom companies have a clear interest in not having to "compete" with cheap, publicly funded broadband. On the other hand, their position just happens to tie in with a broader political debate: states and municipalities are on the verge of bankruptcy, and municipal infrastructure projects are a disaster outside a few well-managed cities like NYC. The telcos aren't incorrect in saying that these sorts of projects often turn into boondoggles, or disproportionately benefit parts of the population,[1] or cost too much and end up underfunded and poorly maintained in the future.

With these lobbying measures, the telcos can tie something that benefits them to a position (municipal infrastructure projects), that many people oppose for entirely different reasons.

[1] It is worth noting that only 1/3 of adults 65+ subscribe to broadband at home, and that many poor people access the internet through libraries or cellular phones instead of home computers.

<comment><USER13> Honest question, does your repeated support of the cable companies' excuses have anything to do with your living in Philadelphia (per your profile) near Comcast HQ?

<comment><USER5> I was in Philadelphia for a one year appointment to work for the federal court here. I have no personal affiliation with Comcast. As for my views favoring cable companies, it's because I'm a disgruntled urbanist. If you think Verizon or Comcast are bad, wait till your internet service becomes the subject of the absolute batshit insanity of American municipal politics.

<comment><USER14> The people in Chattanooga don't seem to be complaining one little bit about "American municipal politics" with their 1 gigabit symmetric connections.

We've had to put up with this bullshit from Comcast and TWC for decades. I say let's try the alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "The success of public broadband is a mixed record, with numerous examples > of failures," USTelecom said in a blog post. "With state taxpayers on the > financial hook when a municipal broadband network goes under, it is entirely > reasonable for state legislatures to be cautious in limiting or even > prohibiting that activity."

That's the cable companies for you - always looking out for the consumer. It's almost as if they see themselves as a public utility.

</comment><comment><USER16> Nothing, not even the risk of municipal-infrastructure-shennigans-leading-to- disaster, should stand in the way of more competition entering the ISP market. Google Fiber is awesome and all but they're pretty much the only company big enough to tackle large-scale rollouts nationally. These smaller, municipal efforts have much lower barriers and will ultimately provide the market the kind of competitive landscape it needs to begin improving.

</comment><comment><USER17> 2 questions:

1\. Why aren't cities everywhere doing this?

2\. Who do I have to bother in my city to get this to happen?

<comment><USER18> Big telcos lobby for laws to make it illegal, e.g. Louisiana 844.42 [1]:

"To ensure that cable television services and telecommunications and advanced services are provided through fair competition [...]"

Advanced services are defined in 844.43 [2] to mean Internet that's faster than 144 kilobits per second.

This means that the wifi in MSY (New Orlean's airport, a government facility) is utterly unusable.

I can understand the narrative: having government skim the good stuff is a bad deal for corporations since government can do things corporations can't (e.g., taxes, zoning, land use permits, seize land). Presumably, this discourages corporations from providing comprehensive services since they cannot subsidize poorly-performing areas with great performing areas. I'm skeptical that that's a valid reason to have such a law, but c'est la vie.

[1]: [http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285523](http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285523)

[2]: [http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285524](http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=285524)

<comment><USER19> > I can understand the narrative: having government skim the good stuff is a > bad deal for corporations since government can do things corporations can't > (e.g., taxes, zoning, land use permits, seize land). Presumably, this > discourages corporations from providing comprehensive services since they > cannot subsidize poorly-performing areas with great performing areas.

The think I can't understand is why we should care. If the government is providing reliable gigabit fiber at a reasonable price, who cares if Comcast can't profitably offer service in the same geography? If the city is doing a good job then you don't need them. Meanwhile if the city does a poor job then Comcast will have no trouble providing better service and winning all the customers, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Law of unintended consequences. Cable giants lobby to abolish net neutrality and for the FCC to not designate Internet service as a common carrier. Consequently other people band together to provide their own service.

Now the cable giants, one pure local geographic monopoly, lobby to control municipal remediation of the crappy service. The hypocrisy is, unfortunately, unsurprising.

</comment><comment><USER21> Telcos are a disease in the American economy.

<comment><USER4> Unconstrained corporatism.

<comment><USER22> literally state sanctioned monopolies

there was a website posted to HN a while ago that described the hurdles for municipal fiber in each state, i don't have the link any more, but it seems very relevant to this discussion

<comment><USER4> I think state sanctioned monopolies are _probably_ ok if regulated well. Natural Gas falls in that category here and I think they do a pretty good job. I'd say Comcast falls into state sanctioned monopoly-power-abuse which is different.

<comment> atom-morgan > I think state sanctioned monopolies are _probably_ ok if regulated well. > Natural Gas falls in that category here and I think they do a pretty good > job.

How would you ever know since they literally have no competition?

<comment><USER4> Competition isn't the only way to calculate efficiencies.

But yes, my opinion of not feeling gouged is not a scientific indicator. I don't want 2 gas companies or 6 electric utilities.

That picture on the left, [http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/189...](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/1890sWires.jpeg) I have seen that in Vietnam. Everyone gets their own wire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good thing we don't get our water from Comcast.

<comment><USER24> Or air...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ugh. The answer is not municipally owned ISPs.

Sure it's easy for a municipal ISP to have "cheap" rates when you consider that they are taxing authorities and don't have to run a profit. How exactly would this service be put into place? It would take a massive capital investment by the municipality, full of opportunities for fraud. I live in a fairly small, highly liberal town and yet in the past few years we've had financial scandal after financial scandal, from city staffers abusing credit cards to money losing investments in everything from technology parks to parking garages to outright fraud by contractors with inside partners in the government.

And what does your typical city council know about running an ISP business? Nothing. Where I live, they can't even stay ahead of the pothole repair. It takes a team of a dozen laborers a month to install a block of sidewalk. The incompetence and inefficiency is just staggering. I'm simply unwilling to believe that they would do any better trying to offer internet service. I also don't buy the arugment that municipalites provide better "utility" services than businesses can. My parents lived in a neighborhood with poor water pressure for nearly two decades before the city finally got around to installing a booster pump station that resolved the problem.

I'm not in favor of the status quo either. Regulated monopolies have given us the current mess with indifferent and expensive providers, product packaging that forces you to buy services you don't want, and little competition.

Remove the monopolies. Let providers provide backbone, last mile, or both. Let them buy and sell bandwidth in bulk, and compete over customers from house to house. I don't see anything else that can possibly resolve the problem.

<comment><USER26> > Sure it's easy for a municipal ISP to have "cheap" rates when you consider > that they are taxing authorities and don't have to run a profit.

why is this a bad thing?

<comment><USER27> The implication is that the municipals are not just "non profit", but operating at a (significant) loss. Is this "funded by taxes" aspect usually true?

At least for the case of the Sacramento area electrical company, no. PG&E is substantially more expensive, although I don't know how far-flung rural distribution is funded - by all rate payers, or if there is some kind of govt subsidy to encourage rural distribution. (by rural, I don't mean the parts of Yolo and El Dorado counties that are 10 to 15 miles outside of Sacramento county, I mean areas like the Sierra and Siskiyou mountains)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I remember the day in US when the consumer was king, and its interests were second to all others (govt, big business, etc). Sadly that day has passed. Without getting too political, the root cause is unrestrained campaign giving.

<comment><USER29> It's interesting that most people (at least around here) point to unrestrained campaign giving, rather than the fact that government even has the regulatory authority to do what it does. Of course, we have both, and stopping either one would in theory stop the other, but it's interesting that people always seem to point exclusively at one or the other. I wonder if there's some correlation between what angle people take and what their broader political leanings are.

<comment><USER28> Well I don't think it's a left/right thing as campaign finance reform has been proposed by both major parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wish there had been a lot more stimulus, and a lot more projects like Chattanooga.

</comment><comment><USER31> Atleast in areas where the laws permit, why isn't a competitor, e.g. Google Fiber, not taking advantage of this clearly prevalent customer dissatisfaction with Comcast/TWC etc?

Also, some people seem to say that laying Fiber/infrastructure has costs which may be the reason. Then what happened to the wireless technologies which were presented as options for covering a city with connectivity? There was so much chatter about Wi-Max and such technologies - why are they are not being researched/refined/pushed? One of the best example of the vast advantage of penetration of wireless vs wired in terms of speed of deployment and impact is in India - especially rural areas where one can't expect clean drinking water but the cellphone signal is strong. Everytime somebody complains that in smaller towns in US that Comcast is the only choice in such places due to their infrastructure, assuming there are no laws prohibiting wireless competition, wireless should be the best option, no? So what am I missing (seriously)?

<comment><USER32> Well for one thing, there's a big difference between a 9.6kbps cellphone voice call (and thus data channel) and 20 mbps+ data.

Wireless _sucks_. It is a bad solution to everything _except_ where some much larger problem exists (i.e. you are on a plane).

Wireless seems good in India because the networks are not highly demanded - and are expensive to boot so volume is managed. Wireless seems to grow quickly because you throw up a tower and declare "50,000 people now have access!", and telephone service is still kind of a big deal.

But that's all you get from it. You can't provide a 20mbps pipe to those 50,000 people - not even close.

But India is poverty stricken. The electricity grid is bad. And there's the lawlessness that comes with poverty (heard of copper thieves?). Wireless towers are easy central locations to power and protect. Thousands of miles of copper or fiber is not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm all for people owning their own last mile for all kinds of services, if that's what they wish to do. Cooperatives are a great thing.

And the marketplace where these coops buy their internet access, electricity or water can still be competitive. It would actually be MORE competitive than the monopolies handed out by governments that you cannot easily leave.

And the decision to grant such a monopoly or revoke or allow an increase would not be in hands of the few. It would be in many different collections of hands and be much harder to pay off all those hands for some sweetheart deal.

</comment><comment><USER24> They bought corrupted laws and now they are brazen enough to complain that someone dares to oppose them? It's really disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER34> Most interesting part of the article: USTelecom would like "public entities [to] bear the same regulatory burdens as private service providers".

What's that about? What regulatory burdens are these public providers avoiding, and are those burdens in the public interest or not?

</comment><comment><USER35> horse vs unicorn

US cable wants to keep monopoly over subscriber base and keep things as they always were. Nice steady revenue per cable subscriber per month.

High speed internet access is disrupting their business model. Pick any streaming service you like as long as you have fast broadband.

</comment><comment><USER36> And then, in a fit of pique, he napalmed Cheltenham. Even the police began to take notice.

</comment><comment><USER37> Counterpoint: try googling "Volstate EPB".

I'm no expert, but I think it would be a shame if small struggling ISPs get the short end of the stick. It's hard for me to make a judgement on this specifically.

<comment><USER38> OT: this post is the 4th result in Google. Comment on HN indexed within 35 minutes. Crazy.

It kind of sucks for companies like that, but competition is good.

In an ideal situation you'd have "the people" own the pipes which they then rent at cost to commercial providers. In practice this would usually be via local government, but I'd prefer it via some kind of mutual society (where residents own a share, is open only to residents, and which is sold along with the property).

The UK has a variation of this model, called "local loop unbundling" ([http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/llu/llu.do](http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/llu/llu.do)). The infra was originally built by the state telco BT, which was then privatized. To create competition they introduced LLU, which forced BT to allow competition access to the pipes.

<comment><USER4> The last mile should be open to the people and supported as infrastructure. I should be able to send packets across town for zero cost.

<comment><USER39> You should also be able to host your own services. These two things are more closely related than a lot of people realize.

<comment><USER40> Two points - someone has to maintain the network; holes need digging, kit needs buying, upgrading and monitoring. This cannot be free. It could be a government utility, but paying for it would then come out of taxes and the choice would be between paying for that, aircraft carriers or incubators.

Second, networks are designed to deliver different things at different price points. Running a web service at the end of a residential connection does not make economic sense compared to running it in a datacentre connected directly to a peering point on 40gig-e.

<comment><USER39> > end of a residential connection does not make economic sense compared to > running it in a datacentre

While I agree with you, I believe there exists an in-between solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> * sigh _</comment>


Show HN: Prompt, Ask questions. Get answers. In a human, natural way - <AUTHOR> https://presentio.us/prompt/

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately I didn't make it possible to understand prompt without first logging in. I'm sure people might be hesitant. Check this out if you're interested: [https://presentio.us/prompt/bdb22f](https://presentio.us/prompt/bdb22f)

<comment><USER2> If your initials are GM and you don't wish your email to be leaked - I would redact that link. The source leaks an email. Not sure if it is yours, the presenter of that prompt, or someone else though.

''' "username":"[REDACTED]@gmail.com" '''

E: [IGNORE]

10 points taken away from Nadya House for failing to see you were also the submitter/creator. I see the // TODO (gmike) now.

So first issue I see is that many users might not appreciate leaking their emails.

E2:

As responded to below - it doesn't leak the email for presentations created by users. It was updated to respond with null, it seems.

''' "username":null '''

<comment><AUTHOR> There. I pruned. No longer leaking creator username.</comment></comment></comment>


The Secret Search Engine Tearing Wikipedia Apart - <AUTHOR> http://genius.it/8731704/motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedias-secret-google-competitor-search-engine-is-tearing-it-apart <comment><USER2> I click on the link. Massive popup menus on the right partially obscure my view of the article. I close the tab. Next!

<comment><USER3> My sentiments exactly, why don't you post the motherboard article instead of trying to build ad revenue for genius. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The actual article is at [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedias-secret- google-co...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedias-secret-google- competitor-search-engine-is-tearing-it-apart)</comment>


Ask HN: Robotics engineers of HN, what do you work on? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN! I wanted to know what kind of projects do the robotics engineers here work on? Also, how did you get to where you are? Did you always want to work on robots? Also, what resources do you recommend for a person starting out in robotics? Thanks! <comment><USER2> [https://weeklyrobotics.com/](https://weeklyrobotics.com/)

is a very good resource

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for sending this! I'll check it out.</comment></comment>


SEO tricks from Patio11 - <AUTHOR> http://melmiranda.com/post/12529167823/seo-tricks-from-patio11-aka-patrick-mckenzie <comment><USER2> At Techcrunch when we removed the share buttons average traffic to each post dropped 20-25%. We saw no jump in number of blog links, or tumblr's, or anything else.

The buttons suck - we knew that a lot of users hated them (it adds 4 * 20 additional HTTP requests to the main page), but they were worth too much traffic to do away with. Social network referrals likely surpass search engine referrals for a lot of blogs and web sites. They have steadily become an important web traffic navigator.

If somebody can figure out how to make those share buttons prettier and more efficient there is probably a product in that. I would guess that most blogs would love to drop the grid of share buttons that can be found on every post.

Otherwise I totally agree with not going for subdomains. We setup each property on a separate domain and initially had some on subdomains. The subdomains didn't rank at all and didn't help our PR or SEO. As soon as we switched each property to a separate domain our search referrals rocketed. For eg. you can now find a crunchbase link within the first 5 results for the name of a startup, while similar records for posts that lived on subdomains wouldn't rank at all. We had around a dozen different domains and frequently linked between them (for eg. each post would have multiple crunchbase links), and it worked really well for search ranking (search engines are ~40% of crunchbase traffic, IIRC) It shouldn't be like that, but it is.

<comment><USER3> Its nice how the 4*20 requests problem has been solved during the redesign. Now the individual Buttons are only loaded if someone really wants to use them and is hovering over the dummy buttons.

I found that quite nifty and unobtrusive. A smart solution to the problem.

<comment><USER2> It is much better than having two clicks (which I had prototyped), but the prob is that a lot of portable devices don't have 'hover' - so I don't know if it falls back on anything in that case.

There is a product here - package the buttons together so they only load once, hide them in some way by default, and provide a bunch of analytics. Lots of blogs and websites would pay for that - the current solutions for social button analytics are really bad, or non-existant (you need to know things like click-through rates, which share options are most popular, autohiding some for users who never use them, detect if the user is logged in for each service, how many followers/likes/retweets etc. each user gets from a share so you can identify 'power sharers' etc.) - I don't think that exists.

You can't just keep adding more and more buttons for each social service, and there are some people who will only use, for eg. delicious or pinboard and there are no buttons for them.

<comment><USER3> I guess <http://www.addthis.com/> kind of does this and has a "fallback" option to integrate many services.

Mobile is definitely a problem but the mobile version of the website makes that solveable for the most popular devices.

<comment><USER4> I guess it's a matter of taste but i find the addthis button bar rather horrible to look at. Plus it does not have nearly the feature set that Nic is looking for. I agree there's a product there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Github, Slideshare, Tumblr are fantastic, but don't give them your link juice. Put your content on your own domain. "

Love this. There's no reason you can't host the write-up for your github projects / gems on your own domain, and make a much prettier and more intuitive documentation for your code than what you can do with markdown and no pictures. As an example, look how nice VowsJS (<http://vowsjs.org/>) does this. It makes me excited to clone their module and use it in my project. More people should be doing this!

<comment><USER6> But you can get one-way dofollow links by placing some of your code on Github. It can make sense, just needs some carful planning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ooh, look, an on-topic location to ask Patrick questions. ;)

So, about that whole "subdomain" thing, as mentioned in this article. The problem in SEO is that separate subdomains accrue separate Google scores, correct? So if I was to serve my whole site from a third-tier domain, like "www.example.com", that would be okay? Provided I were not foolish enough to also put stuff on "example.com" and "other.example.com" and expect links to that content to contribute to the reputation of "www.example.com"?

Basically I'm looking for confirmation that the classic old "www" prefix is okay, if used carefully. (Lots of people hate it for aesthetic reasons, and I used to agree with them, and then I had to dig into the rules for DNS CNAMEs, and the terrifying results have made me fall in love with "www" again. Unless you tell me it's bad, in which case I guess I'll just have to take to drink.)

<comment><USER8> Yes, you're totally cool to use either site.tld or www.site.tld. I'd recommend using a 301 redirect of one to the other (Google and Bing are pretty good at automatically canonicalizing these, but not perfect).

The trouble comes when you segment content to subdomain.site.com. The domain authority engines assign to a root domain may not always pass to all the subdomains, so you end up with subpar rankings to what you could earn.

As an example, we launched the Beginner's Guide to SEO on guides.seomoz.org and moved it after a few months to www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo (where it currently lives). It had earned tons of links prior to that move, but the day after the 301 back to the main domain (away from the guides subdomain), it jumped to #1 rankings for all sorts of terms, including "seo guide" (recently got beat out by Google's SEO guide and is now #2). This was a good illustration of the power of keeping content in a single sub/root domain location for us.

<comment><USER9> What Rand said. #include <ndaed_client_anecdote.h>

<comment><USER10> So you think it's worth the move to example.com/blog even if you already have an established blog.example.com?

<comment><USER8> That's been my experience. Not only will the blog's pages rank better by being on the main domain, they'll also help the rest of the site's content rank better by bolstering that location's authority.

That said, I don't want to suggest this is always true all the time or that Google/Bing never group subdomain authorities together, just that we've seen inconsistency and thus I'd recommend keeping them together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _Design Matters. A lot._

This is a common sense, but I have hard time reconciling patio11 saying that with an actual appearance of his projects. Preaching without practicing takes away a lot credibility from a preacher even if the advice is reasonable.

<comment><USER12> Look at his main site: <http://www.kalzumeus.com/>. It's quite good looking and well designed.

<comment><USER13> What about this one <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/>

That doesn't look that good looking to me.

<comment><USER14> Fortunately, you are not Patrick's target audience. He didn't say it had to make the design community swoon; just that it has to convey professionalism and draw your intended users in. I would bet the Bingo Card Creator website accomplishes these goals just fine for his core audience of middle-aged schoolteachers.

Also, that site has not gotten a lot of attention for a while. His focus nowadays is on the much more attractive Appointment Reminder.

<comment><USER13> > He didn't say it had to make the design community swoon; just that it has to > convey professionalism and draw your intended users in.

That is a "no true scottsman" fallacy.

When someone says design matters, it means having a pleasant design. BCC's design is not something that can be considered good. It still does business - that's great, but "it does business -> hence it has good design" doesn't hold.

<comment><USER15> """When someone says design matters, it means having a pleasant design"""

'Pleasant' to who? Myspace's design is/was pleasant to teenagers, for example. So surely design is tied closely to the audience. If the goal is, let's say, making money, and the site has been A/B tested extensively and this 'design' makes the most money from its audience, then it's presumably the best design. There are so many anomalously successful website designs that ye can't just say it's about 'pleasantness', unless your audience are graphic designers.

<comment><USER16> You're morphing the meaning of design that was conveyed in the article:

 _A good looking, well designed website will convey credibility and professionalism. Even if you're just two guys coding at a Starbucks, you can look like a big, well-known brand. Invest in design._

BCC does not convey credibility and professionalism and is not good looking. It doesn't look like a Starbucks brand, it looks like some guy in his bedroom put it together.

appointmentreminder.org, on the other hand, does follow that advice.

So either Patio11's ignoring his own advice, the author misinterpreted it or Patio11forgot to add 'tailor to your market', which BCC might be.

<comment><USER15> Sorry you're right, i did change the meaning (even though i read the article :S).

In that sense you're totally right, BCC doesn't convey credibility, it looks like a landing page, and personally, i'd immediately go off the site if it was a product i was looking for because it _looks_ scammy to me. It works though, apparently, is all i meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >> Twitter links has no SEO juice

Besides using Twitter to:

\- build your network and following,

\- Twitter can aid in brand/product mentions

\- Some reason to believe Twitter links are followed by the search engines, so help with indexation and discovery.[1]

\- Some reason to believe Author/Agent/Identity rank of social profiles will start playing a role.[2]

\- Finally, there are sites who add Twitterfeeds to the author profiles. Not all these feeds have the "nofollow" property.

The last one is also relevant to the statement: "Wikipedia doesn't matter for link juice". There are many copies of Wikipedia on university domains, where they don't employ nofollow (For study about web crawling or natural language processing). Or people rewriting Wikipedia articles and adding the references without nofollow. A nofollow link can transform into a dofollow link.

>> Don't use the keyword meta tag.

Exactly, but do use its fine on-page alternative: Microdata keywords: <http://schema.org/WebPage>

If only for internal usage: Writing down the keywords for a page, keeps you focussed. If you don't mind giving this information to your competitors (there are tools to find out these keywords anyway, if not already obvious), do experiment with microdata keywords.

[1] [http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased- index...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased-indexation)

[2] [http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google- plus...](http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus-as-an- identity-service-or-digital-signature/)

<comment><USER15> They never said it doesn't have marketing juice, they're just talking about link building i presume. So surely it'd be better to focus on more solid SEO strategies than link building on no-follow sites and hoping that somebody mirrors it somewhere. Do .edu links even have any ranking weight anymore? It's probably one of the most abused link building schemes there is.

<comment><USER17> They are talking about Twitter having no link juice.

With my post I tried to show that Twitter has both SEO (indexation, ranking, discovery) and marketing value (visitors, network, following).

Using Twitter is so-so SEO strategy. But it is an invaluable online marketing strategy.

Just dumping your links on Twitter and calling that link building is silly, and he is right to shoot that down. But using Twitter a little more intelligently, would have you connecting with other webmasters and linkerati: People who can add (Twitter) links to their sites, for example when they blog about the topic of your tweet, or submit it to Hacker News.

There are valid reasons to ditch Twitter: if your produce content just for ranking, instead of your users, and you lack a brand, because you have a keyword-in-domain.net, then Twitter will be very ineffective. No one wants to follow or engage with a non-brand, with highly optimized content.

If you have a brand and produce interesting content, you'll shoot yourself in the foot, if you ignore Twitter.

>> Do .edu links have any ranking weight anymore?

I don't know, I am unable to measure their value (lack control groups with the exact same linking profiles)

There is good reason to believe there is something like "proximity to authority". Taking a seed set of quality websites (Stack overflow, Wikipedia, a lot of .edu domains) you can calculate the distance/similarity of your site to this seed set and measure your own quality and authority.

If this is a solid measure, then the .edu TLD alone might not give a free pass. It matters if the .edu is deemed authoritative or not and to what degree. A link from cnn.com can be more authoritative, relevant, contextual and so provide more ranking weight, than a link from a random university student page that happens to end in ".edu".

A nofollow link always caries mention-value. For a smart search engine just a relevant mention of, for example "SEOmoz", could attribute a vote to <http://seomoz.org> . Also an added benefit of mentions is the increased "search results estimate" for your brand or product. Some people give more trust to companies that have more results in the index, especially when comparing companies.

<comment><USER15> I wasn't disagreeing with you, but so far as i can see, nearly all of the benefits you listed are marketing ones, which twitter is practically essential for these days.

In terms of marketing a product, indexation and discovery aren't critical issues, even if it's nice SEO to be able to control it in such a fashion, but i can't see evidence of ranking being affected by tweets.

Thanks for the info re .edu and mention-values, makes total sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> On the subdomains topic, on one of my sites I went the subdomain way for languages. Example: www is for english, de is for german, fr is for french and so on. The reason I did this is because I wanted Google to index the sites properly, in the right language. So if you go to google.fr and search for some of its keywords you would see the french version and not the english one. I'm just not sure how Google behaves but my feeling is that if all your languages are on the same domain (without any difference on the URL) then it will always display the english one by default (assuming it's the default one, obviously). Can anyone enlighten me?

It's been working for me but I notice the english version (which is the default one, www, but not the one with most visits) is not working as good as the other languages so I'd say juice is not shared between subdomains, like Patrick said. Still trying to figure out what's the best solution...

</comment><comment><USER19>
        Use Google Adword's keyword tool to come up with keywords and write pages that
        speak to those topics.
        If you're a productivity app, write a page for
        "increases productivity in Healthcare", another for "increases productivity in
        Education", "lowers cost in Healthcare", and so on.  Rather than automating it or having the CEO
        or head marketing guy write everything,
        you want to define a process such that a freelancer
        or team member can create content
        responsive to those keywords with a consistent level of quality.

This is _really_ cutting it close to violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines for quality and originality on each page.

<comment><USER12> The content should be high quality. This is why I mentioned the story of eHow and what a terrible thing it is, and why Patrick said "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create content in a fashion that scales while simultaneously ensuring that the user experience of consuming your content remains good"

He specifically told us not to create crap content.

<comment><USER15> The amazingly high quality of your content will be irrelevant if the keyword density on your page is one that Google deems to be low quality.

"""If you're a productivity app, write a page for "increases productivity in Healthcare", another for "increases productivity in Education", "lowers cost in Healthcare", and so on."""

^ That type of thing is pretty risky if it's one of your big strategies..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I agree with all these points, except with respect to Twitter. There is one case where I have seen Twitter impact SEO and that's in getting a new URL indexed fast, and in local SEO... Lots of tweets about a local-related page from people whose (legit) accounts are located in the same region seem to help for local keywords.

<comment><USER8> Yeah. Have to agree with you here. I just tested this recently , getting a few hundred retweets of an obscure URL ranking on page 4 for an obscure term and it moved to page 2 within a few days. I suspect Google may not be getting Twitter data directly (or getting it as fast as when they had the direct relationship), but, at the very least, there's a strong second-order impact between pages earning lots of tweets and getting ranked.

Our latest public post on this is here: <http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-tweets- still-effect-rankings> but we'll continue to test and try to get more definitive answers.

<comment><USER15> Is that 'second order impact' not tied to the public doing the link building for you, outside of twitter? E.g. blogs, reddit, etc, rather than Google actually putting ranking weight onto info in tweets?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I alone in finding the following quote profoundly depressing: "It cost Patrick $8.95 to buy [halloweengiftcards], $100 for a writer to make 5 pages of content, and he made thousands in sales."

Ditto "If you're a productivity app, write a page for "increases productivity in Healthcare", another for "increases productivity in Education", "lowers cost in Healthcare", and so on."

This kind of seo-engineering just seems so desparate, as if SEO is the be-all and end-all of running an online business.

Whatever happened to having a site that obeys all the normal 'rules', and provides valuable information / services / products to your target audience. They'll find it.

<comment><USER22> I find that pretty annoying when I'm looking for tools, but I do think it works, with varying degrees of shadiness. Some companies completely rebrand a product as if it were custom-designed for an area, taking their Foo Software and making it Foo Software for Healthcare, when in fact that's a lie and it wasn't customized for healthcare at all (and certainly not based on any knowledge of the area or research into its practices). Maybe users don't notice, and even if they do, sometimes you can mitigate it by just giving refunds freely to the users who complain, and keeping the money of those who don't.

An even scammier version of that is to rebrand software you didn't even make, like take VLC and rebrand it as customized video software for $whatever, when indeed you've done no customization for anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seriously Patrick, it was awesome to have you here. You were voted as the most helpful speaker at 500 we've had so far in the batch. Thanks!

<comment><USER23> and thanks to you too for writing this so that those of us who don't have the benefit of being there can learn as well :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As someone who has been in the SEO industry a long time I can tell you that some of this is terrible/spammy advice...

Buy KW rich domains and pay some copywriter to crank out 4-5 pages?! Are you serious?

Twitter has no SEO Value?...just so you know...the SE's came out and said that authoritative tweets absolutely have value....While they don't pass "juice", they can help you in the SERPs

I'd hold off on that hug if I were you...

<comment><USER25> There is nothing about SEO (and SEO only) that isn't spammy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is pretty sound and basic SEO if you want to spend your time making dozens of very basic wordpress blogs about particular topics to grab some easy money.

Nothing wrong with this if you have time on the weekends, heck this could even be a fulltime job as the income will slowly climb.

However, this 'trick' is quite old, but probably new to some people...

<comment><USER9> The motivation for the audience at 500 Startups is less "In your spare time, start blogging about [red men's shoes] and try to sell $0.50 a day of AdWords clicks about it" and more "As one thing in your marketing arsenal, create systems and processes to mass-produce quality content about the market addressed by your SaaS application, scaling your userbase from the few hundred people you had at launch to something closer to the 200,000 your friendly neighborhood bingo sideproject has, show your user adoption graph to investors, create lots of value, and ideally end up rich."

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This part sounds like cargo cult black magic: "This works for .com (.edu, .org) domains, but not for non-US TLDs like .co or .ly." Does Google really discriminate based on TLDs?

<comment><USER9> Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: yes, Google certainly treats the Big Three differently than it does .co or .ly. I don't have specific evidence of them discriminating _against_ .co/.ly, but the evidence that they discriminate _for_ EMDs in the Big Three is overwhelming and undeniable.

<comment><USER17> Is this not a bias? As in: It only looks like Google discriminates for the Big Three, because they are so abundant?

I've heard from official sources like below that Google doesn't discriminate on TLD. There are my sites and Googlers who use ".info" TLD in a legit and well-ranking manner.

Where this "evidence" does play a role, is in spam/made for Adwords-sites. It is reasonable to assume that a .co or .ly will get more attention, to combat spam/made for Adwords sites that try to use Keyword-In-Domain tricks to outrank legit companies.

But if you are not making Keyword-In-Domain Made-For-Adwords sites, you have nothing to worry about (at least as for Google discrimination).

It is mostly _users_ who discriminate for a .com. If Google ranks website.ly in the top 5, but its users don't click on the result, in fear of spam or low- quality, then your rankings might suffer.

Matt Cutts interview on DomainRoundtable.

      "For example, do .com domains carry more weight than a
      .net, .us, .info, etc.

      He said that TLD doesn't matter -- that's the way Larry
      and Sergey originally designed the Google algorithm. The
      algorithm doesn't care where the page is located, it's
      all about pagerank (LINKS) of the particular page. At the
      end of answering this question he did admit that they
      might have started to look at particularly cheap (and
      spammy) TLDs differently than other TLDs or they might
      start considering TLD in their algorithm if they're not
      already doing so."

So it is still good to advice against .io and witty domain names (portfol.io), but not for the reason of Google discrimination.

I am reminded by statements like: "For better ranking, claim your domain for 5+ years". Just because Google gives extra attention to domains with a low expiration date, because they correlate with spammy/get-rich-quick sites, doesn't mean that spam on a 5+ years registered domain is ok, or that simply claiming a domain for 10 years, somehow signals quality to Google.

You only have to worry about registration dates, when you know that you deliver low-quality content and you don't want to be found out soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Unfortunately, I have to agree on much of the advice.

Especially, I just hate how much google gives credit to the terms which are in the domain name. Why is having been able to register a "good" domain first such an important signal about site relevance? On many searches the first page is full of "keyword.com" "keyword.net" "keyword.it" websites that were only made for SEO and Adwords and have no usefulness.

<comment><USER15> This is something Google are surely working on, or, i hope they are. As much as the topic of SEO fascinates me, when it's successful it can be so deleterious to the quality of results. Google search is practically useless, for many searches that i'd do which i'd imagine are common enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> @dikbrouwer: Was the talk recorded, if so is there a youtube link?

@patio11: could you make your presentation / slide deck available for those of us who were not fortunate enough to attend in person.

<comment><USER12> No recording that I'm aware of.

<comment><USER29> Thanks. Any idea if the deck is available anywhere?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> People should realize he is just telling you how to build a good website, remove any mention of SEO from this article and you will see my point.

<comment><USER31> Build a good website, as in adding lots of "content" with [your product] for [Healthcare|Pets|Education|Halloween]? That doesn't sound like building a good website -- to me, it sounds more like spam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Where is a good place to hire someone to write 5 pages of content for $100?

<comment> barry-cotter Email me and I'll get back to you. Or elance.com, vworker.com or odesk.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Whoa, patio11 is in Mountain View? Want to get lunch?

<comment><USER12> He's back in Japan now. He was here about a week ago.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the summary and write up - incredibly useful. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Nice article

<comment><USER36> Great talk Patrick! I love the pic from dinner in you blog Melissa!

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Awesome! Thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER38> Patio11, thanks for coming!!!</comment>


UnifyID wants to bury the password once and for all - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/12/unifyid-wants-to-bury-the-password-once-and-for-all/ <comment><USER2> Seriously. Just stop.

Strong hashing service-side and strong random password generation client side (coupled with usable password management) is a solution that works literally right now.

Its also very easy to explain technically, and reasonably easy for security researchers to verify claims (ie hashing algorithms, source of random passwords, password manager storage method, etc)

This will almost certainly be covered by patents, and honestly how can anyone possibly analyse the security of this method without inherently trusting what the authors say or becoming an expert in the field themselves.

This also sounds like too many failure modes. Hurt your leg? Sorry no email for you this week. Got a blister and can't type the same? Sorry no logging into your banking site.

What happens about people who can't walk and/or don't type directly?

If the effort going into these ridiculous efforts went into giving more users access to a decent password manager the problem would be solved in no time.

</comment><comment><USER3> > With UnifyID, instead of supplying a password, the system begins to build an > understanding about who you are, the devices you use, the places you go, the > sensors you interact with throughout a day, even the way you walk and the > cadence of your typing.

Oh, so it's a cheap excuse to aggregate a huge amount of personal location data, activity logs, and a keylogger. This is exactly the data needed to build a _very_ accurate pattern-of-life profile. Sure, you could probably make a reasonable estimate if the right person is trying to authenticate, but that's _obviously_ not the goal.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone have (referral code/secret handshake) for the same?</comment>


How Emacs changed my life - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/yukihiro_matz/how-emacs-changed-my-life? <comment><USER2> 75 slides to convey an impression which could have been spelled out in a paragraph or two...

Anyone with a slow connection knows what I'm upset about.

Needless to say, I quit when I was about 24 slides into the presentation.

<comment><USER3> Sorry to disagree, but

1\. The transcript of the entire slideshare presentation is below the slide. This is the case for every presentation on Slideshare and you can skim that if you are in a hurry.

2\. I dislike content-stuffed powerpoint slides like most viewers would. It is usually recommended to keep the text per slide at a minimum even if the content needs to be spread across many slides.

<comment><USER4> >>It is usually recommended to keep the text per slide at a minimum

The point is, slides are teaching and not information recording/storing tools.

Most people forget this plain simple fact.

First principle of giving a presentation, ensure people focus on what you say and not on your slides.

<comment><USER5> Well, then he made the right choice, because he turned his presentation into a summarised subtitle of the story he was telling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's awesome is how all of us can probably attribute similar life changes to various software discoveries.

Though it's much weaker than saying "emacs influenced the massively adopted programming language I went on to write"...in many ways, having a computer that, as is - was unable to run Doom - led me to understand good old autoexec.bat and config.sys, what extended memory and himem.sys were, mouse drivers, etc, etc.

On the emacs front - emacs lead me to realize how useless the capslock key was, rebind it to Ctrl on all of my computers, and forever make numerous typing mistakes whenever I use someone else's keyboard :) Worth it.

Good little read.

<comment><USER7> I've never understood the caps lock/control switch; swapping the ctrl and alt on one side of the keyboard just feels so much more natural to me: left thumb is alt, right thumb is ctrl.

<comment><USER8> It seems extremely awkward to me to be regularly trying to hit alts with your thumbs. In a normal typing position your thumbs rest near the middle of the spacebar. That's quite a reach, under your hand, which is trying to hit another key at the same time. Definitely worse than hitting ctrl with a pinky, at least for me.

<comment><USER7> It's less awkward on a laptop keyboard than on a desktop, but it feels pretty natural at this point (I've been using it for 7 or 8 years now). Don't you have to use your thumbs to hit alt/meta anyway?

<comment><USER8> Yes, but for that reason I always prefer when things use ctrl as a modifier instead of alt. So I wouldn't want to do more alting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a Lisp implementation Emacs Lisp was pretty primitive then:

        * primitive GC
        * only dynamic binding (Stallman sold that as a feature)
        * no nested functions
        * no threads
        * no object system
        * no namespaces for symbols
        * implementation not independent from the editor
        * no TCO
        * slow

On the positive side it already had a simple byte code interpreter with a compiler for it and it was fast enough for some editing. Also, dedicated Emacs Lisp users managed to write some amazing code - given the restrictions.

The 'eight megabytes and constantly swapping' thing now is also of less importance. ;-)

<comment><USER10> Emacs, imho, will get a whole lot better when it runs on Guile[1]. This was a great presentation. I've been using emacs since the mid-eighties, it's so easily programmable that hackers are always hacking new things for it, so it keeps up with the latest fashion.

[1] [http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile- user/2013-07/msg0006...](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile- user/2013-07/msg00065.html)

<comment><USER11> Not sure about that. Guile is pretty old and messy itself. It's still my preferred Scheme, though. But that's mostly just because of familiarity and loyalty on my part.

There is already Edwin, which comes with MIT-Scheme. It's Emacs written in Scheme. It never took off, and most don't even know about it.

<comment><USER12> I love Edwin! It's my favorite Emacs implementation, even though I don't get to use it as much as I'd like. It even has a nice email client, IMAIL, written using a beautiful object-oriented style. Many years of Scheme wizardry lives in there, I need to spend more time studying it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Someone told me this is called "Takahashi method"[1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method)

</comment><comment><USER14> Ah, that explains Ruby's concurrency situation.

(It's a joke, I understand the difficulty involved with concurrency in interpreted languages. But given that both Elisp and Ruby are well-known for having trouble with threading, well, too hard to pass up!)

<comment><USER15> Actually there is nothing about interpreted languages which makes concurrency particularly difficult other than their history.

As an extreme example, you can run Erlang as an interpreted language and concurrency will not be a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> i think people are being too harsh on this presentation, and focused too much on the form factor and number of slides , instead of the actual content and message

i like the human factor in it, like how random and incidental stuff like being able to complete ruby-mode.el had such a high impact on ruby's syntax

and how learning a text editor inside out, eventually led to ruby, which let to RoR , most people would consider learning so much about emacs as a waste of time, for matz it helped him made ruby

this presentation is more about our human nature , this is i believe a great exmaple of when doing what you love is more important that doing whats important or what you think is right, i like it

</comment><comment><USER17> Matz gave this presentation at LibrePlanet 2012 in Boston. This talk was _the_ reaason that I decided to give Emacs a shot after being a Vim user for a couple of years. I have used Emacs every day since.

I talked briefly with Matz afterwards and he was very friendly and pleasant to chat with.

There should be audio of this presentation to go along with the slides somewhere, but I couldn't quickly locate it.

<comment><USER13> How do you feel about emacs? I am a long time vim user too. I want to hear some testimonies before investing in emacs.

<comment><USER17> I love Emacs. I'm much happier now that I live in Emacs. I work on a Ruby on Rails application at work and I use Emacs not only to write code but to run tests, use the rails console, use the MySQL console, bundle update, use git, etc.

Let's not forget the amount of customization possible with Emacs Lisp. Editing your editor is a pretty great experience. If you work with any other Lisps, Emacs is _the_ editor to use.

I don't read my email in Emacs like some people, but I do use it for IRC and it works quite well.

I could "evangelize" more, but I've done enough. Give it a shot. Figure out which editor you like more. If you stick with Emacs, be prepared for a weird adjustment period where your hands get really confused and you start mixing up Vim and Emacs key bindings. :)

<comment><USER18> Couldn't have said it better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The fact the Ruby syntax was mostly derived by what could be made to have auto-indentation in regex in a week in emacslisp is interesting. More than that, it's interesting that Matz seems to ascribe a lot of Ruby's success to it.

        If I couldn't make ruby-mode to work the syntax of
        Ruby would have changed to more C-like one too
        similar to other scripting languages as a result,
        Ruby would not have gained current popularity

I've heard that Ruby's parsing code is especially difficult to replicate.

</comment><comment><USER20> Self admittedly, I'm a newb at coding but I've tried emacs and am not a fan. I get the benefits of being able to debug and execute code immediately in the REPL, but I would much rather write code in sublime text or any other text editor. The last thing I want to do when I'm writing code is try to remember some obscure combination of keys in order to perform a simple backspace or copy and paste a line of code. Have not been convinced otherwise yet, maybe someone here can better enlighten me

<comment><USER21> >The last thing I want to do when I'm writing code is try to remember some obscure combination of keys in order to perform a simple backspace or copy and paste a line of code.

That makes me think that you really haven't tried Emacs. Backspace is just backspace. Copying and pasting is not too different than what you'd use in other software (but it can be, in many awesome ways). Do the tutorial, start using it daily, focus on the stuff you really need. The rest comes along on its own.

<comment><USER22> > Backspace is just backspace

Unless you're on the wrong terminal. (google "emacs fix backspace")

Besides, it's really a big deal that most applications in your system use one set of hotkeys, while bash and emacs use a totally different one.

<comment><USER23> What other applications are there on a system but Bash and Emacs? :P

Besides, you can tell GTK to use Emacs-y keybindings rather than the 'standard' C-v, C-x, C-c.

<comment><USER24> > What other applications are there on a system but Bash and Emacs? :P

I remember the days when it was just sh/ksh and vi in any commercial UNIX flavor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's hard to go bad on this article given the source, no?

I find it more interesting for insight into Matz than anything about emacs. The idea that his text editor got him excited about programming is pretty powerful. Yes it could have been written in a 1 page memo, but who cares?

<comment><USER26> Calling emacs text editor is huge understatement.

<comment><USER25> I meant it with some irony. As in, "What appears to be a mere text editor..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Anyone know if the Emacs source code still is a "good read"? …or has it grown too much

<comment><USER28> I read the emacs lisp code quite often. It's very nicely documented and easy to read in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is there a video of this presentation somewhere? Would love to see it.

</comment><comment><USER30> He says he understood the power of Lisp, yet he made a non-Lisp language. :P I don't get people who make non-Lisp languages.

</comment><comment><USER31> 'then i started using ruby' _subconsciously presses >>_ 'thank you.'

<comment><USER15> You misunderstood what he meant by, _I started Ruby development._

That's the creator of the Ruby language. That's when he started developing it.

<comment><USER32> it's you, who misunderstood him

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> vim is amazing indeed. changed my life too.

<comment><USER26>
        "Why do we have to hide from the police, Daddy?"
        "Because we use vi, son. They use emacs."

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> That was really really annoying and pointless. Why has this been up voted?

<comment><USER35> Because it's a poetic, hacker'ish celebration of something that all --err, _some_ of us love so dearly.

<comment><USER14> Writing a single sentence fragment per slide for 75 slides does not make poetry.

<comment><USER36> You have to realize he was probably talking about each of those points. Slides don't translate well into reading.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: UX/UI people for open source privacy projects - <AUTHOR>

Tl;DR - Please use your UX/UI skill to make open source crypto, privacy and anonimity software usable for the masses! Contact me: jurre [monkeytail] useotrproject [dot] org
Dear Hacker News,
We all have heard the story about PRISM by now. Some of you don't want to hear the story and want to focus on creating, doing what  you are good at, I can't blame you for that. Meanwhile, we can't simply ignore the story and carry on as if nothing happend.
Many of you are great designers and spend day and night working on little details to create that perfect interface and user experience for your soon to be launched adventure.
I would like to ask your experience, knowledge and time, to create usable software so we can finally email encrypted with our family and friends. <comment><USER2> If you are interested in this subject checkout "Security and Usability" by Cranor and Garfinkel.

[http://www.amazon.com/Security-Usability-Designing-Secure- Sy...](http://www.amazon.com/Security-Usability-Designing-Secure- Systems/dp/0596008279)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I will order the book!</comment></comment>