Medium releases Memberships - <AUTHOR> https://blog.medium.com/upgrade-your-medium-924b74c36552 <comment><USER2> > It's based on the premise that, instead of yet another never-ending feed, > people would be much happier with a limited set of carefully curated > stories, chosen by experts among topics we care about.

To see if this would be a feature I want, I went to Medium's "Staff Picks" page to see what they already care about. Front and center is an article about some kind of convention for twins. Also featured: a post about witches getting political and another post about design lessons learned from cats.

Not sold on Medium's ability to curate articles...

<comment><USER3> If I was Medium, I would use machine learning to curate a feed for each individual subscriber.

Their personalized curated feed is already really good. I had to stop looking at their weekly email because my clickthrough rate was too high and it was a time sink.

<comment><USER4> _" If I was Medium, I would use machine learning to curate a feed for each individual subscriber."_

If I was Medium I'd hire a team (three or four) experienced newspaper editors [0] and use their expertise to bring back some discipline back to the story process. Do you remember newspapers? There were hundreds of competing stories but the news was carefully selected on a daily basis. This is what is lacking.

The machine is being gamed. Maybe the editorial teams' suggestions should be used to train some aspects of story and category selection? Machine learning is a tool and if Facebook with all it's propellor heads have a problem, what hope have Medium? A different approach is needed.

reference

[0] Lots of newspaper people are out of work or under utilised and as such their availability is high. For example this tweet highlighting guardian journalists getting the sack: [https://twitter.com/Hadas_Gold/status/844580929226072065](https://twitter.com/Hadas_Gold/status/844580929226072065)

<comment><USER3> > Do you remember newspapers?

Honestly? No.

They're that thing my dad would buy on the weekends, read one page of, and then we'd use it for potato peels, lining the floor when painting rooms, and stuff like that.

By the time I was old enough to even consider reading newspapers, they had devolved into clickbait sensationalist garbage. Designed primarily to find whatever boogeyman would make each newspaper's audience most likely to buy the issue. For left newspapers the top story was always about a businessman doing something bad, for right newspapers the top story was about how this or that nationality is threatening our economy. Sometimes both sides had the top story as this or that natural disaster or war that happened so far away that it's irrelevant.

At least the trashy magazines were always honest about being trashy. Their top story was this or that random celebrity doing some outrageous act that nobody cares about.

Honestly, the problem is tying remuneration to readership. The other problems are emergent.

Edit: the intro of this System of a Down video sums up my thoughts excellently --> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vBGOrI6yBk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vBGOrI6yBk)

<comment><USER5> Whatever your feelings about newspapers are, they have existed for hundreds of years and learnt some incredibly valuable lessons about news, journalism, reader psychology, etc. The collective wisdom of newspapers of record could fuel countless of business ventures and avoid lots of costly mistakes.

<comment><USER3> Totally. I just don't think I've ever experienced that. For as long as I can remember news has been about sensationalism at all cost.

The question was do I personally remember newspapers and the answer is no. I remember them as a thing that exists, yes, but not as a thing that provides value.

<comment><USER6> As one of the other commenters suggested, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the Economist.

<comment><USER7> I dearly love The Economist (and, indeed, have a small stack of them about a foot from me right now), but I do sometimes get the feeling that reading a newspaper with which I agree so strongly on almost all issues (hell, even the advertising feels like it's targeted at people _just like me_ ) is probably a little unhelpful in terms of giving me a balanced perspective on the world. I'm not sure what one can do to balance this, though - I picked up a copy of Nexus ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_(magazine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_\(magazine\))) recently and that didn't really much help either, though it was pretty damn entertaining.

<comment><USER6> I have a friend who is a intelligent, die hard progressive who makes it a point to read the most extreme right wing news sites, just to glean how a person on the other side might view and construct the world.

Maybe that is a bit extreme, but I think Economists readers (I think the publication is center right?) can pick up a center left or far left publications from time to time.

<comment><USER7> It's a bit tricky to pin The Economist to either the left or the right; they describe themselves as being "radically centrist". This Quora answer from an Economist writer is good: [https://www.quora.com/Is-The-Economist-left-or- right](https://www.quora.com/Is-The-Economist-left-or-right)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Exclusive stories from top Medium writers," given the type of content Medium is prone toward, seems like less of a perk and more of a punishment.

Sure, people _may_ pay for good articles, but they definitely won't pay for a "new homepage" or "offline reading list," both of which should be _standard_ in 2016.

This does not seem like a promising solution to Medium's existential revenue issues.

<comment><USER9> Not sure why Medium wants to be a publisher. They already have other publishers using their platform. They can create a subscription feature and take a cut. Seems like they are going to compete with their most serious users.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like they want to be a curator. I agree on the idea to create a subscription feature and take a cut. Medium has such a big audience that I think publishers would gladly sell there for a % fee. If they can't do that, then they'll stick with selling exclusively on their websites.

<comment><USER11> Can't see what the advantage is to "paying the curator" though - why give up control of who my support goes to by letting them split it up amongst their 'elites', when I can just support the content creator(s) I like directly? Which these days, most people already have avenues for or can set up easily. It seems in Medium's (or any middlemen in this arena)'s best interest to avoid that truly 'frictionless' alternative and present themselves as a good compromise.

As others have pointed out here I don't see how empowering some specific group to decide is any different from a traditional publisher model, or indeed how picking a group steeped in a specific culture bubble will 'fix media'. (Though hey, I invite them to prove me wrong... Any fix would be a welcome fix these days)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And it begins again ...

Ev is not wrong, media is broken. And the advertising system that feeds it is broken too. People reading articles generally aren't interested in 'random' advertising, trade magazines do ok because if you're interested in the trade there are vendors that supply that trade who can advertise in a very targeted way.

It would be interesting to have Medium partner up with Blendle (blendle.com) where you'd pay 0.05 to read a medium article, and the standard Blendle refund rules apply. Assuming 2 cents for Blendle, 2 cents for Medium and 1 cent for the author. An article with 80,000 'reads' would pay the author $800. It would be interesting to see if the capital outlay would provide the necessary curation to insure a quality queue of interesting things to read.

<comment><USER13> > Assuming 2 cents for Blendle, 2 cents for Medium and 1 cent for the author. > An article with 80,000 'reads' would pay the author $800.

I "love" these calculations: So, you suggest it is okay that the content generator (aka author) gets 1/5th of the money readers spend, and intermediary organizations get 4/5th?

What if (in this example) Blendle and Medium somehow fail to generate the 80.000 reads - just by promoting other articles? They get their 4 cents from other content, the author of the article in the example gets nothing (or much less) - but is totally depended on Bendle and Medium promoting (and paying) him.

Why should I, as an author, support the intermediaries in this model? Wouldn't this model kill quality instead of promoting quality? As an author, I would still have to favor articles that are written fast and focus on sensationalism to make a living, not on quality, research and balanced presentation.

<comment><USER12>
       > but is totally depended on Bendle and Medium promoting (and paying) him.

What would possibly lead you to think that? All of the existing ways that the author can make money are still available to her, no opportunity has been removed. Another opportunity is simply added. If you get a chance some time pick up a copy of the "Writer's Guide" for the current year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This could have been a really smart way to get Medium started a few years ago. The way the site has been built out, though, this will be quite challenging.

Right now, Medium is a very noisy site. Noisy in a good way. Lots of energy. Lots of advocacy posts, full of swear words for emphasis. It's become a place where bold new voices periodically show up to make a statement. (Talia Jane, etc.) I try to skim it a couple times a week. Skim is the key word; the site's stories are very hit or miss. It's possible to breeze past five duds in a row so quickly that I hardly notice, and that's okay.

Nothing about current Medium feels like it has the makings of a judicious, curated concert hall of careful writing. Signing up a few famous writers won't fix this mismatch. Erratic is a big part of Medium's brand right now, and to forfeit that in a belated dash to "quality" feels dismissive of what the brand stands for.

It's really hard for me to see Medium as a place for the kind of WSJ/FT paid content that's aimed at rich high achievers who want business or lifestyle tips that the masses don't know about. It's even harder to see it succeeding as a paid online home for long, magazine-style features. Too many rivals in every genre are giving it away.

Building up a paid online audience is hard work, and it goes slowly at first. Jessica Lessin at The Information is doing it about as well as anyone, and she's defined her mission very tightly.

This latest strategy switch by Medium seems very prone to trying a lot of different formats in a hurry, without the patience to stick with one quietly for 2-3 years, waiting for the first little bits of traction to take hold.

<comment><USER15> fair observation overall, but not sure about "patience" \- in 3 years, who knows how much of current VC funding remains.

<comment><USER14> Good point. In the do-over category, starting out with a small business that could recalibrate at $500k/iteration instead of $30m/iteration might have helped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had a startup that tried something like this.

Initially we went with a similar membership concept, except people subscribed to one writer directly, and got access to the collective. It barely worked, and we moved over to more of a crowdfunding model which was about 100x more effective.

In the end we worked with major publications and hundreds of journalists, had a million dollar matching fund program, and paid out millions of dollars to writers directly, but it still didn't work as a big business.

This makes me think Medium is pretty clueless about what they are getting into - especially after raising more than $100 million.

<comment><USER17> Have always been interested in why few startups try to do this. "Netflix for journalism" seems like such a low hanging fruit pitch, at least to get funding that you'd think more folks would have at least tried.

After moving to the crowdfunding model, what was the primary problem? Were the unit economics not conducive to retaining good writers who would attract readers, or conversely was there no way to sustain a margin for the platform?

<comment><USER18> The problem is the same one that Medium will likely soon find out.

The news market is a heavily competitive one, with hundreds of sites offering everything for free with ads. As a result, most people just don't see the need to pay for news. They can find the exact same information in a million other places, and the friction from going from 'free with ads' to 'pay for content' is fairly considerable.

It's like trying to sell a smartphone app. The pressures against it are considerable due to the race to the bottom and a large percentage of people just don't see the point in paying.

So it's a business that's hard to build trust in, requires a decent amount of marketing/awareness, will attract a far smaller audience than the free sites and ends up being a difficult one to monetise properly.

<comment><USER17> Totally agree. The only advantage I could see them working is being able to act as a central platform for paid outlets.

Digital subscriptions (NY Times, Washington Post) have seen a boost since the election in the U.S., but does anyone pay for multiple subscriptions? It's frustrating - even as someone who really wants to support media - that each outlet has their own barrier.

This is so different from how we consume other media (video: Amazon Prime, HBO, Netflix; music: Spotify, Apple Music) where I can get access to a library and it makes the tradeoff with finding a free version online easier to deal with.

To my knowledge, major publishers have never tried this and they instead are caught in the digital impression arbitrage game.

Admittedly, Medium doesn't have those publishers on board but I do think that's an angle the market has not tested/figured out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > We will be routing 100% of the revenue from founding members (those who sign > up in the first few months) to writers and independent publishers who have > important work to do. Those who have hard-won expertise, do exhaustive > research, and think deeply. Those who make us all smarter. Those who > maximize our understanding of the world but _don't necessarily maximize > clicks_ — and, therefore, are at a disadvantage amongst the highly optimized > algorithm chum being slung by the truckload by low-cost content purveyors. > [emphasis mine]

Is he saying that subscription revenue is going to writers hand-picked by Medium editors and not driven by writers who have more readers? I don't get that approach. If anything, as a subscriber I'd want my subscription dollars to go to the writers of articles I've liked/recommended. Why are they demonizing those kinds of clicks?

Am I understanding this wrong?

<comment><USER20> They don't want to incentivize people writing just to get maximum clicks.

<comment><USER19> I get that, but don't you sort of have to trust that your users are smart enough to 'heart' the articles that are of value to them? It _almost_ feels like he's saying 'our readers aren't smart enough to know good writing from clickbait'. Which might be true, but that's not exactly a sales pitch that's going to make me want to subscribe.

Just take my $5 and divvy it up among all the articles I hearted. Keep it simple!

I've read so much great stuff on Medium I'd hate to see it fail. But, the hand-picked articles on the front page are almost never ones I really value. Maybe I'm just not Medium's target audience.

<comment><USER21> I'd pay to not have to spend any time deciding if an article is an actual good article or if it is just clickbait.

I read way less than I could because I don't want to spend precious minutes every day sifting through random articles. There's way less opportunity cost compared to Hacker News or even Reddit where I can get quality reading for not a lot of effort.

<comment><USER22> Want to develop a HN for writers with me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When I first got the oh so very secret and cool, private 'invite' email, I thought "Great - they are gong to reward me for being one of the first people to sign up and post articles way back when they launched!"...

Click through, and there is a vanity demo badge that says I was a "Member since March 2017" \- wait, what? Scroll down - Ah, the first ever mention of money. $5 per month. Close browser window.

Something about the way they are trying to sell this doesn't sit well with me. If it is a paid subscription, then sell it from the outset as a subscription - not some sort of chic, cool membership in a secret society.

Granted Medium has some great articles, and I will still continue to publish my thoughts there, but there are too many 'listicles' and inane 'life lesson' articles for me to spend $5 per month on the platform.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's easy to criticize Medium, and I wish they started with direct monetization earlier or went 100% native ads. Now Medium has somewhat limited choice. Reason is because it's not a publisher, it's a platform for different types of publishers.

Site-wide paywall won't work, since majority of writers do not want to limit access to their content and publish to get eyeballs. Metered access might solve that problem but a lot of testing is needed to figure out right amount of access limiting, so casual readers would never see a wall.

Premium section might work but big question is how to split revenue among writers and how to select writers. Share based on recommend count? Perhaps. How much would Medium have after payouts?

Premium feature(s) would work but what.

Giving existing, relatively big, publishers a monetization tool to create and manage subscriptions. Big question here is again, how much Medium would make after payouts?

Premium section seems like a lot of work but could work. Attracting big publishers and giving them great CMS and great way to monetize might work as well but it is a very different path.

</comment><comment><USER24> This might be misreading things, but it feels like Medium is trying to be less of a publishing platform (like a twitter), and trying to turn more into a media/content company.

Honestly I'm not sure what I'd really get from my $5. A single page browsing experience doesn't sound amazing. If anything, they should do that for everyone because the infinite scroll tends to just get people to read more.

For some of the more popular pages, like for example war is boring is one of my favs, they seem to generate a following unto themselves, probably by finding and targeting their niche audience. Most people on medium would probably find war is boring, well, boring.

It seems like the hard part is combining "thoughtful, well researched" with "interest of the reader" without becoming an echo chamber, censor, or deemed irrelevant by the reader.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's a bit dishonest that first they said they are going to develop tools for ads. They tried that and failed. Now they try to spin this as if they are on a mission to rescue the world from ads. Very dishonest.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm always dubious of startups based on how the founder wants the world to be. Even if there are a lot of people who want it to be that way too, markets have a way of foiling such plans.

</comment><comment><USER9> The page says I joined in 1970 :D [https://www.dropbox.com/s/sfa1imgle0zn6vk/Screenshot%202017-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/sfa1imgle0zn6vk/Screenshot%202017-03-22%2022.05.26.png?dl=0)

<comment> X-Istence unix timestamp 0.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. But I would hope they have my real registration date somewhere :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> >We're still writing this next chapter of Medium. Our members program is currently in limited release, but we'll open up to more readers soon. So click the button below, and we'll notify you as soon as you can join.

It really rubs me the wrong way that I have to ask to be notified when medium will be ready for me to pay for this service.

<comment><USER28> Why does that bug you? How else are they supposed to notify you without you opting in to be notified?

Or, if what you're insulted by is having to pay, how does this differ than being notified about other paid products and services e.g. the launch of the next Google Pixel phone?

<comment><USER29> It's about being made to wait to give them money.

It's like you go to the store, standing there with your bills in hand, and the guy just says 'please wait there, I'll get to you when I'm ready.' then proceeds to have a smoke break.

<comment><USER28> I see your point, but I don't think the analogy fits. In that case, it's infuriating because (a) you actually had to travel to the store, and (b) it's supposed to be open right now.

Medium's new business simply isn't ready yet. It's like the restaurant that across the street from my apartment last year and put up a "Grand Opening: March 15th" sign in February. Or Apple announcing their new iPhone before its release. Etc. Nothing wrong with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think Medium definitely needs a subscription plan of some kind. I think others are like me and would be glad to pay a monthly patronage to encourage good writing. The key is making sure the money gets to the creators so the content can drive the audience. The tricky part is doing it in such a way that the system can't be gamed.

So let's say I get 10 article credits for my monthly subscription. I'd be glad to "pay" $0.50 an article if I knew 80% went to the writer. Each writer would have to invest in as many free teaser articles that they needed to write in order develop an audience. Medium could then still recommend articles they like but I'd rather see ones that people "like me" read and enjoyed. I'd sign up for a service like this so please take my money.

<comment><USER31> > So let's say I get 10 article credits for my monthly subscription. I'd be > glad to "pay" $0.50 an article if I knew 80% went to the writer. Each writer > would have to invest in as many free teaser articles...

Isn't this just clickbait all over again? If you were actually willing to pay for good writing, a simple email address or paypal link would be enough. But you aren't, so it's not, and online writers have to do all sorts of strange things to pay the bills.

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure what you mean by clickbait. The thing I think you are paying Medium for is discovery from the user side. The writers are attracted there for the audience side. So let's say I'm an author and I put I paywall in front of my articles. How do I get 100K people to even read my free article and come to my site? I agree that if that problem were easy, I'd not need Medium. I also think that by paying for the bundle, I'm more likely to consume up to that amount meaning more writers get paid which encourages more articles and more writers to try also.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For anyone curious, here's a comparison of the signed-out, signed-in, and "members" signed-in homepage:

[http://imgur.com/gallery/h3tN3](http://imgur.com/gallery/h3tN3)

Instead of a feed of stories (recommended by people you follow) you get them in a grid layout.

Worth $5? Hell no. If I was paying for design, I'd pay it to the folks at theoutline.com (nicest media site by miles and miles). However, there are great writers on Medium and they deserve to be supported. Take my money.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not in a position to downplay or comment on Medium as a platform, as I don't actively read it and when I see posts linked to it from places like here I often don't read them, but in the articles I have read I've rarely found anything truly substantial or of note (outside of some programming articles) when comparing to more traditional news organizations like Economist or newer news organizations like Quartz, and so when I read that they want to funnel money into content that truly makes me think or learn something, I'm not sure if I buy it. Sure, I've read blog posts about postmortems and about product releases, but rarely have I found anything that makes me learn more about the world, like for example, a more nuanced understanding of the reasons behind the South Korean ex-president's impeachment. I'm sure Medium could pull it off, but I'm not convinced yet that they will.

Also, as an aside, they really should let people change the look of the posts beyond the header image. Content tends to look too much alike and while Medium's design is pretty nice, I'm sure there are content creators that would like to change how their posts look beyond the basic controls.

</comment><comment><USER33> I would like to see a pay per post model to access content from certain writers or certain collections. There is a lot of technical content shared on Medium that is really valuable, and most definitely worth paying for. I would much rather see the writers decide what of their content is worth charging for and what should be free versus Medium making this decision for the community.

</comment><comment><USER34> We'll see how this plays out. I got an invitation email from Medium to submit a pitch and compensation amount. I've received an automated response regarding the submission, in that they have a lot to go through and will only contact those they are interested in, that sort of thing.

I like the platform and how dynamic it is in a multimedia sense, yet the 'anchor' is still the written word.

This is a new time for media enterprises. Even the NYT is getting a refresh - according to Taibbi at Rolling Stone, 132,000 subscriptions in the first 18 days following the election.

There is a craving for better signal-to-noise voices. The pendulum has swung - obviously - in an extremist direction, and it will take someone of incredible merit and stature to rise above and simply, deftly, and beautifully dispatch with such rhetoric on a daily basis.

I'm pretty optimistic in Medium's chances to cultivate a new arena. Heck, even BuzzFeed is getting into the serious journalism arena.

</comment><comment><USER35> Smells like desperation, especially coming in hot after recent layoffs. Blogger didn't shatter records or change the world, and honestly we're not going to see that with Medium. I am glad they are enjoying their time in the sun though, as limited as it may be.

</comment><comment><USER10> Medium had a beta for subscriptions + monetization tools last year for individual publishers. A few examples: [http://www.poynter.org/2016/facing- shutdowns-and-stagnating-...](http://www.poynter.org/2016/facing-shutdowns- and-stagnating-readership-independent-publications-are-finding-new-life-on- medium/429164/)

The advertising part of the model may have been removed, but I think there's still value in enabling publishers with tools to sell their content directly to readers.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder what a medium + brave partnership would look like . . . For those who don't know brave: [http://brave.com](http://brave.com)

</comment><comment><USER37> I really hope this works out for Medium. Although $5/month is not a lot to pay for quality reading content (a book is like $10...) people have grown so used to paying next to nothing for content. Will be interesting to see if recent trends, like fake news and more awareness of clickbait, have people realizing that. Maybe our tastes for information will evolve like our appetite for fast food - we'll realize the crap we're stuffing in ourselves mentally. I'm optimistic.

<comment><USER38> I pay for the New York Times and Netflix because several times a week I want something that they have and that I can only get if I pay them.

I'd like for Medium's plan to succeed, but I don't feel any similar urgency about the content they host, so I'm not sure how they will get people like me to open our wallets.

<comment><USER39> I do the same as you (pay for NYTimes + Netflix). I also like Medium a lot, but can't see the benefit at this time for paying them.

On the one hand, having superstar writers/journalists might be an inducement. On the other, some of the best reads from Medium have been deeply intimate pieces from non-writers.

The publications concept in Medium has sometimes been great. I really like "Backchannel" and "Bullshitist." But these publications have a tendency to die out (eg "Matter", and some I can't remember).

It would take an amazing "federation" of thought-leaders curating phenomenal articles to convince me to fork-over a monthly fee in addition to what I pay for the NYTimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> How are they going to decide the portion of the money that goes to each writer?

If it's based on portion of page views, we're back to encouraging clickbait-- but now we're paying for it!

I'd pay the $5/month if they could convince me they've solved this problem. But to me it sounds like they'll have some "staff curation"\--which other commenters have pointed out is questionable--and otherwise just be hoping the non-advertiser revenue magically changes things.

I'm not convinced this will work.

</comment><comment><USER41> [https://twitter.com/ev](https://twitter.com/ev)

I'm not sure this is the right man to lead the "curation" of opinions. Or at least, if he does, he needs to be upfront about his own political leanings.

Social justice warfare and anti-Trumpism may make the world a better place.

But fighting democratic trends by censoring / controlling the opinions of a significant proportion of the population may also inflame rightwing opinions and give Trump semi-legitimacy.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why do I feel like this is just going to create a feeling of "serfdom" (there's got to be a word for this that stings less) of writers who choose to publish on Medium?

-asking as someone who publishes on Medium for a national sports outlet. This really worries me for that reason, and for the reason that I already find Medium's curation, or the things they tell me I'd be interested in to be extremely boring and not at _all_ worth reading.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think besides the subscription, the most important news in the post is that they are trying to kill the infinite feed and starting offering Human-Curated articles.

"the big difference is that it's not an endless feed. Instead, it's a finite digest of stories, organized into sections, and updated three times a day. Topics are different from tags because they're curated by experts in their fields and they bring the top stories directly to your homepage."

</comment><comment><USER44> $5 = introductory price. I assume it'll go higher?

"We will be routing 100% of the revenue from founding members (those who sign up in the first few months) to writers and independent publishers who have important work to do."

How much of the revenue will be paid out to writers and publishers in time?

I assume Medium wants to make money from this venture so I'll hazard a guess that the $5 will become $10, and Medium will take 30%.

</comment><comment><USER45> It would be interesting to see the shift from decades old advertising pattern to membership. I wonder what will happen to the general Internet and the future companies when advertising itself is scorned down upon. There is a reason why adverts were invented, so that every company isn't a walled garden. We live in interesting times!

</comment><comment><USER46> Hey listen man I need a business model. How about you give me your money? I got some great stories I could tell you

</comment><comment><USER47> It looks to me like they want to do a Netflix like system but for long form content. The $5 goes towards hiring a specific writer to do a specific in depth article (or series). Unless I am misunderstanding.

</comment><comment><USER48> IMHO Micro payments should have been the play here.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's based on the premise that people go to Medium's home page, and are willing to pay to do that.

</comment><comment><USER50> User since 2010 beta. Ok now I get it, new media and new business model: secret society.

<comment> angry-hacker SV has that privilege. It's s snowball effect and eventually crashes just like the rest in the graveyard I can't even remember to name. What was that platform where you were able to give kudos? Quora was shilled heavily too, then suddenly hated by everyone, etc etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> tl,dr: We're running out of money. Investors are waiting with their pitchforks.

</comment><comment><USER52> Super early--but I can share a little bit about what I'd consider the product side. In the case of Memberships, the a big part of the product is what content you're going to have access too. (And important to note, this is going to be content that wouldn't exist without memberships.)

I got tapped to be Medium's first external editor. I'm going to run a section on personal development: productivity, health, life hacking, maybe some gadgets, plus a few more crazy topics.

Medium's execution idea is to take a subject-matter expert (I run Coach.me) and give that expert a modest editorial budget and a lot of freedom. Literally, Ev's directions were:

"I'm interested in any topic you're interested in that you think matters to smart people."

I think that model of smart, subject matter experts filling editorial roles can actually work really well to produce high-quality media. The heyday of O'Reilly books (when all programmers had O'Reilly books on their desks) mostly ran this way. The main editors were also great coders. The O'Reilly conferences still run this way.

In my case, having a budget has been an amazing switch from the editorial I had been doing. It took me about three days to start sending out hyperbolic statements like:

"There hasn't been a personal development publication that mattered since Gina Trapani left Life Hacker in 2009. This could be the next one."

Experiencing the switch really highlighted for me what's wrong with the status quo.

In personal development, blogging has been completely corrupted by content marketing. Literally a content marketing company, Buffer, came in and owned productivity blogging for awhile. Look at the top productivity stories on Medium and you'll find most of the authors are marketers rather than academics or coaches.

So what you see in personal development content is articles that have been fully optimized for virality. The headline is everything. I run a Medium publication that is a group blog for our coaches (Better Humans) and we saw a 5X change in traffic after we asked writers to run their headline through an online headline scoring tool.

But... having content dominated by content marketers feels like empty calories pretty quickly. Not to be too prickly--but a content marketer doesn't have any experience with how the reader is going to implement the advice. That makes for functionally weak articles. Either the reader attempts nothing or attempts something and gives up in frustration.

A personal development article that works is actually really hard to write. Tim Ferriss does this exceptionally well. And if you deconstruct one of his posts you'll find a lot of parts to it. You can't write a short article if you actually care about changing people's lives. I've been on the receiving end of a Tim Ferriss article and those users come in hyped up to the point where they spike retention.

Maybe the current crop of content marketers don't care about impact. Or they just see themselves as the front of the funnel.

Well, here's the switch with content in a membership model. Our content is the end of the funnel. Medium already has the reader's money. So we're going to write completely different articles than anyone else because our article is the product. It's supposed to change your life on its own.

These high quality articles take time to write. The people who know how to write them are busy. In other words, I think really great content for this particular niche really can't exist in any other format. Not sure I completely made the case for that, but it's definitely what I'm feeling after a few days.

I haven't thought too hard about what other niches get transformed in a good way if you put them behind membership. I know people are mentioning news. That experience seems lame to me too. But I do pay for ESPN's Insider. That's just because I'm a basketball junkie. I used to have a subscription for Rails tutorials. I would pay for insider-y stuff--if I love your book and you have a paywall for your daily blog then I'll pay. Mostly, I think this just comes down to any other pay product: if the content is the type of content I love and is trustworthy and is higher quality than I can get anywhere... of course I'd pay for that.

</comment><comment><USER53> they really should have done a token model on Ethereum, loosely similar to Steemit. That would have been interesting.

This "pivot" is just about Medium being a better magazine editor than the current magazines.

<comment><USER54> I was hoping for the same thing.

Wondering if the click bait type articles this might promote was a reason to not pursue this direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Patreon but instead of a single creator or publisher, you patronize Medium. That's a start, and in the future they may launch something more targeted. But:

>Media is broken. And we need to fix it.

Medium is broken and needs fixing.

Medium has no journalism and no good writing. It only has _content_. Content Marketing. Either for companies or for individuals.

Subscriptions are a way of fixing this - but get off your high horse first and get introspective. Medium is _worse_ than BuzzFeed and Business Insider as it stands.

<comment><USER56> _Medium has no journalism and no good writing._

This is wrong. [https://theringer.com/](https://theringer.com/), for example, is hosted on Medium.

<comment><USER57> Go back and reread any of Rembert Explains America on Grantland. There's nothing even approaching that on The Ringer.

Sure Grantland had a lot of silly pop culture stuff, but it had good journalism and writing, too.

It's really sad that Bill Simmons seems to truly believe people only want the short, superficial shit that's on The Ringer.

<comment><USER56> Critique the quality of The Ringer compared to Grantland all you want. I'll agree with you. But The Ringer isn't content marketing.

<comment><USER57> I didn't call it content marketing, I called it "short, superficial shit".

<comment><USER56> Dilemma called it content marketing. My comment was in response to that original assertion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Url changed from [https://medium.com/membership](https://medium.com/membership) to one that gives more background.

</comment><comment><USER59> Medium STILL crashes Safari 9 on Mac. The only website that does this, for months and months. Congratulations guys, I don't know how you do it!</comment>


Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6582/learning_from_the_masters_level_.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraFeatureArticles+%28Gamasutra+Feature+Articles%29

<comment><USER2> I still remember saving up for Zelda and finally opening up that gold NES cartridge. IMO the original Zelda and the follow-up SNES version are among the best games ever made.

The opportunity to explore and build your character was amazing for its time. The replay value was so high opposed to other popular NES games that required you to start from the beginning each time you turned it on. Zelda is a great case study for new game designers to learn from.

<comment><USER3> It's amazing that they knew what they were doing 25 years ago! Where did they have their knowledge from? They were pioneers!

I always thought "it just worked" and they analysed it afterwards, silly me :)

<comment><USER4> Electronic games, esp console versions isn't where this knowledge was learned/pioneered.

Numerous PC and even "mainframe" electronic games predate LoZ. Pen & paper "adventure" games are 40 years old at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This type of analysis can be performed for any of the early Nintendo-designed NES games. They knew what they were doing. The first few levels of Super Mario Brothers are ingenious at how they subtly teach the player the context of the world and the physics of moving Mario. It is the artistry of these subtle touches that distinguished these games from ordinary, competent platformers long after they'd been knocked off to oblivion.

</comment><comment><USER6> _"In most modern games, there would be fewer enemy types and the rooms would ramp in intensity by combining monster types together."_

This is a very interesting observation. It seems that modern open-world RPGs (Skyrim, for instance) have opted for larger and more elaborate worlds at the expense of enemy variety. This is probably the result of the "territory race" that has been taking place in the genre for well over a decade now: each new RPG is expected to have a world twice as big as the last. The player's sense of novelty, and of world scope, is more easily cued by landscape ("room") variety than by enemy variety -- and so, focusing resources on landscape variety usually yields better payoffs.

Even still, I can't help feeling that something has been lost along the way. While I am extremely pleased with the immensity and variety of modern-day world maps, I _do_ notice the emptiness of them, or the repetition of NPC and enemy types. (While enemy level-scaling is a nice feature that keeps enemy encounters relatively fresh, it can also be a crutch that keeps developers from thinking about variety of encounter design).

</comment><comment><USER7> "It is possible to achieve the feel of non-linear level design by taking a linear path and adding short offshoots."

also called a "maze".

"As with the other levels, there is a minimum amount of re-traversal required to get through this level, as the critical path is extremely linear."

"The flow is generally linear and ramps well, as with Level 1, but the designers stop the player in Room 6 and won't let him continue until he gets the ladder in Room 8."

"One surprise was that the silver arrow is not technically on the critical path even though you can't beat the end boss (Ganon) without it."

So we see that these mazes are linear, except in parts where they have branches, and some branches are required, and there are a few loops.

So, what exactly is the point of this analysis? That this great game has structure, and isn't a completely open world? OK.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is minimal dead space (i.e. space not on the critical path) not a design criteria? In level 9 (in the appendix[1]), for example, there seems to be a large amount of space that isn't on the critical path at all. I understand that this increases the non-linearity of the level, but it seems to me that it would also significantly increase the amount of re-traversal required to get through the level.

[1]: [http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/6582/Zelda-L...](http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/6582/Zelda- Level-9--Skull-med.jpg)

<comment><USER9> Arguably more dead-space later in the game makes sense. You want to make it really hard to get lost early on, but start to make it harder later on.

<comment><USER10> Also you want a feeling of greater size in the later dungeons, for aesthetic reasons. They're supposed to be more important and powerful as you go on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The amount of entertainment I got out of these classic games is in many ways the same, if not more than I get out of modern RPG and FPS games. The graphics have gotten way, way better but the fundamentals that make it fun are the same. In fact some modern games, even though they look great, they just aren't as much fun to play.

Those old games seem a little slow now because the bar has been raised as far as speed and eye candy. But the amount of thought and craft that went into them made them so much fun to play.

</comment><comment><USER12> The comment on the article about all the maps fitting together reminds me of html/css sprites. clever use of 1 file for multiple uses. great article. never knew this stuff...

</comment><comment><USER13> Zelda took place in Hyrule, a land which I would years later learn is topologically a torus.

<comment> T-hawk Not exactly. A rectangular world that wraps around on both axes is indeed a torus, and appears in many video games, but not Zelda. Hyrule in each of the first four Zelda games in 2D is a flat rectangular world with impassable edges. (Perhaps a game cheat device could let you walk through a wall and wrap around the edges; it's arguable whether that would mean the world is toroidal.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The only thing I can think of is:

10th Enemy Has the Bomb</comment>


Embed iPhone/iPad YouTube Videos - found good solution - <AUTHOR> http://techdrawl.com/D-Boards/2-Developers-Corner/iPhone/iPad-embedding-YouTube-finally-the-right-w#12

<comment><USER2> great how-to...</comment>


Kevin Rose on Why He Won't Sell His Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rutkt/bitcoin_is_falling_again_here_is_why_it_really/

<comment><USER2> He tried to time the market and sold his bitcoins at $300 on November 8.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1q6z18/kevin_rose_f...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1q6z18/kevin_rose_founder_of_digg_just_tweeted_that_he/)

</comment><comment><USER3> What a hypocrite: [https://twitter.com/kevinrose/status/398865551730036736](https://twitter.com/kevinrose/status/398865551730036736) — Kevin Rose sold some Bitcoin's a little while ago. Seems he's on both sides of the fence, one of those sides being people who want to make a quick buck selling Bitcoins as an investment medium and the other side as someone who wants to see an alternative currency thrive.</comment>


Show HN: API for medical guidelines - <AUTHOR> https://getguidelines.com/ <comment><USER2> This is neat. I'd love the API to be public to try out the GET requests in the browser without logging in.

I don't have a use for something like this now and most other developers probably don't either, but if you gave us the chance to play around with it with zero friction, I'm sure ideas would come up that led to products that benefited you.

It takes a long time for niche products like this to gain traction and eliminating friction is the lowest cost way to expedite that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'll be thinking about a way to play around with it sans authentication. But just to clarify, you can try it out in the browser after getting a token. The sign up doesn't even have a captcha, and it's free, so while not 100% frictionless, it's pretty darn close.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here, happy to answer any questions. I'm sure there are some things I could have improved, but at a certain point it's better to push it out into the wild. All comments, suggestions, criticisms are welcome.

<comment><USER3> 1\. The menu drawer has a transparent background, don't know if you've left that intentionally. Looks confusing.

Although you've done a good job at explaining, I still find it hard to imagine an application for it. Maybe it's just me.

Either way, what's your motivation, what got you to build this and what's the purpose you see it serving best?

<comment><AUTHOR> The menu transparency resolves on mobile once you move down the page, but yeah, I appreciate the observation.

Good question about motivation: I was tasked with incorporating guidelines for a patient intake system, and decided to spin it out into a dedicated service. It's also being used in an EMR integration for their patient portal solution. And I use it every day in clinical practice myself, via postman.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Pay to leak details of iTunes purchasing history to your bank - <AUTHOR> http://ralfrottmann.net/apple-pay-to-leak-details-of-itunes-purchasing-history-to-your-bank

<comment><USER2> It doesn't say it leaks transaction history, the text says it will tell the bank if you have a long history of purchases. I presume this purchase record is to validate the authenticity of the card (if you've made a lot of purchases on the card over a period of time, it's pretty safe to say it is indeed your card). I can't see how the /contents/ of those transations are leaked via this route, or even what remote stretch of reasoning would indicate it. No bank cares what apps and music I buy, but the bank would care if I've only used it for the last 15 minutes or if I've used it for the last 5 years as a risk- calculation element.

</comment><comment><USER3> "(such as the name of your device, its current location, or if you have a long history of transactions within iTunes)"

Security, perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER4> The title of the article currently has a trailing "?" which changes the meaning somewhat.</comment>


Ask HN: What industries are worth specializing in as a developer? - <AUTHOR> What industries would you recommend to programmers who want to combine domain expertise with software skills? I'm not the best programmer, nor the best domain expert, but I've gotten some great results from combining these two. I've also learned that there are large differences between industries; in how much room and motivation for innovation there is, in how much they value software, how much corruption and politics you'll encounter, and so on.<p>Are you in an industry where you wish you had more motivated developers? Are there some industries where new or better software would have positive societal impact? Do you have bad experiences from some industries? <comment><USER2> InfoSec above all</comment>


It Is Time to Address Airborne Transmission of Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa939/5867798 <comment><USER2> I read it. No hard data presented save for a couple of findings. Key aspect of the message: following the precautionary principle. I can expect governments to act on that, but not scientists.

I'd have expected an appeal to study more on that instead. The precautionary principle is absolutely not scientific.

</comment><comment><USER3> Astonishing that after six+ months of worldwide research on war footing we are still learning new aspects of COVID-19.</comment>


Tips for Spackling and Plastering a Black Hole (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.his.com/~pshapiro/spackling.html <comment><USER2> I kind of miss when people just wrote stuff and put it on the internet, without needing to fuss around with blog frameworks, social media, or SEO.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure if I'm missing something but from the plain reading of it it's not that funny of a joke.

<comment><USER4> It was mildly amusing, just chuckle a bit and move on.</comment></comment>


How Facebook Helps Shady Advertisers Pollute the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-27/ad-scammers-need-suckers-and-facebook-helps-find-them <comment><USER3> Now we see the propaganda machine at work.

Not satisfied with sticking to the important story of FB's monstrous track record with personal data, the news media must turn each cycle into a full on character assassination. Regardless of how I feel about FB, I'm more disturbed by the media pattern.

<comment><USER4> >"Now we see the propaganda machine at work."

No, it's called public interest journalism. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal it's quite logical that the public has an interest in knowing more about the inner working of of an opaque and powerful entity.

>"the news media must turn each cycle into a full on character assassination."

A "character assassination " by its very definition is an attack on a singular individual. You can not have a character assassination on a corporation.

>"Regardless of how I feel about FB, I'm more disturbed by the media pattern."

I'm more disturbed by your labeling something as "propaganda" simply because you yourself didn't feel it merited reporting on.

<comment><USER3> > No, it called public interest journalism.

There is little to no "public interest journalism" anymore, only click interest journalism.

> You can not have a character assassination on a corporation.

This is metaphor for the pattern of behavior. They are taking the same methods they use for the news cycle's "horrible person of the week" and turning it on Facebook.

> I'm more disturbed by your labeling something as "propaganda"

Considering the media's hyper focus on how the RNC used FB with the CA story, and an almost complete omission of how the DNC did the same thing, and more, with CTR, I'm comfortable sticking with "propaganda".

<comment><USER4> >"There is little to no "public interest journalism" anymore, only click interest journalism."

What an incredibly uninformed and naive statement to make. Just because inferior sources of something are abundant does not mean that quality alternatives don't exist. This is as absurd as drawing the conclusion that fine dining doesn't exist any more and pointing to the prevalence of fast food restaurants as evidence of this.

There is no shortage of quality public interest journalism or entities committed to it. Here are some examples - The Marshall Project, First Look Media and ProPublica.

>"Considering the media's hyper focus on how the RNC used FB with the CA story, ..."

There was no mention of the RNC in the news piece being discussed here.

<comment><USER5> if the article had done minimal research, they would have included taboola, which is the affiliate scam of news publishers. the fact that they didn't hint that this thread assumptions are correct, and you are being slightly naive

<comment><USER4> So a 3,500 word piece that written over a 6 month period is suspect because a single vendor was omitted from the piece during? Right. It sounds like you definitely naive about both how the editorial process and how journalism works.

<comment><USER5> 6mo and missed something under their nose that plays a huge part on the topic... but I now know the scammer latest diet at least :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The guy featured in the article is using Facebook as the bad guy instead of him. Just because Facebook allows you to post these if you are tricky enough doesn't mean Facebook is responsible for people being scammed by them. It is a weird type of projection or something like that -- a denial of responsibility. Weird guy.

<comment><USER7> It's becoming pretty apparent that regulation is necessary in the advertising space. Left to their own devices the biggest, most well-funded ad companies are doing little to combat scams, misinformation, and outright fraud.

> It is a weird type of projection or something like that -- a denial of > responsibility.

There's denial of responsibility at every level. What's funny is that Facebook has absolutely taken on the responsibility of censoring content - <USER2> nudity and certain other topics. But at the same time has denied responsibility for misleading or fraudulent ad content that gets on its site. I think the difference is that one is cheap to do (object classification via machine learning) and the other would require some real manpower.

<comment><USER8> Not sure it would require more manpower, but it would surely decrease their revenues.

People refuse to accept it, but there's a reason there used to be millions of spam messages sent out each day 10 years ago and there's probably even more sent today, we just don't see it as much. Shady business brings a lot of money. Heck, entire (smaller) countries kick-started their wealth by collecting from shady people.

<comment><USER9> > Heck, entire (smaller) countries kick-started their wealth by collecting > from shady people.

I have no doubt, but am very curious to read more if you've got any examples.

<comment><USER8> Cyprus is a somewhat classic example: [https://euobserver.com/justice/139688](https://euobserver.com/justice/139688)

Malta seems to be doing something similar.

Switzerland was quite prosperous but it upped its level by 1 notch by being neutral (and therefore both safe from destruction and a safe haven during 2 world wars) and also through some "minor" dirty banking: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Jewish_Congress_lawsui...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Jewish_Congress_lawsuit_against_Swiss_banks)

Basically every banking center our there hasn't really had any qualms with money laundering until international organizations put the squeeze on them. Panama, Seychelles, Curacao, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wonderful example of Machine Learning being used to harm, the banality of evil:

> Affiliates once had to guess what kind of person might fall for their > unsophisticated cons, targeting ads by age, geography, or interests. Now > Facebook does that work for them. The social network tracks who clicks on > the ad and who buys the pills, then starts targeting others whom its > algorithm thinks are likely to buy. Affiliates describe watching their ad > campaigns lose money for a few days as Facebook gathers data through trial > and error, then seeing the sales take off exponentially. "They go out and > find the morons for me,"

<comment><USER11> What in that is evil?

<comment><USER12> Using AI to weed out people most susceptible to manipulation via ads doesn't really seem to be something that falls under "good & moral" category.

<comment><USER13> There are a lot of choices on this spectrum between "good & moral" and "evil".

<comment><USER14> True, but consider the following:

1) The people _themselves_ don't know how easily they are manipulated.

2) Facebook analyses this about them, and helps other businesses to use this _against them_.

3) They do not know Facebook helps other businesses to use this against them.

That's problematic. At the very least, #3 should be solved ie. they should be informed beforehand because then at the very least they're informed about the malpractices. You can then make a case about it being allowed, or not. But you cannot make any informed case if you don't even know it is _occurring_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This actually seems more damaging and disgusting than all of the Cambridge Analytica news. Facebook employees actively working to help scammers get billions of dollars out of uneducated poor users. Despicable.

<comment><USER16> Hey but all those users agreed to have their information used this way, so what's your issue?????

/s

<comment><USER17> You call it sarcasm however it is true. Nobody forces anyone to visit that ad invested shit hole. Even less without adblock.

<comment><USER7> > Nobody forces anyone to visit that ad invested shit hole.

That's a little simplistic. In the social media space there are no widely-used competitors to Facebook. Companies that could be called competitors in scale - Twitter, Tumblr, Youtube, Snapchat - target different demographics and use- cases[1]. You're not likely to find too many older family members on Snapchat for example. Even so, Facebook also owns several former such competitors like WhatsApp and Instagram.

I try to avoid Facebook like the plague, but it gets harder every year. Just about my entire extended family currently uses WhatsApp for messaging and phone calls to save money on overseas phone bills. I'm trying to push them towards Signal - but it's like pushing a boulder uphill because all of _their_ friends use WhatsApp also.

[1] None of these vet their ads with any rigor either, by the way. If I'm looking for a company that uses personal information and displays ads carefully and ethically such a beast doesn't exist.

<comment><USER17> For me it is the exact different. More and more people are available outside of the Facebook eco system because at this point the media conception is bad enough that you don't need to argument anymore.

Due to hangouts we are all connected in a social media like but private environment anyway. This only works because nobody i know has a iPhone anymore tho.

Literally the only reason I used facebook were low effort marketing actions. However they widely lost their effect the last years.

Tldr: from my point of view it never was easier to not use Facebook.

And I highly believe everyone can just not use it if they actually wanted to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As much as I dislike facebook, a lot of these articles these days just seem like "piling on" (albeit deserved) and quite frankly unsurprising to most people _here on HN_.

<comment><USER19> Earlier I realized, the lesson to be learned is, if you have an online platform, you should care about users' privacy even if you're small, because who knows, one day it can lead to an international scandal with you as the bad guy.

<comment><USER18> So I guess at least someone here learned something from all this. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is getting annoying. Is anyone else sick and tired of the FB related propaganda? 6 out of the top 30 stories are FB related. It was like that yesterday. The day before. Usually the mods are very good about getting rid of the clutter but for some reason, FB related spam is allowed.

</comment><comment><USER21> And yet again, this is nothing to do with Facebook but the global advertising industry that is largely unregulated and has no consequences.

There is the FTC (in the US) and guidelines for TV, radio, print work well enough along with the natural time and effort barriers, but digital advertising has far greater reach, scale, and precision with almost 0 oversight. This must be fixed with actual consequences (as in prison time for offenders who run scams and malware) otherwise nothing will change.

</comment><comment><USER22> There is one thing i don't get : If users get scammed by a facebook ad, they should lose trust in the platform, and share that mistrust. I get that you can earn some money with new users as they enter the platform, but after a while, you should not find any more suckers, because every one will be educated (at a cost of a cheese)

</comment><comment><USER23> I see lots of Russian scam ads ("earn money easily blah-blah") on Instagram (which uses Facebook's unified ad network). Other category of ads I see here often are ICOs.

</comment><comment><USER24> A bit off topic, but, is logging off from a facebook account in the browser enough to stay away from FB's radar or they can still track users through scripts running on others websites?

<comment><USER25> People run the FB pixel scripts on their site</comment></comment>


Google App Engine provides Full Text Search API (experimental) - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/search/overview

<comment><USER2> This is pretty cool - Since they're running Python, can I use this for Ruby apps as well?</comment>


Show HN: Travocado – Simplify camping trip logistics - <AUTHOR> https://www.travocado.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Travocado simplifies planning the logistics of your group camping trip.

\- Send invites and collect rsvps.

\- Coordinate rides and carpooling.

\- Create lists of supplies and figure out who's bringing what.

\- Plan meals and schedule of activities.

\- Submit expenses and calculate how much each person owes.

\- Chat real-time or offline with other trip members.

\- Receive regular email updates on recent chat activity, the progress of planning, and your own personal to-do list.

\- An email at the end of the trip tells each person how much they owe and the methods by which they can pay the organizer.

\- Works for camping trips, Coachella, Burning Man, any type of coordinated group trip!

I'm a solo developer/designer/entrepreneur and this started out as a learning project so I could learn node, react, postgres, isomorphic rendering. It turned out to be a solid idea so I quit my job and have been working on this full-time for the last few months.

We just came out of private beta and now looking for a wider audience to give us feedback and help guide us to be the trip planning tool you've always wanted! (I'm not a designer by trade so I'd love feedback if the UI is confusing anywhere.)

<comment><USER2> Interesting concept, but the UI is a little confusing, or maybe it's just that features aren't functional yet. The primary navigation is not apparent to me.</comment></comment>


Almost 40% of HN users block Google Analytics, how we learned to adapt to it - <AUTHOR> https://thirtybees.com/blog/ablockers-hurt-seo-strategy/ <comment><USER2> I find it very uncomfortable that the author's solution is not just to recommend, but to implement for his platform's users, a fallback that circumvents the block and still feeds data to Google Analytics. Using Piwik grants the site owner the data they need, while respecting the visitor's choice to block Google.</comment>


One of the Milky Way's arms might encircle the entire galaxy - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2015-01-milky-arms-encircle-entire-galaxy.html <comment><USER2> Not entirely related, but the scale of this I find just mind boggling. E.g. I learned a little while ago that the universe of Star Trek just takes place in "our" galaxy alone! Not the entire universe, just our galaxy. Imagine the billions of other galaxies out there... Mind blown..

<comment><USER3> Most of it (original and TNG) actually takes place in the 'alpha quadrant' only. DS9 introduces the wormhole to the gamma quadrant, and Voyager is mostly about the trek back from the delta. Warp 9 is garbage in the grand scheme of things eh! ;)

<comment><USER4> The Milky Way galaxy is approximately 100,000 light-years long and 1,000 light-years deep (Wikipedia). edit: I'm not sure why I felt the need to write that.

Voyager was 70,000 light-years from home and it was said on the show they needed 70 years at warp 9 to get home so the velocity of warp 9 must be 1,000 light-years per year (365 earth days) plus the whole faster than light thing which disregards the usual light year in a year thing. That's 2.74 light years per day which seems low considering Warp 1 is supposedly equivalent to the speed of light.

We've been lied to all these years it's all fake man!

<comment><USER5> What part of "2.74 light years per day" seems low? Assuming your break down to the day level is right, to expand, it means at warp 9 voyager is capable of covering a distance of 2.74 light years in 1 day. That means the distance that light could travel in 2.74 years, Voyager could cover in 1 day. So warp 9 = 2.74 x 365 x speed of light =~ 1000 times speed of light. So warp 1 = speed of light. warp 9 = 1000 times speed of light. which does not seem 'low' to me.

<comment><USER6> All you did was reverse the calculation that was done in the comment you are replying to. He already stated that warp 9 is 1000 times the speed of light:

"the velocity of warp 9 must be 1,000 light-years per year"

<comment><USER5> OP points out that warp 1 is supposedly speed of light and yet some how warp 9 being 1000 light years per year is somehow not impressive enough. I reversed the calculation to point out that warp 9 = 1000 times speed of light. And want to know what part of it is not impressive enough or misleading.

And by the way OP did not directly point out that warp 9 is 1000 times speed of light and my intention was to point that out to make sure they did not get confused by their own calculation which might have led to their underwhelming impression.

Seeing OP's response to one of the comments below (warp 9 factor = 834 ) validates my assumption that OP was lost in his own calculations for a moment. Only they can confirm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've still not found anyone who can explain to me why galaxies aren't simply considered large (and 3 dimensional) accretion discs. In that regard, why would it be weird that "arms" of the accretion disc might not wrap completely around the drainspout anyway?

I guess it's not romantic to think we're all just circling a very large drain...

<comment><USER3> If it's romantic you're looking for, forget about gravity for a minute and consider the large-scale electromagnetic forces at work. The recent news about intergalactic structures in the universe (google "the great attractor" to start), our position on the edge of Laniakea and the seemingly-mirrored Perseus-Pisces supercluster, of which we are basically smack dab in the middle. Obviously not definitive by any stretch, but maybe we actually are the center of it all?</comment></comment>


On Backups - <AUTHOR> http://swapped.cc/on-backups

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to get an idea on how important an _openness_ of a data archive format is. Not in FSF sense, but practically speaking.

Has anyone had any luck/problems with transferring a history of backups from one software to another?</comment>


Ask HN: The difference between "overvalued" and "that's how much it is now"? - <AUTHOR> I'm particularly interested in housing prices, but if it's different for other industries I'd love to understand that as well.<p>It's strangely hard to find a good answer. Googling yields "housing is overvalued (2011)", ... "housing is overvalued (2014)", ... "housing is overvalued (2018)" but with no particularly rigorous explanation on why, nor the difference between "overvalued" and "yep, that's normal now". <comment><USER2> One of the biggest misconceptions about markets is that the most recent trade price is the current value. But that's not actually true – it's approximately true in heavily traded markets (like S&P 500 stocks). But for a much less frequently traded market (like brownstones in Park Slope, Brooklyn or apartments in downtown Minneapolis) where there are only a handful of transactions each week, the price doesn't actually reflect value. It reflects the most recent price paid – and if there aren't a lot of buyers, then the actual value is lower than that price.

Most people who have done a lot of options trading have seen this in practice: if you're trying to sell a really thinly traded option RIGHT NOW, most of the time the latest price is a higher than the price you'll get. That's because there was only one buyer at the time, and someone else got that person's bid. So now you'll have to go to the next-most-interested buyer, and you'll probably need to lower your asking price a bit because otherwise he or she would have been the most recent buyer.

All of this is masked in heavily traded markets. But it's a lot more apparent in housing. However, that's complicated by the fact that people REALLY HATE lowering their asking price, so instead of seeing prices drop, housing markets typically just see volume go down. And recent lower transaction prices are often dismissed by sellers ("That person was just desperate to sell, I'm going to wait for someone to pay what my house is worth").

<comment><USER3> They hate selling it for less than what they payed for it as well. Even if the market will not support that price any more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Valuation of assets typically is a function of how productive the asset is. In the case of housing, it's best to assume you're renting out the property. If you can rent a property for ~12% of the cost annually, that's probably a pretty decently priced house (your returns after maintenance, taxes, etc. would be pretty close to something like the S&P500). If you can only rent for, say, 5% of the cost annually, some might say the house is overvalued.

<comment><USER5> In the Seattle far-suburbs I'm renting at 3.36% by your metric. And people keep asking me "why don't you buy?!?" THIS. :)

<comment><USER6> Buying isn't always the best option but don't forget about potential appreciation and tax write-offs in your financial decisions.

<comment><USER7> People also forget the costs of selling a home. For example, sellers usually pay a realtor commission of five to six percent of the final sales price.

<comment><USER8> The seller's commission is always negotiable, but 5-6% is customary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Overvalued" is speculation about the future disguised as a factual statement about the present. The difference is whether the price will eventually come crashing back down. If it will, it's overvalued, otherwise it's just the new normal. Of course, that means you can't make that distinction with any kind of certainty until long afterwards.

<comment><USER10> It could be speculation about the future. Alternately, it could be a claim about an (at least somewhat) objective standard of value.

"Stocks are overvalued." How do you know? "The price to earnings ratio is too high." Now the question is, how good a measure is the price to earnings ratio? Is the "right" price to earnings ratio determined by the historical average, or does "right" change with changing circumstances?

I don't have any solid answers about whether stocks are overvalued. (My personal guess is that, in a time of very low interest rates, a high P/E ratio makes the rate of return on stocks comparable to the rate of return on bonds, and so stocks may in fact not be overvalued. But I'm not an economist or a stock trader, and I could well be wrong.) My point is that there are _some_ at-least-somewhat-objective measures of whether some things are overvalued.

<comment><USER9> There are objective measures, but how do you connect those objective measures to the price? In other words, how do you decide that a certain P/E ratio is a good objective measure, and counting the number of napkins in the company cafeteria is a bad objective measure?

In the end, it's just another layer on top of the speculation that the price will come down in the future.

<comment><USER10> Well, for P/E ratio, we have a century or more of solid data. We also have a plausible reason why it might be a measure of how overvalued stocks are. For napkins in the company cafeteria, not so much (by either measure).

The case against the P/E ratio boils down to "this time it's different". That can in fact be true... once in a while. Not nearly as often as it's claimed, though.

That doesn't mean that P/E is absolutely correct - just that it's somewhat better than random noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IMO Overvalued usually implies a comparison to something else.

For housing you could compare to: cost of renting, cost of in-fill construction, salaries in the area, cost of alternatives (eg moving, to other neighborhoods or cities).

I think these housing headlines are also basically asserting that prices will fall, which clearly hasn't been true, but is a valid statement of belief.

<comment><USER12> Yup, probably the simplest objective metric to calculate is price-to-income ratio as a measure of "overvalued" in a given location.

<comment><USER13> Not really. There's no universal law which says that bread has to be X% of local income or that housing has to be Y%.

<comment><USER12> You're right, interpreting whether a given price-to-rent ratio is overvalued or not is subjective, but calculating that ratio is (mostly) objective and can make for an apples-to-apples comparison between different locations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The problem here is a little more complex than one might think at first.

Usually when something is overvalued it means that the value it has been given is higher than what people are willing to pay, resulting in a product which has been assigned a value nobody is willing to pay. This is not always that clear cut, as some things have different values to different people. What is overvalued and probably overpriced for one person might be well within reason for someone else.

The housing market is very dependent on the location you live in so wihtout further information it's hard to say if a house is "overvalued". The price is normally closely related to the property price, so while housing might not be overvalued, property prices could very well be.

Then there are different considerations regarding the longevity of your assets (aka your house). Most things you buy are rather short lived, this is not the case for property, which can be inherited over multiple generations.

You also have to consider that the amount of land is limited (within cities) and owners/sellers are not necessarily companies trying to make a profit, so "normal" supply/demand doesn't necessarily apply in these situations and producing more (land/property) is just not doable. This also means that renting prices usually increase similarly to housing prices.

There are lots of other variables here to consider but even regarding only a few of them its already really hard to say what a house or property is "worth", so what you should much rather be asking is "what are people willing to pay/how much can they pay". If that is your question you could look at default rates and newly approved credits to determine whether people are able to pay for their house.

</comment><comment><USER15> 'Overvalued' or rather 'overpriced'?

Real estate just as any other market instrument can be objectively overpriced.

Asking price is often set higher to pad for negotiation, as giving a discount is a phychological incentive for a buyer.

As for 'overvalued', that's seems to be a subjective concept. Value is static until it's exercised. If you hold a $100 in your wallet, it does not matter (save for a fear of losing it) until you show someone else that you have it, as basis for some value transaction.

Can you overvalue a $100 ? Sure, make it a collectible, put a celebrity's signatue on it etc. Provide future reasons for it to hold a higher value. Use it as a basis to borrow $200 (even though that $100 may have being borrowed itself).

In a way, real estate has become a fiat just as the actual currency is. While the dollar is a short-time instrument so its value could be exercised immediately, real estate functions as a long-term instrument to transact for a future value. That value is in form of taxes for government, interest for banks/lenders, rent cash-flow, or a potentially higher selling price for the owner.

As for the owner-occupied house, it can be seen as being more a liability than an asset.

Do you believe that a newly listed property does not hold your expectation of its future value? Well, the seller has not promoted that value to _you_ convincingly enough.

</comment><comment><USER16> You can't claim "overvalued" unless you have a model that tells you what the price should be. That's all the difference there is, really.

Everyone telling you that housing prices in Silicon Valley are "overvalued" really are saying "it's too expensive for me". But they have no data to back it up, so they're declaring something with no proof or evidence. In order to do that you need a model to show you what a fair price should be based on the model, and how the market has deviated from that model.

<comment><USER17> The only thing that tells you what prices should be is an active market place where transactions (proportional to the number of market participants) are happening. If sellers and buyers are in agreement about the price of something, then the only other way I could see one defining overvalued (and undervalued) is over a certain time period, but then you would also have to classify what class of assets and level of risk you are comparing it to.

But in most cases, "overvalued" and "undervalued" are meaningless terms for when someone can't afford something, or someone doesn't want to sell something at a lower price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's not strange at all that there's no good answer, because if it were commonly available knowledge that something is overvalued, it wouldn't be overvalued. All investment is gambling, even housing. If you don't have a strong opinion that you are willing to bet (big) on, don't buy. Nobody can tell you the answer. If they could, and they were sure about it, they would make a bundle betting with borrowed money instead of telling you.

</comment><comment><USER19> For investments it's generally to do with 1) the risk of holding the asset, 2) the potential return on the capital invested, and 3) the difference on returns between asset classes.

Two examples: I can invest $1m into one or multiple properties. Depending on the location, I will get some yield on that capital invested -- e.g. 5% per year from capital appreciation + rent.

There are other locations where the return might be less than 5%, or more than 5%. But there are generally are reasons for that (the yield of investing in property in NYC will be lower than if you invested in say, Kiev Ukraine). It's risk reward.

Tax policies, for example, might incentivise local owners (who actually live in the property) to buy property where it is unrealistic for an investor to make money on -- if yields are 1 or 2%, one could say it's overvalued (unless we are talking about unique buildings in prime locations that are unlikely to ever decline in value).

Now a different situation: assume the stock market has declined by 40%, but property prices have not. One could say property is overvalued then (i.e. not the best asset to invest money in). As the spread between valuations and yields between different assets increases, some assets could be overvalued when comparing them to others.

</comment><comment><USER20> Start here: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUkh9m2BorqkNzSSPrCDk...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUkh9m2BorqkNzSSPrCDkO2jlufVCinVw)

This is a class on valuation. Very interesting and teaches a lot of important concepts.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think with housing you could consider it as overvalued because the product hasn't changed much while at the same time its price has increased a lot. Another indicator could be that for most people the share of income they need for housing has increased. In 2008 an indicator may have been that a lot of people relied on ever increasing prices in order to afford their mortgage debt.

But in the end "value" is highly subjective so there is no clear method to determine if something is overvalued.

</comment><comment><USER22> As you know, there's a difference between price and value. A price is the inefficient maximum of what the market will pay for an asset. So if there's an influx of wealthy people to an area (or cheap subprime credit), properties will ride a wave up as those credit-flush buyers compete for a limited pool of homes.

But my home doesn't generate cash flows, so it's impossible to say the home is "over valued" because there is no objective benchmark. Perhaps someone is selling my great grandfathers homestead. it will be "valued" more highly by me, and I may "over pay" because I want _that_ property. Or there is only one property available per year in a small neighborhood and I _must_ have it. The value is psychological.

At a market level, look at the percentage of household monthly income spent on housing to gauge the market's mood. If that strays from historical norms, it's possible that the market is temporarily overheated.

Keep in mind that historical trends are distorted by the recent zero-interest rate policy from the Fed, too.

[https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue- bri...](https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue- briefs/2016/03/household-expenditures-and-income)

</comment><comment><USER23> In a free market, things can only be "over valued" if the buyer is misinformed. If a home buyer believes that housing prices will go up 10% next year, but in reality they stay flat, they are apt to over value houses. However, if they believe prices will rise 10%, but they end up rising 20%, then they under valued houses. You can only know in retrospect if something over valued because the term implies a future outcome.

The other problem is that free markets are self correcting. Home buyers can bring down prices if the majority simply believe they will drop and refuse to offer asking price. So, anything believed by the majority of purchasing power becomes self-fulfilling in dragging prices in that direction.

With the current housing prices, the majority of purchasing power believe that houses are under valued, which is why prices continue to rise. Prices will continue to rise until the majority of purchasing power believes that houses are over valued. Only history and an arbitrary future reference point will tell us if they were right or not.

<comment><USER24> It's the "maximum price the market will accept" pricing you describe the only possible pricing method in a free market in your opinion?

Over-valued could be that players in the market are able to raise the price through, for example, manipulation of scarcity (actual various types of scarcity may be the only way?).

Or it could be that the seller seeks a certain profit that is [viewed as] excessive compared to the labour and material costs. The product is desirable, but the capital holders control the price ensuring large profit whilst keeping low wages for those who are actual creating the value.

House prices in the UK were hugely inflated by the buy-to-let market which increased scarcity of buying options whilst simultaneously increasing rental costs in order to cream off more wealth from the poor tenants and pass it to the middle classes. Rentals became overvalued because now the cost includes not only the cost of provision of a home but the unnecessary cost of paying your absentee landlord an investment premium. The middle class cornered the market, by generating an artificial scarcity of affordable housing.

The more wealthy can buy high street property -- keep rents high, occupancy doesn't matter because they get a reasonable return in asset value just by sitting on the property. High Street rentals are over valued.

<comment><USER17> Capital holders can only ensure a large profit because those who are creating the value aren't themselves valuable. The value (price) of something is how much a buyer is willing to pay, not the value it provides to the buyer. Therefore the low wages are due to a surplus of labor. Not that this is a good thing, but I think it's important to point out because if we want to fix low wages, then we have to target the supply of labor. Give people mandatory six weeks of paid leave, 1 year of maternity/paternity paid leave, and watch wages go up automatically as capital owners have to adjust to less supply of labor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Two thoughts on housing:

1) One component of housing is how much money banks are willing to loan for the house. So 'easy money' environments will boost prices, apart from the quality and size of the house, the desirability of its location, and the circumstances of the buyer. In the mid 2000's, a lot of loans were made based more on bank's willingness to lend than on the other factors.

2) To hold on to a house, someone has to pay the carrying cost. If the carrying cost goes up past the ability of the owner, the house is sold or foreclosed on (or rooms are put on AirBnB, etc). In 'easy money' environments like the one created in the early 2000's and sustained since then, carrying costs have been kept low. If they go up, as they did briefly during the financial crisis, house prices will drop. The pattern seems to be to keep the money easy, so it's hard to say house prices are too high, even though their traditional relationship with income is out of whack.

</comment><comment><USER26> Overvalued on a personal level means something costs more than you are willing to pay and you can do without said thing. That's how much it costs means you think it's too expensive but you really want it or feel you can't do without it and you can't find an acceptable alternative for less.

I think housing in my area is overvalued because what I can afford to buy would be a step down in terms of comfort from what I can rent. I looked at some houses and checked tax records for sales history and notice a lot of houses were selling as if they grew in value 8% compounded annually. This made me think I would be buying high. I might be wrong but it feels to me that houses are overpriced. I could be wrong of course. Maybe prices increase at their current rate for 10 years. But it seems to me that the increases can't be sustained given the situation in the country (USA).

</comment><comment><USER27> Whether or not the price falls within your expected range. Prices can rise faster than someone's perception of the price range, so the conclusion is that the asset is "overvalued". In other words, "overvalued" is a subjective conclusion that is weighted by human biases. What may be "overvalued" for one person might be "undervalued" for another. Another key component is the perception/faith of asset growth. Can the price of the asset continue to rise? If yes, then it is "undervalued".

</comment><comment><USER28> on a national level, the case-shiller index should give you a good baseline for how a home's price should appreciate over the long term. homes should basically trend with inflation and, to a lesser extent, population growth (until space or other resources become a constraint hundreds of years from now).

hwever, local market conditions dictate the volatility around that trend line. SF, for example, is space-constrained, demand-driven, and limited by zoning and other regulations, so house prices will be high relative to historical trends.

appraisers use 3 methods to triangulate the current valuation of a house: (1) cost approach (how much it costs to buy the bare land and build on it), (2) sales comparison (finding recent sales for homes similar to the one you're valuing), and (3) income approach (typically the discounted cash flow of rental income). how these three approaches are combined to come to a final value is more art than science.

basically, just like economic bubbles, you can only know for sure after-the- fact if something was overvalued. you don't have enough statistical data to know if something is currently overvalued rather than within the normal volatility of the asset price.

(i used to manage the leading cost approach product)

<comment><USER29> Does energy efficiency get considered in the valuation at all?

<comment><USER28> yes, but mostly indirectly.

both cost to build (both materials and labor) and sales price will be a little higher, typically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Housing is overvalued because the interest rates are very low compared to what you can see historically. A lot of people are expecting a serious credit crunch in the next few (max. 10) years which mean that housing prices will decrease significantly compared to the current prices.

<comment><USER31> And then we can tell our kids about the great crash of XXXX, in the same manner as we were told by our parents.

Some things are cyclic and out span most people's memory/life.

Luckily, humanity learns from its mistakes, and people write down what happened in history, so we don't need to worry about where we are going.

<comment><USER32> Writing things down is nice, but is sadly inadequate unless enough people later _read_ what was written, and in a timely fashion, and the act on it. Otherwise you just have what we've dealt with for millennia, a record of history repeating itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> For a lot of economists price == value, so it doesn't really make sense to say something like a house is overvalued. This is particularly true with liquid, well traded securities like US equities. That's not to say the current price (value) won't ever change but -- generally -- you can't make consistent, exploitable predictions about them. Prices for equities generally take a "random walk" from where they are at any given moment.

For an interesting discussion about when and when this isn't the case the book Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky is pretty good.

[https://equilibriabook.com/](https://equilibriabook.com/)

<comment><USER34> Interesting. What about in the case where something clearly doesn't have the value that the price says - i.e. the dutch tulip bubble?

<comment><USER35> It's the same answer. The idea is that the free market acts out its own price- discovery mechanism and assets are valued in relation to what speculators / investors are willing to pay for them.

This is an interesting segway into auction theory and Dutch vs English auctions in particular, if you are interested: [https://mikebrandlyauctioneer.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/engli...](https://mikebrandlyauctioneer.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/english- auction-versus-sealed-bid-and-dutch-auctions/)

<comment><USER24> * segue

I only realised the pun in the product name when I first saw someone make this homophonic substitution error.

<comment><USER35> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> housing isn't just a financial investment. people factor in the benefits of living at a certain place over just the investment value. to a person who will live and earn a big salary at a place with a lot of good jobs or send their kids to good schools, the place is worth a lot more than to a landlord who can only rent it out. of course that can push rents up, letting investment value catch up, however that's only the case if there is no supply.

</comment><comment><USER37> Value is an expression of utility. "Overvalued" means it's not as useful as you thought.

 _Either you got a great deal, or you got robbed._

</comment><comment><USER38> This person probably lives in Seattle.

</comment><comment> gm-conspiracy Ease of financing?</comment>


"Hello, I am not real programmer [...]" - <AUTHOR> http://foicica.com/lists/code/201502/2344.html

<comment><USER2> And here we have a rare sighting of the hermit programmer...</comment>


Ask HN: When does the "Who is hiring" post kick in? - <AUTHOR> I thought it was supposed to be automatically generated at midnight on the first of the month? <comment><USER2> in ~40 minutes: [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring)</comment>


Visualizing Hash Functions - <AUTHOR> http://gfredericks.com/gfrlog/98

<comment><USER2> he says

>I'm hoping this sort of diagram can give an appreciation for how complex hash functions are, both absolutely and relative to each other

but it seems like the images are designed to make them look much more complex than they actually are.

On the wikipedia page the pseudocode for sha1 is just 64 lines of fairly straightforward code. Also, 90% of the circuit diagrams are just loop- unrolling. Wikipedia has a much simpler diagram [1] of a single iteration that is a lot more enlightening.

It seems like the only goal of these diagrams that succeeds is

> be fun to look at. I love things that give a sense for how crazy-complicated > computers look from certain angles.

But that's quite a feat in and of itself :)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SHA-1.svg>

<comment><USER3> also, on the md4 diagram, it seems like most of the left column of vertical lines are carrying zeroes, so do not affect the output.</comment></comment>