Ask N.YC: How hard should we work to support those who don't use cookies or javascript? - <AUTHOR>

...or who don't use css or who use a really low resolution?<p>what does today's audience expect? <comment><USER2> It might just be me, but it sounds like you're asking "how much should I sell my car for" without telling us what kind of car you're selling. Ok, ok, maybe that's a bad analogy. Honestly, at this point in my development career when I'm designing a first iteration of a web app, I don't even worry about people with 800x600 rez, or no cookies, or no Javascript. Again, it might just be me, but that's like worrying about scaling to 1 million concurrent users when you're first building your app - not worth the time. Sure, it would be nice, and sure, some gov't agencies (I've worked for one, the Florida Division of Emergency Management) require adhering to some handicapped guidelines. However, you time is _valuable_. Keep that in mind. You're trying to maximize the total utility to your users, and making 2 complete apps for JS/No JS (a la GMail) isn't maximizing your time. Later, when you have xx,xxx,xxx users - yeah, go for it; you could be turning away thousands of non-JS users. But, let me ask you, do you have 1E8 users? Don't initially spend 20% of your time on 2% of your audience...

</comment><comment><USER3> That really depends on what you're building.

Using cookies to run sessions is pretty much the norm, so trying to support stateful application behavior for people that refuse to use cookies sounds like a good way to waste a lot of time.

JavaScript .. well, if you're a public website then the whole thing should just work without JS and degrade gracefully where you do use it.

Having specific functionality JS-only is fine for certain applications, but it's considered good form (and for some government contracts - a requirement) to present an alternative non-JS interface for accessibility purposes.

Check out <http://maps.google.com> with JS disabled, for a good example.

<comment><USER4> > trying to support stateful application behavior for people that refuse to > use cookies sounds like a good way to waste a lot of time.

Some frameworks handle this automatically. At worst, you append a parameter to each internal URL.

> JavaScript ... considered good form

Making your website degrade also helps visibility in search engines. Feel free to ignore this consideration but those who provide graceful degradation will have a small and sustained advantage over your efforts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's good to make content accessible without cookies, js, etc so that it can easily be crawled by Google. I wouldn't waste time making the interactive parts work without it though.

Moving the session cookie into the url is a bad idea -- it creates security holes (urls leak via referrers). Ironically, fear of cookies has actually hurt privacy and security.

</comment><comment><USER6> This came up at the hackers meetup in london last night.

Its a matter of the extra dev time vs reach of audience, which varies from site to site, I would say on average, I assume a reasonable resolution, with js and cookies enabled.

I dont think every person crippling functionality to cater for the maximum possible market is a good thing for the individual sites or the industry in general.

flickr came up as an example, but when flickr launched their 'organizr', you could count a handful of large sites that used heavy js / ajax interfaces, there were also a large number of photo sharing sites, while it wasnt the reason flickr won the photo sharing wars, providing an incredibly powerful and usable tool to let people work with their photos gave them a very good start.

Obviously for some sites (wikipedia) catering for handicapped users provides a huge benefit with very little negative impact on the standard user.

However I dont think a strict requirement, and if your application benefits a lot from scripted interface elements, go for it. If everyone sat and served static text pages. handicapped users will never get to enjoy the benefits of a fully featured scripted interface that will inevitably be created through new demand.

<http://ejohn.org/blog/ajax-accessibility/> is also worth a read

</comment><comment><USER7> Personally I expect cookie support since it's much harder to support a login mechanism otherwise.

On the other hand, I'd use javascript only to enable nice interactive additional features but the site should degrade gracefully when it's not. In fact I should probably state that as: The site works normally without javascript and "upgrades" if it's enabled. The "degrades gracefully" sounds like "semi-supported, absolute last resort".

I wouldn't do an all-ajax site...

</comment><comment><USER8> It really depends on what type of site you're building. If it's a simple website where the JavaScript just makes things a little slicker or easier to use, then you should gracefully degrade for browsers with JavaScript disabled. Same with CSS and low res.

If it's a complex web application, don't worry about the people without JavaScript enabled.

As for cookies, I think it's pretty much expected that they be enabled for any sort of login mechanism. The alternative is to pass a session token around in every URL, but the moment they close the browser or open a different URL that gets lost.

</comment><comment><USER9> The most important part of the JavaScript (and Flash and Java Applets and...) vs. non-JavaScript, et al question is much less about users and much more about making sure that you site is coherently crawlable by the search engines.

If you're site isn't easily crawlable by the search engines then you're pretty well hosed because that's where most users come from these days for most sites.

</comment><comment><USER10> Start by building your best thing that works for most users. Most people work in 1024 resolution or higher, and don't bother with disabling cookies or javascript. Trying to support everyone right away is just like premature optimization. Get something out first, then work to support exceptions if you see that you actually have users that would want that.

</comment><comment><USER11> The simple answer is it's all about optimizing. Does making the screen wider make your product more appealing to the 97% of people with >=1024px wide screens? It wouldn't take much to compensate for the 3% of people who have to sidescroll.

Same with Javascript. Who in your audience doesn't have that? If you're building an app people will want to use on mobile phones, clearly you should have an html only view. If you're making a project designed mainly for desktops, then 99% of people have js and cookies on. If it adds any good functionality at all, it has to be worth it.

The question, as posed, is to generalized to have a meaningful answer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Frequently your low resolution visitors are vision impaired and compensate by making bigger pixels.

</comment><comment> mark-t Who's your audience?

</comment><comment><USER13> JS' foremost use is to serve ads. I block JS using NoScript. So, I conjecture that a lot of people block JS for the same reason.

<comment><USER14> It seems like it'd be a lot easier to use something like Adblock to block ads - if you block Javascript you can't use GMail, Google Reader, etc.

Also, that sucks you were downmodded so much without replies.

Edit: I guess you could use GMail, but without the fancy look.

<comment><USER13> While it's true that JS is used for a lot else besides serving up ads, the most profitable way, on the margin, to use it (say, per line of code per site) is by serving ads. If you really disagree, let me know of a something that produces per profit per line of code!

<comment><USER6> thats a pretty strange metric to discern a technologies use. profitability per line of code is a pretty vague metric, and using the same logic you can say emails foremost use is spam, therefore block all email.

<comment><USER13> Or not. Consider:

Email is used for many business transactions, and for other types of meaningful communication between people. So, it can be estimated that email tends to enable profit due to this relationship-building and information- carrying ability.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Traveler IV, the first entirely student-designed rocket to pass the Kármán line - <AUTHOR> https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2019/05/usc-rocket-propulsion-laboratory-shatters-student-altitude-record/ <comment><USER2> Great news! There's been a bit of a space-race between universities the past few years. At the Aerospace club at Northeastern University we've spoken with people from MIT and UVM who are also making spaceshot rockets. We've been going for a two-stage solid fuel approach, some are trying liquid fuel, etc. I'm glad someone finally did it</comment>


Termshark – A terminal UI for tshark, inspired by Wireshark - <AUTHOR> https://termshark.io <comment><USER2> This is very cool. Though I've always done remote wireshark captures:

        ssh root@sniff_server_ip -p port tcpdump -U -s0 'not port 22' -i eth0 -w - | wireshark -k -i -

Source: [https://serverfault.com/questions/362529/how-can-i-sniff- the...](https://serverfault.com/questions/362529/how-can-i-sniff-the-traffic- of-remote-machine-with-wireshark#530020)

It works very well on low volume captures.

<comment><USER3> This method even worked for Wiresharking all PS3 traffic in real time for a GTA Online session, running the tcpdump on a little plastic old mipsel SoC OpenWrt router that was also doing all the routing (not a passive sniffing box), without noticeable effect on gameplay. (I was trying to detect cheaters.)

BTW, for anyone new to tcpdump, you can also specify selectors/filtering on the command line, to reduce the traffic. The filtering in Wireshark is on top of that.

<comment><USER4> online games are pretty low volume though, data is usually transmitted at a few Kbps per player. Just out of interest, how did you try to spot cheaters doing that?

<comment><USER5> Not quite in their interest to publicly explain methods of how they detect cheaters :)

It's one of best guarded secrets in gaming industry.

<comment><USER4> OP does not sound like he was actually working for Rockstar on GTA, more like a hobby project

<comment><USER3> Correct, not working for Rockstar. And I'm pretty sure R* stopped caring about cheaters ruining Online for last-gen console, shortly after that could push people to buy the game again, for current-gen. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems useful. Are there other good recent tools for analyzing network traffic? For example something more high-level than Wireshark? A common use is to zero in on the flow you're interested in, and see which party is saying what. And maybe zoom back out and pick another flow. The flow choosing part could use better UI, maybe in the form of a more high level view.

<comment><USER7> My first port of call tends to be tcpdump, with various filters and greps to pick out what I want. Usually I'm looking at RTP streams [0], so I run it through some perl to decode [1]

For wider monitoring, at key points on the network I use ntop [2] to see what's

If I want a quick overview of a given machine I load up iftop [3], which isn't very thrilling on my desktop at the moment

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/O9ekuPt.png](https://i.imgur.com/O9ekuPt.png) [1] [https://i.imgur.com/x9l0UNd.png](https://i.imgur.com/x9l0UNd.png) [2] [https://i.imgur.com/gFXAxwa.png](https://i.imgur.com/gFXAxwa.png) [3] [https://i.imgur.com/vmpgR6i.png](https://i.imgur.com/vmpgR6i.png)

All of these are trivial to install (except for the RTP perl script which I have as a custom apt-gettable package) and don't require non-standard interpreters and package managers.

Nethertheless I went to get this. I had to install 540MB of support files just to run "go get github.com/gcla/termshark/cmd/termshark". Still it compliles. Then I run it, and it shows bugger all, I suspect I need to find and install more libraries (tcell, gowid), which themselves require massive downloads.

It's simply not worth it, it's like going back in time 20 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> hi isostatic - sorry for the trouble :( I had hoped that compiling it would be quick and reliable. By default termshark will be installed in ~/go/bin/ \- though it sounds like you have it compiled, it's just not running. Send me a message if you like and I'll see if I can get it working for you. There are also pre-compiled binaries at [https://github.com/gcla/termshark/releases](https://github.com/gcla/termshark/releases)

<comment><USER7> As an old fart I expect to type "./configure; make", however it did seem to compile.

It runs, just doesn't look like it's reading anything from "sudo ./termshark -i eno1 icmp". Works fine when reading a pcap file, works fine when launching from a root session (rather than via sudo)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Drat; this was my best idea for a portfolio Rust app!

The more we do of this kind of tool in a memory-safe language, the better.

For a while, it seemed like Wireshark dissectors were second only to 2D image format libraries, for memory exploits. I joked that one way to locate and compromise a network admin's workstation would be to create a simple network anomaly that would prompt them to fire up Wireshark. :)

<comment><USER8> isn't this a go application, I did not see any rust usage yet here.

<comment><USER9> While GP wanted to write it in rust, I think they just meant it's not as useful of a thing to write (in any language) now that this implementation exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wish softwares were more often retrofitted to terminal when possible. Good work !

<comment><USER11> The terminal is Eternal. It has not changed since the Dawn of Time.

It's not retrofitting. If you make it work for the terminal it will always work from now on.

It comes outside the reaches from the graphical designers. Nothing with a graphical design survives more than 10 years.

<comment><USER12> Just because the terminal doesn't use graphics does not mean it can't be improved by visual design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have some students who are really going to dig this. I teach an introductory networking course with students that have significantly less technical background than the typical CS networks course.

A lot of the students are already feeling stretched, as this is their first deep dive into the terminal. Though I do teach them how to run a remote capture through SSH, I can imagine them finding some relief in this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Link to the project in github [0], as the site seems to be down due to the hug of death.

[0] [https://github.com/gcla/termshark](https://github.com/gcla/termshark)

</comment><comment><USER15> Hmm, XForwarding Wireshark is one of the only reasons I use XForwarding, I should see what this can do.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is incredibly useful. I spend a lot of time rsyncing captures to examine on WireShark.

This went immediately to my personal /bin/

</comment><comment><USER17> Doesn't have vim bindings :(

But handles custom rules well :)

<comment><USER18> Another vote for Vim key bindings. Think of it as future proofing. For all eternity :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wireshark is very good and this definitely looks like a nice tool, that could be a good alternative to ngrep that I usually rely on on the command line.

[https://github.com/jpr5/ngrep](https://github.com/jpr5/ngrep)

</comment><comment><USER20> I was looking for something like this just yesterday! Looking forward to giving it a try.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to everyone for the kind words and encouragement. It's been very gratifying. Now I have a good number of suggestions, and a handful of bugs to fix!

</comment><comment><USER21> Awesome work! Let's get it into Homebrew.

</comment><comment><USER8> awesome tool, termshark is 16MB after compiling and it is so handy and useful especially for servers. Using it right now.

</comment><comment><USER22> Made me a little nostalgic for our old Sniffer™. Edit: from Network General.

</comment><comment><USER23> Post your python to go urwid port gcla. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks very good! Will give it a spin soon.

</comment><comment><USER25> Really nice. Reminds me of IPTraf.

</comment><comment><USER26> That looks good! Good job.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does it require ncurses?

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks very nice, but not yet available in brew on OSX?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, I'll put that on my todo list!

<comment><USER29> Cool thanks for the work! I'll try it out once the formula is released :) (Note: I am a different person)</comment></comment></comment>


Is majoring in liberal arts a mistake for students? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@vkhosla/is-majoring-in-liberal-arts-a-mistake-for-students-fd9d20c8532e#.ekw4ut99t <comment><USER2> Yes, it's not worth the money. If you are interested in liberal arts, study it in your own time and don't put yourself in so much debt, that there will no way to pay it back.</comment>


American Meritocracy Is Killing Youth Sports - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/income-inequality-explains-decline-youth-sports/574975/ <comment><USER2> This is a good article, and the final paragraphs about the Norwegian model are welcome in a world where so many articulate criticisms fail to offer any positive suggestions.

I am not sure about the following paragraph though:

> For example, rich parents may pull special levers to get their kids into > hyper-select schools, or elite internships, or exclusive entry-level jobs. > In so doing, they—in effect— snatch precious opportunities away from the > less fortunate.

> Parenting doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, but it often is.

I find the zero-sum assumption here a little concerning. In terms of classical economics, it is a good short term assumption (there are only so many Internships or select schools) but a bad long term assumption (high profits will incentivise more school to open up; though I haven't thought about Internships enough to say either way).

Is there any evidence that these opportunities are relatively inelastic in the long run? Or that the equilibrium is relatively zero-sum? i.e. that rich families find a way to take advantage in a way that puts others down long term?</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way to accept donations? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a service that charges minimal transaction fee in exchange for giving away something valuable. Ex: 1. Free software 2. Blog Posts 3. Graphics<p>Some of the existing solutions: 1. Paypal 2. BitCoin 3. Stripe <comment><USER2> One option, depending on where you are located: Direct Debit with [https://gocardless.com/](https://gocardless.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Have a look at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr)</comment>


You've been SHODAN'd - <AUTHOR> http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2009/11/youve-been-shodand/

<comment><USER2> There is a very fine, often moveable, always unpredictable line between what's considered "in plain view on the network" and what's considered "intrusion". People have been convicted of felonies for crossing that line with no malicious intent.

It's also one of the great slippery slope arguments in my field. As anyone who's ever played with Metasploit on a big network knows, what's in "plain view" depends entirely on how good your optics are.

</comment><comment><USER3> SHODAN will definitely motivate network and server administrators to stay up to date with the latest vulnerabilities. It could possibly even be used by them to test to see if their servers are vulnerable.

Overall I don't think that will have an overly negative effect. Instead, like any other dangerous tool, it will cause people to find a way to limit the danger that it poses, and that means that they will work harder to make sure that their servers are up to date and as secure as possible.

</comment><comment><USER4> When an entity only advertises a domain name www.domain.com rather than the URI <http://www.domain.com/> then as far as I am concerned, I have been invited to query that server concerning the services it offers, namely: a portscan.

For instance the page at <http://www.amazon.com/> contains an advertisement that simply says "amazon.com". So I should scan it to see what they offer. It might be http / https / irc / echo / heck even a shell for all I know. If it were "1 Amazon Street" I would be perfectly entitled to arrive at that building and see if any entrances were open to the public.

It might say "Amazon club card holders only" on a door and I might be asked for my card should I try to gain entrance. It would only be "criminal" if I decided to gain entrance despite such constraints.</comment>


Exposed Blockchain-Crypto files resold on Deep Web causing $40 Trillion collapse - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@NewsPowered/40-trillion-crypto-and-blockchain-market-collapse-due-to-exposed-confidential-files-on-google-68d422a5e3eb <comment><USER2> I'm an outsider to blockchain things. This article is terribly written. Why did the $40 trillion market collapse exactly? And where is the shockwave of the bust? Paragraphs would also be nice.

<comment><USER3> I suspect someone has just made a bitcoin article generator.</comment></comment>


Amazon QuickSight Now Generally Available - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/11/amazon-quicksight-now-generally-available/ <comment><USER3> Just want to chime in what a big deal their (very low) pricing is, at least to me.

As a software engineer, I have been in a tricky situation a couple times when my boss asked me to build out data visualization features in our internal admin dashboards--including generic visualization of arbitrary data in our SQL database.

Of course, the correct answer is, "We have better things to use our time on, we should buy something for this". But the boss is never happy to hear that:

* These services start at around $1000/month, even for very small-scale data.

* There are additional charges per-user.

* There are additional charges (hundreds per month) for more data sources (e.g. if you have a second SQL database, or dump some data to Redshift)

What's more, it is next to impossible to find pricing information on these service's web sites. Instead you resort to Quora[0] and hope the information is accurate.

I have used both Periscope and Looker, and loved them. But according to the Quicksight pricing page[1], my company could get everything it needs from Quicksight for under $50/month.

After I hit submit I am planning to run to my boss and tell him I finally found the one. (Of course, we'll see how the demo goes first ;)

[0] [https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-share-their-experience- and-...](https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-share-their-experience-and-pricing- with-Periscope)

[1] [https://quicksight.aws/pricing/](https://quicksight.aws/pricing/)

<comment><USER4> Preach- I'm going through the same process at my company. First I built a custom dashboard, but I haven't been able to maintain it with all the ad-hoc visualization requests I get. So I've been looking around for something else. It basically boils down to sketchy marketing sites (Chartio, Periscope, Mode, etc.) that end up being very expensive.

I'm very hopeful for quicksight, but unfortunately it feels very clunky and hard to use at the moment. Hopefully they improve the clunky UI and give it a SQL inerface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was involved in the alpha for QiuckSight and found it interesting. My feeling is that Amazon realizes that there is a market for data visualization and analysis for RDS, Redshift, S3 flat files, etc. There are many players in this space as well as traditional BI companies like Tableau.

QuickSight is going to be leveraged for more than just data analysis. They'll (probably) be using this for cost exploring and other features down the road (ELB Log Analysis, VPC Flow Log Analysis).

There are several limitations that I ran into. If you want to use a Redshift cluster as a data source it has to be a) publicly accesable and b) you have to whitelist the QuickSight IP range. QuickSight is launched in Amazon's infrastructure (their account and VPC) and that places limitations on what can be accessed (no VPC peering).

As an operations engineer, my biggest feedback was "let me launch my own QuickSight resources in my own VPC". Don't get me wrong, the fact that you get an AD instance, SPICE DB, and Web UI at a button click is nice, but I want to have more freedom to control and secure it. Just my two cents.

<comment><USER6> > you have to whitelist the QuickSight IP range.

How did you find QuickSight's IP range? I saw it referenced in the FAQ, but couldn't find the actual IP itself anywhere.

<comment><USER7> It's buried in the QuickSight documentation, which doesn't seem to be linked from anywhere in the QuickSight product pages:

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/quicksight/latest/user/configure-...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/quicksight/latest/user/configure- access.html)

I opened a support ticket last night after being unable to find this exact piece of information. If only there were a way to make a web page reference some other web page...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazon will likely begin competing with many of their AWS customers.

Step 1: develop a Trojan horse to gather growth and profitability data (QuickSight).

Step 2: roll out home-grown apps to compete with their most profitable AWS customers.

This is exactly how Amazon.com operates[1].

I can only imagine how the conversation went:

        Bob:   We need to diversify!
        Earl:  You're right! Let's do some research.
        Susan: That'll cost a ton...
        Ed:    Eureka! We'll just let everyone give us their data.
               It'll be a quick sight into all the markets!
        Becky: Ed... You're a genius!
        Ed:    I am?
        Becky: Yes. We'll call it QuickSight!

1\. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/got-a- hot...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/got-a-hot-seller- on-amazon-prepare-for-e-tailer-to-make-one-too)

<comment><USER9> This is irresponsible conjecture. AWS has very strict privacy and data safe guards in place. There are a number of laws (particularly in the EU) that forbid such practices.

[https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy- faq/](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-privacy-faq/)

The reason AWS is successful is because Amazon takes privacy and security seriously. Why does Netflix trust AWS when there's Prime Video? Because Netflix knows that they have legal recourse against Amazon if they tried to do anything underhanded. I suspect Amazon would quickly fire anyone who breached customer data.

<comment><USER10> Sincere question: how are such clauses enforced?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Strange one from Amazon. They've always provided cloud infrastructure services for building and launching apps, QuickSight departs from this - it's a ready to use app.

The logic must be: more money in apps than infrastructure.

Opposite of Google, they have the apps and now want the infrastructure too - <USER2> think it's a mistake for Amazon to go down this route, there is too much competition in this space and so far playing with QuickSight I don't see anything new/different from other analytics apps available on Amazon marketplace [1].

It feels like an experiment vs. a new direction for the company

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/b/2649336011?ref_=gtw_nav...](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/b/2649336011?ref_=gtw_navlft_node_2649336011)

<comment><USER12> _> I don't see anything new/different from other analytics apps available on Amazon marketplace [1]._

I'm not familiar enough with all those alternatives you cited to make a feature-by-feature comparison but one key difference is those other tools all use AMI (vm images). The Amazon QuickSight doesn't seem to need a deployment and management of any AMI. The customer just uploads a csv or Excel or points at a data source like Salesforce and instantly starts slicing & dicing the data. QuickSight seems to be positioned similar to Google's Data Studio offering.

 _> The logic must be: more money in apps than infrastructure._

That seems inevitable. Amazon AWS proved that IaaS being higher up the value chain than bare-metal services was more profitable. Rackspace's decline was proof of that. To continue the climb up the value chain, everybody including Google Cloud and MS Azure is offering higher valued-added services. Even a company like Github couldn't survive purely on on hosted Git disk space. (A "dumb" data pipe and disk space to a shared git repo.) They are moving up the value chain to build out full life-cycle project management to compete with MS Visual Team in the cloud.

<comment><USER13> There's also that they seriously undercut the marketplace solutions in price. As said before - this is typical for Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really exciting. I've been wanting to this tool for quite a while, but because our headquarters are in Africa, we're pretty locked into the EU-West-1 DB.

This, on first look, definitely looks like it will be simple enough to have our operations team work directly. That's quite exciting!

<comment><USER15> Where in Africa? I was setting up IaaS in Nairobi 2 years ago (couldn't get enough funding unfortunately). We should connect adam at varud.com

<comment><USER14> Nairobi funnily enough. The best hosting provider I've found so far has been truehost.co.ke. Many places claim to be in Kenya then are actually just reselling hosting in Europe.

My info's in my profile, I always love to meet tech folk working in Nairobi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anyone looking for self-hosted data exploration platform (only SQL), Airbnb's Superset[0] (previously Caravel) is good alternative.

[0]: [https://github.com/airbnb/superset](https://github.com/airbnb/superset)

<comment><USER17> It's actually sql and druid. We also use it for vertica (which probably falls under sql)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was tasked with rolling out a "self-service" BI/reporting tool for all of our internal users a while ago. My company is on AWS, and at the time QuickSight was just getting ready to begin the preview period. We felt QuickSight would be a good option since our data was already in RDS and we had just decided to buy a Redshift cluster as well.

I evaluated trial versions of the following tools: Looker, Periscope, Mode, Tableau, QuickSight, and Microsoft PowerBI. They are all very similar in my opinion and at the end of the day will all provide the ability to view dashboards and reports through a web interface. The tangible differences come down to how exactly data refresh happens and the customizability of dashboards and reports. Each tool also offers varying degrees of useful edge features like sharing, alerting, privileges, and saved queries. I eventually settled on Microsoft PowerBI.

The biggest advantage for using PowerBI in my mind is the degree to which reports can be customized. Compared to QuickSight, PowerBI is leagues ahead in terms of customization, while still providing enough predefined templates that you are not constantly thinking about trivial styling choices. More than any other feature, Microsoft gets this right and executes on it better than any other BI tool I've tested. There is even a growing gallery of community visualizations that can be used for free ([https://app.powerbi.com/visuals/](https://app.powerbi.com/visuals/)), and you can write your own visualization templates using TypeScript.

I've been using PowerBI for several months now, and each month Microsoft releases an update that targets the biggest frustrations I've had, such as lack of pre-defined data connections or pre-defined styles. It's still missing some key features I would like (different forms of aggregations, etc) but it's still better than QuickSight, no question. As far as pricing goes PowerBI actually starts with a gratuitous free tier. The free part ends when you want to enable the "groups" feature, which allows you to set up privileges for which users can view certain dashboards. The paid version also allows more data to be stored in the SaaS. You need a premium account which is $10/per user/per month. The pricing + the speed of creating and uploading reports made PowerBI the winning tool. So far the team has been very happy with it.

<comment><USER19> If customization is an important requirement, also check out [https://vida.io](https://vida.io). It allows you to have full control of the visualization layer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apparently QuickSight is an OEM of ZoomData [http://fortune.com/2016/03/14/zoomdata-adds-amazon-data- sour...](http://fortune.com/2016/03/14/zoomdata-adds-amazon-data-sources-to- its-menu/)

</comment><comment><USER20> My concern is morphing terms of use that could give Amazon access to my business data and insights. Who has the time to monitor evolving terms of use? I don't.

</comment><comment><USER21> > At 1/10th the cost of traditional BI solutions

So it begins. How sticky are customers in this space to existing solutions?

</comment><comment><USER22> For $9 per user per month, this seems like not a bad option. Does it have a TV mode for your KPIs, or is that a use case where you still need to use Ducksboard or whatever?

</comment><comment><USER23> This (and your comments) seem very interesting, but after reading through the glossy web pages, I honestly can't quite get a bead on what this really does. As for background, I've been deeply technical, on the back end/server side since the beginning.

It says I can upload a CSV. What would be in the CSV? One row per sale, for instance? Does it then do a bunch of magic to, among other things, trend that pile of data?

Thanks in advance!

</comment><comment><USER19> I think open source data visualization is a good alternative to these out of the box visualization. You have full control of the stack and can grow it. Switching vendor is always expensive.

Disclaimer: I work at [https://vida.io](https://vida.io), an open source visualization tool.

<comment><USER24> Is Vida cloud-only?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know of an affordable white-label version of something similar?

The idea: Re-sell pre-built dashboards and reports for specific niches.

Of course, you can roll your own using various javascript graphing libraries but it would be nice if everything was taken care of and one could just build the various reports and visualizations.

<comment><USER25> Answered my own question by Googling "white label analytics".

Of note (in case anyone is interested) was this open source project which appears to be a complete solution: [https://github.com/piwik/piwik](https://github.com/piwik/piwik)

<comment><USER26> Metabase may also be an option - [http://www.metabase.com/](http://www.metabase.com/)

<comment><USER27> I love Metabase!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does it support export yet? (.CSV etc.)

<comment><USER29> No, not yet (surprisingly).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Direct link to the product page: [https://quicksight.aws/](https://quicksight.aws/)

The page feels very sluggish on a i7, 16GB MBP. What machines are they using to test it?

</comment><comment><USER31> Is this a direct response to Google Data Studio [1] ?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12897415)

<comment><USER14> This has been in beta for quite a while I believe. I don't know if Google Data Studio has been around for longer, but I remember looking at Quicksight at a previous employer in 2013.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Has anyone tried it with a Heroku database? I'm getting an error message saying that the SSL certificate cannot be verified.

<comment><USER33> Same issue for me. If anyone has found a solution, that would be really nice to share it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Could you analyze a database with coordinates data? For example, querying a geocoded resource in postgres DB given a radius?

</comment><comment><USER35> What are advantages over Google BigQuery? - if somebody is not bounded by existing Amazon products (EC2, databases etc.).

<comment><USER18> The proper comparison to Amazon's offering would be Redshift. The reason you would go with Redshift over BigQuery is if your data is already in RDS, then migrating to Redshift is fairly straight forward (just whitelist the IPs in your security groups).

As others have stated, this offering directly competes with Google's Data Studio which was recently just announced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I know a few people working on the similar stuff. Old story! Take the idea from new comers and utilize the brand value.

</comment><comment><USER37> Anyone know how QuickSight compares to KlipFolio and ZoHo Reports?

</comment><comment><USER38> Great tool</comment>


Show HN: Workshape.io – A talent matching service for developers in Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.workshape.io

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there I'm Gordon and I am a software engineer! I have worked in the startup space for the 4 past years in London and San Francisco. Over this time I, like many others, have experienced the way in which the world of tech recruiting works. I have grown frustrated by the number of times I have been contacted about roles not suited to me and how recruiters regularly pitch me roles based on technologies I used in previous employment. I have also experienced recruitment from the employers point of view where I had to build a team out in San Francisco which was equally frustrating.

I believe the systems that we employ to help us find a job/recruit falls short of our expectations and is in need of some desperate rejuvenation and optimisation!

5 months ago I arrived back from San Francisco and teamed with 2 former colleagues who shared a passion in trying to improve this experience for both developers and hirers. I would like to invite you to be one of the first people to see and use Workshape.io - a talent matching service for Startups.

The key premise to Workshape.io is that we are a matching service that focuses on what you want to do in your next role - more specifically: what tech you want to work with and how you want to spend your time as a developer. We feel when you are open to another role your aspirations should be recognised as one of the key components to matching you to a role. We are focussed on rolling out in London right now and currently have roles from companies such as Shazam, Spotify, Qubit and Moo.com online.

We are very early stage right now and would really welcome your feedback on the experience, thoughts on the site and how we match you to roles.

Thank you for your time

<comment><USER2> I'm having some trouble logging in. First time I got redirected back from Github (to [http://www.workshape.io/api/0/session/connect/github/callbac...](http://www.workshape.io/api/0/session/connect/github/callback?etcetcetcetc)), I got {}, second time I tried, I got { name: "RqlDriverError", msg: "Object field 'id' may not be undefined", message: "Object field 'id' may not be undefined" }

<comment><USER3> Same here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. I'll look into this as soon as I can. Do either of you mind if I contact you via email to resolve?

<comment><USER4> Sure do, here is my profile with everything you need: [https://github.com/atmosx](https://github.com/atmosx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does Github alone determine a good match? If I don't have much on my Github, I'm ineligible?

<comment><USER6> Recently, there seems to be a trend that everyone should be pushing code to github. While it's great (real project is much better than a paragraph in CV and it shows your activity over the time), there are a lot of devs who just don't have time or just can't push code there for good reasons.

For me, I push my toy projects there - my first RoR app, and that kind of stuff. Would I like an employer to decide hire/no hire based on my weekend projects? Thanks, no.

GitHub profile is a nice add on for a job application, but it shouldn't be the whole job application.

<comment><USER7> I strongly agree with this, I push a lot of toy projects to GitHub, and some of the more interesting work I've done can't/won't end up there (I designed the algorithms behind an advanced analytics startup, but can't share the code since the startup failed because I don't own the rights, for example).

<comment><USER8> What if you were looking for a job, how would you demonstrate or prove your skills? What would be a good way to share the most interesting work you've done (since you can't just post a Github link)?

<comment><USER9> That the most common case, though, not the exception. You make a CV that highlights your accomplishments, and you make sure you're prepared to dive into technical details during discussions. The hiring company tries to put your through your paces, somehow or other. It's imperfect, but the GitHub profile approach is going to weed out a lot of candidates who you probably ought not to weed out.

By far the most interesting work I'm doing is for my current employer; and it's not OSS (and wouldn't make sense to open source).

In theory, I could cut back on my work-work, and spend more time on side projects; but I have a family, and other interests as well. I'd rather have good overlap between "interesting work" and "work I'm paid for" than sacrifice my time with my kids or my guitar so I can work on interesting technical problems I'm _not_ paid to work on.

For some people this could work out well -- e.g., maybe the crucial and awesome component of your company's infrastructure that you're building can be open-sourced! -- but for lots of other people life simply won't line up that way, and building something serious (but a personal project) on GitHub in your spare time means you don't have spare time for anything else in life... I wouldn't demand that of myself, or of anyone I was hiring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bug report: I tried to sign up (great landing page BTW - I think you pull off the flashy design) but when I clicked the "authorise" button from GitHub, I got dropped into JSON at [http://www.workshape.io/api/0/session/connect/github/callbac...](http://www.workshape.io/api/0/session/connect/github/callback?<big) qeury params> (Not sure if its unsafe to post the whole URL. I cannot web).

Here's the JSON {"name":"RqlDriverError","msg":"Object field 'id' may not be undefined","message":"Object field 'id' may not be undefined"}

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been looking for something that's both useful for me personally to check out the current work available and that works as an employer. I think this is it.

It's _incredibly_ difficult as an employer to convey exactly what the job will involve. Unless you're hiring a direct replacement of somebody you likely won't know what it is they'll be working on. Equally, as a developer, it's easy to see a job spec as a pack of lies, which they often are, and it can be hard to break into a slightly different role. A recruiter's aim is to fill the jobs their clients are paying them to fill and not to advance careers of candidates. I believe this [will] solve the problems in the current recruitment industry from the perspective of both invested parties.

I fully expect this to stir the waters of technical recruitment, so best of luck to you both.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have nothing bad to say about this.

Does it take into account relationships between tags? Like if someone puts in CSS3 will it put CSS in the listing?

Is there going to be a "questions" section? :P

<comment><AUTHOR> As for a questions section it is not on the roadmap... yet!

<comment><USER12> I think you have a good thing going here with or without questions. I was half joking. It might lead to "shopping lists" which is what I find is the greatest hurdle when hiring people. I need someone who can do what I need them to do/would want to be hired for what I can do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems really interesting, unfortunately nobody seem to be looking for a starlord willing to take over the universe.

How would this work for companies looking for candidates? I saw no search or nothing. Companies signup a different kind of account?

Do you have plans to integrate topcoder, hackerrank etc? Will you be emailing users when you add new stuff? I regularly signup to services to test out them, but then immediately forget them as I get no reminders of new stuff or reminders about the existence of said service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi.

Company sign ups are curated, there is no public sign up form presently.

We will inform users of future developments periodically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice idea and really well executed. I run [http://www.zonino.co.uk](http://www.zonino.co.uk) with a couple of other chaps and we think similarly about the need to bypass recruiters. Get in touch if you'd like to have a chat about the wild London startup scene!

<comment><USER9> Seems inactive -- [http://zonino.co.uk/jobs/latest](http://zonino.co.uk/jobs/latest) "No matching jobs found", and copyright 2013?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Awesome idea. I like the concept of balancing the qualities you want and do not want in a position. It's a great step up from simple keywords.

Thus, I was bummed after I signed up and discovered it is basically for matching developers with _web_ startups. :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. Thanks for your feedback, appreciate your point of view. We had to start somewhere though, and this is the area all founding members have domain knowledge. We will roll out to other sectors and geographies (right now mainly in London) when resources allows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> No matches so far (I got more on tinder, lol), but extremaly useful, well done. Altough it would be nice if one could also explore offers that don fit him perfectly, especially when there's no others. It always good to know what market needs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this insight. We'll take this onboard for next iterations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is slick. The one thing I'd suggest is that you add percentage labels to the sliders.

That being said, I was mostly guessing the ratios for those 10 segments and I wouldn't be surprised if I was off by 20-40% for some of them.

</comment><comment><USER18> great idea, love that it solves a problem so many in the tech industry seem to have finding the right people

think the design of the homepage, interface, and signup are all very slick

feel like it runs aground slightly if there are no matches, and as I had no matches, can't really comment on the end goal / application experience

otherwise good work, pretty interested to see where this goes, good luck!

</comment><comment><USER19> Really slick set-up, novel but so intuitive - Great work.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am getting an issue. I have entered the "job description" but showing empty and shows my profile is not complete.

</comment><comment> adam-_- Looks kind of interesting but I wasn't able to view any matches or any close positions, so it's hard to judge.

</comment><comment><USER21> I really like the simplicity of this- it does what it says on the tin. Nice, neat and simple!

</comment><comment><USER22> Just get a page with empty brackets after authorizing on GitHub: " {} "

</comment><comment><USER23> cool concept, the very best of luck growing it and getting more employers and employees on board.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great concept

</comment><comment><USER25> Great concept

</comment><comment><USER26> Like.

<comment><USER27> Cracking idea.</comment></comment>


Low-carbon power around the world (map, charts, ranking) - <AUTHOR> https://lowcarbonpower.org/map <comment><AUTHOR> Surprised that no one created this before</comment>


Ask HN: Am I anti-fun for not liking Nerf guns - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Depends on the context. If you're (as I suspect) talking about not liking playing with Nerf guns yourself or not appreciating people using them around in you a professional environment, not at all. If you're walking around complaining about children playing with Nerf guns, maybe just a little.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, you're an adult. I don't personally know anyone that's been into Nerf since the mid 90's.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nerf guns are a rather narrow definition of fun.

</comment><comment><USER5> Context is pretty important here and we have none.

But if you don't like it in an office setting that might be understandable depending on circumstances.

The proper response might be .... to shoot the perpetrators with some sort of foam flinging weapon...

I like the easily concealed "jolt". Walk by a cube, one shot to the back of the head like a professional does it and you just keep walking.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nerf guns in the office is the worst, I don't understand what's the obsession with nerf guns in "start-up"s. It's incredibly distracting and sometimes dangerous, everybody just abuses it and list it as a "perk" to attract frat boys to work for their company.

</comment><comment><USER7> In an office, fuck off, no.

At home? I have a cat that loves chasing nerf darts. I'd raise an eyebrow with you if you questioned my owning one or two. It's just too damn funny to watch the cat go nuts and then look at me like I'm the bad guy when the dart stops moving.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just play along. Do you want to be rejected for being a bad cultural-fit?</comment>


They redesigned PubMed - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/they-redesigned-pubmed-beloved-website-it-hasn-t-gone-over-well <comment><USER3> Meh. Any significant interface change is going to annoy some users. It's pretty unavoidable. Unless there are actual, real, usability issues or feature reductions in the new UI, what typically happens is that after a few weeks of complaining, most people just get used to it. If your product is important enough, you can even get away with some usability issues or feature cuts—users will use your product _in spite of_ those feature cuts.

A recent UI redesign that wasn't very well received is Google's code search redesign. Compare, e.g. the same page on the old one[0] and the new one[1]. It looks jarring at first sight if you're used to the old one, but ultimately people just need to accept it and move on.

[0]: [https://codesearch.chromium.org/chromium/src/third_party/bli...](https://codesearch.chromium.org/chromium/src/third_party/blink/renderer/core/html/forms/html_input_element.h)

[1]: [https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:t...](https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:third_party/blink/renderer/core/html/forms/html_input_element.h)

<comment><USER4> Redesigns should never, ever happen unless absolutely necessary. They're basically never worth it and almost always worse than before.

<comment><USER5> In particular, the people doing the redesign often seem to not understand what made the first design successful/effective, and senselessly wreck parts without even realizing. I'm not sure if this is because they understand the problem less than the original designers, the institutional incentives are set up poorly to encourage high quality work, increased system complexity / technical debt is harder to work around, institutional complexity makes it harder for competent people to be in position to make the decisions, the original successes were partly down to luck and reversion to the mean dooms follow-ups to mediocrity, recent UI fashions are generically user hostile, or what... but whatever it is, it's very frustrating.

And that's not even mentioning the inevitable bugs and glitches.

There's probably some selection bias involved too. Those products and redesigns which are amazing and wonderful get used, but nobody thinks too hard about all the ways in which they are better. On the other hand when redesigns negatively affect customers, the bad experience is unpleasantly memorable.

<comment><USER6> It's like rewriting a codebase. There's so much tacit understanding of the actual problem inherent in a living design/codebase. All that nuance gets obliterated because someone got a bee in their bonnet about better code/cleaner design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The new PubMed interface is definitely 'prettier' (more white space, mostly), but the old interface was packed with information that helped me quickly decide whether to read an article.

These sorts of applications should cater to experts who use them daily vs. design standards du jour or new users, IMO. /rant

<comment><USER8> Right. There's a huge value to information density, at least with certain kinds of subjects. That's been completely lost with modern design that emphasizes smooth edges and whitespace.

<comment><USER9> Also, it seems like modern web designs (templates?) require a picture for every entry. How many bulleted lists of titles/links do you see on web pages anymore? Now each bullet point would be a complete entry with a picture and the title requiring lots of scrolling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The new interface is dumbed down and has removed significant amount of content.

The original interface was excellent for the user community of experts.

It appears to have been designed by a third-rate UX designer for the average dummy, with no thought to what a professional user needs.

See: Dumbed down : [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/)

Original: [https://pmlegacy.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/](https://pmlegacy.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/)

<comment><USER11> My relatively recent pet peeve has been 'UX designers' (in quotes because I respect the discipline and the many competent practitioners but refer here to the charlatans) that push their narrowly defined views of 'form', 'simplicity' or 'minimalism' to the extent that the end result compromises the essential functionality required by a user base.

I cannot wait for these people to leave the industry and hopefully take their dogma with them. They're the rebirth of the same mindset that led to the 'eyeballs are all that matter' era of the web in the early 90s.

<comment><USER12> I agree with your complaints, but would like to save 'form' 'simplicity' and 'minimalism' from the heaping tire fire that is the pubmed changes.

Apple's design philosophy takes good parts of those three concepts and implements them well. Moving around essential functionality can be required in specific cases.

Maximalism can be just as poorly made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > "Others offered a more nuanced take, noting that nearly every redesign of a > popular website is initially criticized before people learn to live with > it."

For a bit of computer history, while it may sound quite far fetched nowadays, there were actually times when relaunches were generally welcomed and user numbers were expected to double rather than dropping. (Well, this was before UX.)

<comment><USER14> Do you have any insight into why this is no longer the case?

<comment><USER13> My guess is, it's about marketing thinking and rather defensive thinking in terms of consistency and world building. On the latter: We may assume that any virtual application/appliance should be rather aggressive in terms of world building in order to facilitate a comprehensive and consistent presentation (this is what Apple once was great in). When we migrated from terms like usability, screen design and interaction design to UX, this became subject to rather defensive approaches (A/B testing, "best" [i.e. median] practices, rather asking users instead of supporting them by own ideas, etc – arguably you can't manufacture meaning and aesthetics just on popular vote). Also, I'm not seeing much of a particular willingness to discuss, why prominent relaunches keep failing for years. Rather, there's now this myth of users always rejecting new designs at first. (As it turns out, in practices, either the old design returns - e.g., the infamous Ars Technica relaunch – or users won't return. And then, it's time for the next relaunch, usually with similar results.)

Edit: As an example, I suppose none of the much beloved and personality defining original Macintosh icons by Susan Kare could have come out of a modern UX work flow, nor the use of the Norwegian landmark sign as the marker of the command key. Or, where there any users that rejected the OS X Tiger and Snow Leopard UI, which applied quite radical changes to the previous Aqua UI?

<comment><USER15> Why are marketers allowed in the design department ever? I've never seen a design that made me think, "I sure am glad marketing was involved in this!".

<comment><USER16> Because the relationship between the visitor and the site is now exploitative. Marketing is there to ensure they can turn you into money. The site is just a lure, so it's built around the needs of the fisherman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This isn't the first time this has happened with PubMed. When they first introduced their javascript application version years ago (the old site now) it wouldn't even show text of abstracts without JS. But eventually they made it so the text was always there, just badly styled without JS on.

The same thing happened with the recent SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System redesign ([https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/)). Initially they planned to only have the very heavy SPA but after a few months of comments and complaints the team made a really excellent "basic HTML" fallback, [https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/core](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/core) .

No doubt PubMed will implement a similar full featured fallback to sane HTML if they want to remain relevant to researchers.

<comment><USER18> At the same time ePrint [https://eprint.iacr.org/](https://eprint.iacr.org/) is peak web design: simple, fast, functional.

<comment><USER19> That site is wonderful. Even the "Complete contents" page, which appears to load the entire archive in one request, is snappy on my iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Of the US government science databases that I've seen, OSTI seems to have the best interface: [https://www.osti.gov/](https://www.osti.gov/)

Good search, no JS required, loads fast, and looks modern for those who care. You can even export the results of a search to a CSV spreadsheet.

<comment><USER21> I agree that is excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Beloved? The first time I used the 'old' pubmed 15 years ago I remember thinking it really, really sucked. The weird drop down export options, clunky irrelevant filters on the main page but having to click through multiple pages just to apply a reasonable filter, unsophisticated search etc. And it still objectively sucked 15 years later, there was just no other option. To me the new pubmed is obviously better. It pisses me off that some fool with low neuroplasticity gets attention by trashing it on twitter, and 'Science' writes a click baity article about it. Shameful behaviour if you ask me. If anyone on HN was involved with the redesign, thank you, you did a great job.

<comment><USER23> The previous design was not 15 years old [1]. If you want to push back 15 years you'd have been under the influence of the (Yahoo) Toolbar [2]. The toolbar then, the Google+ whitespace now, NLM is of the times but with a governmental handicap on timeliness.

[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_redesign....](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/so09/so09_pm_redesign.html)

[https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd05/nd05_toolbar.html](https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/nd05/nd05_toolbar.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The new pubmed is fine. I've been using it nearly daily for a few years, so from well before the redesign, and it does the job it needs to do. You're going to get outsized backlash if you make any change with how non-tech-savvy and conserved the biomedical research community is. The new version looks nicer and seems to do a better job of searching articles using citations you copy (forgot which Twitter user pointed that out). It's perfectly fine amd this is really the only article I can find about this supposed backlash - <USER2> few tweets does not signify community outrage when most researchers are probably not on Twitter and are currently spending their time panicking about the impact nonessential research shutdowns are going to have on their career goals

<comment><USER25> "non-tech-savvy and conserved the biomedical research community is"

They do tech and know it, just a different kind.

<comment><USER24> The tech we know in general isn't the tech this site thinks of when it says tech. Set up a qPCR run? Yes we got that. Anything information tech related? Ehh, not so much

<comment><USER9> We had thousands of years of technology before computational devices came along.

For example, there was a whole range of technology encompassed in the transition from rubbing 2 sticks together to start a fire to pocket size lighters.

The terms "developing new technologies" can be heard in the seminars in fields having nothing to do with computers, programming, or the internet. One would need a good background in calculus, partial differential equations, etc. to understand many of the talks.

\---- edit: typo - replaced "we" with "with"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think another great example of a failed redesign is Internet Archive. The old design was organized, easy to use and perfect for research on a PC like most would use when browsing this site. The new design is a "mobile first" disaster, unorganized with infinite scrolling that feels like your are aimlessly scrolling pictures on Instagram or Facebook.

I love the content on Internet Archive, but the new site has been a pain to use from day one.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think this is really just the typical "it doesn't look/work exactly how I'm used to". Every time I have used pubmed in the past (I generally use othe databases for search) I thought how antiquated it looked and how cumbersome it was to use. At least the new website has a mobile interface that alone is a huge step forward.

<comment><USER27> The redesign also looks nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

</comment><comment><USER29> Change for the sake of change is societal cancer. You can thank it for the loss of your phone's 3.5mm jack and the fact it's nearly impossible to find a gif on Google image search because it only returns video results.

</comment><comment><USER30> This seems like a better than average redesign.

They aren't shuffling everything (Facebook), making it slow and laggy (Reddit), making constant stupid changes (Quora), or throwing out features.

<comment><USER31> What is the state of Quora these days? Especially after the pandemic hit, how many employees do they still have and how many did the furlough/fire?

I'm genuinely asking, because how the fuck does that site make any money?

<comment><USER30> The pandemic doesn't seem to have changed much at Quora yet.

There are a lot of glitches (for weeks the answer button in a request to answer in notifications returned a 500 error), lots of trolls, lots of spammy questions, and the occasional decent piece of writing. The usual. I still don't think they have a test suite simply because they keep changing every little thing.

Quora makes money on advertising. A lot of the answers are actually paid adverts which are them promoted into your feed. Read closely, as often in those top 5 lists is the company that paid for the list to be written. So many of the top 5 to do travel answers were sponsored and promoted.

<comment><USER31> Ah, thank you! I had no idea that's what they did, as most of the Q&A I come across are from first-hand sources, usually regarding some event/incident/thing that occurred.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Shout out to my people at the Lister Hill Center (Bldg 38A)!

I used to work at NCBI when I was graduate student at UMD, more than 25 years ago. Pub Med was just being invented. There was a thing called Medline (which had been a replacement to a thing called Medlars).

The guy I worked for was an MD/PhD (math) who was publishing papers on document retrieval and natural language search. Absolutely brilliant man. There was (and I'm sure there still is) a tremendous group of great scientists there. It was mind blowing work for a kid right out of college.

Two things that came out when I was there [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST_(biotechnology)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST_\(biotechnology\)) and [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spouge%27s_approximation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spouge%27s_approximation) . The environment there, and how much the researchers loved there jobs almost made it seem like getting a PhD could be worth it.

(That being said I imagine the staff researchers are not the people doing the Web UX.)

</comment><comment><USER33> What if PubMed had something like Google's "I'm feeling lucky"? What if we could explore PubMed by selecting a random PubMed URL instead of searching? This script generates a random PubMed URL. To do this we need to know the maximum PMID number in the PubMed database. The current max is included in the script and will be saved in a 9-byte file named "max-PMID" when the script is run. If run with the argument "update" it will search for a newer max PMID. If a newer max PMID is found, the script updates the number in the max-PMID file and in the script itself. An alternative is to use the ftp server[1] to find the max PMID; I noticed the latest ftp update was missing new PMID's caught by this script. If run without any arguments it selects a random PMID between 1 and the max and outputs a URL. uses socat, GNU sed and requires a fifo named "1.fifo" 1\. ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/updatefiles/

           #!/bin/sh
           test -s max-PMID||echo 32446294 > max-PMID;read x < max-PMID;x=$((x-1));h=pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov;
           test ${#x} -eq 8||exec echo weird max-PMID;sed -i "/test/s/echo [0-9]\{8\} /echo $x /" $0;
           case $1 in update) mkfifo 1.fifo 2>/dev/null;test -p 1.fifo||exec echo need 1.fifo;
           (grep "<title>PMID .* is not available" < 1.fifo|sed 1q|sed 's/<title>PMID //;s/ *//;s/ .*//;' >max-PMID)&
           y=$((x+10000));seq $x $y|sed '$!s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\n\r\n|;
           $s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n|'|socat - ssl:$h:443 >1.fifo 2>/dev/null;
           ;;"")awk -v min=1 -v max=$x 'BEGIN{srand();printf "https://'$h'/" int(min+rand()*(max-min+1)) "/\n"}';esac

<comment><USER33> Improved

       #/bin/sh
       test -s max-PMID||echo 32449615 > max-PMID;read x < max-PMID;h=pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov;
       test ${#x} -eq 8||rm max-PMID;sed -i "s/[0-9]\{8\}/$x/" $0;
       case $1 in update) mkfifo 1.fifo 2>/dev/null;test -p 1.fifo||exec echo need 1.fifo;
       (grep "<title>PMID .* is not available" < 1.fifo|sed 1q|sed -n 's/<title>PMID //;s/ *//;s/ .*//;wmax-PMID')&
       y=$((x+10000));seq $x $y|sed '$!s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\n\r\n|;
       $s|.*|GET /&/ HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: '"$h"'\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n|'|socat - ssl:$h:443 2>/dev/null|grep -o '<title>[^<]*' >1.fifo;
       ;;"")awk -v min=1 -v max=$((x-1)) 'BEGIN{srand();printf "https://'$h'/" int(min+rand()*(max-min+1)) "/\n"}';esac

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am completely blown away that they edited the stock photo to actually contain the new page in question. So many lazy "generic computer screen" images grace news articles about specific technologies.

</comment><comment><USER35> Hey, We have created Publibee, where you can search PubMed the same way you did on PubMed legacy but benefit from cool interface improvements. Feel free to test it on www.publibee.com.

We kept everything we liked about PubMed legacy and enhanced it with:

\- A clear and easy to read interface \- Additional information on articles (citations counts, journal scores…) \- A pin function to avoid opening 1,000 tabs \- The possibility to discuss articles

Tell us what you think in the chat so we can improve it!

</comment><comment><USER35> Hey, We have created Publibee, where you can search PubMed the same way you did on PubMed legacy but benefit from cool interface improvements. Feel free to test it on www.publibee.com.

We kept everything we liked about PubMed legacy and enhanced it with:

\- A clear and easy to read interface \- Additional information on articles (citations counts, journal scores…) \- A pin function to avoid opening 1,000 tabs \- The possibility to discuss articles

Tell us what you think!

</comment><comment><USER36> I recall going through grad school, the only legitimate peer review according to one professor was pubmed. I tried using google scholar and she told me it was invalid, I HAD to use pubmed. The issue is pubmed is much less easy to comb through, the site itself is very basic and unintuitive, and ultimately both searches yielded the same results except that google scholar found one extra article.

<comment><USER37> She was right, Google Scholar is great for discovery but poor for reference, it accepts a lot of non-reviewed stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> tbh, I find the PMC redesign a lot worse. e.g. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7204679/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7204679/)

It uses screen real estate well but it feels weird to read from top left to the bottom right of your screen before you scroll. This makes it much harder to skim papers

</comment><comment><USER39> In the same line of thought, I miss the old time.gov.

</comment><comment><USER40> What if some subset of the web were set up in such a way that websites could be forked as easily as projects are forked on Github?

<comment><USER41> We could all go back to styling the web ourselves. I think the main thing stopping that is it would be difficult to deliver ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm still more annoyed by the recent Nature redesign. The new font on their site is awful

</comment><comment><USER43> From my mobile phone the new site is unbelievable fast. A huge improvement in speed and just a better feel overall.

I haven't played with desktop site yet.

</comment><comment><USER44> i just wish they could move it onto a different domain that doesn't end with "nih.gov".

People can go on PubMed, find some bad article about 5G or fluoridation from a dubious journal, and then send it around social media. The nih.gov TLD gives the impression of official sanction to all kinds of garbage.

</comment><comment><USER45> Use Causaly.com</comment>


Neural network generating technical death metal, via livestream 24/7 to infinity - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNNmBtNcccE <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the corresponding paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.06633.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.06633.pdf)</comment>


Google Voice adds VoIP feature to all users - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/happyinwater/status/1095026062533246976 <comment><USER2> One thing I didn't know is you give up google voice is you subscribe to project fi. Very disappointed by this. I don't want to give away my real phone number to a million vendors.

<comment><USER3> For what it's worth, you can have two different Google accounts on your phone. One of them uses Fi, the other one "regular" Voice. That's what I ended up doing. And no, you can't make Voice forward to the Fi number, but that's less of a problem now with VoIP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am at the point where I cannot keep track of Google communication products at all.

Wasn't Google voice already their virtual phone number service?

<comment><USER5> Virtual _redirect_ phone number.</comment></comment>


StartCom will log all issued SSL certificates to public CT log servers - <AUTHOR> https://www.startssl.com/NewsDetails?date=20160323 <comment><USER2> Context: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11330877)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's worth pointing out that StartCom claims the verification email address in the article in question was only accepted because it matched the WHOIS record of said domain[1], which is permitted according to CA/B Baseline Requirements and their CPS. Definitely not a good choice by the researcher either way.

[1]: [https://www.startssl.com/NewsDetails?date=20160322](https://www.startssl.com/NewsDetails?date=20160322)

<comment><USER3> That is real confusing, wouldn't that imply one party is outright lying?

Blog claims: In the last step of the validation process is where you can modify the email address and replace it with _any regular email address_

StartSSL claims: The email address used to verify the domain name is listed in the WHOIS records..

<comment><AUTHOR> It could be that, or the researcher really didn't think to try it with an address that's completely unrelated to the domain.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that an audited CA has a system where the web frontend can make a decision as to what would be an allowed verification email address. I'm leaning towards believing their story, and would assume they have a backend system which is responsible for checking that input (and which happened to be out of sync with the options offered by the frontend). That's a reasonable explanation for the complete lack of validation in their frontend code.

Then again, some CAs have had a terrible track record, so I guess we'll never know for sure now that they fixed the issue (whatever the issue actually was).

<comment><USER4> Honestly, while StartSSL's front-end is awful, their practices always seem to far exceed other CAs - especially around verification.

I don't enjoy the website, or the verification procedure, but ultimately I generally trust them pretty highly - they operate in a way which shows me they care about security.

<comment><USER5> We've been generating certificates in direct violation of their TOS for over six years. Every few years they pretend to find out, we do another blatantly non-compliant verification, fork over 120 dollars, and they let us keep printing certificates.

<comment><USER6> Went through the same headaches for a few years. Their atrociously unfriendly and unintuitive interface finally just pushed me over to using a cheap alternative that is much less painful (RapidSSL in our case).

<comment><USER5> Until Let's Encrypt came around we've heavily depended on wildcard certificates (several domains with 100+ customer facing subdomains), so any other alternative would have been massively more expensive.

But with LE allowing scripted certificate generation, we're just moving to that instead.

<comment><USER7> How do you plan to get around LE's 5 subdomains per 7 day period limit? You can only get about 60 subdomains _in theory_ , and that only if you stagger the registrations out carefully over three months and never make any mistakes.

<comment><USER8> If appropriate for your use case, you can get your domain added to the public suffix list [1]. Then the restrictions no longer apply.

This has side-effects with browsers and cookies so you wouldn't want to do it on a domain without understanding the impact.

[1]: [https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/blob/master/public_suff...](https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/blob/master/public_suffix_list.dat)

P.S. In the unlikely event that someone involved is reading this, PLEASE make this a DNS attribute that is set on the top-level domain instead, in a TXT record perhaps. It's silly that we have to have a globally coordinated and distributed list for this data.

<comment><AUTHOR> > P.S. In the unlikely event that someone involved is reading this, PLEASE > make this a DNS attribute that is set on the top-level domain instead, in a > TXT record perhaps. It's silly that we have to have a globally coordinated > and distributed list for this data.

The Dbound WG[1] was working on this, but sadly didn't seem to get anywhere.

[1]: [https://tools.ietf.org/wg/dbound/](https://tools.ietf.org/wg/dbound/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a Class 4 StartCom subscriber, this is quite irritating.

We use StartCom to issue a lot of certificates for sensitive internal hostnames. While we don't rely on security by obscurity, we'd really prefer it if our internal hostnames weren't published all over the internet... :\

Given Lets Encrypt does this too, I'm not sure what other options we have with regards to certificates without paying on a per-certificate basis. :( I like StartCom's model of only paying for verifications (i.e. the only thing which really directly costs money).

We definitely want our EV certs going to CT logs, but not any of our wildcard or Class 2/3 certificates.

<comment><USER9> If they are internal hostnames, don't you control both client and server? Why not create a PKI?

In my opinion the only advantage certificates from official CAs bring is that clients you have no control over are not MitMed.

<comment><USER4> Well yeah, that is a fair point actually. There would be a couple of issues to sort out, but nothing major or anything we couldn't deal with.

<comment><USER5> Setting up your own CA is rather easy, for internal hostnames I'd definitely not bother with going to an external CA (nor want an external CA to have control over internal certificates).

<comment> ryan-c Having set up and run an internal CA for a > 1000 person org that needed to issue a couple certificates a week, I would refute the "easy" claim.

<comment><USER5> Still easier than StartSSL's horrible, occasionally unreachable, web interface I'd bet.

<comment><USER10> I hope you don't often place bets. :P

Honestly, it's not that easy. The StartSSL process is much, much, much easier.

There are a myriad of problems you need to solve when running an internal CA for your organization. Who has access to generate new certs? Is it automated, and what security controls are around that system? What audits are there around certs being cut? Who can revoke certificates? Then you get down to the details of CRL/OSCP...

While running your own PKI is great and definitely recommended, it's much easier to say "just set up PKI" than to actually do it and maintain it.

<comment><USER11> I've always enforced a strict policy of every certificate request be asked for in person by someone with authority to ask us for one, and then a second person actually issues the certs after an hour, just in case. Nobody likes being responsible for data breaches, and I for one am a sadist and a masochist when it comes to keeping control of my systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They pretty much have to, right? The alternative is for Google to make the announcement for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure about that, based on this[1]. The turnaround time for this is a bit too fast for it to be just a reaction to that incident, I think. (Not saying that it's a coincidence either.)

[1]: [https://www.startssl.com/NewsDetails?date=20160322](https://www.startssl.com/NewsDetails?date=20160322)

</comment></comment><comment> cat-dev-null SSL CA's are broken in some sense in that it's currently relatively easy to acquire rogue certs because it's a Tragedy of the Commons of the unaddressed issue of a single-source of truth, trust and cert issue authorization for cert management for a given domain.

Perhaps all CAs for should be married to internet-facing domains with an encrypted, authoritative, non-repudiable cert discovery protocol... perhaps something like DNSSEC+DANE or something else.

Likely the only way to fix the situation is make some nonrepudiable proof-of- domain-ownership mandatory before any CA can issue any cert... although that doesn't solve the other issue of clients figuring out which certs to trust, although there have been some web-of-trust efforts to improve it (un- authoritatively).

<comment><USER13> If you believe it is relatively easy to issue a certificate for a domain you do not own, I am sure many people would like to hear about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The next step is to have browsers check the CT database for any page that requires a login. Pages you just look at aren't really security-critical; it's user input that matters.

<comment><USER15> Oh sure. Can I have your session key? Not your password, just the thing that lets me reset it, drain your bank account, etc.</comment></comment>


How people really use the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/createwithcontext/how-people-really-use-the-iphone-presentation/ <comment><USER2> This was awesome, but I recommend viewing the high-res PDF instead: <http://www.createwithcontext.com/landing-iphone.html>

Incidentally, Scribd and Slideshare have given me a newfound appreciation for Adobe Acrobat. A couple of years ago nobody would have said "I just want a good old PDF."

<comment><USER3> I love PDFs. I hate Acrobat.

<comment><USER4> I love xpdf.

<comment><USER5> Evince is fine for me. What does xpdf do that Evince doesn't?

<comment><USER6> xpdf has better anti-aliasing in my computers, usually. Pdfs from jstor for example look awful under evince and ok on xpdf.

<comment><USER5> Evince will use the anti-aliasing option that Gnome does, including a couple of different flavors of subpixel rendering.

<comment><USER6> Yes, and it works marvellously for most fonts, but I think it doesn't do anti aliasing for bitmapped fonts, and xpdf does. I could send you a screenshot of how badly jstor pdfs get in my laptop, if you're interested.

<comment><USER5> No need, consider me educated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Surprisingly, article matches it's title. They actually did put camera and recorded how different users used iphone given specific tasks. This looks like good data to me, i'll go finish the slide deck.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow--it really surprised me how much I take for granted in interacting with a UI. The big piece of information for me was the placement of the buttons in Safari. Extremely interesting.

The carrier in the images is T-Mobile; jailbroken iPhone?

<comment><USER9> Or T-Mobile Germany

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can two finger tap to zoom out in Maps?! Frick. Did not know that. I suck at iPhone.

<comment><USER10> I think that was their point: it's an incredibly small feature that doesn't advertise itself well.

That was my first reaction too, though. I must admit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, slide two was TERRIBLE! I couldn't read the text with that very distracting background, who does that?

<comment><USER12> It looks fine in the PDF. It seems like a translucent layer is missing in the slideshare version.

<comment><USER11> Oh that makes a lot more sense. Good catch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How many people participated?

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd love to see more details of this or follow on research. They did an excellent job. None of the suggestions here would be surprising to a UX expert but having them in context is really helpful.

</comment><comment><USER15> One thing that seems to get people is 2 finger to scroll divs/iframes in safari. Pretty intuitive when you think about it, but some don't. Especially when the scrollbars aren't obvious.

<comment><USER16> Intuitive? I'm not sure you understand that word.

<comment><USER15> OK, what other method could you have to scroll a div/iframe? It was the first one that I thought might work, so I tried it. Unless I'm mistaken that made it intuitive for me.

I do get your point though - for some people it's not obvious...

<comment><USER17> Why not use the same mechanism you use to scroll the main document window?

<comment><USER15> because then if the iframe covers the whole screen, it'd be impossible to scroll the document?

<comment><USER17> I would expect the standard scrolling gesture to scroll the iframe -- unless the iframe is already scrolled all the way in that direction, in which case it applies the scroll to the iframe's container.

This behavior is intuitive, if slightly inconvenient in some cases, which is exactly the trade-off I'd have expected Apple to make. Requiring an unfamiliar multitouch gesture for a common operation strikes me as the kind of "let's do something cool because we can" geekery that got us middle-click-to-paste in X Windows.

I'm curious: what does the iPhone use to scroll an iframe in an iframe? Three fingers?

<comment><USER18> Sorry for the off topic comment but I have to say... I _love_ middle-click-to- paste in X Windows! Hooray geekery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is great!

The thing is, though, for a lot of the "problems" they found with Apple's UI, fixing it would cause other problems. Such is the nature of design.

<comment><USER7> I think the idea is not to avoid all problems, but rather avoid unnecessary problems.

<comment><USER10> Yeah. For instance, a lot of the button-consistency issues could be fixed without harming the interface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This just goes to show you that nothing beats good old fashioned usability tests with _actual_ users. They'll unearth the most obvious problems with interfaces that you're blind to.

</comment><comment><USER21> great stuff in that presentation! what also interested me was the bit on application pricing because that's what I'm struggling with at the moment.

do we go the .99 cheapy-route or price at a premium to maintain a status-quo. hmmmmmm

<comment><USER17> One guy I heard from recently recommended pricing cheap until you get on a top-100 list, then jacking up the price. Of course, he was trying to market a game, which probably has different market dynamics than an application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> when you use msn on iphone does it charge to your usage? if so, how much usage does msn take

</comment><comment><USER23> Thank you for sharing that!

Pure gold!!!!

</comment><comment><USER24> Great find.

</comment><comment><USER25> I thought I was the only one who found "the most intuitive phone in the world" a bit confusing. I also hate touching the screen because I sometimes accidentally click something I didn't mean to.</comment>


Lessons from a failed startup (devotee) - <AUTHOR> http://cobyberman.com/2011/08/08/devotee-lessons-from-a-failed-start-up/

<comment><USER2> Coby, Excellent synopsis of your experience starting Devotee, and congratulations on moving forward. Why was development held hostage by revenue, though? These are not mutually dependent.</comment>


Some say it's a myth, but could treadmills for planes be a billion $ business? - <AUTHOR> https://www.billiondollarstartupideas.com/ideas/treadmill-takeoff <comment><USER2> Am I missing something? The Mythbusters clip they post clearly shows that the plane is not stationary as the article claims. Even though the surface it's traveling on is moving in the opposite direction it's still moving forward.</comment>


Is poker a game of chance or skill? - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~nogaa/PDFS/skill4.pdf

<comment><USER2> Short summary, for anyone who already knows the basics of poker: yes, the cards are random, but everyone's bets are a function of their statistical competance and their ability to make inferences from other people's bets, and therefore poker is a game of skill. It's a fine article but it appears to contain very little new insight.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't that mean that it is a game both of skill and of luck?

<comment><USER4> I think the better question is how much of each? 50/50 is a lot different than 70/30, but I wonder if there's any good way to measure it?

After all, like so many games, the random variation can mask the effects of skill and you can only measure your skill relative to that of your opponents (so a good player against newbies might destroy them, while a superb player against good ones might only get a little ahead).

<comment><USER5> There isn't a simple, definite answer to this question because the skill of the players affect how much luck determines the outcome. Unskilled players are much more likely to bluff, call bluffs with weak hands, and over or underestimate their hands. In a low stakes, beginners game, there's enough variability that one player with a little more skill won't have much of an advantage. In a professional tournament, the best players show up in the top spots time and again.

<comment><USER6> Exactly...the new internet based players are, generally speaking, very loose players, and have really change the game in the non internet world. And I'd reckon that a very large percentage of entrants into physical tournaments now are internet trained players, and if you have a large enough % of these people starting, and all (hyperbole) of them "swinging for the fences", a lot of them are going to get through just on luck, but different ones each time.

Whereas, you will generally see at least one or two of the top 20-30 "old school" people at the final table of any major tournament.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article is correct, mathematically, from what I can tell. However, the author seems to not understand the meaning of skill.

Apparently to the author a skilled player is one who knows and plays all the odds correctly whereas an unskilled player plays randomly, or sub-optimally. If all players are equally knowledgeable of all the probabilities involved, then the game is a game of luck.

A true game of skill is one in which there is no luck factor. No matter the relative skills of the players, the most skilled player will win. For example, boxing is a game of skill. Poker is not. Two grand masters of poker playing against each other, the result will be determined by the cards. They might as well play Candy Land instead.

<comment><USER8> I agree that the paper makes some naive assumptions. However, you seem to be equating poker to chess, which is a common but erroneous analogy.

Poker is a MUCH tougher game (dozens of orders of magnitude, depending on the variant) than chess. We have no idea how close to optimal any human is at the game. Similarly, computer opponents can only play well in very limited settings like heads-up, fixed-limit Hold'em, where the game tree is a reasonable size.

Also, it depends on the period of time that you're looking at. If two people play a single hand, it's almost entirely luck. However, as the paper argues (though again in a simplistic way), as the number of iterations increases, the CLT comes into play and skill wins out.

This is true, even for "grand masters" in poker. Tom Dwan has an open challenge to play him in 50,000 hands online. If his opponent is ahead after 50,000 hands, he will pay them an additional $1M. He's not doing this because he loves to gamble. He's doing it because he knows 50K hands are a sufficient sample size to significantly reduce the luck factor.

Do you think a game like backgammon is also luck?

<comment><USER9> I am not sure how you quantify toughness, but this is the worst use of "orders of magnitude" I've ever seen.

More so, since I have spent a nontrivial percentage of my life playing both games.

<comment><USER8> Size and complexity of the search space (i.e., the game tree). The tree is several orders of magnitude larger for poker than for chess.

I've spent a non-trivial percentage of my life both playing and researching AI for poker. See <http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications/billings.phd.pdf> for an initial discussion on the differences between the 2 games' search trees. He notes that for 2-player, limit hold-em, the game tree consists of 1,179,000,604,565,715,751 nodes. The tree expands exponentially as you add players and different betting sizes. For no-limit and other real-valued variants like pot-limit, the game has an effectively infinite search space.

<comment><USER9> If I recall, there are more possible chess games than atoms in the universe. So even if you were to quantify toughness as number of possible decisions, it would still be completely off. However, in both those games, a lot of the plays would be ridiculous.

It's easier to try and measure toughness by the time/effort it takes to be competent or the best. In this case I would say chess is hands down much tougher.

<comment><USER8> Sure, the number of possible moves is huge in both games. However, it's more about the number of relevant moves at a given game state. Alpha-beta algorithms for chess can do a much more thorough search than their poker- specific extensions and related methods like MCMC.

I suppose if you're measuring difficulty of a game as how difficult it is for a human player to beat the current masters, then that seems a little unfair. Poker has been around for less than 200 years and the current variants are less than 100 years old. Chess has been around since the late 1400s according to the Wikipedia article. There has been a lot more research and time spent on chess, and the community is consequently much more mature and skilled.

<comment><USER9> To clarify, before you were comparing a tree of every possible move in a chess game against the decisions in a poker game?

That has to be a joke to compare the games that way. Even here you mention number of relevant moves at a given game state. I have to be misunderstanding that. Bet/check/fold vs say half dozen candidate moves?

I've been assuming difficulty for a human the whole time, to attain any level of skill. Since the chess community/theory is more established, it's going to be a more difficult game.

<comment><USER8> You are indeed misunderstanding.

A game tree search is not defined by the available options for the very next move. It's about the total possible paths to the end. In this case, poker is a much larger tree. Read the intro section of Darse's PhD dissertation that I linked to above and you'll understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Imagining games to have a "skill component" and a "luck component" is the wrong way to conceptualize games which involve randomness. A much better way conceptualize these games is to consider how many "units" (games, matches, hands, tournaments, whatever) must be played before the distribution of players by (score/place/points) becomes indistinguishable from that expected based on the players' ability levels.

For instance, if a GM rated 2800 plays a GM rated 2700, he may lose. In fact, he may lose several games in a row. However, if the two play a 30-game match, the probability that the 2700-rated player will win is very low.

Now, if you take the best heads up no limit hold em player in the world and have him play a series of hands against the hundredth-best heads up no limit hold em player in the world, he may very well lose the first hand. He may very well be down after the first thousand hands. But if they play, say, 1,000,000 hands, the probability that the weaker player will be up on the stronger player is as low as, if not lower than, the probability that the 2700 will beat the 2800 in their match.

It's not about "skill" versus "luck"--the question is simply, "How many (hands/games/matches/etc.) must be played before the probability that the weaker player (has won/is ahead/etc.) becomes sufficiently small?</comment>


A California Mega-Flood Could Change Everything - <AUTHOR> https://features.weather.com/us-climate-change/california/ <comment><USER2> Not mentioned in this otherwise excellent and comprehensive article is the likely outcome of dumping hundreds of thousands if not millions of displaced climate refugees on a state which has found it impossible to find either temporary or permanent housing for just a few tens of thousands in the firestorms of recent yearss.

Extreme housing shortages, reflexive NIBYism to the most modest of density and new construction proposals, and land costs and use which have driven many into the most vulnerable floodplains, would make this or numerous similar widespread catastrophes (fire, earthquake, possibly tropical storms striking the Southland San Diego - Los Angeles region) utterly catastrophic to many in California, leading mass to a exodus ... to where, exactly? The US as a whole would be burdened to cope.

Apart from the meteorological, topographical, and engineering challenges, the practice of treating real estate as a financial asset rather than an essential societal infrastructure may come back to bite and hard.

Land tax could address both the housing crisis and shortfall, as well as much of the funding requirement for disaster preparedness.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax)</comment>


Computer and Information Systems Managers are #12 on Highest Paying Jobs List - <AUTHOR> http://college-education.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=005475 <comment><USER2> Interesting to see the list. The first ten entries on that list are all legally protected professions, with strict supply control (via licensing boards, etc).

</comment><comment><USER3> Given that physicians average about US$225k, I'd say that this information is suspect.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm making way too little if this is true...

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, the thing is, should we target the fields we're keen on or just target high-paying job fields ?:P

I would go for the 2nd -- peace of mind I guess...</comment>