How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeremymorgan.com/blog/programming/how-to-stay-relevant-as-a-web-developer/

<comment> grey-area _If spending an hour a day reading industry blogs and learning a new language or technology every month sounds like work to you, then it's time to start thinking about an exit strategy._

I disagree with this. It could only be true for a very small subset of web developers (freelancers who are working in a variety of languages for many clients), and even then it smacks more of post-hoc justifications for activity like reading blogs and doing 'research' rather than concrete need. What advantages does reading industry blogs each day really give you? What disadvantages does it have (less time for real work)? There is a strange confusion here between work and play, and the silly illustrations accompanying the post don't help its credibility. Given the hyperbole and excited ignorance that passes for insight on most blogs, I'd say it has negative value to read them every day. Once a month would easily work if you want to keep up to date with current trends, but learning a new language each month as a requirement to stay employed is absurd.

There are many kinds of web developer, but just to take a few examples of those who have no need to heavily invest in learning new languages every month:

The majority of web developers work in-house at a firm where the technology in use is mandated, and only changes slowly (and rightly so), because the business depends on it not breaking. They are not threatened at all by the rise of new technologies, and certainly not on the timescale of months.

Then there are many small web developers who make a good living installing, customising, and maintaining CMS systems like wordpress for a wide variety of clients. They don't need to change technologies every month, and frankly it's the last thing their customers want - these developers have chosen a specialisation and will probably stick with it for decades before changing.

Finally there are freelance developers who work on lots of different projects for lots of different clients. They have to stay a little bit more up to date, but the rate of change is measured in years, not months, and there is plenty of time (years) to shift to another platform if the one you have specialised in is not growing but shrinking in usage. The above statement is incorrect even for the developers to whom he expects it to apply.

Now if the timescale were years or decades, I'd agree that a web developer has to be willing to adapt and completely change the tools they are using, but this is hardly a surprise in a fast moving industry. The industry does not change much on the timescale of months though.

<comment><USER2> > _Then there are many small web developers who make a good living installing, > customising, and maintaining CMS systems like wordpress for a wide variety > of clients. They don't need to change technologies every month_ [...]

I've done a little work in this space.

WP changes, plugins rise and fall, UA's come and go, devices spawn ever more variants, SEs adjust algos, design moves to a new focus, customer expectations alter. The technology changes constantly, if you sit still then offering a quality service becomes impossible.

The background is the commoditisation of web site creation using massive web hosts with automated installation and templating systems. Add in the availability of off-shoring of design and coding, eg via 99designs and similar systems. You have a price squeeze, massively increased competition and a continuously rolling variation in the tech.

Personally I don't think it's possible for a single dev to address all the necessary issues any more. Keeping pace with the changes needed to produce optimised and efficient sites is no longer possible as it has been in the recent past.

The field is maturing, this is an expected effect. I'm looking, as I re-enter the field, to pivot in to site optimisation as a bespoke B2B service

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe I'm just a grumpy old developer, but the idea of learning yet another framework's opinion of exactly what the difference between a Model and Controller class should be, trying to fathom whateverissexy.js and working with yet another "awesome" HTML 5 framework where centering something on a page is still a mystery doesn't fill me with excitement _at all_.

Instead , I would prefer to learn something about "hard" computer science or something from a related non-CS discipline such as Math, Statistics , Psychology and find some way to apply that knowledge.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that contradicts the OP's position. Indeed learning a new framework's opinion is not exciting, but learning some "hard" CS is fun. For example I was a Ruby on Rails/GRails guy and I took up nodejs 8 months ago. That's a big - and fun - change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> SOAP? Jesus. I think his list is behind the curve; a modern web dev would want to learn:

\- Javascript, Javascript, Javascript

\- Frontend: Backbone / Angular/ whatever MV* framework takes your fancy

\- Backend: restful web services, good APIs. MVCs like Rails/Django if you can't push that stuff to the client.

\- CSS pre-processors (SASS, Less, etc). Using classes instead of IDs, for modular, re-usable css. OOCSS ideals and methodologies.

\- Dependency management via AMD / requireJS.

\- Templating (underscore, dust, hogan, etc.) be it client or server-side.

\- Page performance (PageSpeed Insights, Chrome Dev tools, etc) - to get content on the page ASAP, in seconds. On that note, to keep up with the Velocity web perf conference.

\- Monitoring and Analytics - Real User Monitoring, Synthetic Benchmarks, A/B testing, Dashboards

\- Fast development pipelines through something like Mimosa

<comment><USER6> > MVCs like Rails/Django if you can't push that stuff to the client

Uh, how exactly would you push your API to the client?

<comment><USER7> I believe he means that if you cannot use an architecture where you push presentation logic to the client as JavaScrpt (aided by an MVC-like framework like Backbone), serve all HTML/CSS/JS statically, and serve data dynamically through a web service (e.g. node + express or express-resource, RoR or Sinatra, MS Web API or WCF), then it's important to know a modern (MVC-based) server-side web framework dynamically generating HTML.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Everyone has their own experiences, but from my view as a freelance web developer constantly working with new clients, I don't see much of this happening. All of this depends on who you are working with though.

SEO: You don't need to know any more here than what you have needed to know in the past. Just make sure that you are sticking with your part of the basic webmaster guidelines.

Design in general: Nobody is going to ask a developer who can't design to do design work. That includes UI / UX design. That would be quite silly. Though the developer should probably be able to code the front-end plumbing in addition to the back-end.

HTML / CSS: You should know all of this, but back-end developers generally don't have to do most of the heavy lifting here. It's very easy to hire someone to turn your PSD's into HTML / CSS and then the back-end devs can take it from there.

Build or join an open source project: There are a certain number of people who can benefit from this (you get paid for it by a company which benefits from the work or you are planning to offer paid support for your product) but I believe that projects outside of paid work should pull (or at least try) their own weight in paying for time that went into building that project. This could be money back or it could be utilities which make life easier for you.

Fast moving industry: Not really. Technology in general moves fast, but web development is painfully slow. Part of this has been browsers (and probably the standards groups) holding things back. We can't outrun the caboose.

Lots of people willing to take your job: Really? Where are they? We are supposedly competing on a global level (outsourcing) but I just don't see it. Even when I do have to compete with much lower cost developers, those developers are usually invisible and I never have to worry about them. I live in the Philippines and there is very little web development talent here (partially because all anyone cares about is sending texts.) I imagine much of the rest of the developing world is like that as well.

There are a lot of barriers to entry. Freelancing is difficult on the BUSINESS end, not the technical end. Good English and writing skills go a long way. Much of the technical side you can pick up quickly, but the really be functional enough to be worth much to a team requires a lot of time.

Most important is that you really only have to be good enough to stay a bit ahead of the masses. That's not hard.

One great way to nail all of this stuff is to build an app on the side and ship it. Monetize it, do the SEO, get traffic, etc. You will learn a lot from this process, and you will cover almost everything you need to know as a web developer. You might also make some money from it.

<comment><USER9> > _It's very easy to hire someone to turn your PSD's into HTML / CSS_

This is definitely true, however things are a little more complicated ... it's not the actual writing of the HTML/CSS that bugs me, but the fact that a PSD is static and often is not accompanied with guidelines on how it should be used.

So for instance if the width of the design is 960px, what are you going to do? Keep it static while centering it on page? What background color should you use? (ever noticed that many designers simply forget about the background around the page?) And also, it's much better to make it dynamic, especially in this age of mobile browsers - so what should you resize? Should the side-bar also resize? By how much? Should it be capped at a max width? Should it fall at the bottom if the total width is too small?

The big problem is that the dynamic parts should also be part of the design. I mean, sure, give me the PSDs because I can do a better job at writing clean and optimized HTML5 and I'm pretty efficient at it too, but I also want an HTML to see it live. It makes my work easier and also it shows me that you've thought about the dynamics at play, so I don't have to fill in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _The cycles are so much shorter now that what you were doing last year is antiquated, and what you were doing 5 years ago will get you fired._

This isn't true in any other field of software development. Has the author not wondered why web development is in such a state of flux? The answer is that the whole concept is a hack - using a document markup system to deliver applications was a poor reinvention of the old thin client idea. Any programmer worth his salt could see this, and so all the early tech like PHP was 'designed' by people who couldn't design. Since then smarter people have tried to fix it, but it's still layer upon layer of hacks, which is why it requires entirely new hacks every year.

<comment><USER11> YES!!! Add "print this page" or "print this very long page" that many "webdevelopers" still don´t know how to handle and see how unbelievably br0ken or at least unfinished the whole concept still is.

Barners-Lee is a god now and untouchable, but I would nominate him for the "most-unfinished-idea"-oscar, if it existed.

<comment><USER12> I hate to post this kind of comment, but it's "Tim B _e_ rners-Lee".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The continual references to how much easier it was "ten years ago" makes me wonder if the author was actually in the industry ten years ago, or is merely using it as a shorthand for "grandpa's stories of how it was in his day"

I'm pretty sure I could have written the same thing in 2002 except that the list of technologies would have looked different.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's hard not to be at least a little cynical about "be passionate" messages. On one hand it's true. On the other hand, it's almost like saying "be brilliant."

</comment><comment><USER15> It's a bit idealistic to suggest you must be passionate about web development to continue to be relevant.

You can get along just fine if you are in it for the money for a long time to come. You may be miserable with your work, but if you can perform competently you will have a job for the next 10-15 years minimum.

That said, these are certainly good practices to be following.

<comment><USER16> "skills trump passion"

[http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore- ebook/dp/B0076DD...](http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore- ebook/dp/B0076DDBJ6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I do not agree with the overall point. In order to stay relevant you have to build stuff and in building it, you have to constantly improve your techniques, while dealing with scalability (of development, of features, of a bigger consumer base, of growth in general).

If you do that, the other stuff will come naturally. I hate learning new tools. That hasn't stopped me from hitting every single bullet on his list and my list of technologies I worked with is probably bigger than his ... but I learned in response to challenges I faced, not because I feared that I'm no longer relevant (what an awkward notion btw). I couldn't give a damn about what the popular du-jour tools are - I only read about them in passing, then later if I have a concrete problem, maybe I'll remember something about tool X and then I'll go check out if it solves my problem or not.

So basically I consider it far more valuable being able to recognize pain- points, being able to say " _this sucks, I need something better_ " and then act on it. Being able to say NO to certain tools, paradigms and platforms is also a valuable trait. I'm pretty sure that right now developers that worked with and invested time in learning ASP (the original) regret making that choice, especially since far healthier alternatives were available and that are still relevant today. Common sense and good taste should reign supreme (not mentioning a general preference for open-source, but that's another topic for another day).

And that's the healthy attitude. Learning tools and protocols for staying relevant will ensure that you will end up outdated, while the developers that focus on learning about algorithms, design and business will be with us for a really long time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think it's funny how the only place that languages that he personally doesn't know are referenced is in a single paragraph.

So what you're saying is, to stay relevant, I have to learn PHP and ASP.net? I'm not sure that qualifies as polyglot programming.

I would think of polyglot as someone who can be effective in a systems language, an interpreted language, a DOM language, and probably shell. I.e. something like C, Python, Javascript, or maybe C++/Java, Perl, Postscript, although that's a pretty wacky combo.

<comment><USER15> I believe those were examples, not specific requirements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This scares me.

Right now I'm young, single and almost no responsibilities. I love doing what the article suggests, keep learning new stuff, etc., but I'm not too sure I can keep it up for the next X+ years.

And within that time my life could get much more complicated, not to mention the whole industry would keep on changing faster than I can manage, and add to that the unfortunate side-effects of aging.

The older I get, the harder I have to work to remain relevant.

<comment><USER19>
      > The older I get, the harder I have to work to remain
      > relevant.

No. I will be 40 in a few weeks and I consider myself more relevant than many many web developers half my age, even if web development currently is not my main activity (it was however for the last 14 years).

The more you know the easier it gets to grasp new stuff — because it is rarely fundamentally different and you can easily see patterns and where it fits.

Just like with languages—the more you know the easier it gets to learn a new one.

<comment><USER20> exactly. I think it is an common misconception that _everybody_ has trouble learning new things as they grow older. This might be true for some. However, it seems that if you actually try and don't let the misconception trick you into thinking you can't keep learning, then you won't fall victim to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> TL;DR Keep learning new stuff

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd say the best way to stay relevant is to complement your knowledge and learn something totally unrelated to web development, and then find a way to combine the two.

</comment><comment><USER23> That was maybe true few years ago. But with the web of today with backend and frontend becomming more and more complicated, I personnaly found that expertise is more and more of required.

But more and more often, I have been ask to help on project for cleaning the mess.. Not that the tech team is bad but without real expertise in backend, frontend, db or operation.

I love doing the full stack and never stop to learn is great advice. But getting specialised and learning few things very well matter a lot as well otherwise you end been average in loads of things and don't have real value on the market.

Now it s matter of what you are building, web apps become much more complex but it's still a small part of web market.. Where website or webcampain still rules as main business but I m personnaly not interrest to build that.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Dynamic Language PHP or ASP/C#

Accuracy doesn't appear to be important.

</comment><comment><USER25> It looks like the article was written in 2008. PHP or ASP/C#, SOAP? seriously? I think we're in the low part of the quality curve for Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER26> Learning and adapting is a great thing. However, history shows us that real progress is made by societies made up of co-operating specialist elements. One person can certainly be mediocre at the range from Photoshop through to MySQL and jQuery, resulting in a mediocre product. Masters, working together, at each discipline will result in a masterful product (at greater initial expense).</comment>


Teleport 2.4 released - <AUTHOR> https://gravitational.com/blog/teleport_2.4_released/ <comment><USER2> Pretty excited about this (even though its a .x release). There are some nice features in the OSS edition, including better support for OpenSSH nodes and Github OAuth[0], and it also is the first release where you can use the Enterprise features at a standard monthly subscription price[1].

[0] [https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/releases](https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/releases)

[1] [https://gravitational.com/blog/teleport-pro- business/](https://gravitational.com/blog/teleport-pro-business/)

<comment><USER3> do you have a public roadmap for future releases?

<comment> old-gregg The best place to look would probably be here: [https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/milestones](https://github.com/gravitational/teleport/milestones)

<comment><USER3> thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yey! 2.4 finalized another crucial feature that didn't make it into the changelog or release notes - the --insecure-no-tls flag for operating behind a proxy with SSL termination (such as with a load balancer in AWS)

</comment><comment><USER5> ...Eyewateringly expensive

</comment><comment><USER6> Aww, still no windows bins?

<comment><USER7> The web UI client works really well from Chrome on Windows</comment></comment>


Why less competent may rate their own ability higher than more competent - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning_kruger_effect

<comment><USER2> Even more disconcerting, it can sometimes be very hard to tell the competent from the incompetent until you have them in the door working for you.

I once worked with a guy (not in an engineering discipline) who could talk circles around much more competent people. He knew all the buzz words, and even knew most of the topics about one level deep. When he spoke, he spoke with an absolute air of authority on whatever subject he was talking about. He managed to convince division manager after division manager (he jumped around a lot and it was a very large company) that past failures were just because of circumstances out of his control.

However, he didn't actually know _anything_ and every project he was put in charge of either failed disastrously, or was caught from the brink at the last minute by colleagues who worked double shifts to do the project (which of course allowed him to point to those same colleagues as incompetents that he had to deal with on his project and hence the reason for failure).

The really sad thing is, I could never figure out if he knew he was grossly incompetent and just spinning things to keep a job far above the level he should have had, or actually believed the yarns he wove about what he knew.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious: is this not solved by a solid technical interview?

I would have guessed that if someone impresses HR, you could find out if they really know their stuff by getting a KNOWN competent person to ask them lots of hard technical questions, make them solve problems on the spot, etc.

A friend recently gave me a great example of how to do open-ended questions and probe someone's knowledge: ask a question like "when you type in a web address and hit enter, what happens?" The answer can range from "your computer loads the page" to delving into DNS, IP routing, HTTP headers, server load management, server-side processing, sessions, database access, cookies, browser rendering, etc etc. If the candidate gives a simple answer, you can continue to probe different areas to see how much they know in each one.

The trick is that the interviewer has to be competent enough to tell what the candidate knows and whether he/she will BS rather than admit not knowing something (which is also important to find out).

If you don't already have anyone competent enough to conduct the interview - maybe you're hiring your first programmer - you could temporarily hire someone who comes highly recommended to help you with the interview process.

So, was this guy vetted like this on technical merits, or did he just talk impressively to non-technical people? I'm curious to know how he slipped through.

<comment><USER2> It wasn't exactly a technical field. It's amazing how many fields outside of development are very nearly impossible to test in a meaningful way. For example, hiring a sales vp, if done at the same level of problem solving as most tech interviews I've seen, would have to result in a 30% sales increase for the company. You basically have to just see what they say, if they sound like they can tie their own shoes, don't suffer from short term memory loss and have a pulse you usually give them a try and just fire them if they don't work out.

That's why there are so many hangups during the interview process that have nothing to do with a person's actual skill in a given area..like font choice on a resume, or little tips like how to sit in a chair or whatever. Those are all little tells that people look for in an interview, but candidates also know this, so they try to game the system by appearing confident, showing up precisely 15 minutes early with a binder full of extra copies of their resume, just the right amount of hair gel, etc. Because by and large, in fields outside of technical ones, that's how you get a job.

> So, was this guy vetted like this on technical merits, or did he just talk > impressively to non-technical people? I'm curious to know how he slipped > through.

But yeah, this is actually how he kept slipping through. His interviewers were hiring him for expertise in his field that they themselves did not have. Pretty much it was bureaucrats and administrators hiring somebody for a particular skill requirement. They simply didn't know how to dig more than a level or two deep. In the same way that a person can game the hiring system like I mentioned above, he could do the same for his field. Somebody who was actually in the field would have to spend a little time to figure out that he didn't know the equivalent that computers need electricity to operate. But he could talk for hours about how for example, a browser operates with DNS servers to resolve IP addresses -- and do it with authority (again, as a very rough equivalent).

You could even ask him to produce a plan of action for the next six months and he could produce a pretty good outline, good enough for an interview, but ask him to fill in the details and he couldn't.

<comment><USER4> > His interviewers were hiring him for expertise in his field that they > themselves did not have. Pretty much it was bureaucrats and administrators > hiring somebody for a particular skill requirement.

This is what keeps me coming back to small companies and startups. Any company with an HR department big enough that they hire using a series of bullet points pretty much guarantees I will have brain-dead coworkers.

<comment><USER2> Funny you say that, I actually left that place largely for this reason directly for a very small startup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not much on "why", just that it exists. The "why" is essentially a re- statement of the situation: illusory superiority and illusory inferiority.

A common "why" theory that I personally subscribe to: the less competent don't know enough to know what they don't know.

<comment><USER6> This happens often in music, where subjectivity comes into play. What's not immediately obvious: programmers use subjective measures of quality all the time. We have to do so to get our work done in a timely fashion.

Those who want to be truly great should be humble. They should also check themselves as much as possible with objective measures and feedback from trusted and respected fellow practitioners.

Come to think of it, I suspect this phenomenon affects the implementation of programming languages. A lot of second tier CS talents implement languages because they have enough ego to get through the ordeal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

</comment><comment><USER8> The skill you're looking for here is called meta-knowledge. It is knowledge of your level of knowledge about a given topic.

It is a teachable trait, arguably what very selective schools with hard grading curves teaching difficult things teach people to develop (as you have to determine what you don't know to pass/excel/etc there).

I've always personally believed the test: "What would you need to get going on these 5 projects?" Is a great question. If talking about researching X Y or Z don't come out of the candidate's mouth (and it's not an old solved problem, like self-contained embedded C code), you mark them down as less meta- knowledgeable. (Doesn't mean unhireable, but you don't want them in highly independent positions or constantly learning new things; people with low meta knowledge appear to actually be quite happy in places that high meta people hate, such as long term maintenance programming).

In software particularly, study of estimation (and it's continual use) can teach people the practice of evaluating all risks, including metaknowledge. I like the book: [http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying- Pract...](http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Practices- Microsoft/dp/0735605351) (non-aff link) for getting people going with the practice.

</comment><comment><USER9> HN discussion of posting of same Wikipedia article from 92 days ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1063287>

</comment><comment><USER10> Will knowing this concept affect the meta-cognitive ability of a person?

Will those that were underestimating their ability start to correctly/over estimate it? i.e if they buy this concept.

Will those that were over estimating their abilities before, start to realize they were over estimating?

Will those that want to look/sound smart start to fake humility, since underestimating one's ability may give the idea that he is smart?

Oh well, ...

</comment><comment><USER11> There is scientific evidence that social rejection massively reduces the intelligence & injects aggressiveness in kids.

<http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2051>

</comment><comment><USER12> "There are, in effect, two things: to know and to believe one knows. To know is science. To believe one knows is ignorance."

"Their misconception is fueled by the fact that they are completely unaware of their own ignorance. This unawareness or unwillingness to admit their ignorance subconsciously prods them to make (wrong) assumptions in order to fill the void in their knowledge."

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

"What we do not understand we do not possess."

"We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making."</comment>


Google shutting down Project Tango - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/projecttango/status/941730801791549440 <comment><USER2> And I say thanks to #ARKit. ARKit really changed the game and Google have to accept it.</comment>


Apple OKs app bringing Flash to iPad and iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2272702/apple-oks-app-bringing-flash

<comment><USER2> No, Apple approves an app that pre-processes and converts Flash content _on the server_ and delivers nothing but html-friendly content to the client, displaying it in an embedded browser.

It's not even the interesting case of a Flash runtime standalone app being approved, let alone the browser plugin that would be needed to 'support Flash content' in any reasonable sense.

(Also, as the article notes, it obviously doesn't work at all for interactive Flash content, either. It sounds like a glorified flv->mp4 service.)</comment>


Apple Sues HTC for Patent Infringement - <AUTHOR> http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/apple-sues-htc-for-patent-infringement-85950187.html <comment><USER2> If this had happened a day earlier I don't think I would have posted that RFS. Apple is inching ever closer to evil, and I worry that there's no one within the company who can stand up to Jobs and tell him so.

<comment><USER3> Apple has been evil since the first ipod when you had to use itunes to load music. They have locked people in with no cheap way out. Pure evil IMO.

<comment><USER4> Aiding and abetting totalitarian regimes by censoring search results and turning over email correspondence is evil. Making shiny toys that don't do exactly what you want is not evil. Let's stop using "evil" as a synonym for "reprehensible."

<comment><USER2> Historically the word "evil" has had a pretty broad meaning. Among tech companies the word has a new and fairly specific sense that follows from Paul Buchheit's slogan "Don't be evil." That's the sense I was using. It has a pretty low bar. It means, roughly, winning by taking advantage of people instead of by doing good work.

<comment><USER5> Maybe Apple succeeds most when they take advantage of people _and_ do good work. :)

<comment><USER6> Which makes them better loved than Microsoft, which for long stretches got away with taking advantage of people and doing mostly mediocre work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Steve Jobs, visited PARC in 1979 and was impressed and influenced by the Xerox Alto, the first computer ever with a graphical user interface. Jobs designed the new Apple Lisa based on the technology he saw at Xerox.

<comment><USER8> They, Xerox management, gave him a license to do so. People at PARC weren't so enthusiastic, I think.

<comment><USER6> The Xerox management thought all of those things were just toys and that computers would never be anything but what they were at that moment.

Reminds me of a lot of people who look at the iPad and say "meh."

<comment><USER9> Come on now. Please explain to me what is revolutionary about the iPad. It _is_ 'meh'. It's just a big iPod touch. It's like a netbook or laptop but less useful. There's nothing revolutionary about it at all. It's a slightly slicker version of all the tablet PCs that have failed to capture significant market share for the last 10-20 years.

It'd be easy to say "sure but you're a geek, you just don't see how easy to use and useful the iPad is for normal people". But I don't think it is. The form factor is just bad. Watch the video on the Apple store, and you'll see actor after actor carefully pretending that it's comfortable to sit/stand/hold this device without getting an aching hand/sore neck etc.

Yes, there are applications, just like there have been for previous tablet PCs, but they're niche.

Is it really that much more than the Apple Newton was 20 odd years ago? Did the Apple Newton seem revolutionary at the time? If so, why did it fail?

I'd love to hear a concrete reason why the iPad is 'revolutionary'. Like a genuine reason, not just people pointing to the lone person on slashdot who called the iPod 'meh'. That doesn't count.

So, please explain to me clearly, why having a laptop without a keyboard/trackpad is revolutionary.

<comment><USER10> The only thing I can say in response to this is that I see that my dad uses his iPhone to surf the web much more than he uses his computer, and he's interested in a bigger screen to do so. He's in his 60s, and he's actually not buying another desktop computer (his is 11 years old) because his iPhone does what he needs, and more, plus he's tired of viruses and spyware. (Yes, we know it's not a target yet, but a closed system does help prevent a lot of that.)

I see it as a step towards hurting Dell, who makes a portion of their money selling laptops and desktops to people who really don't need them, like my parents, grandparents, other non-technical people. It's also a step towards hurting the "PC repair" industry that charges these poor folks $150 to install and run freeware antivirus tools and "double your memory".

I think the lack of Flash support is going to hurt it the most, as the target market I'm describing are people who tend to use Flash a lot (think Facebook games and other online games.)

The iPad is aimed at that market of people - the people who use the Internet as another vehicle for entertainment. I've seen what the iPhone has done for average people, and I think this is Apple taking that a step further.

I guess I wouldn't say it's "revolutionary" but then again, I said that about the iPhone. ("it's just another phone, who cares?") And remember, it was pretty 'meh' before the app store.

I could be wrong, but I think it has the potential to be pretty neat for the average person. We need a revolution in that space.

<comment><USER9> Why wouldn't a netbook+ChromeOS win?

I disagree @ iPhone. That _was_ revolutionary. It was the first pocket webbrowser that actually worked well and rendered websites properly.

>> "And remember, it was pretty 'meh' before the app store."

Again, difference of opinion. I couldn't care less about the app store. Why would I download software approved by Apple, when I can just use the browser for most things?

<comment><USER10> You're stating it's not useful to _you_. You're not the target market for the iPad. I personally don't have much of an interest in the iPad, but I'm not willing to go out and say that nobody else will.

You could care less. But you know better than to download malware. Most people don't, and I'm sure you know that if you've ever had to fix someone's computer over the holidays.

As for netbooks? Triad them. Screen's too small for the elderly. Apple lets you zoom up things you can't see. I have horrible vision, and I have an ipod touch and a netbook. Guess which one I surf on? It ain't the netbook.

I really think they're targeting people who don't _want_ a computer who want the Internet for entertainment, and nothing more. It's a good sized market. Time will tell if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER9> FWIW, I may buy an iPad to play with. But here's the crutial point - I can't see it being useful to my kids, or my mum, who are most certainly in the market you describe.

My mum has a macbook, which serves her fine. My kids have Netbooks with Ubuntu netbook remix which also is great for browsing the web.

I just don't see how the form factor makes sense. I can just see the write-ups now - highly irritating to use for long periods, aching hand/neck, too easy to drop, etc etc

<comment><USER10> Yeah but that's _your_ family. In my house, Kid #1 slings a macbook and a netbook with no problem. Kid #2 is 2. She loves looking at pictures on the iPod. Kid #2 will be hacking soon enough. But that's the environment I created, and I guess it's just like yours.

Kid #1's friends have computers, but they don't use them like we use them. They use email and Facebook. (Yes, I know, I already covered Flash games previously, so we'll need to see on that one.)

They don't know or care how their computer works, they use Internet Explorer cos it's there, and they don't download software because they've had to pay so much to have it removed by GeekSquad.

This is a smart move by Apple. It'd be smarter if they'd just make Flash work, put a couple of USB ports on the thing, and let it be a master for an ipod.

The fact that you need a win or mac box with iTunes to get music on this thing could very well be the one thing that keeps it out of the reach of the _everyman_. In that case, you and I are in total agreement.

<comment><USER9> Yeah I would be in total agreement if they'd come out with a macbook mini, slimmed down small macbook. It's just the form factor that I think is a big mistake. I think we agree on the software side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love that apple drives innovation in hardware and interface design. I hate that the patent system we have now actively hinders the adoption of apple's innovations.

Apple complains that competitors are stealing apple's technology, as though apple's success relies entirely on technology x or y. Not true. Apple's success is based on its polish and attention to detail, something which competitors have an incredibly hard time copying. I for one, love when competitors copy apple, because it forces apple to up its game.

<comment><USER4> _Apple's success is based on its polish and attention to detail_

If that's the case, why can't they drop OS X and iPhone and simply make clones, just clones with polish and attention to detail?

You want to have your cake and eat it too: You want Apple to innovate and you want everyone else to leverage their innovation freely. I understand why that's in your best interests, I can't figure out why Apple would bother if everyone else could "adopt" their innovation wholesale.

Where do you want to draw the line? Can others adopt Apple's multi-touch gestures? How about the look and feel of OS X? What about the code, can CherryPC or whatever they were called make PCs that run OS X by writing drivers for it? How about duplicating the OS X copde, can Chinese clone makers simply copy the OS X code and replace Apple's logos with their own?

<comment><USER12> >If that's the case, why can't they drop OS X and iPhone and simply make clones, just clones with polish and attention to detail?

Because OS X and the iPhone are part of that polish and attention to detail.

<comment><USER4> It was a rhetorical question!

But responding to your explanation, if competitors are free to "adopt" Apple's innovations, why can't competitor's "adopt" OS X and iPhone by copying them feature for feature, polish for polish, detail for detail, simply changing logos and writing "Hello from Dreary Seattle" on the back?

It is not obvious to me how "polish and attention to detail" are going to be a competitive advantage in a world where competitors have the unrestricted right to adopt Apple's innovations.

I suggest that part of why Apple is able to differentiate with polish and attention to detail is our existing barriers to adopting other people's innovations.

<comment><USER13> > Why can't competitor's "adopt" OS X and iPhone by copying them feature for > feature, polish for polish, detail for detail

They can't copy the code for OS X because it's covered by copyright. They also can't make it look _exactly_ the same because of trademark. What does that leave? A competitor could then still completely implement their own operating system, User Interface, related hardware, and put the effort into polish and attention to detail. And somehow that's a problem that requires legal recourse to prevent?

<comment><USER14> Were you alive in the 90s? I'm just wondering out loud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mobile devices is an incredibly patent-heavy landscape, where manufacturers are used to licensing technology from one-another and have been for years.

Obviously Apple and HTC have been in discussions (lawsuits are incredibly expensive and always a last resort) and the fact that Apple went ahead and filed indicates that these discussions failed. This means either HTC was offering less than 'market' in licensing fees, or Apple was asking for more. Which do you think is more likely?

<comment><USER16> It could be a "you infringe on as many of our patents as we do infringe on yours" thing too.

I expect a counter-suit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If I were paranoid I might think that this was a bit of an attack on Google rather than HTC.

<comment><USER18> I think it's far more calculated than that: Google's shipping Android builds avoid a lot of basic UI features that Apple did first. HTC then adds most of them through their "TouchSense" modifications, just like they did with WM6 before.

They're trying to keep Google in its place, and prevent HTC from extending it. They're happy with Android being out there for the dorkwads and ideologues (it lets them shed their 'worst customers') but they don't want the public to see a sea of direct clones of their style of multitouch.

<comment><USER19> I enjoy reading hacker news comments because they tend to be mature and express interesting ideas well. I hope your future comments do not resort to childish name calling as you do in this one.

As for your point, that you feel patents like the multi-touch patent are justified, I would point out that many people disagree with trivial patents such as this, or even software patents in general. It is developers and IT people that are upset with Apples highly controlled development environment. Alienating this group of people may eventually backfire.

<comment><USER18> C'mon now, as a dorkwad and an ideologue myself, I feel free to refer to my brethren here by those 'childish' names.

I don't feel that the patents are justified -- I'm merely explaining how and why I think Apple is using them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Swiping to unlock and other similar patented items are all "obvious" design decisions. All great design is obvious because great design produces things that are appropriate. Moreover, because great design is so obvious, it must be easy to design great things; the world must be full of great designs.

Right?

Um, no. The truth is that great design is NOT easy, and it stands out so prominently because the world is NOT full of great designs. Things like swiping to unlock are "obvious" only in retrospect. All great design is obvious -- in retrospect -- because great design produces things that are appropriate. But it is hard to do (PG has several essays on precisely this topic). Moreover, because it is hard to do, great designers are rewarded with some degree of protection for making the details of their innovations public (thus the legal terminology that patents "teach" a particular topic). I don't see why we should expect great designers to give up control of their ideas, willingly or otherwise, simply because those ideas are particularly good. Much of the logic in these comments amounts to "the iPhone had such a marvelously simple UI that everyone copied it, and because it became pervasive (by virtue of the copying), it must remain pervasive via Apple giving up the right to protect their IP."

I just don't buy that.

Also, people are asking "why now? why not earlier?" According to Gizmodo & other news sites, the brief is some 700 pages long. I'm sure Apple started working on this the day the Nexus One details started surfacing and it became clear it was effectively an iPhone clone. They can't sue Google (remember that Schmidt sat in Apple's huddles for years, listening to the plays, learning the playbook by heart, soaking up all insider info he could) because Google is intentionally disabling contested technology in Android -- they evidently know quite well what patent infringement means. Google is instead relying upon their handset manufacturers to enable the contested technology and thus take the bullet for them. I wonder why nobody is criticizing Google for using HTC as a "human" shield?

</comment><comment><USER21> I think they should put a cap on the size of a company that can hold and enforce patents. Apple et. al. do not need the protections afforded by patents. I know that in reality this would just create a lot of proxy companies but there has got to be a better way; getting rid of the patent system is not the solution as it does provide the little guy protection, from the big guys just stealing, his idea and drowning him out with cheaper copies.

But given the two choices, I am cheering for the patent trolls to just screw the whole think up to the point that the big guys clamor for it to go away.

</comment><comment><USER22> Which particular patents are in question?

<comment><USER23> Digital Daily has the documents [http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100302/apples-suits- aga...](http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100302/apples-suits-against-htc- both-documents/)

Gizmodo has a summary of the patents: The '331 Patent, entitled "Time-Based, Non-Constant Translation Of User Interface Objects Between States," was duly and legally issued on April 22, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The '949 Patent, entitled "Touch Screen Device, Method, And Graphical User Interface For Determining Commands By Applying Heuristics," was duly and legally issued on January 20, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '949 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit B.

The '849 Patent, entitled "Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image," was duly and legally issued on February 2, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '849 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit C.

The '381 Patent, entitled "List Scrolling And Document Translation, Scaling, And Rotation On A Touch-Screen Display," was duly and legally issued on December 23, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '381 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit D.

The '726 Patent, entitled "System And Method For Managing Power Conditions Within A Digital Camera Device," was duly and legally issued on July 6, 1999 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '726 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit E.

The '076 Patent, entitled "Automated Response To And Sensing Of User Activity In Portable Devices," was duly and legally issued on December 15, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '076 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit F.

The '105 Patent, entitled "GMSK Signal Processors For Improved Communications Capacity And Quality," was duly and legally issued on December 8, 1998 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '105 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit G.

The '453 Patent, entitled "Conserving Power By Reducing Voltage Supplied To An Instruction-Processing Portion Of A Processor," was duly and legally issued on June 3, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '453 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit H.

The '599 Patent, entitled "Object-Oriented Graphic System," was duly and legally issued on October 3, 1995 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '599 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit I.

The '354 Patent, entitled "Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods," was duly and legally issued on July 23, 2002 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '354 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit J.

[http://gizmodo.com/5483632/apple-sues-htc-for-infringing- on-...](http://gizmodo.com/5483632/apple-sues-htc-for-infringing-on-20-iphone- patents-the-complete-documents?skyline=true&s=i)

<comment><USER24> Don't the last two patents basically give them the right to sue ANYONE who has ever made some sort of GUI application, including vendors in their own app store and people who write apps for OSX? Aren't these basically design patterns?

<comment><USER25> > Don't the last two patents basically give them the right to sue ANYONE who > has ever made some sort of GUI application, including vendors in their own > app store and people who write apps for OSX? Aren't these basically design > patterns?

Welcome to the world of software patents. Many of the other ones are probably also very basic and widespread, they're just not worded in such a way as to make it so obvious.

<comment><USER26> Read the claims, not the titles. The title of a patent means nothing, from a legal sense. So while a title can be broad, the claims must be very specific.

<comment><USER27> The claims merely need to be specific enough to not conflict with other patents (excluding the so called "obvious" and vague notion of "been there, done that"). Design patterns in the general sense are patentable, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Steve Jobs:

> _"We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we > can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think > competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original > technology, not steal ours."_

<comment><USER29> Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo:

> _"We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we > can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think > competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original > technology, not steal ours."_

<comment><USER26> I assume you're talking about Nokia (since as an American, I can't be bothered to remember their CEO's name).

The Nokia situation is a little more murky than this. With Nokia, Apple tried to license their patents (which I believe are crucial to GSM), but Nokia wanted a broad cross-licensing agreement, to basically use all of the Apple display / mobile device / multitouch patents (what HTC is accused of doing). Patents involved in communication standards are supposed to be licensed on reasonable terms, so Apple cried foul. The predictable lawsuit and counter- suit then commenced.

I don't think anyone in this case is saying that HTC bothered to ask Apple to license the patents in question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I love John Gruber's response to this:

<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/02/stand-by-this>

</comment><comment><USER31> HTC should countersue (if Apple are actually trying to sue HTC over HTC's technology and not Google's).

HTC pushed pure touch-based phones for years before Apple released the iPhone in 2007 and should have a reasonable patent portfolio they can use against trolls like this.

<comment><USER32> Apple released the iPhone in 2007. They didn't even release the i _Mac_ until 1998.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Same story for those who prefer it on TechCrunch: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161526>

ADDED IN EDIT:

tl;dr - I think cross referencing is a Good Thing(tm).

Clearly some people here think that this comment detracted from the value of HN. I can accept that, and I don't mind the loss of karma. Let me just explain that as a programmer I abhor unnecessary duplication. Equally, though, as an infophile I like to get different angles on each story, to try to see if there's any extras. So when I see the same story from different sources I like to read them all, but equally, I prefer that discussion and comments end up in one place.

So I try to add value to HN in part by making sure these things get cross- referenced. Mostly I think people find it harmless. Some people actively dislike it and vote me down, others actively like it and vote me up. Yet others find it both irritating and useful in equal measure, so no doubt they are confused and conflicted. That's their problem.

But I'm slowly stopping doing this anyway. I get the occasional comment saying it's really appreciated, but in general I'm reducing the time I spend here anyway.

And that's the rationale behind the comment.

ADDED FURTHER IN EDIT: Or perhaps you saw that I'd got the reference wrong and just down-voted me instead of bothering to tell me. Now I'm really disappointed in the HN crowd. I've fixed the reference.

<comment><USER31> I appreciate the need to get different angles, TechCrunch however isn't a credible source of information (they throw great parties though).

I'd love to see a Mashable or CodeSketch or whatever perspective though. Someone else contributed John Gruber's post on the topic and was modded up accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why can't Apple continue to out-innovate Nexus One and Android instead of suing them?

Reading from the overall situation and his quote, Steve Jobs might feel that the current iPhone UI is 'perfect' as a whole. Apart from nitty-gritty details, he does not see a way to drastically improve it. (That's why he chose it for the iPad UI as well.) So he might figure that the only way to stop competitors from getting too close is to sue them.

</comment><comment><USER35> I guess that makes Steve Jobs a hypocrite <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU>

</comment><comment><USER36> My next computer wont be a Macbook. :-/ Which makes me really angry because I love my current Macbook. And there goes the thought of buying an iPhone as well.

Unfortunately at this point I feel that I'm obligated not to buy Apple products. Walk with your feet, as the saying goes. Believing in patent reform can be damn inconvenient sometimes.

<comment><USER37> I'm in the same boat. I think Apple should consider adopting that bullshit "Don't be evil" mantra.

<comment><USER31> Apple make good laptop hardware though. Here's a better idea: keep your existing Mac, but buy an HTC Desire as your next phone.

You get a lot of features the iPhone doesn't have (pictures for your contacts, social network integration, streaming, no sync requirement, a faster CPU) and stick it to Apple at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm really hating how tech discussions relating to Apple are turning in the Apple fanboys versus detractors of Apple.

</comment><comment><USER39> It seems to part of a longer game, I think certain companies are not wanting "Google Voice" to revolutionise phone calls. There is a lot of companies making a lot of money for not a lot of bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER40> I was wondering how long it would take Apple to start doing this. A good amount of phones have similar tech to their baby.

</comment><comment><USER28> Could suing for patents ever be considered a violation of monopoly law? (I know Apple isn't a monopoly.)

<comment><USER41> By definition, patents give you a monopoly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Good artists borrow, Great Artists steal - Pablo Picasso, I think Jobs also quoted that phrase as well

<comment><USER5> Yeah, he totally stole that line from him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I don't know why, but this just makes me laugh.

</comment><comment><USER44> Way to stifle innovation, Apple. incumbents and lawyers getting what they want, fantastic system ...

<comment><USER45> Innovation and theft are two different things. Forget the hardware and architecture patents - I'm sick of design being treated as a commodity that's assumed to be freely copyable, simply because it's a user interface rather than a hardware element. Just as many hours and insights went into making the iPhone UI as it did the physical device.

<comment><USER46> _Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image_

Maybe hindsight is just 20/20, but "slide to unlock" seems to be something pretty obvious.

<comment><USER47> It becomes obvious once you make the leap to "there is no keyboard, the touchscreen is the entirety of the interface", but prior to the iPhone no one had dared to try that particular path of development. It was probably not possible to patent the concept of only using a touchscreen for your UI, so instead Apple patented a lot of the little details that are a consequence of its innovative leap.

<comment><USER16> One shouldn't be able to patent something that's a direct consequence of having a specific limitation, This slide to unlock idea is something a reasonably clever designer would figure out in about 5 minutes.

And, BTW, is a common feature in many physical devices that employ a lock over a button. It reminds me of the locks I had in my car by the late 80's and the power button I had on a Compaq server in the early 90's.

<comment><USER31> Actually a patent already has to be 'not obvious to an engineer sufficiently skilled in the art' if I remember correctly, although that's almost never applied.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


ThePirateBay is down - <AUTHOR> http://thepiratebay.sx/

<comment><USER2> I would like to propose that such things are not allowed on Hacker News. There are websites on the Internet which will tell you if a website is down for just you or everybody. When a website goes down the sysadmins do everything humanly possible to get it back, no need to create noise about it.

It would be news if the reason for the downtime was published, to learn from others mistakes/problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand, why is this relevant to Hacker News?

<comment><USER4> Tend to agree, but to be fair whenever a major site/service ( Reddit, github, netflix etc ) goes down, it is inevitably posted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And the rest of the Internet is surprisingly fast..!

<comment><USER6> Good one ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And at least this time it's not domain name seizure. The server 126.96.36.199 is down.

</comment><comment><USER8> Local proxies (eg the NL proxy [1]) are displaying their usual error page.

[1] [http://pirateproxy.nl/](http://pirateproxy.nl/)

</comment><comment><USER9> What part of "The Galaxy's most resilient bittorrent tracker" do you not get? :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Now it's up again...

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd guess DDOS?

</comment><comment><USER11> thepiratebay.ee

<comment><USER12> nice phishing URL :))</comment></comment>


Onepw upgrade – a lightweight command line tool for managing passwords - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mkideal/onepw <comment><USER2> From the github page:

1) Generate Key by master password

        +</comment><comment>--+         +-----+
        | Master | MD5Sum  |     |
        | Pass   |</comment><comment>==>| Key |
        | Word   |         |     |
        +</comment><comment>--+         +-----+

This is an epic fail. Someone needs to read up on key stretching: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_stretching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_stretching)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> CHANGELOG:

* Add command `upgrade` (aliases `up`) * Add validating master password(you __SHOULD __upgrade password.data by `onepw up`) * Add secret prompt for typing password * Add `info` command</comment>


Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia is Losing Contributors - <AUTHOR> http://siliconfilter.com/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-is-losing-contributors/ <comment><USER3> Say you draw a venn diagram with three intersecting circles:

1\. People with technical web expertise

2\. People with deep domain knowledge

3\. People willing to deal with bureaucracy

You will get a very tiny population.

Wikipedia wasn't always like this, the problem is that well established editors have built a fort to keep the noobs out—not because they are power thirsty—but because they don't want to deal with noob mistakes.

As with anyone new to a job, your first week will likely be a net loss to the company: they have to show you the ropes, set up your computer, take you out for lunch, make you feel welcome, etc. The wikipedia editors don't want to deal with this, so they just build technical and policy barriers to keep new people out.

Around three years ago I decided on "donating" one day of my life to Wikipedia in Spanish. I went around areas of intest, fixed some stuff, created two new articles of well recognized designers. The next day both articles were "nominated for deletion", one because it wasn't properly formatted or referenced, and the other for copyright infringement. An overzealous editor made a search on google and found a similar article in a blog, _my own blog!_ which I release under public domain and which shares my wikipedia handle.

I ended up collaborating one day and fighting bureaucracy three days. No wonder they're having trouble finding new editors.

<comment><USER4> It's pretty clear that Wikipedia's eventually death/massive reorganization will come about over four easily recognizable flaws:

(1) rejecting articles for notability.

(2) no advertising

(3) reliance on a tiny population of unpaid editors.

(4) allowing anonymous edits.

Google tried with Knol but they focused on (2), (3) and (4) when in actuality the biggest weakness is (1) due to Kryder's Law.

What Google (or Microsoft or some startup) should do is create a third party wikipedia extension, call it notapedia (or whatever) and have it spider wikipedia and keep a fork of any page deleted for notability reasons.

Of course that's just the tip of the iceberg. People will be able to make their own (notable or not notapedia) info pages. Notapedia will hit a critical mass and the killing blow will come all at once as wikipedia is forked and most of their editors enticed with revenue deals.

Having swallowed it's father (patriphagicide?) notapedia grows even faster. Info pages are created for nearly every person on the planet, becoming the anti-facebook that Zuckerburg envisioned but replacing the real facebook and twitter and flickr and linked in and everything else as well. Businesses and government agencies will check your id against the datestamped photos of you on notapedia. An enormous network of private and government databases will be setup to work as extensions of notapedia.

<comment><USER5> The final paragraph seems like a huge leap from your (very convincing) earlier paragraphs.

Reducing/removing notability guidelines does not necessarily open the flood gates to some kind of social network with a wiki page for every individual on earth :P

That said, I really hope a wikipedia fork gains popularity and is merged back later.

<comment><USER4> Was engaging in a bit of artistic license there but I think it's certainly possible.

Once the notability threshold is gone and people realize they could make a page for themselves, their family, friends, their dog, their band... Well some people will do that. This can easily be turned into a crowd sourced version of any social or blogging service. It grows faster because one user can make pages for 100, 1000 people. It grows faster because the total lack of privacy and editorial controls make it more interesting (right up Google's alley btw). Lack of anonymous commenting means people are ultimately subject to libel laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Contributing to Wikipedia is not fun.

If you create a new article, it's likely to get deleted for not meeting high "notability" criteria.

Your first edits will likely end up being reverted for not having sources good enough. For overzealous admins it's easier to bin them rather than find a better source link or let someone else improve it.

<comment><USER7> As an administrator on Wikipedia, I thought the Wikipedia notability criteria is quite leniant about articles which are not that notable, this is evident if you ever look at what kind of articles gets kept on [[WP:AFD]]. The reason notability criteria is there so not everyone can create an article about their band which sold 3 copies of their CD (edit: Which typically have no realiable sources indicating its existance). If the article you are creating was deleted for not meeting the notability criteria, it means you probably did not source it with a reliable source, and the administartor who deleted it could not find a reliable source about the article you were writing.

If you think your article's deletion need to be reviewed, try contacting one of the admins, if your article was deleted by me I would be more than happy to tell you why I deleted it, and if I made a mistake I would not hestitate to revert the deletion.

<comment><USER8> > The reason notability criteria is there so not everyone can create an > article about their band which sold 3 copies of their CD.

I could see this being a problem if the band's name is ambiguous with existing, important articles. But if there's no conflict, how is that a bad thing? Perhaps it would encourage people to contribute more if Wikipedia is a little too lenient rather than a little too strict.

<comment><USER7> Bands which sold 3 copies of their CD tend to have no reliable sources indicating its existance even, with no sources, how is anyone able to ensure that it even exists? (Perhaps I should of reworded that). Notability criteria in a nutshell, basically means, the subject of the article needs to be mentioned by some reliable source. If we had no notability criteria, then we simply have no ways to ensure that the subject of the article exists or even real.

Note: I'm pretty much summarizing what's on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:N> If you think I'm biased, please read the policy directly on Wikipedia itself.

<comment><USER9> The notability criteria are rather stricter than that. There are plenty of individuals and nouns that assuredly exist but which are not "notable" according to Wikipedia. The criteria wording is "significant coverage" in outside sources, so not only does your band have to have one article written about them, but many, in different outside sources, before Wikipedia won't delete your entry.

<comment><USER10> Iirc, the multiple-sources requirement came in because of some cases where there was exactly one "reliable" article on a subject, but it was hilariously bad, like an article on a fringe physics theory in some popular-press magazine that made the mistake of taking it seriously, or an article on a person that paints them in a very negative light. So the worry is that without more that one source, Wikipedia just amplifies bias by parroting what one source says, because the one source gets cited, but the rebuttals don't exist in a citeable form. That can happen with more sources too, but at least there's more chance of sources disagreeing when they're >1.

Despite it being phrased as "notability", to me it's the "verifiability" requirement that's a better argument: there should only be Wikipedia articles on things where there exist enough good sources to write a reasonably well sourced article. That's more of a pragmatic than a philosophical decision; not "this subject deserves/doesn't-deserve an article", but rather "we have/don't-have enough sources to write a good article about this subject".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can't engage gradually - if you don't get everything exactly right first time you just get spat out with little or no feedback or encouragement.

Designers of user interfaces have learned over time that you need to engage gradually and give positive feedback for the good bits, while gently removing the bad bits. WikiPedia seems to do exactly the opposite.

User Hostile rather than User Friendly.

More, in the push to become a "proper" encyclopedia the markup has become remarkably baroque, making it almost impossible to get to know what to do. The macros and other procedures that work behind the scenes are nearly impossible to grok given the lack of tools to help.

Overall, it's simply groaning under the mass of twiddles and has no elegance.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've freely given many, many hours of my life to improving Wikipedia, and here's why I left:

Except for technical, completely uncontroversial articles, Wikipedia is dominated by people with apparently unlimited time on their hands to devote to pushing their point of view.

I got really tired of the endless arguments I needed to engage in to contribute new information or improve the wording of existing articles.

Some person or group of people with apparently unlimited time on their hands and who feel they "own" the article would inevitably come by and start reverting and endlessly arguing every little change.

I just don't have the infinite time on my hands (or interest, frankly) that it would require to out-argue these people. They can keep their articles. I've got better things to do with my time than argue with no-life Wikilawyers all day, every day.

</comment><comment><USER13> Wikipedia puzzles me.

Why so many deletions? The significance of a topic is very important for paper encyclopedias because shelf space is finite. A regular encyclopedia collection can have only so many books before no one can afford to buy one.

But when most of the Wikipedia contents are text - why all the deletions?

<comment><USER14> Because there are storage costs other than the literal cost of maintaining data on a server.

Is the data accurate and up-to-date? Are the links still viable? Do the citations check out? etc.

It's just like having a project with a huge number of lines of code. It's an important maintenance task to delete outdated or obsolete code - not because you will run out of disk space to store your .c files, but because unused, unmaintained code is very likely to be confusing or wrong.

Remember also the power rule for user contribution: 90% of all users do not contribute anything ever. 9% of users contribute at least once. 1% of users contribute everything else. If an article is not very notable, it's extremely likely that the person who originally contributes it will be the only person who ever contributes anything to the article, and contributing the original is very likely to be the only contribution to the subject they make. This will hold true even if there are some number of "long tail" readers interested in the article, because readers are drastically more common than writers, and infrequent writers drastically more common than writers who consistently attempt to improve the articles they read.

So: Articles with low notability are probably poorly maintained, out of date, and/or consisting entirely of the statements of a single person. Making them better imposes a cost which relatively few people in Wikipedia's community actually pay - the cost of taking time to edit something.

All of Wikipedia's pains and stretch marks will become much clearer if you restate the purpose and function of the site. If you approach Wikipedia as a server farm that takes in user contributions and produces a compilation of same, then it's strange to have any limits on contributions, since the cost of storing text data is extremely small. If you approach Wikipedia as a group of people that takes in the members' time and energy and produces agreement between the members, then you see where their problems come from.

Remember, a Wikipedia article gets to stay in a particular state only when everyone who potentially could change it agrees that no changes are necessary. Wikipedia produces consensus, not data. Its limiting factor is the time and patience of the people who work on edits.

If you need consensus - the kind that will not be repeatedly challenged by latecomers - and you are limited in the number of people who will voluntarily "meet" in the editing area to discuss a particular subject, then low- popularity articles are a cost with no benefit. The opinions of a single person - possibly an oddball, since they're the only one who submitted the article - will produce no agreement, and it will consume more time and energy to find people who could hammer out a lasting consensus.

<comment><USER13> _Wikipedia produces consensus, not data._

That's a great description of what Wikipedia is.

I keep thinking of it as an open source repository of human knowledge, like an infinitely large encyclopedia. But in reality it is more like a forum where useful information "gets voted to top", so to speak.

<comment><USER14> I think this is also the best way to understand the results of editing wars and the like.

A requirement for consensus is incompatible with individual rights, since people have the right to disagree. For low-interest topics, Wikipedia eventually succeeds anyway because less-motivated contributors become bored or exhausted and stop arguing. For high-interest topics, the search for consensus becomes more and more explicitly political - political as in "determining the governing rules of a body of disparate people", rather than political as in "are Republicans better than Democrats", although the two kinds of 'political' are both present in many edit wars.

Take the cool-off rules, for examples - locking an article for a period of time, or forbidding certain people from editing it. This is central to Wikipedia's functioning in highly controversial areas, but "nobody can edit this article today" is a policy, not a datapoint. Politics produces policy - <USER2> set of actions that can be acted upon by people who do NOT necessarily agree about the underlying facts.

Nasty edit-wars borrow from the tools of dictatorship and oppression - censorship, propaganda, exclusion from the body politic. It's not a coincidence; as mentioned above, consensus is incompatible with individual rights. You need to limit which individuals are allowed to participate, or negotiate the ways that their participation will be accepted. In a sufficiently small or like-minded group, consensus can work again.

A data server has a failure state where some of the data is lost. Wikipedia's failure state, on the other hand, resembles the internal rupture of a political party in a post-Soviet state. Like communist countries, Wikipedia articles demand consensus from their citizens in order to operate.

Of course, unlike Eastern Bloc revolutions, Wikipedia contributors typically do not get lined up against a wall and shot. =) That's also one of the reasons we tend to put Wikipedia edit wars in either the "tech company struggles with its architecture" bucket or the "people on the Internet are angry, news at 7" bucket, rather than the "fractured political unit experiences internal strife due to irreconcilable demands on limited resources" bucket where they actually belong.

<comment><USER15> Do you have any ideas for other rules that can increase the useful-output-to- political-conflict ratio?

(Welcome either in this thread or in direct communication; I am trying to devise better computer-mediated systems for this. While conflict and politics are intrinsic to human affairs I think proper system design can reduce the number of zero- or negative-sum interactions.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My beef with Wikipedia is the squeaky wheel gets the grease problem: a vocal minority easily drowns out the more rational but less rabid. For example: why does the article on pregnancy need a naked woman on it? The talk page dismisses all arguments of "why is this necessary, what's wrong with this other photo of a clothed pregnant woman" with "we don't censor".

The article for video games is a good example of this. There's clearly someone on wikipedia who has made it his life's work to ensure that there cannot exist an article which doesn't explicitly state that "video game" can only refer to something that has a raster display.

<comment><USER17> >My beef with Wikipedia is the squeaky wheel gets the grease problem: a vocal minority easily drowns out the more rational but less rabid. For example: why does the article on pregnancy need a naked woman on it? The talk page dismisses all arguments of "why is this necessary, what's wrong with this other photo of a clothed pregnant woman" with "we don't censor".

The irony is palpable. Upon reading this, I went to the Wikipedia article on Pregnancy and looked at the talk page. I found a lot of surprisingly decent and rational discussion about the choice of the image, including some gems:

 _"There is no profanity in any of the later 3 images. These images depict the natural condition of pregnancy (external manifestation, physical changes, etc), to which image 1 alone would not be able to do justice."_

 _"Someone recently used the phrase "adolescent glee" to describe the attitudes of some editors who argue for the most prominent possible placement of nudity, and that resonates with me. Just because we can (and IMO should) include this image somewhere in the article does not mean that we should make it be the first and largest image—or that we should have zero images of pregnant women who aren't in a state of undress. If you want to present pregnancy as a part of normal life, then showing exclusively images of women who are undressed isn't the way to go about it."_

Regardless of whom you agree with, both sides are putting forth legitimate arguments. Your intentional misrepresentation of the discussion raises questions about your motives.

<comment><USER18> I've had similar concerns with many articles as the GP (as clarified in the sibling comment): namely that so much of it is a clash of ideologies, and it's inconstant with my own. I don't have the time or inclination to deal with ideologues—I had enough of that as an elected public education official.

As a specific example, consider the pregnancy article already under question. In my mind, a reasonable compromise would be to move to image (not _re_ move it) and put it behind a link labeled "image of nude pregnant woman" or a mask (like the spoiler codes in game forms) or some other easily identifiable method. I won't argue whether images like that has value or not [1], but the clash between opposing moral standards (if you'll pardon the potentially charged term) is pervasive in the talk pages.

There are some images that I don't feel the need to look at, and more particularly, don't wish _my_ young children to look at. I understand that not everyone feels that way (I'm not telling anyone how to raise their kids), but by placing such images front-and-center, I feel blindsided or robbed of the choice to seek out such things. Yet on Wikipedia, this sort of perspective is consistently rejected ("No censorship!"). I see it as the amoral being preferred to the moral, and I'm uncomfortable supporting an organization that consistently acts in such a way. In recognition of opposing views I'm not suggesting that images like this be removed--just labeled or easily masked so that I can choose to see it if I want, and similarly choose _not_ to.

I'm not trying to push my view on others, but Wikipedia (as embodied by its editors) pushes its view on me.

1: It seemed to me from the talk page that some of those in favor of keeping the nude pictures had emotional attachments to the image rather than objective reasoning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hardly surprising. The last 50 edits to a Wiki I've made were to private Wikias. Why? Because I actually contributed something, and the paragraph I wrote about bugs in a Fallout: New Vegas location is still there in it's entirety, but with additions and conformations from users of other platforms.

That's how Wikipedia was supposed to work. Now every time I try to do something, I know it will be deleted over non-notability. It's not even a question anymore, it's just a matter of time.

Since we can break up articles into sub-topics very easily, there is absolutely no reason for this behaviour other than a love of power-tripping and some vague Wikipeida guidelines to fall back on. The editors are already in this thread, defending themselves. Nothing new, just the same "We don't want pages about your unknown indie band". Talk about baby & the bathwater.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think MediaWiki is showing its age. Some improvements could include: \- reputation system and better meta-edit controls a la StackOverflow. This could help remove some of the politics associated with Administrative rights in the current system. \- edit thresholds that increase with size/age of articles, to avoid stupid troll-based edit wars. To still allow quick reaction to news events, have a vote-based modification system to allow upvotes to overcome the threshold. \- A robust table editor to replace the monstrosity of MW tables would go a long way to improve readability. \- ... and in general, less arcane markup.

<comment><USER21> MW tables aren't really a monstrosity -- I doubt a better text editable table format that maintained the flexibility could be produced.

But yeah, there are some problematic holes in MW, especially when you consider how wikipedia is used today.

Example: How many times have you clicked on a link, to be redirected to a page that seems to have no relevance? After a few seconds, you realise it was supposed to redirect to a specific subsection, but that subsection has been removed or renamed. That is a problem that could be solved with better technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not surprising in the least. We already know that the people who add content to wikipedia are not the same as the people in power. But worse than that there's a pervasive failure to understand that within the wikipedia moderator and management community.

The mods and admins have put a lot of their effort into pissing off the greater community with edit wars and rampant deletionism. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this would eventually take its toll on discouraging commenters.

</comment><comment><USER23> Presumably a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the English-speaking world has been picked. So Wikipedia really needs to draw contributors from outside Anglosphere to flesh out history and culture articles.

<comment><USER24> More importantly, it needs to draw contributors from outside the Anglosphere to work on languages other than English.

English wikipedia has 3.7 million articles. Spanish has only 810,000, Chinese just 300,000-ish, and Hindi less than one hundred thousand. That's the top four most spoken languages in the world right there.

<comment><USER10> For Hindi in particular, there's a big competition-with-English issue. There was a study at some point that Wikimedia commissioned that found that most educated Hindi-speakers preferred to read and contribute to the English Wikipedia. IIRC, one of the reasons was that they felt it promoted Indian culture to a more international audience if they wrote an article about an Indian location, or novel, or historical figure, in English. Another reason is that a lot of higher education in India is in English already.

(Also, anecdotally, the South Indians I know would rather use English than Hindi; their own native-language Wikipedias, like Kannada, are too small for them to consider them viable, and they see English as more "neutral" than Hindi in domestic political terms.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The problem with Wikipedia is the reaction to people trying to add crap that doesn't belong. It has been to put up barriers to adding content, making anyone who starts a new article go though more and more bureaucracy, paperwork and proving your innocence. It is the same with uploading pictures or just adding text to an article. This has led to much fewer people joining the community, and without enough editors to look after the articles, the arguments to lock down and protect only becomes stronger.

Basically Wikipedia has suffered the same fate as many mature online communities. In the beginning everyone is helping each other out and you are creating something great together. After a few years the older members of the community start getting really tired of the clueless newcomers and start complaining and setting up rules. New users no longer feel welcome and never stay long. Soon 90% are experienced members, and the newcomer perspective is lost completely. It is often not intentional, making it easier for moderators is just higher priority than letting more people participate.

I wonder if Stack Overflow will survive growing up.

<comment><USER26> _After a few years the older members of the community start getting really tired of the clueless newcomers and start complaining and setting up rules._

Maybe a "forced retirement" rule should go in effect for long time editors?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It has always been my opinion that the high barrier to editing has prevented vandalism. It seems we are now getting to the point that it is preventing legitimate commits as well.

<comment><USER28> I've been on both sides of the spectrum of this--I've "vandalized" (I was young, it wasn't malicious but I can see now it was disruptive--and for those wondering...it had to do with wild cats slowly taking over my city... haha) and I've legitimately tried to post useful and factual information and I will say this, the thing I universally found to be my biggest obstacle was this elitist structure of the "higher ups"--the big editors held way to much power (I can't speak to the present as I no longer even try) but I can't tell you how frustrating it was to try and be helpful and good, and then being told I am an idiot/noob and to cease from attempting to write wiki articles. It always seemed like some of them were just on power trips, and didn't care for your "help".

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe wikipedia should start to move to a git-style of collaboration? Anonymous or semi-committed members can make or arrange small contributions that may or may not fit all the requirements. More senior members collate and merge contributions together. There would be multiple branches of a page to support re-organizations or new page sections....

I dunno, just a thought.

<comment><USER26> Or perhaps support different "levels" of "encyclopedianess"? At the top are only articles that are of encyclopedia level contribution, then as you go down the rules slacken up a bit. All new contributions start at the bottom, say...level 5, and have to be accepted by editors at each higher level.

That way if a reader doesn't care for the hyper-strict top level, they can view more inclusive information down the lower levels.

If the site grows too big/strict and more levels are needed, it should be relatively trivial to add another level down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My current project aims to address many of these concerns with a new kind of reference website. The goal is to be complementary in license to Wikipedia, but with a different organizational model that is better able to accept any topic and casual contributors. (That is, it's definitely _not_ Just-Another- MediaWiki-Install or content fork.)

I'm still pre-launch but I discuss the themes and motivations in a blog at:

<http://infinithree.org>

<comment><USER30> I remember this being brought up before, and I remember some sound advice to change the name. It appears that advice was not heeded.

<comment><USER15> I cannot find any criticism of the name here via HNSearch, nor in the previous submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597881>

So it appears that advice was not, in fact, given.

If anyone had delivered that advice, I would have pointed out: 'Infinithree' is just a pre-launch code name.

Any other feedback?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I find it quite worrying that people will rely on Wikipedia but stop editing it because it's hard and because not everyone is friendly there. Yes, part of the time that you spend editing Wikipedia is lost because you have to look up obscure conventions and templates and policies, and argue with people every now and then, including some rare cases where it's hard to assume good faith. You should be fair though -- Wikipedia is a huge endeavor, and administrative friction is unavoidable to some extent.

If people stop contributing, though, the bureaucrats will take over, and we cannot afford to let Wikipedia stagnate and die in this way. It's tempting to leave the administrative burden to someone else, but it will get heavier and heavier for those who stay.

</comment><comment><USER32> "It's the deletionists, stupid."

</comment><comment><USER26> No really? Wikipedia has fostered a culture where the only remaining people who participate think it's perfectly reasonable to destroy knowledge because it hasn't achieved a level of fame such that everybody already knows it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I too have found editing wikipedia painful.

On one memorable occasion my historically accurate change to a page was reverted by the 'page owner' on the grounds that "ask any man in the street and he will tell you different".

</comment><comment><USER34> Because Wikipedia peaked in 2005.

</comment><comment><USER35> Tweaking articles is the very best way to get involved with editing Wikipedia. There are lots of minor typos and grammar mistakes in Wikipedia, and fixing every little bit refines an article.</comment>