Ask HN: Hacker News users reading habits - <AUTHOR> I think it would be interesting to talk about our reading habits, so here there are some questions related with this topic: - How many articles do you read each day? - They're usually related to your job or to some side projects? - Do you usually read about a variety of topics or it's focused in 2 or 3 topics only?
- Do you usually read during some time of the day or it's usually random? <comment><USER2> I read 3-5 articles per day, but oftentimes, I read the comments of 20-30 articles without clicking on the actual article. Recent example: Article about Angular 4.0 being released. I don't care about the article, but I do care about the comments of the JS folks.

<comment><USER3> Same and I've thought about this a lot. I so often only read the comments without reading the actual article. Surely the fact that so many people do this must mean there's an untapped opportunity somewhere?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it would be cool if someone made a bot to extract a summary from the article and post it as a comment to help those who have not read the article.

<comment><USER5> Someone did. Or faked one. IIRC it was active for a few days but was told in clear terms to stop or be banned.

Somewhat related: I have been using the HN bot on Telegram. That way I could even catch a glimpse of wildly popular stories that have been flagged of the site :-)

<comment><USER6> A TL;DR service could maybe be made as a browser extension that pulls it from some external source instead. Not visible for those that don't want it, and also removes the problem from having to hunt for the TL;DR comment when there are many replies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised there are no comments on your question...so let me be the first. I'm a medical student about to start residency. I also have a master's degree in computer science.

I read a lot of articles about AI in medicine, pretty much anything I can get my hands on. I also read generic tech articles related to everything from Nintendo Switch, Tesla, Brain-Computer interfaces, and other popular media articles.

-How many articles do you read each day? Likely 10+. These aren't high-brow articles, just random blog posts and pop culture tech. I read about 2-3 research abstracts per day in medicine and _maybe_ skim the text of 1-2 articles.

-They're usually related to your job or to some side projects? Usually they are related to my interest in medicine or technology. Sometimes they are related to my job (I work as a part-time developer / data scientist). I also run a small website ([https://www.cronote.com](https://www.cronote.com)). I encountered a number of issues with time-zone switching and the daylight savings change on March 12th. Read about 20 articles having to do with correctly implementing timezones in Python.

-Do you usually read about a variety of topics or it's focused in 2 or 3 topics only? Topics cover a vast span of medicine and computer science. I enjoy computer science more than medicine so it's a 20:80 split.

-Do you usually read during some time of the day or it's usually random? I read whenever I'm behind my computer, usually alternating between work and browsing the Internet. This amounts to ~5 hours per day.

</comment><comment><USER8> I read random when i'm stuck on something or have to rethink on things. Doing something else for 5 minutes let's me suddenly think about it differently.

The subject doesn't count. I don't read the new stories though, otherwhise it would be a bigger timesink ;-) .

Always interested in hearing other people's thoughts, HN has some good reasoning in comments. I prefer it over watching the daily news in the noon :)

I save interesting stories on my side project [http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/](http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/), which can also show HN comments when adding the tag: commentsbyhackernews ( it's currently a bookmarking service for myselve mostly, but it can do a lot more under the hood)

Eg. : [http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/Item/Details?id=49b1ed7e-5d35...](http://tagly.azurewebsites.net/Item/Details?id=49b1ed7e-5d35-4bb0-b0fb-44e837eab7f5)

Edit: Example feature, add a article to wsj.com ( paywalled) and it will automaticly create a link through facebook. So you can read it ( i hate paywalled articles)

</comment><comment><USER9> I have subscribed to RSS feed on feedly where I skim through the list when I am idle/on the road/catching a smoking break and If I find something interesting save the link to pocket.

I usually clear my pocket reading list each weekend, even if there was something I dint finish reading (used to happen a lot), I just flush it out because that helps me determine my bandwidth for reading over a fixed time period.

Though mostly I am interested in comments section of tech/startups related topics, I also use feedly's reader count to decide whether to read or not articles on other topics.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure if the question is about reading habits on HN, or the reading habits of the HN demographic.

If it is the former, I middle-click 3-4 articles a day, and if they are also juicy topics, I middle-click the comments links as well.

If it is the latter, I read tons of articles a day (avg 20), some related to tech, but mostly not. I read in the morning, at lunch (very productive time to read), and after dinner.

Offline: I have subscriptions to dead-tree versions of Time, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Affairs. I also have 4-5 books on the go at any given time, mostly nonfiction. I go through phases, and my last major one was statistics and category theory.

Online: Slashdot, Reddit, HN, Marginal Revolution, John D Cook, Farnam Street, Quora, and a bunch of data science related blogs. I also read articles on the getpocket.com recommended list, and I find myself drawn to reading articles on The Atlantic.

<comment><USER11> What data science blogs?

<comment><USER10> Simply Statistics, Andrew Gelman, DataTau, Win-Vector, StatsBlogs (an aggregator)

<comment><USER11> Cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I read the comments before I read the articles, if at al

</comment><comment><USER13> Most of my reading is off HN/Reddit, whatever catches my eye and looks interesting which can be up to 10 articles in a day, but often enough 0-1.

I use [https://bazqux.com](https://bazqux.com) as a RSS reader to keep up with the stuff I actually want to follow. Some gaming sites, LWN, EFF's deeplinks and the blogs of various products my company or I use.

(BTW, I highly recommend bazqux. UI very close to Google Reader, very cheap and with a lifetime subscription option)

<comment><USER14> What is a deeplink?

<comment><USER15> Deeplinks is an EFF blog. [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I do a lot of my news reading via RSS feeds to Newsblur. One of those RSS feeds is from hnapp.com which generates an RSS feed of Hacker News submissions with a score over 50 or more than 30 comments.

If there's something I want to read later I send it to Pocket which my ereader supports, so I can read them on my nice portable eink device whenever I have a spare moment stuck in a waiting room or on a bus or whatever.

According to my reading habits[1] I've averaged reading 690 articles that way in each of the last two years.

In order to track my article reading habits, plus follow up on articles in related forums such as Hacker News after I'd read them and such, so I wrote a litte PHP browser based application that interfaces with the Pocket API to help me manage all that.

Naturally I called it Pocket Lint.

[1] [http://www.michevan.id.au/tag/books/](http://www.michevan.id.au/tag/books/)

</comment><comment><USER17> check every weekday, but only click and read one, maybe two articles each day. I always read comments in the articles about Go to see the Haskell programmers having tantrums. I always read comments in the articles about JavaScript to see the Go programmers having tantrums. I don't ever read anything about politics from HN because people that read HN are not a representative sample of the real world; HN isn't exactly a wellspring of political diversity. I basically only look for announcements and stories about catastrophic failures in production systems.

also fwiw this is by nature a broken census since the people that will click this link are already gonna be the people that like the comment threads (since it's only a comment thread) and the people that respond are the people that post comments. so basically your feedback about how people behave based on comments is already going to select down to people that post comments on HN, which is likely a single-digit percentage of people that visit HN. asking users how they use a website on that website will always be subject to extreme sampling bias. so... this is fun by all means but let's not look too far into it ;)

</comment><comment><USER18> I subscribe to some newsletters that aggregate weekly articles around some category or topic. This is a lot easier for me as I do not have to continually scan sources for new articles.

I also try to read a book or article on something new I want to learn. My most recent book I started reading is called the Mom Test. Its about doing customer development, and it touches on the subject of what type of questions you should be asking.

</comment><comment><USER19> I read about 10 articles per day, filtering through the top 10 to find the ones that I could be interested in. I really like the comment section, as it's a lot more civilized than other online community, and they usually add another perspective to the post. I actually make it a point not to read comment on most articles/blog other than HN because it tends to be filled with trolls.

</comment><comment><USER20> I read HN in this way I go to [https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=5](https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=5), then [https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=4](https://news.ycombinator.com/news?p=4), till "/news" which is the same as "?p=1". I do that every night before bedtime.

If maybe I'm too busy and can't read HN one night, what I do is read the next day starting from "?p=10", if I miss two days I start from "?p=15" and so on, though that query has a varying limit, going after the limit gives no results, in the past I've gotten a successful request til "?p=25" but today it seems the limit is just "?p=10", most times I've seen the "?p=15" working.

I don't want to miss new tools or discussions so I always try to keep a maximum of 2 days of not reading HN.

</comment><comment><USER21> > How many articles do you read each day?

0 - 1 Articles

100+ Comments on 20 - 25 articles.

I use the comments as a curation tool, to decide if the article is really worth reading, or click-bait. Sometimes the comments also do a TL;DR; summary of the original article, so that saves me time (esp. on rambling articles that write 1000 words to prove a couple of points or make a statement / take a stance on something).

> They're usually related to your job or to some side projects?

Job, side-project and technology related. I'm here only for the comments as I see gems from software industry veterans and experts whose knowledge on various tech topics far exceeds mine.

> Do you usually read about a variety of topics or it's focused in 2 or 3 > topics only?

Usually 2 to 3 - I mostly come here for "Show HN", "Ask HN" and technology related announcements / findings. I come here to find inspiration and motivation to ship my side-projects.

> Do you usually read during some time of the day or it's usually random?

Random, throughout the day. It's gone up more ever since I gave up reading mainstream news after the elections. ( Nov 10th 2016 to be precise). I try to avoid political news on HN also. The mods have done a great job of flagging and removing them, so I am very grateful for that.

Related Reading: [http://joel.is/the-power-of-ignoring-mainstream- news/](http://joel.is/the-power-of-ignoring-mainstream-news/)

P.S. I also use [https://hckrnews.com/](https://hckrnews.com/) It loads super fast , has a very clean pleasing UI and helps me quickly scan the top stories on HN and decide which ones to come and peruse.

</comment><comment><USER22> I read mostly geopolitical articles and whatever TheBrowser kicks up to me. I used to read a lot of books, but these days a book has to be really attractive for me to get over the usual low signal to noise ratio that books offer.

I've been on a reading diet for the last few weeks, I plan to kick back into high gear soon, with a project I'm building to ingest all my reading materials and present them to me in bite-sized formats. I used to be satisfied with Pocket, but my reading workload is too heavy to comfortably shoulder, so I need my own power tools.

What would be great is if I could break books up by chapter and feed them into the system, so that way they don't feel so heavy. I'll find a way to do that eventually, probably based on some ugly hack of converting Kindle books to EPUB or something ungodly like that.

<comment><USER23> Will you eventually open source these power tools? :)

<comment><USER22> I could, but it's all very custom work. The world doesn't need my xpath to slice up Stratfor or RubyWeekly emails. These small tools need a bigger toolbox to live in, someone needs to build that toolbox. I could open-source my toolbox, but it's not really anything special either, just a dumb interface to a dumb database, and a dumb API layer on top of it.

If it starts to look like something better than a shop piece, I'll definitely put it out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I read about 8 articles a day, mostly from HN and Lifehacker.com, usually just Productivity "Junk Food" Articles

Depending on my energy and/or how long my build is taking, sometimes I just skim articles headings and throw them to Pocket. Then when I have medium energy and more time, I open up my Pocket, filter aggressively, and read the rest. Really long articles get tagged with #someday and go to the weekend.

I've been trying to focus on C & C++ related articles, as that's what I want to and will be doing more. But I also find articles about Functional Programming very interesting.

I couldn't care less about start-ups or the culture. I can't even open most policy or political posts now because it's just a punch to the gut every day. I read less than 1 comment on average per article.

</comment><comment><USER25> 20-50. :-( related to work, related to Tech, personal interests, news (politics, world, finance)

</comment><comment><USER26> 3-4 articles per day.

Probably split equally between tech things I think might be helpful ("Python, Bash, SQL how tos" etc.) and non-tech things which are novel.

Like "Guy frozen in ice brought back to life after 600 years" (which wasn't a real article but if it had been you bet I would have read it).

I avoid most article from major news source (I keep up with the news anyway) and most Medium stories and anything with a social justice type slant (nothing wrong with that, it's just not of interest and not why I'm here). Also skip most "Our startup is doing XX or shutting down or whatever".

Skim comments for many more articles (~20) and if they look interesting read more in depth.

</comment><comment><USER27> I actually read 3-5. I read the comments on another 3-5 without reading the article. Like WA said above. Sometimes I care more about the comments than the original article. I also find that if I'm not totally sure if an article is worth my time or not there are usually a couple of high-quality comments that will let me know if I should. I really love HN for that. I will also usually bookmark 10-20 articles with the intention of coming back to read them later, but I almost never do.

As to the type of article, I'm all over the place. Sometimes it's work related, sometimes a side project, sometimes just something I've got a passing interest in.

</comment><comment><USER28> I tend to read a couple of scholarly-type articles a week and a bunch of blog/tech sites as interesting things come up. That said, I've been reading a lot of literary fiction lately as I've been spending time in that circle because my wife just launched her first novel (and it's really quite brilliant, actually).

[https://www.amazon.com/Mikhail-Margarita-Novel-Julie- Himes/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Mikhail-Margarita-Novel-Julie- Himes/dp/1609453751/)

Grab a copy at your local indie bookstore!

</comment><comment><USER29> I read for pleasure during my commute. (Days when I work at home are a little more stressful because I don't get that enforced downtime.)

During the workday, I check various sources of information about once an hour, unless I'm working on something that requires either research or flow.

I run an RSS collector to manage repeating sources of information and categorize them for me. I add sources as I come across them and clean it out about once every six months.

Everything I read during the workday is related to work, but that's about fifteen different topics.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd be interested in hearing if people share my habit of always reading 3ish nonfiction books in parallel. I have a pretty hard time sticking to one. It's usually a programming or related book, some science book and some pop-science or selfhelp or marketing related stuff (or something like outdoor living, fishing etc.). And usually fiction during the commute. Oftentimes I'll also have random collections of stuff (Lovecraft collection) or comic books lying around for a "quick read".

<comment><USER31> I tend to be listening to at least one audiobook, reading at least one book on Kindle and dipping into a few old favourite physical books.

<comment><USER32> Forgot the audiobook I listen while driving.

<comment><USER31> The main problem I have with audiobooks (and to a lesser extent books on the Kindle) is the ease of dipping in and finding a good bit to read again.

I _know_ it should actually be easier - but it never seems to work that way.

<comment><USER14> One of the reasons I am teaching myself to read spectrograms is so that I can skim through audio.

You might see something about my progress on HN in a few years :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I read 2 to 5 articles a day. But this reading is not comprehensive instead it's like looking the important points, although skimming is the key of surfing but recently I've discovered that it shortens attention span so it seems theres a big effect to changing other habits too.

That's why I'm in the diet of not skimming through instead if I start one article I finish no matter how boring it is. But it's very hard I'm old surfer and suffering for deep concentration..

</comment><comment><USER34> I skim Hacker News couple of times a day. I prefer reading books (on Kindle), ~30 mins to 1 hour every night before sleep and 20-30 mins every morning after waking up.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm a Mathematics major so I make a point of reading all maths related articles and if I have something to contribute then definitely comment.

On average I read 2-3 articles fully but it also depends what's it on. On breaks I always try to read top 10 or 15 and sometimes comment. I find this community and commentators quite a pleasure to read because many of us posses something unique or at least it seems so.

</comment><comment><USER36> My anecdata: I don't read much on internet anymore aside from what's linked on HN and what I research for a specific topic. Plus a bit of news at CNN and a bit of Producthunt.

I read about 15 articles on average and all comments to about 10 of them and scan some comments for the rest. My reading is batched around morning, lunch, and evening. I download few articles to Pocket for offline readin. During subway commute.

</comment><comment><USER37> Usually would read topics that are of interest to me (i.e. technology, software development, frameworks, etc.).

For the others, I would usually skim through the article and also read the comments.

I am finding that there's a lot of value reading the comments, as some folks have that deep seated knowledge, as well as providing relevant links that will help you further grasp what's on the article.

</comment><comment><USER38> Usually if I find an article that I'd like to read, I skim it and then decide if I want to actually sit down and read it word for word, and if so I save it for the weekend. Usually skim through a couple articles daily, and they go all over ranging from tech to non related tech stuff.

</comment><comment><USER39> I always open the article and comments in separate tabs. I then skim the article if it's very short, if it's long-form I read the comments first. If the comments indicate it's worth reading I save it in my favorites for later.

I still have a list of ~40 articles to clear out...

</comment><comment><USER40> Skim 5 to 10 articles daily. Interesting ones keep accumulating browser tabs till weekend. Mostly tech, personal interest. Have allocated time for cleaning up all the tabs on weekend. For long reads, I use TextAloud to quickly convert to audio and listen with faster speed.

</comment><comment><USER41> A fun game to play with a co-worker is "what articles would you click on the homepage?" I just did that yesterday. My co-worker knew every link I'd opened (without looking at my screen) and I couldn't figure out most of his.

</comment><comment><USER42> 95% of the time I only read comments. People usually insert quotes from the article and discuss them right away. And it is much more valuable to read comments because there are a lot of smart people commenting who work in related fields.

</comment><comment><USER43> Mostly comments on websites. Even when I read something for learning (books/articles/blog posts) I tend to skim it at best. My attention span is getting fairly low.

Either about iOS development, design or (lately) learning thai language- material.

</comment><comment><USER44> 1) I read HM during break time. For like 5-10 minutes.

2) Usually I open the interested topics in other tabs and have a quick scan on the passage/ website

3) If that's interesting, I will add it to my reading list

4) I go over the reading list after dinner when I have free time

</comment><comment><USER45> I read hacker news daily when ever i am free, hacker news is the next thing i do. Apart from this i have subscribed to hacker news 500 Pushbullet channel. When ever any news hits 500, i get notification on my phone or chrome.

</comment><comment><USER46> I read a handful of articles a day covering several disciplines. I usually am reading two or three books at a time. Reading a few chapters of each, setting it down and round robining through threw them.

</comment><comment><USER47> I have the RSS feed in my reader, I skim through he headlines with it mixed in among other technology RSS feeds, I read maybe 2-3 interesting topics, mostly in the morning while eating breakfast.

</comment><comment><USER48> I use the RSS feed with Feedly. I only read things about actual technology relevant to me, and skip everything about silicon valley startup nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER49> I use The Old Reader as a news aggregator and my own emacs mode to read it via API. In fact I read HN in emacs :) At least when I'm home.

</comment><comment><USER50> I read 3-5 articles on the average, mostly very different topics to enlarge my knowledge and get to know Sites that I did not know before!

</comment><comment><USER51> I read about 20-40 articles per day, mostly tech or business related. Generally speaking, I find them on HN, Facebook, Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER52> I read 10-20 articles a day, don't really read too many comments.

</comment><comment><USER53> Skim through via my RSS reader, and read around 10-20 articles a day.

</comment><comment><USER54> I read, or peruse, too much. You can thank Digg RSS Reader...

Fun stuff : xkcd and the like, 4 sites

News: Chinese edition NYT and the like, 11 sites

Technical: Hacker News, Venture Beat, ARS Technica, etc. 12 sites

Daily I maybe read / peruse ~100 articles out of what is summarized in the RSS feeds. Meaning, I see an article headline, it interests me enough to actually click to open the underlying website article. Maybe half of what I open I spend 10 seconds looking at only to immediately close. Half of what remains gets a speed read scan through. Maybe 5-10 articles a day get a thorough slow read. I try not to comment as much as humanly possible. I need to do other stuff in life youknowwhatimean....

</comment><comment><USER55> ~10, no, variety, randomly.

</comment><comment><USER56> I read most things and it makes me happy but when I read a bunch of whiny white men on Hacker News I feel sad. ;(

<comment><USER14> Such is life.</comment></comment>


Linode Nextgen: The Network - <AUTHOR> http://blog.linode.com/2013/03/07/linode-nextgen-the-network/ <comment><USER2> I never quite understood the love for premium vps like linode (also remember slicehost?). If you check out lowendbox vps, their top-rated providers almost always beats linode (and alike) in almost all category you can think of.

Its nice that they are now increasing the bandwidth cap, but it was on the low side to begin with. My takeaway from this is that "linode finally joins everyone else in network speed and bandwidth."

Don't get me wrong, I have used linode in the past and enjoyed them very much and never had any problems, and support was top notch. but their offering is not very impressive at all.

Edit: wow, thats a lot of hostility... didn't realize linode reached fandom status. I guess I should keep my opinions to myself then?

<comment><USER3> Support matters. When your neighbor is being DDOSed and you're offline as collateral damage, active support is the difference between happy customers and angry customer losses.

For hobby boxes, yeah, sure, use whatever is the most cost-efficient.

<comment><USER4> Linode is great during stable periods but when there is an outage or DDOS they are completely absent. I was sick to death of waiting whilst my Fremont instances were down due to power issues and receiving no response from support tickets.

And based on their security incidents Linode is absolutely in the hobby box category as well. At least Amazon is PCI DSS compliant.

<comment><USER5> > I was sick to death of waiting whilst my Fremont instances were down due to > power issues and receiving no response from support tickets.

Do you want their engineers bringing up the datacenter or answering up a bunch of e-mails with "we're working on bringing up the datacenter"?

<comment><USER6> For a company providing critical computing resources, during an incident there should be one person responsible for managing incident response. It actually shouldn't be an engineer; the person's job should be to bug engineers as little as possible but provide periodic updates in a central location (a site of the form <https://status.example.com>) which is available to all customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm actually most unimpressed with the vendor selection. So now Linode has Cisco overhead in their premium tier of hardware. Not good from a costing perspective. The Cisco Nexus line is hardly next generation when it comes to R&S product.

Linode is in a position to seriously consider SDN and they shoot themselves in the foot with one of the most stagnant companies as it applies to new and innovative product for pushing packets. I'd have been far more impressed with Juniper in the hot seat here. At least they're more cost competitive. You can get a full non-blocking 10Gb L3 switch (480Gb backplane) for less than $20k fully loaded up with 10Gb SRs out of their EX line if you're looking to play it safe in 'standard' networking.

The good part about software is there's far less vendor bias. This just smells of a Cisco blowhard touting the wonders of a fully vendor locked network. And software people seem to be less informed of the reality that is how the current norm of the networking realm works.

Good luck to them. I've put in plenty of ASR and Nexus gear in the past few years. They'll need it.

<comment><USER8> Were they wrong when they said the Cisco product was the only one that could handle their routing requirements?

<comment><USER9> I can see how you read it that way, but that's not what they said. They said that the Cisco Nexus 7000 is the only _Cisco device_ that could handle their routing requirements.

<comment><USER8> My mistake :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a hard time trusting Linode after the major March 2012 security incident where an attacker compromised an internal system that let him gain access to any Linode Manager accounts: [http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security- incident.h...](http://status.linode.com/2012/03/manager-security- incident.html) and basically had access to _all customers servers_!

I have a hard time trusting them because they specifically gave very little information. I would have expected a followup with a better response, like Google or Facebook do when they get compromised: "the attacker used exploit X on this developer's workstation, therefore we are doing Y to prevent this from happening again".

They can work on increasing performance all they want, but if I do not have basic trust in the security of their infrastructure, this does not matter. I expect top-notch security especially from a "premium" VPS provider!

<comment><USER11> This type of thing is my primary complaint about linode. Their transparency on things that make them look even slightly bad is basically non existent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is one of the reasons why I am happy to support Linode with my business: they seem to care about doing things the right way and keeping people happy. I've got a simple 512 Linode server that I use infrequently (I like having a Linux box available in the "cloud" to SSH to from home/work) and yet I've always been treated as a "real" customer. I know it's sad that I'm impressed by it, but grandfathering in customers like this just by default, and always having great support turnaround times (within a couple hours at basically any time of the day) makes me like the Linode guys a ton. This sort of stuff is the reason why I don't really care if there's a cheaper alternative; I know what I'm paying for and I'm very happy with what I'm getting.

</comment><comment><USER13> We run our company using Linode as one of our primary providers. We're very, very happy with their uptimes, control panel, and particularly their support. It's a testament to their professionalism that they've been going about these pretty major changes without experiencing any downtime. I'd highly recommend them.

<comment><USER14> Great to hear that, I switched from heroku to linode a couple of days ago and couldn't be happier. I haven't had to contact the support yet because the documentation is so excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Linode is definitely one of the best VPS providers. They don't market it as 'fanatical', but their support is simply incredible. I like AWS too, but the lack of support (unless you pay loads) keeps me with Linode.

Nextgen sounds cool. Extra bandwidth is great. I also hope they add more RAM and provide some kind of a storage pool to store images/snapshots/virtual- disks between different linodes (similar to cloudfiles or EBS).

<comment><USER16> Their support is quick, but they only solve the problem if it's easy.

My linode IP ended up on an email block list because of someone else on the subnet. I was on vacation so I wanted a quick solution and I asked for an extra IP for a week. They wouldn't do for any amount of money. I had to set up an extra server and redirect connections instead.

<comment><USER15> I can't comment on your particular case, but it sounds odd that they didn't help out. Certainly not my experience with their support so far (and I've been with Linode for probably 4 or 5 years now and used their support on many occasions)

However, it's so easy to fire-up another linode, shut down the host, move the disk image to the new linode, assign it and turn it on. You get a new IP, and can get rid of the old one. And all this via their web interface and with no need for support...

<comment><USER16> I needed to keep the old IP during changeover so that DNS had time to update.

Not bashing linode, because I think they do a fine job - I have two servers with a year and a half of uptime. But I don't think the support is a valid reason for them charging more than their competitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Find this interesting? OVH is already upgrading routers to 100gbps and 500gbps versions.

<http://www.infinera.com/j7/servlet/NewsItem?newsItemID=336>

<comment><USER18> Their servers seem extremely cheap. Are you basically getting what you pay for with their service or do they have solid uptime and solid support?

<comment><USER8> The cheap 'servers' aren't servers -- they're desktop parts in a rack. Desktop hardware fails more often, and non-ECC RAM will experience multiple bit flips per year on average. That's fine for a dev/staging server, but not a good thing on a production server with paying customers.

<comment><USER17> Their real servers are quiet cheap and beefy.

Drooling @ <http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/eg_64g_ssd.xml>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone know if Linode has investors? I've never been able to find mention of any, and the fact that they've been in this for the long haul (since 2003) and are now expanding after seeing massive growth in the last two years[1] makes me think they're bootstrapped. If that's true it would be seriously awesome. They were started by a single founder too!

[1] [http://blog.linode.com/2012/08/28/linode- makes-2012-inc-500-...](http://blog.linode.com/2012/08/28/linode- makes-2012-inc-500-list/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow, this is quite a jump. Great to see Linode continue to lower costs and improve quality.

It's also important to note that if the billing system stays the same, each instance you purchase increments your account-wide bandwidth pool. For example, if a Linode 512 has 2 TB worth of data and you have two of them, you end up with 4 TB for all Linodes on your account. It's not bound to the individual Linodes.

</comment><comment><USER21> Instead of getting a $20 VPS, why doesn't anyone consider a full dedicated for $12?

<http://www.ovh.ie/dedicated_servers/kimsufi.xml>

I realise that people have mixed feelings about OVH, but I've yet to have a problem and 100% uptime. Plus I can max out 100 mbps on the server pretty easily.

Another 2 providers that probably have a better reputation than Linode are BuyVM and RamNode: <http://buyvm.net/> <http://ramnode.com/>

A 512mb is less than half price there and they use SSD's.

But the main thing I'm seeing now for commercial sites, is why don't you use Jekyll and host your site on a CDN like Cloud Files or CloudFront? I'm suprised how cheap it is now to use a full on CDN to host your site. While it's not for everyone, most business sites are just a landing page and a wordpress blog, which would be much more resource efficient if it was hosted on a CDN, plus your pretty much guaranteed 100% uptime.

So for under $20 you can get a SSD VPS and your site hosted on Akamai's CDN or just a $20 box from Linode :/

</comment><comment><USER22> Neat. But it's really the hardware size that's the restricting feature of linode. In particular: Memory.

<comment><USER23> Yea. I'm hoping as part of this nextgen upgrade they announce more RAM. SSDs would of course be nice too, but more RAM is what I want the most

<comment><USER24> For less than the price of a 4GB linode get a 32GB SSD server from OVH <http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/sp_32g_ssd.xml> or a multitude of others [http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/8302/99-e3-32-gb- list-o...](http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/8302/99-e3-32-gb-list-of- providers) .

<comment><USER25> How is the performance of OVH's network by the way? Anyone had any issues with it? I'm paying ~80/mo right now for VPSs, and this offers way more horsepower than what I have now. Any downsides to going this route? Also is there anything comparable that's located on the west coast?

<comment><USER26> I'm absolutely stoked about their low-end dedicated servers. I have 13€/mo and 18€/mo instances (located in France) and I'm in Finland. No issues whatsoever, connectivity or uptime, and I use them to run both my personal and company mail, and some web stuff. If you go over traffic quota (5TB / mo) they will limit your speed to 10Mbit/s, not cut you off or bill extra (but you can purchase extra quota). But I have no idea how good their support is because I never needed it.

After initial setup you may want to change the grsec kernel to something else (according to preferences, it's not bad), and by default they have root ssh access to your box (key-based auth), which you may want to revoke.

Ovh has one data center in Canada, but that's in Quebec, not west coast.

<comment><USER27> Yep. They're not just a small Johnny-come-lately shop either, they've been top tier in Europe for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Edit: The post title has been changed, but tldr is that Linode is increasing the monthly transfer limit quota 10x because they're upgrading their network infrastructure.

\--

It's great that Linode is passing these improvements to their customers free of charge. A while back they increased RAM allocated to all users without increasing prices, which was a great surprise. Things like this make me happy to host my multiple projects with them.

</comment><comment><USER29> I have recently been thinking about moving to digitalocean, because they look like excellent value. I haven't made the move yet because of inertia, and Linode's customer service which is just mind-blowingly good. I suspect that in a couple of days I won't be able to spot a single patch of greener grass on the other side of the proverbial fence.

<comment><USER30> I really wish DigitalOcean provided more then one core on their plans with < 2gb of memory. Despite that, I am probably going to move to the 512mb plan in the next year or so (once I get around to it). The backup feature is enough incentive alone.

<comment><USER21> Meh DigitalOcean is oversold. Each box has 128gb ram, so you are probably going to be on a server with 100+ other VPS's.

Lots of people have been complaining about network speeds recently:

[http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/8339/very-bad- performan...](http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/8339/very-bad-performance- downloading-from-digital-ocean-vps-http/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> That's great. If it was another provider doing this 10 fold increase, I'd suspect they would fuck up and wouldn't be able to deliver. Linode earned my trust and I can't recommend them enough.

<comment><USER4> Please. Major upgrades happen every single day among the various VPS providers. And whilst it is notable it isn't particularly useful to most Linode customers. In fact 99% won't see any difference at all.

Had they actually decided to offer SSD based instances to compete with the likes of DigitalOcean then we would have something interesting.

Also this is a terrible way for a company to earn trust. It should be earned based on their behaviour during the bad times. And we know how appalling Linode handles those.

<comment><USER31> My comment wasn't clear. Linode has earned my trust along the years (been a costumer since Jan/2009), via top notch support and quality hardware/network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> 2TB is good... their old bandwidth was paltry.

Everyone chant with me: price war! price war! price war!

</comment><comment><USER33> Once I moved out of the Fremont DC, I was very happy with Linode.

But I have sites that choke on quite modest I/O. I waited for Linode to install SSDs, then waited, and waited more. Last week I gave up and moved to DigitalOcean.

</comment><comment><USER34> Linode hands down is the best VPS company. I fully expect SSD drives to be available in Nextgen as well, looking forward to it.

<comment><USER35> DigitalOcean has been working well for me. They have SSD, but only single core.

<comment><USER36> Looks like they have up to 4 cores in their standard plans, and up to 24 on their larger plans, all SSD: <https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have been Linode customer since sometime 2008 I think till last month, when I fully migrated to Digital Ocean to two, individually better instances for half the price than my one box at Linode.

I was running Gentoo at London DC without any issues, my major gripes with Linode was how hard was it to get additional IPv4 addresses without lying about your reasons - i.e running services on different IP addresses or separating your business/personal websites (and very easy if you lied, I know someone who did). Another thing was that I paid them by a virtual CC and always put there just enough money for transaction every month, it's dedicated for internet pay only and prevents cc fraud, but every now and then they'd get the card declined at the beginning of the month cause I didn't put the money in yet, like 2nd or 3rd day and always always there was this template threatening ticket put in by a person in my account. I was paying them every month for years, so what if I have outstanding balance on the 2nd or 3rd, is that the reason to threat deleting my stuff? That felt really alienating.

Digital Ocean, while don't hand out IP addresses at all, costs so little that it's $1 + damn good reason at Linode or $5 and a VPS on top for the IP at DO.

The support at DO is nor fast, nor technical, I had issues with my Gentoo builds basically where after reboot /dev/null would come up being a text file with junk in it, you can mknod it but it wouldn't survive reboot. I've raised a ticket and they've removed Gentoo from selection, but I doubt it's fixed and and I'll have to work some ugly hacks to work around this if it happens again.

They use a kernel loaded from below, so you won't really have latest and greatest Arch if you use that, kernel upgrades are in pkg ignore list and even if upgraded it won't load.

I might return to Linode sometime in the future if DO messes up my Gentoos again and Linode does better at matching DO's offer.

At the moment, if you don't need to scale a lot (it's not as convenient at Linode, $20 vs $5 starts to hurt as the number of boxes go up, also Linode doesn't bill you by the our) and just want a personal server for your website I'd still go with Linode, especially after increased transfer quotas.

</comment><comment><USER38> Cant Love them Enough, they are meticulous in their efforts and the most trustworthy VPS providers.. Just love them - can do free advertising for them - call me fan or follower.. we love Linode

</comment><comment><USER39> Woo Hoo! I really don't understand much about what you guys are doing, but well, I'm a happy linode customer, so whatever it is that you are doing to make things faster, better, bring it on!

</comment><comment><USER40> Wahey! I love good news. I'm still running a bunch of linodes for free off the credit I won for <http://faxitforme.com> in Rails Rumble 2012

</comment><comment><USER41> I made little benchmark, Linode vs Digital Ocean <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5221477>

</comment><comment><USER42> The irony is that, in spite of these upgrades, my first attempt to load the blog post timed out, and the second attempt was not speedy (or should I say SPDY?)

<comment><USER43> I also had a time out. Perhaps they host their blog on some external service

<comment><USER42> Probably an AWS micro instance

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> If you went from 200GB to 2000GB, you increased 200GB 10 times, you increased it by 1800GB, you increased it by 900%, not 1000%. Just sayin'.

</comment><comment><USER45> A 10x increase in bandwidth is pretty impressive. More useful to me at least is the increased throughput though, 250Mbps is pretty speedy.

</comment><comment><USER46> I love Linode but the paltry RAM got me to move to someone else that I have been happy with for the last month. The customer service was great but the specs were bad. If they double the RAM for the same price I would move back in a heartbeat.

Hopefully Nextgen v.2 adds RAM for the same price.

</comment><comment><USER47> Been using linode for 3 years now for a little instance to do basic stuff on. Its only ever been down once for a move to a new, faster, host. Even that they gave significant notice for and plenty of time for me to move it (I chose when to move it).

</comment><comment><USER48> Someone in the world are always unsatisfied for everything, yes, everything, no matter what you changed, no matter what you improved, they always always can point something out there to complain about. Example!? Right here!

</comment><comment><USER49> For those with high bandwidth needs this would really make sense. The cheapest package has 2TB of egress bandwidth; this would cost $228 (0.12 x 1900GB) with AWS EC2.

</comment><comment><USER50> What is the cost of a Cisco Nexus 7000 Router and Switch?

<comment><USER51> $83,490 but the price rises dramatically if they filled all of the expansion slots.

_[http://www.ctistore.com/catalog/cat/prod,574258.html?gclid=C...](http://www.ctistore.com/catalog/cat/prod,574258.html?gclid=CK_Hi-3N67UCFY8WMgodZzwA_Q*)

_[http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Cisco- Nexus-7000-Series-32-...](http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/Cisco- Nexus-7000-Series-32-Port-10-Gigabit-Ethernet-Module-with-XL- Option/2816432.aspx?cm_mmc=ShoppingFeeds-_-GoogleBase-_- NetComm%20Products-_-2816432_Cisco%20Nexus%207000%20Series%2032-Port%2010%20Gigabit%20Ethernet%20Module%20with%20XL%20Option%20-_CIS-N7K-M132XP-12L=*)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> They talk about interconnectivity bandwidth, but not the pipes going out to the backbone or peering. Anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER41> Now we are waiting part 2 and 3 of Linode Nextgen. (I think one part will be storage)

</comment><comment><USER53> As a new customer who has had nothing but a great experience so far, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER54> What about Rackspace Cloud?

<comment><USER55> Managed cloud at rackspace starts at $100 plus usage charges. Seems a bit high.

<comment><USER54> If managed, but unmanaged starts at $16.xx for 512MB and outbound traffic is at 0.12/GB I think

<comment><USER56> Except now rackspace is even more expensive than linode for certain uses as the 2TB of bandwidth free would cost you an extra $240 on rackspace cloud and because bandwidth is shared between all linodes this extra bandwidth can make a big difference.

<comment><USER54> If you are having 2TB BW then you would not host on linode or rackspace cloud, but take a dedicated server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have Linode VPS for 3.5 yeras now, no problems at all.

</comment><comment><USER57> 900% increase.

<comment> zupa-hu I wished it was not only bugging me

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I've had a system on Linode for the past two years. Zero problems, zero downtime. My experience with Linode has been very consistent and reliable.

<comment><USER59> My Linode accounts on their Dallas data center have gone through quite a bit of downtime over the years. Their support is why I've stuck with them, though.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> original title: "Linode is increasing the monthly transfer quota 10x after a hw upgrade"</comment>


I Just Love This Juicero Story So Much - <AUTHOR> http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/i-just-love-this-juicero-story-so-much-1794459898 <comment><USER2> "The device Evans spent three years laboring to invent is a $400 WiFi-enabled tabletop machine that squeezes juice ... out of a bag of Juicero-brand juice. It squeezes bags of juice. It is a juice press that squeezes the juice ... out of bags of juice. Bags ... with built-in spouts ... that are filled with juice. Juice that comes in bags."

You know, what we were all suspecting once the thing was originally announced.

<comment><USER3> It's kind of funny really. Glad I'm not an investor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "When we signed up to pump money into this juice company, it was because we thought drinking the juice would be a lot harder and more expensive." Priceless.</comment>


Why don't websites immediately display their text these days? - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/q/547743/73619 <comment><USER2> Agreed that this is a terrible nuisance.

Webmasters please: use a CDN, have a download budget, use YSlow, smarten up how you use caching, push your scripts to end, and so forth. Nobody wants to stare at a blank screen for 30 seconds while you're loading up all of your bells and whistles. If you want to keep reader engagement you've got about 5 seconds from load to text appears, max. Probably a lot less than that.

And the same goes for web apps, btw. In fact, web apps are worse because people aren't passively engaged. Your content site takes 20 seconds to load? I bail out. Your web app takes 20 seconds to load? I'm spending the entire time cursing you under my breath.

Anybody who delivers anything over the web should be stone cold brutal about doing anything possible to decrease load times.

<comment><USER3> A lot of this can also be alleviated by being smart about using a web app's login screen to preload resources that will be needed on subsequent screens, as well. It's relatively simple to include a bit of JavaScript on the login page to fetch webfonts for the rest of the app _before they are needed_.

Furthermore, if you use JS to load your webfonts, you can have the site display in "web safe" fonts until your custom fonts are loaded.

Example: [https://developers.google.com/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader#S...](https://developers.google.com/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader#Styles)

<comment><USER4> IMO the websafe -> webfont transition generally looks crappy. You get a brief window where you see the plain font, you start reading, then all the text changes size ever-so-slightly, which moves the _entire_ page around. Jarring. At least as bad as having a bunch of images that aren't fixed size that reorganize the page as they load.

<comment><USER5> All the more reason to use userContent.css to override site fonts. Size and face are legible.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely agree :) Add in a social-plugin blocker (if you're not a disable-js person), and the internet moves like 3 times faster. Just preventing e.g. someone's twitter feed from loading often makes the page respond a couple seconds sooner, which is really unforgivably bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This stuff is seriously irritating to me as well.

The other thing that is irritating is websites that take so long to render they freeze up my mouse and computer, rendering interaction with their website useless for 10 seconds. It's not like I'm on an old machine either. I tend to show my appreciation by clicking the little "x" on the tab that corresponds to the webpage.

There really isn't any good excuse for this stuff: I've seen quite a few sites that clearly use heavy javascript that render almost instantly. There is no reason that a blog or simple site should take a long time to render.

There seems to be a trend of making things "awesome" with no consideration of user-experience and usability, and frankly, the designers and programmers who do this stuff make the good programmers look bad and ultimately hold back the progress of the web.

And I don't use Google Fonts either because I'd rather have my fonts installed locally.

<comment><USER7> What OS/browser are you using? I have no idea what you are talking about. The only time I have ever seen anything like what you are describing is when maybe something is messed up with flash or an external pdf viewer. But even that doesn't freeze up the mouse.

Also I am a pretty heavy browser user, I have 20+ tabs open on average and a bunch of plugins.

<comment><USER6> Usually use Chrome on a Win7. I've seen this happen about once a day or every other day. Comment got upvotes so I guess I'm not alone in this experience?

<comment><USER8> This happens to me with Chrome on Mac OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The blogger "javascript gears" loading animation from Google is even worse.

<comment><USER10> the blogger "javascript gears" is one of the best examples of "javascript gone wrong" on the internet. if you just want to display static text, use HTML. if you want to offer functionality, use front end javascript. whenever i see something like "use front end javascript to show non interactive text" then i know something went terribly wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This gets especially bad on mobile.

I can sit on a mobile connection under bad conditions, barely capable of pushing 10kb/s. But you know what? The raw article text isn't going to be more than those 10kb.

Anything exceeding that is fluff, and when you need to DL 5MB/s of webfonts and god knows what to read those 10kbs, something is horribly wrong.

Good presentation is good, I don't disagree with that, but when you go down that route, make sure that the actual _content_ gets the priority in loading and rendering, and not fluff.

</comment><comment><USER12> Have you noticed how TechCrunch is a step ahead of this mess?

It shows the text quickly, but then _hides it_ only to show it again, unchanged in few seconds. It must be a clever trick to make you get disappointed with their web devs and to anchor your attention there, so that you won't be as critical of their editors when you finally get to read that blinkentext.

<comment> user-id They probably use something like Google's WebFont Loader[1] to avoid the delay in text visibility when using web fonts.

[1] <https://developers.google.com/webfonts/docs/webfont_loader>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When web fonts came on the scene, I was enthusiastic to finally see headlines rendered as images, or even worse, those sIFR Flash headlines, disappear.

But now people are using custom fonts even for body copy, and with this whitespace problem, it's just as bad.

Webdesigners will always find new ways to sacrifice usability.

<comment><USER14> custom fonts shouldn't be used for body copy?

Shouldn't technology be bending to our will? Not our will to technology?

<comment><USER15> >custom fonts shouldn't be used for body copy?

No.

>Shouldn't technology be bending to our will? Not our will to technology?

It has nothing to do with technology, it is about user experience. Pushing a crappy font on me because you think it is pretty does two things. It makes you feel good about yourself, and makes it harder for me to read your site. This is the same narcissistic designer syndrome that gave use flash intros back in the day.

<comment><USER14> Erm... I think you are just not a designer yourself and don't understand the difference custom fonts can make to the 'readability' and overall feel of a website.

Using custom fonts for headlines and then a 'helvetica' variant to mix in on copy only gets you so far.

I'm not a designer, nor a narcissist, but I've seen body copy fonts used well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought web browsers were supposed to use a built-in font until the web font resource(s) were finished loading?

When I use Opera, the pages render and then a second or so later, the font faces change. It's a little jarring, I admit, but at least the text is rendered.

<comment><USER17> It was my impression too. According to one of the comments on SuperUser, Webkit based browsers like Chrome don't show any text until the font is loaded.

<comment><USER18> Correct; Chrome doesn't do it to prevent the FOUS (Flash of Unstyled Content) that so many designers toiled so hard with Javascript hacks to work around.

There are several things you can do with varying degrees of effectiveness:

1) data-uri encode your fonts and shove them into your CSS files directly. By the time your CSS shows up, your fonts are loaded. Downside is that your CSS grows substantially as a result.

2) Use a CDN (ideally a grown-up CDN that does geo-targeted delivery) and get your fonts downloading to the client ASAP by declaring them as early as possible. Use aggressive caching headers.

3) In all cases, consider using font subsetting to reduce the size of the font package you have to deliver.

4) In all cases, be aware of how browsers load fonts, to ensure that you don't have to end up downloading, say, a massive .ttf file just to throw it away end up downloading a .eot file that is a quarter the size.

<comment><USER19> Hahahaha oh god give me a few minutes to stop laughing. The designers are so stick-in-the-mud about everything being perfect that they make the site invisible until everything is loaded, and then the user gets to stare at a blank page for 20 seconds, and it's not an accident, there's even a term for the situation.

<comment><USER20> jakobe said it best above ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5181226> ):

      > Webdesigners will always find new ways to sacrifice usability.

I even see some of them defending the practice in this discussion... 'f the users -- it looks good/strong branding/etc.'

<comment><USER19> While I agree with the quoted part, custom fonts aren't necessarily problematic. But you have to make sure it renders well and doesn't delay the page.

<comment><USER20> I too am all for nice web design that puts the user first. It's definitely possible and positive for the web; it just takes (sometimes a lot of) extra work and people are too lazy to test everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm a web developer that implementes designs given to me. Most often in modern times they include custom fonts. I always just ignore this and go with the closest system-available equivalent font.

Reasons: \- Delayed rendering of text (as per OP's link) \- adds a considerable extra payload to download before the page is rendered. \- UX and responsiveness on a site is way more important than the first impression of a nice font IMO. Yes, I agree fonts can help readability, but the standard fonts are not that bad.

<comment><USER22> >fonts can help readability

Yes, this is true. But it seems that many custom fonts are not designed for being rendered in a browser.

Recently, I have seen pages using fonts which look blurred, fuzzy or have a weird shape. These fonts are used for the main content (copy text). There must be people who notice that this is hard to read, but nobody seems to say anything. Some days ago I was told that "it looks expensive".

I am also affected by occasional browser and OS freezing due to webfonts. The freezing may last for an eternity (subjective) and is accompanied by an intense feeling that I have lost control. A user experience can't be worse.

<comment><USER23> Often times there is a modern web friendly replacement. I've got an idiot designer who specified Grotseque MT designed in 1926. It breaks up, doesn't scale well over pixels. Even the photoshop mockups looked jittery. I've swapped it for Adelle Sans. He wouldn't even have noticed, they are close enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The text is hidden on purpose by the frontend programmer because he wants to avoid a phenomenon called "Flash Of Unstyled Text"(FOUT) that happens with embedded fonts (@font-face). For more info: <http://paulirish.com/2009/fighting-the-font-face-fout/>

<comment><USER25> That is incorrect. As the article you link to states:

> Webkit takes a very different approach, and very intentionally. They believe > it's better to keep the text invisible until the font is ready. This way, > there is no moment where the text flashes into its newly upgraded self.

Google Chrome, the subject of the original linked post, is built in WebKit and thus inherits this behavior.

<comment><USER26> > That is incorrect.

It looks correct to me, you're both saying the same thing. It's not the _site's_ frontend developer, it's the _browser's_ , but it's for the same reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's funny that example site doesn't use one single built-in font

I can understand the desire for a nice menu or heading font but the whole website?

Here's that page:

<http://portableapps.com/apps/development/notepadpp_portable>

Looks like it uses Ubuntu font-face for everything. It's a nice font but Arial would have been fine too.

Also looks like the font is hosted on a third party site googleusercontent.com so I guess they are hoping you've cached it before.

<comment><USER28> The font files aren't that big either, and as you note are using googleapis.com.

The page is 600k and the fonts are ~160k; primed cache page-weight though is ~6k.

I wonder if the use of Ubuntu font really makes any difference to their users, A-B test would be interesting.

As Ubuntu is free wouldn't it be useful if the browser offered to install the font locally?

<comment><USER29> Having a strong brand is not something you can measure via A/B testing, it's a long-term commitment.

<comment><USER28> Yes.

This wasn't clear.

> _I wonder if the use of Ubuntu font really makes any difference to their > users_ //

What I meant was I wondered if using Ubuntu had any negative effect. Personally I think it adds to the site but then I've Ubuntu font installed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It is extremely difficult to deal with this issue on the developer's side.

My solution has been to embed the font in the format the most commonly used directly into the CSS. Then I Gzip it and put it on a CDN. My blog now loads under 200ms almost anywhere, and there is no flash of unstyled text.

But I realize achieving those load times may be hard for a heavy web application/site.

<comment><USER31> "Give thanks to nature, the bountiful, because it has made necessary things easy to procure, while things hard to obtain are not necessary."

\-- Epicurus

<comment><USER12> Arguably, things are promoted to being necessary _if_ they are easy to procure. Otherwise they remain optional.

\-- V.Pupkin :)

<comment><USER31> Wow, from an evolutionary point of view that actually makes sense.

<comment><USER32> More like: if you require rare things, you are less likely to live long enough to reproduce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> To everyone saying CSS3 webfonts are anathema to good sense and usability:

As engineers, we're sensitized to performance implications[0]; the added value of not using Arial is a more difficult thing to quantify. Many businesses perceive that value to be significant - behaving as if it doesn't exist isn't useful or pragmatic.

Still, on mobile you'd have to be completely insane to incur download time and latency x2 for the CSS and font files before showing any text. If you need it that badly, take the hit and force a FOUC ("flash" in this case a misnomer). When reading HN on the go I frequently wish CSS had never been invented.

Most desktop sites though can happily get away with a bit of bling type. I'd wager no one would notice if they were more careful with what they show prior to the font loading (hiding the bullets from lists, for example). In the battle between web performance and web functionality, the onus is as always on making intelligent conscious choices that represent the right tradeoffs for your objectives.

[0] [http://at.cantl.in/nerd-stuff/2012/11/29/fast-page- start.htm...](http://at.cantl.in/nerd-stuff/2012/11/29/fast-page-start.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> Yes, that's on my list too, but the top of my annoyance list are sites that play an advertisement (audio and/or video) that can't be disabled. The advertisement always starts before any useful content appears.

</comment><comment><USER35> There is actually a very simple solution for this : use the Javascript include method and place the code at the end of the body tag.

This is what happens technically : The CSS will get loaded, and the custom font will not be found. The browser will then use the fallback font. As the rest of the page gets loaded, so will the Javascript function. This will download and include the custom font, therefore changing the fallback font to the custom font.

The change of font may be quite disturbing, but hey at least people with slower connections can read meanwhile.

</comment><comment><USER36> Is there a way to block such annoyances? Something like NoScript for CSS ( or actually for third party connections? Since the problem is not actually CSS but slow font/ad/whatever servers.)

<comment><USER37> RequestPolicy for Firefox blocks all requests to other domains. I sometimes think it should do sub-domains too. When you use this you will see just how many assets websites load from or place elsewhere.

<comment><USER38> Indeed, RequestPolicy, AdBlock+ and NoScript are the essential default plugins, both from a security and usability perspective.

But sometimes the content will not load at all, because to show an article's text, the page uses Google's ajax, webfonts, a cdn, and the blog's master site @ wordpress.com or blogger.com etc. In that case, the content has to be really interesting for me to allow all those third-party connections.

<comment><USER39> I adore RequestPolicy in principle, but after a year I just couldn't take it anymore. NoScript was better, it took me five years until I was fed up with constantly whitelisting every new site I visited and playing guess-which- sites-are-essential roulette.

I really, really wish there existed versions of RequestPolicy and NoScript with large and comprehensive default whitelists. Until that day, Ghostery is all that I have the patience to put up with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> horrible bloated javascript frameworks. if your page is not interactive, it should be done in just css. if you are loading 5 js files just to display a couple paragraphs of text, there is a problem.

<comment> chestnut-tree I completely agree. Google's Blogger service is one of the worst offenders. I've been to so many blogspot.co.uk sites where absolutely nothing loads if Javascript is disabled. Once you enable Javascript, often a page of text with no visible interactivity loads. Or the interactive elements are for the sidebar widgets, not the content of the page.

Javascript is simply being ridicuously overused and few people seem to call out for it to stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I ran into this issue as well when working on <https://starthq.com>

The font file is loaded the first time any text using the font is displayed and I am using Font Awesome for the icons which are only visible when selecting a drop down menu. As a result there was a very annoying flicker the first time the menu was displayed.

The somewhat hackish solution was to include one of the icons that uses the font as part of the logo in the upper left of the page, which is rendered on initial page load.

<comment><USER42> An equally hackish alternative would be to have a floated div way off screen using the font to force loading (works for image carousel pre-loading too, but with a pretty obvious load time hit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've always wondered why it takes forever to load most pages. Im running debian on SSD with 32G ram and a video card that can handle anything yet Iceweasel, reg FF and Chrome all take forever to load pages like I'm using 1990s internets. Blocking all java scripts and tweaking the guts of FF to load faster still results in Netscape navigator 33.6kps speed to render text.

</comment><comment><USER44> Anyone remember that in old IE days, you have to mouseover to see the image loading on buttons?

<comment> angry-hacker You were still able to preoload them before even in "old IE days", it was just a bad practice :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Why? Because they're too busy deciding what ads to serve you. _ba dum-bump tish!_

<comment><USER46> It certainly looks that way from the user's perspective. You're sitting there, waiting for the actual text to load, yet the ads are already blinking and jumping all over the place.

An all too common experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What's REALLY annoying is websites where lots of layout has loaded, and no text (or only some of the text) shows pending a font load which could take seconds. This doesn't look "fast," it looks janky.

<comment><USER33> Most people would consider this a significant performance improvement on "nothing shows up for several seconds".

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> tl;dr web fonts</comment>


Never-Googlers: Web users take the ultimate step to guard their data - <AUTHOR> https://www.thehour.com/news/article/Never-Googlers-Web-users-take-the-ultimate-step-14116157.php <comment><USER2> Well, of course. Just don't sign up for a Google account.

When you get an Android phone new, there's a moment when it asks you to sign up or sign in with a Google account. There's a "later" option". Click that, and then remove the Google one-time startup program. Install F-Droid, and get your apps from there.

The mail program on Android will talk to an IMAP server. Find one to use, and you don't need Gmail. No ads.

On desktop, use Firefox, LibraOffice, and Thunderbird. Install Privacy Badger from the EFF. Videos are uploaded to Vimeo. I have a cheap web site on HostGator if I need to upload anything for someone else to look at, and a Github account for code storage.

I've been doing this for years, and don't seem to be missing out on anything except ads.

<comment><USER3> Google tracking is baked into Android pretty deep. Simply not having an account doesn't stop Google from tracking what you do on your phone.

<comment><USER4> It requires being signed in.

If you are not signed in, for extra safety you can also disable google play framework and all google apps. You won't get things like fused location, but hey, that one requires connecting to google services too.

<comment><USER5> You may or may not be right about this.

The only way to verify this is to install some system level firewall and carefully inspect all logs.

Until you do that, we simple don't know.

<comment><USER4> Or you can inspect AOSP itself and bring your device to AOSP-like state.

Sure, you won't know whether the vendor of your device didn't modify the firmware itself, but what motivation is there for Samsung, Sony or Huawei to help Google to get user data?

<comment><USER6> > what motivation is there for Samsung, Sony or Huawei to help Google to get > user data?

I'm not sure about their motivation, but several vendors are famously known for bundling spyware with their phones. Usually within the keyboard app or some telemetry system.

> bring your device to AOSP-like state

That's a solution but is impossible without having a clean ROM at your disposal. Google's spyware is contained within Google Play Services, which you can't get rid of that easily.

<comment><USER7> When one wants an AOSP-like state, they can install LineageOS. That doesn't include Google Play Services, so it isn't difficult to get rid of it.

<comment><USER4> Jumping to LineageOS is order of magnitude bigger change, than `adb pm disable` packages. LineageOS has to support your device in the first place, and then you have root your device (and lose some capabilities in the process, like camera processing on Xperias).

Yes, you will get better control over software that runs on your device. You will pay for it by going through more demanding process and the risk of having instabilities, that nobody except you cares about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I did this a few years ago and the blog post (to my suprise) got covered on Ars Technica and others. It always amazes me how people respond with disbelief or with wonder and awe as if it's some difficult or hard to do thing. At the time there were good, if not better, alternatives for almost everything. The only thing I stuck with was Gmail and Google calendar, but since then I've discovered Fastmail which I think is far better at both (I highly recommend them, they're fairly inexpensive and that means you're not the product, you're the customer). Although for me it was less about privacy (at the time) and more about the fact that I had become dependent on the inter-connections between Google services so when they killed one (ie. Reader) it has a much bigger impact on my personal life than it should have. Now any time a product dies it's easy to move my data over to something else and I never get reliant on interoperability between branded services.

I've also got Google Analytics black holed in Firefox, and run an ad blocker of course which (I hope) catches most of their trackers; this just seems good for anyone to do though, even if they're not giving up Google's other services.

</comment><comment><USER9> (disclaimer: I work at a big tech firm, but I've had this opinion before working here)

I'm confused by the lengths people have gone through to "protect" themselves from internet giants while freely giving away their info to credit card companies, traditional retailers, small businesses. Credit card transaction data have been sold for years without most of us knowing about it. Small startups, boutique stores rarely have the security or data governance resources to ensure your data is stored and used properly. Data breaches are common even at large brick-and-mortar retailers.

Given the state of data security outside of big tech, my best option is to trust only big tech.

<comment><USER7> > I'm confused by the lengths people have gone through to "protect" themselves > from internet giants while freely giving away their info to credit card > companies, traditional retailers, small businesses.

You are invalidly generalizing. I try to eliminate all contact I have with the tech giants, and I do not have a credit card, I am at a privacy respecting bank (GLS Gemeinschaftsbank), and I use cash.

Additionally, by sharing your data with a company, you give that company power over yourself and others by enabling them with the knowledge they have over you. Considering this, it is less problematic to give access to data to a small company compared to a tech giant.

<comment><USER10> > You are invalidly generalizing. I try to eliminate all contact I have with > the tech giants, and I do not have a credit card, I am at a privacy > respecting bank (GLS Gemeinschaftsbank), and I use cash.

You do you, but I'm happy to get free airline tickets and other perks from using my credit card at the expense of....... having someone else know I bought a mechanical keyboard last month?

I respect your choice but I honestly do not understand why people go to such great lengths to hide mundane data. I'll tell you the color of my underwear for free, I don't care.

<comment><USER11> Maybe at the expense of buying that mechanical keyboard you thought you really wanted but actually you ended up purchasing because of continued, subtle advertising?

<comment><USER12> Assuming you have the income to support your spending habits, I don't see this as much of a risk? Occasionally buying the wrong thing for whatever mistaken reason is a fact of life. Live and learn.

I would be more worried about scams, bad investments, bigger purchases, or a pattern of impulse buying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> " In the small South Carolina town of Newberry, Bob's Red Mill muesli cereal is hard to come by.

That presents a challenge for resident Gregory Kelly, who can't get enough of the stuff. He'd rather not truck the 40 miles or so to Columbia to stock up on it, but he's also loath to buy it from the company's website, which he says is riddled with tracking software from Google"

Somebody get this man a Firefox Privacy Tab

<comment><USER14> I feel the author was struggling to find a suitable anecdote to open the story. And this one seems a bit far-fetched, perhaps even exaggerated by Mr. Kelly as a means of illustrating the hassle of curtailing the surveillance apparatus of Google. But someone who has gone to the lengths described probably knows how to block requests to google-analytics.com.

<comment><USER15> He should probably install this: [https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/) It's so good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> wow, i had no idea someone in what i assume is rural South Carolina is willing to undertake a pretty substantial convenience/time cost - drive 40 miles (and back?) to purchase directly - in order to better guard their privacy.

wonder if he also prefers cash? although this article is google-focused, not more generally on privacy which would presumably involve defeating credit card companies with cash.

i'm wondering what order of magnitude of people would do the same across the country. tens of thousands?

<comment><USER17> There's a new bridge near me. No cash tolls. It's either EasyPass or they photograph your plates and mail you the bill.

I presume the lack of cash tolls is semi intentional. I mean all cars are being photographed, as you can borrow and EasyPass.

<comment><USER18> Cash tolls cost more. You either need people stationed to collect the toll or send people every so often to collect the tolls from the machines. The machines would also need more maintenance than the camera or EasyPass system because they're mechanical. You also need the camera system regardless in case someone drives through without paying or simply doesn't have cash on hand. Plus, people will need exact change or have the machine (or employees) return the correct change if it's not a coinage machine. This also means cash tolls are slower and cause more congestion. Finally, fewer and fewer people have cash on hand.

<comment><USER17> Maybe. But the lack of cash tolls also enables the Surveillance State. So once again, we're trading privacy and liberty for what amounts to pocket lint.

I think we have closure on the American experiment. Laziness/convenience trumps anything else.

<comment><USER19> Why do they need toll booths to add cameras?

What prevents the surveillance state from just putting some cameras on the highway?

<comment><USER17> They might not. But I'm guessing the ACLU would likely have something to say about it. Just because it feels normalized doesn't mean we should be so accepting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >"I am giving up more than I am getting" from Google, said the 61-year tech consultant who started scaling back his Google usage a couple years ago when advertisements began appearing in his Gmail account.

Ads have been in Gmail for many years, they just became more obvious with their recent design changes.

>Joshua Greenbaum, of Berkeley, Calif., said he pays about $100 per year to use Microsoft Office 365 software that he says has better privacy protections than Google's.

At least he's willing to put his money where his mouth is, though he's probably still using Windows. If I had a dollar for everyone who complained about Google but refused to self-host or pay for someone else to host their email... (Also, people who use free VPNs to avoid tracking. It's free for a reason.)

</comment><comment><USER21> >Such never-Googlers are pushing friends and family to give up the search and advertising titan, while others are taking to social media to get word out.

That'll show em, post on facebook about it...

<comment><USER22> Yeah, everyone knows Facebook isn't a platform to influence people. /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not to get off topic but there are still plenty of ecomm/mail order companies that'll take a phone order. I understand this guy's concern. I don't understand why he's driving (and likely being tracked along the way).

</comment><comment><USER23> You can opt out of analytics:

[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/181881?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/181881?hl=en)

<comment><USER24> This is not the only analytics company though. There are many others. Others that even buy your credit transaction history, how do you opt out of that? I bet those no annual fee cards would bring back fees if they were forced to keep your data private.

<comment><USER23> Incognito mode?

<comment><USER25> Incognito mode is mostly useless as an actual privacy tool. You're still exposing a substantial amount of information. The most basic would be your IP. Most IPs are of course dynamic, but there are two factors here:

1) The IP only changes when your lease expires or you manually renew it. This is not a normal part of starting an incognito session. Google has a confirmed identity (such as by being logged into a Google service) of tantalor at IP x. A few seconds later IP x shows up at SteamyHotPornSite.com that's running Google analytics or otherwise providing tracking for Google - a recent study of 22,484 porn sites found Google trackers present on 74% [1]). That's 100% tantalor.

2) Even in cases where the IP does change, it's constrained to within a group. As most dynamic IPs are also geomapped, it's often a _relatively_ small group. Now what information is exposed during incognito can be cross-referenced against a very small group of potentials. You can likely hit near 100% on this as well.

And that's just one datum, though granted it's quite a useful one! Incognito should be seen as a tool that does little more than disable any cookies you have and automatically [kind of - depends on your OS] deletes your local browsing history.

[1] - [https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-google-quietly- trac...](https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-google-quietly-tracking- porn-you-watch-2019-7)

<comment><USER26> Re dynamic IPs: you may often get the same IP again on renewal. You might have more luck if you randomize MAC addresses, but it's certainly possible that they will keep giving the same IP to a given subscriber until they have their own reason to reallocate addresses (e.g. maybe so that a crashlooping router doesn't exhaust available leases for other subscribers).

E.g. from this ad tech company[0] specializing in IP tracking (take it with a grain of salt):

> In fact our research has discovered many homes that have theoretically > dynamic IP's, but have held the same IP for multiple years. Because of this > recursive reassignment the typical location targeted by El Toro has held the > same IP address for 7 months.

0: [https://www.eltoro.com/how-long-does-an-ip-address-stay- atta...](https://www.eltoro.com/how-long-does-an-ip-address-stay-attached-to- a-home-or-business/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Web search has become a commoditized service over the last few years. I've used DuckDuckGo exclusively for over a year now and it's actually _really_ good, and I've switched over to iCloud for email. Even Apple maps is pretty decent nowadays. There's really nothing I need from Google anymore. Their moat is shrinking rapidly.

</comment><comment><USER28> Nearly a decade ago, then Google CEO Eric Schmidt said "The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

[https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-googles- policy-...](https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-googles-policy-is-to- get-right-up-to-the-creepy-line-and-not-cross-it-2010-10)

The problem with such a policy is in thinking that cultural and legal boundaries are fixed and inviolate. The very process of repeatedly pressing up to a border may trigger the backlash which moves it, and can leave the fate- tempting party in deep water -- with its own culture, processes, amd institutions unable to adapt, or with goodwill so badly burnt it never recovers.

Google should have seen this coming long ago. It's a colossal failure of leadership that they've not.

</comment><comment><USER29> Taking the ultimate step to guard your data would surely involve writing laws or dismantling data centers (I prefer the former). Ultimately what you opt into has little relation to what people actually know about you: you can't _really_ opt out of credit, or out of things like Comcast requiring your social security number as identification and authorization, or out of the fact that it's become the cultural norm to accept ad-supported services as the sole access to communities.

</comment><comment><USER30> One way that Google can track your web usage habits is through third-party websites using re-captchas and other Google services and resources, about which the end-user can do nothing except refuse to use web sites that require them.

Unfortunately, Google is far from the only company that tracks users and collects data on them, so even if you were to somehow completely avoid Google tracking and data collection, you'd still be subject to tracking and data collection from others.

</comment><comment><USER31> "There are dozens of us!"

</comment><comment><USER32> At this point with the proliferation of cameras and listening devices, the only way to stay off Google's servers is to live in the backwoods, or in an undeveloped country, or live on a boat.

Kinda creepy, actually, when I say it like that. If Google is just a front for NSA then I'd say Big Brother is complete.

</comment><comment><USER33> > In the small South Carolina town of Newberry, Bob's Red Mill muesli cereal > is hard to come by.

dammit grandpa get to the point!</comment>


Uber debuts new Uber for Business with custom travel programs and rules - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/15/uber-debuts-new-uber-for-business-with-custom-travel-programs-and-rules <comment><USER2> > "Overall, this is a great redesign with new features that make it very easy > to implement and use for businesses of all sizes, and managers of all levels > of technical expertise. Uber's clearly looking at business as a prime market > for future growth, and this looks like a no-brainer for expense departments > looking to ease the workload."

This article isn't labeled as opinion but seems quite biased. Maybe an example of the submarine.

<comment><USER3> What is "the submarine"?

<comment><USER4> [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

TL;DR: A planted advertisement article.

<comment><USER5> Holy crap that is a solid set of articles! I don't know how I never thought to check paul graham's site.

<comment><USER6> Some favorites:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html)

[http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)

<comment><USER7> Also:

[http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, The University of Southern California announced yesterday that they dropped Uber (in what was probably the largest implementation of this type of program) for Lyft

<comment><USER9> Uber is in 83 countries though, Lyft in just the US. They have a simply enormous global market to tap with programs like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rare Uber related news that sounds good for the company. If this sees a good rate of adoption, and the idea does sound reasonable to me so it may, it would create a much more stable model for reliable revenue that being business to business can provide.

<comment><USER11> Uber needs to go the way of the dodo bird! Let Lyft and others take it's place. Maybe Lyft buys Uber.

Personally and after Uber let $1k get stolen from my bank account and laughed via their bro PR statement (it's the users' fault)it's been great to see all their bad behavior come back to bite them.

<comment><USER12> >after Uber let $1k get stolen from my bank account

I... really fail to see how this happened.

<comment><USER11> I signed up in 2009 .. never used it and forgot about it.

In 2013 or 14 or earlier Uber accounts started to get hacked because people did not use the strongest Username and Password . Uber knew about these hacks and their PR was it's the user's fault vs. sending out emails alerting all users to change their passwords to something crazy secure and utilize 2fa. No they did not do that .. they just released a statement saying it's their users faults.

The hacks happened a dozen times a day for months to years per searching twitter ... drivers in some far off country ... charging obscene amounts for a ride in London for example. The majority of these hacks/stolen money were coming from London.

Then as a user you want to immediately cut ties with Uber, but no there was no way to cancel your account and be done with these scumbags .. you had to send them an email and it took five days for them to cancel my account. All the while I was worried that it might happen again within those five days.

Then years later all this other stuff comes out about Uber.

They never cared for anyone who wasn't Kalanick's BRO ... from their drivers to their employees to their customers to whomever did business with them.

BenchMark is so right to try and rid Uber of that egomaniac... it's all about him vs. everyone else. I hope he keeps being himself ... he's just going to bring down Uber and only hold the ashes that once was Uber in hands!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I was a large business with deep pockets, I'd be wary of signing up to use independent contractors to ferry employees around and get embroiled in the employee misclassification debate.

Uber has said it is just a platform enabling the transaction between an independent driver and customer. That puts the entire burden of employee classification on the company. If HR sets the travel policy on the app, they would be authorizing it.

<comment><USER14> I'd say that if the company doesn't even know the name of the person providing the service before they order the service, that they've offloaded that particular risk pretty damn well. The employee/contractor grey line is pretty far away from that.</comment></comment>


Are You More Likely to Be a Baker If You're Named "Baker"? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/are-you-more-likely-to-be-a-baker-if-youre-named-baker <comment><USER2> This is the worst of science. Two people, each convinced the other is wrong, doing various arbitrary experiments until they get ones that kind-of support their claim, and then publishing ten of those to say they have "evidence".

[also: the conclusion that everything in the article is hogwash kind of agrees with the person arguing against the phenomena, but that doesn't mean I agree with him either]

<comment><USER3> That's the second worst. The worst is a hundred people, all convinced of the same thing, doing various arbitrary experiments until they get ones that kind- of support their claim, and then publishing ten of those to say they have "evidence".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps correlation but _not_ causation

... I wonder if historically "Baker" was used for people who were of the profession baker? It is well known that certain genetic characteristics may pre-dispose people to go to certain professions.

So having the name "Baker" would imply you are descended or contain the genes of people who historically baked.

This factor alone may pre-dispose you to becoming a baker moreso than any psychological effects.

It's a lot easier to see when you look at the children of painters, musicians etc tending to go towards the arts.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the surname "Baker" would've originally been a baker. There are a variety of occupational surnames that you can quickly recognise: Potter, Cooper, Cook, Miller, Fisher, Carter, Tailor, Smith. As well as a few -smith specific ones: Green, Silver, Gold, White, Black, Brown - all having origins in things like working with tin (whitesmith), copper (greensmith) or silver, etc.

I doubt that genetic disposition would be a strong factor given that the skills for these various physical lines of work would be fairly similar.

<comment><USER6> Not to mention variations on spelling! Tailor->Taylor, Cook->Cooke, Fisher->Phisher.

[Name] of [Father/Town/Clan] were also all common.

"John of Connor" (John, fathered by Connor)

German: Hans von Duisburg (Hans from the city of Duisburg)

(Feudal) Japanese: 藤原 鎌足 (Fujiwara of the Kamatari clan)

Then, as mentioned by another user, some names were given based on characteristics or parents' wishes of the future.

Russian: Неулыба (One who does not smile)

Or even the location of where your family lived ("place names"):

Japanese (again): 田中 (center/middle field), 中村 (center of village), 山本 (base of the mountain).

<comment><USER7> > (Feudal) Japanese: 藤原 鎌足 (Fujiwara of the Kamatari clan)

Another neat thing about Japanese surnames is that you can typically tell which families were retainers etc. for the Fujiwara by the presence of the character 藤 (the "Fuji" in Fujiwara, often read "toh" in other names) in names like the very common 佐藤 (Satoh).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >That you might unconsciously be drawn to Georgia if your name is George, or choose a career in baking if your last name is Baker, or be more likely to get worse grades if your name begins with the letters C or D, goes against the belief that you're responsible for—or are the authors of—your choices.

Of course, merely knowing that Bakers are more likely to become bakers is not enough to determine that it's because of unconscious choices. Nothing in this article supports that conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER9> My favorite example of nominative determinism: modern temporal logic was developed by a man named Arthur Prior.

</comment><comment><USER10> If that's the case, I really feel bad for the person with the last name: ServeAsATerribleExampleForOthers. Talk about being born into the wrong family.

</comment><comment><USER11> Mine is Cable. Anytime the network goes down I have to put on headphones because I know I'm about to be inundated with 'Someone go get the cable!' and 'Why don't you check the cable?', and 'The cable is down!' and get briefly confused. The network's gone down more often than you'd expect.

And I haven't worked for Cable TV, but I have worked on things you play on TVs.

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_T._Krebs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_T._Krebs)

This guy was into alternative oncology and his name is the German for cancer.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd wonder if people get complimented/noticed more if their name matches their occupation..

</comment><comment><USER14> [Mordor]

FRODO: Do you believe in nominative determinism?

SAM: [chuckling] That your name can affect your future?

SHAGRAT: Stop it guys

</comment><comment><USER15> Here to answer any questions you may have.

\- Baker

<comment><USER16> Thanks! What's great about HN is that we often get great comments from relevant experts and, as a community, we know how to differentiate between anecdotes and statistically relevant data. It's why the quality of comments is so high.

So to put the question to rest once and for all and to verify the claims from Pelham studies, here are a few questions:

\- Do you bake?

\- Is that your job?

\- If not, would there be reasons for it to contradict Pelham's rigorous studies? did you maybe marry into your name?

Thank you for advancing science! You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar!

<comment><USER15> Thanks for your questions! It's very rewarding to be able to draw on the experiences I've worked so hard to build over a lifetime. To your questions:

\- Do pancakes qualify as baked goods? If so, then yes.

\- No, it's not my job. However, I do work with fintech and hence with banks and, on occasion, bankers...

\- Baker is my first name, actually. Will need to contact Mr. Pelham to see how the first name / last name distinction is reflected in his analyses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those of us in San Francisco, I recently learned that Josey Baker Bread is from a guy named Josey Baker who only started baking bread in 2010: [http://www.joseybakerbread.com/about/](http://www.joseybakerbread.com/about/) .</comment>


A quick tour of the Silicon web framework: A simple blog API in 85 C++ lines - <AUTHOR> http://siliconframework.org/blog/a_simple_silicon_blog_api.html <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone with an experience with web framework, comment here about what you love/hate/miss in Silicon.</comment>