The Elephant in the Room: Web design work is drying up - <AUTHOR> http://www.sazzy.co.uk/the-elephant-in-the-room/ <comment><USER3> I think there's a fundamental shift in the type of web-skills which are now in demand, due to a number of factors. Here's some things which come to mind:

\- A "web designer" or "web developer" used to be a generalist who wrote HTML, CSS, and some jQuery. Now there's a demand for specialization: a UI/UX designer who can prototype, iterate quickly, and use real data if possible, and a UI/UX engineer who can develop large-scale apps with an eye towards security, performance, reusability, and maintainability.

\- The need for the generalist web designer/developer seems supplanted by tools like Squarespace and Bootstrap, which make it easy to get acceptable results with fewer skills. It's the "commoditization of design".

\- The need for specialized designers/engineers is spurred by a realization that good design can command a premium/competitive advantage (and that good design means iterating quickly and having a deep understanding of what makes fundamentally good UI and UX), and that the front-end benefits from sound engineering practices as much as the back-end, especially if you're building SPAs or large-scale apps with complex UXes.

\- A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such as when modals are appropriate, how to design forms effectively, what makes a good call-to-action, and how to structure IA effectively have been answered. Companies no longer need teams of people to work out answers to these questions, just one or two good leaders to evangelize the answers that are already established, and a team of UI engineers that can execute them well.

<comment><USER4> > "A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such as > when modals are appropriate, how to design forms effectively, what makes a > good call-to-action, and how to structure IA effectively have been answered. > Companies no longer need teams of people to work out answers to these > questions, just one or two good leaders to evangelize the answers that are > already established, and a team of UI engineers that can execute them well."

Perhaps I'm taking this the wrong way, but the tasks you listed there don't even begin to scratch the surface of existing design problems a UI designer will face on a daily basis.

EDIT: ex. Consider the design work that went into this product [http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive- computing/watson/watso...](http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive- computing/watson/watsonpaths.shtml)

<comment><USER5> It seems to also depend very much on who the website is for. The reality is that many organizations (small businesses basic organizations restaurants schools nonprofits etc.) need sites that do basic, routine things, in which case, the hard problems are solved, and good templates are available. In that case, having an in-house person who understands the company's needs is better than having a sophisticated specialist. It seems like, as the # of websites has increased, one would have expected the demand for web designers to increase proportionately, but it hasn't, because the orgs with the most complex site needs were the first to build.

<comment><USER4> Website is also a minomer now more than ever. If it's online and you access it via the web is it a website? A product? A web product? A web app? SaaS app? Is it mobile? Is a webkit app a website? Is a website wrapped in a mobile browser ported to a phone a website?

One could certainly argue in either direction for all of those questions. The skills are all very similar, the technologies are mostly the same (foundationally).

I don't think work is drying up nor demand going down. I think designers are more important now more than ever, they just might not be traditional web designers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the problems here is that the author is using his/her experience at "conferences" and stories from former "big business" employees to judge the volume of available work.

Not only is that evidence anecdotal, but also comes from a very specific/narrow audience. I'm not going to say "conference goers" are inferior or bad at their jobs, just that there's a whole lot of web designers and developers who never attend conferences and therefore aren't included in his polling. There's also a lot of us (myself included) doing a lot of web design work for small businesses too small to hire in house. Even when our clients hire someone in-house to _handle_ the web, it results in more work for us.

<comment><USER7> I'm not just using my evidence of anecdotal "conference goers" I have 6 months worth of email to back it up as well. Non-conference goers. People who are just trying to make a living and wondering why they can't.

<comment><USER8> They can't make a living because Wix, Squarespace, Facebook pages, and Amazon shops are now considered "good enough" by most of the middle market (small and medium businesses), so there is not much need now for custom work in that segment.

This was not the case even 5 years ago. The tools are now out there to make a reasonable-looking website with minimal training or experience. Sure, it looks very much like the other sites made with that tool, but (apparently) most businesses don't care.

Custom web dev will continue to exist only at the low and high ends -- hobbyist websites made by people who enjoy the process, and a few large, complex specialist sites.

<comment><USER9> > This was not the case even 5 years ago.

People were saying exactly the same thing in relation to FrontPage 20 years ago. After that it was Dreamweaver. WordPress. Wix. etc.

The tools for people to go off and do it themselves have been with us for a very long time, and they've only ever squeezed out the very bottom of the market. The types of organisations that DIY appeals to aren't in the market and don't have the budget for an average developer, and the organisations that spend money on developers wouldn't consider DIY.

<comment><USER10> But the tools, and the marketing of those tools, have vastly improved in the last ~5 years. Or are you telling me dreamweaver's wysiwyg editor was the pinnacle of development..

<comment><USER9> Yes, the tools have vastly improved over the past five years – but the whole industry has. The tools a freelancer uses have improved dramatically as well. What a freelancer can achieve in a given amount of time has improved dramatically too. And clients' expectations are growing correspondingly.

The whole industry is moving forward. The bottom of the freelance market 20 years ago was plain static pages and that's what FrontPage competed with. The bottom of the freelance market now is a content-managed dynamic site and that's what Facebook pages compete with.

<comment><USER10> You just made my point. Not all freelancers choose to improve their tool-set. Therefore they fall behind where, like you said, the whole industry moves forward.

<comment><USER9> If all you are arguing is that people who don't make any effort to improve their work will struggle to keep up with the rest of the industry, then yes, I agree with that. But that doesn't seem to have been your point until now.

<comment><USER10> Fair point, I probably jumped the gun with that statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No shit. Bottom-tier design work was necessary when the default templates for everything were crap and people were ignorant of the technology.

Also, a lot of "designers" and "design agencies" can't code HTML worth crap and the value they provided was minimal.

To me, a good independent designer codes, knows quirks, and also has the eye for design. If you're a larger company and you want the specialists, it's just better to hire them. And if you don't understand the importance of design, there's an unlimited amount of cheap, quality templates out there.

The trivial work for Photoshoppers with a design degree is up.

<comment><USER12> I'd add one more thing - if you look at it closer, web designers never tried or managed to be properly original and diverse. There was always some sort of "magical guidelines" that made everything look in essence the same. Everyone was/is copying everyone else and getting paid for it. I think this has to end sooner or later and template popularity is one of the signs that real value of things is being better recognized.

<comment><USER13> > Everyone was/is copying everyone else and getting paid for it.

Isn't that just a mixture of technical limitations and fashion.

<comment><USER12> Technical, financial, organisational, etc. yes, but almost the whole point of creativity is being able to come up with something original, new. If you don't you don't get paid or in this case you don't get paid for long. That's just how things work. I personally find it very sad, that a huge amount of (willing!!!) copy cats call them selves creatives and then somebody calls the whole misguided charade fashion.

edit: just in case - I hope this doesn't offend you, somebody=everybody, I didn't mean anything personal

<comment><USER14> I think you're underestimating how many creative projects done for clients are very much led by something they've seen before. "Make it like the Tesla site. I love the Tesla site!" At some budget ranges, it's not worth the time to fight that.

And beyond fashion, user expectations are a massive influence. People are wary of right-side navigation, designers know that top-left is the common spot for branding for a reason, etc. There are very practical usability and design reasons that things get pushed down a fixed number of creative paths.

<comment><USER12> As I've said, there are legit reasons, but my point was that they are being abused too often and this will have consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find this fascinating actually. Just the other day I ended up talking about this with my lawyer. I met with him for a consult on some LLC/Corp setup and mentioned how I had originally ended up on LegalZoom before contacting him. I said something to the effect of "You must hate them".

He thought about it for a minute and then said how he honestly didn't think about them much at all. It was a completely different industry as far as he was concerned. He was in the business of offering problems to solutions whereas LegalZoom was offering a product.

Whether you agree with that or not (I'm not qualified enough to make that distinction in the legal field), it really resonated with me. If you were to ask me if - as a freelance developer - I hated Wix or Squarespace, my response would be that I honestly don't think about them much at all. I'm actually largely ambivalent about them. I freelance full time and I've never been busier than I am right now. I would chalk some of that up to dumb luck, most of that up to good referrals, but at least a portion of that up to the fact that I don't provide a product for a client. I (try) to provide solutions to their business problems.

<comment><USER16> _He was in the business of offering problems to solutions_

Yup, sounds like some lawyers I talk to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Am I missing something? My employer is having a hard time filling a single developer position. We have 100 million people within a 10 hour drive and we've posted to HN and SO. We're not an elite startup paying tons of money with stock options, but if there is no work like the author says, it shouldn't be that hard. I have recruiters messaging me about jobs thousands of miles away. I talk to other developers in the area and they confirm the same problem.

I like the audio feature here by the way, I can listen while working, pretty awesome.

<comment><USER18> Startups have a hard time hiring because they'll only hire ~28 year old white/Asian males with a carefully selected group of 20 resume buzzwords, that can code on a whiteboard with a gun to their head. Not surprisingly that niche is tapped.

<comment><USER19> Oddly enough, working at a startup is pretty similar to coding on a whiteboard with a gun to your head :)

<comment><USER20> I'll take the gun please.

<comment><USER21> Dibs on the whiteboard!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I followed the link to the article to read it.

And then I did what I usually do these days: I hit the "Reader Mode" icon on my Firefox (Android) browser. I do the same for most desktop sites as well.

Why?

Font too small. Contrast too low. Line lengths too long.

I get _a better_ , and far more importantly, _uniform_ experience _when I bin all Web design and go with a built-in default page presentation mode._

Oh, and that _on a Web designer 's own blog._

Where, I presume, she doesn't have the problem of getting idiotic client requests which violate numerous sane design concepts.

I've been saying this for some years now: Web design isn't the solution, _Web design is the problem_.

It's going to be solved, _is_ being solved, _in the browser_ , by:

1\. Stripping out extraneous crud. I haven't mentioned my all-but-blind friend's difficulties in navigating anything on a computer, but extraneous crud and Shit That Randomly Changes (even the Firefox card previews on his browser start page) are huge hurdles.

2\. Uniform presentation.

3\. Metadata.

4\. Curation.

There was a post on HN recently about ePub. Quite frankly, an ePub based browsing / curation tool with uniform, sane, presentation would replace about 99.99964% of my Web browsing needs. There are a small number of missing factors from HTML, largely footnotes, equations support, and hierarchical comments/follow-ups. But add those and we can ditch the entire current mess for 1) ePub articles and 2) Web-deployed apps for the very small handful of sites which honestly need them.

<comment><USER23> #575757 text on a 'white' background, font-size 17px... "Reader Mode" is great, but hardly a requirement in this case.

<comment><USER22> I find #333 problematic -- it seems fuzzy usually, though #330 typically isn't. Hard to beat #000/#fff.

Pixels vary tremendously in size. Other than as a compatibility mode, I'd ditch them entirely. html { font-size: medium; } will give the user their default choices, which works quite well for those who know what they're doing, and can be trivially fixed by those who don't.

A basic style that's foundation for much of what I do: [http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB](http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Freelance worked before because companies needed smallish jobs done here and there. Now they need a full-time team. Shouldn't that be better for the web designers? They don't have to be on a treadmill looking for leads all the time. They can settle in and work at one company with a high level of job security. And probably they'd have much more clout in terms of how things are done in the companies, driving bigger changes and potentially earning a lot more.

<comment><USER25> Not necessarily. Depends on what your goals are. I'm a freelance IT consultant and I love it, especially the part about about finding leads and working for many different clients on new and interesting challenges.

If freelance work dried up in my segment, I'd look for other entrepreneurial opportunities, which could very well mean not working in software development or IT anymore, but I certainly wouldn't settle for working as an employee. It just isn't for me.

Besides, the high level of job security is a fallacy. As an employee you're working for only one client: Your employer. If that employer suddenly decides you're redundant you're out of a steady income at once with no other clients or leads to compensate for that.

You can't exactly always be on the lookout for another position while on a job because your current employer will get suspicious and ask you what you think you're doing. For an entrepreneur always to be looking for new leads is the default mode so losing a deal - while unfortunate - isn't an end-of-the-line scenario in most cases.

<comment> saiya-jin had the same thinking when consulting few years ago... but every scenario is different, everybody has different expectations and all this change as we age. You are right there is no job security in perm job, but there are some true benefits.

I have 25 fully paid MDs per year, another 9 public holiday ones, 2 weeks of fully paid sick days. I can have a month with few MDs of work done and still get full salary. While consulting, when thinking about vacation, by far the biggest costs were not of actual vacation, but time lost not consulting. Which made the price explode 4-5x and effectively prevented me to have much better life.

I might get back later, for a while, but realistically, it ain't worth it. This might be different in other locations, where consulting vs perm job difference is much bigger, but here, taken all into account is less than 10%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What I find interesting is the call to action at the end:

"Our power has always been in our web community – we are exceptionally good at creating movements and solving things, as a community. It's time to dig deep and put as much time and effort into helping our community as we once did fixing browser quirks all those years ago."

I think this is a common wishful thinking comment from people who don't understand how the world works. How is the 'community' of web designers going to do anything about companies wanting in-house staff or squarespace making week-long wordpress projects obsolete?

Bottom line is: most people don't need a website. Squarespace covers a great deal of what very small websites need and frankly - a facebook page is good enough for most things.

Why have a website at all?

I don't know if selling t-shirts is a solved problem in web dev because I'm not in the loop but that seems to me - the last frontier, once you can sell t-shirts and other variety of items without needing much technical know-how, the game is over.

I am glad it's over - who needs a billion bloated wordpress sites? I want everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news posted to a single platform (I use an RSS reader which makes dozens of websites look exactly the same).

We don't need much web design, 100 different types of cars or 100 different shampoos, wake up, it's madness :)

<comment><USER8> Mistaking the order of this causality is a common error. The community of people developed secondarily to an overarching economic process -- money being spent to build websites. Now, Wix and Squarespace and Facebook are "good enough," so that huge middle market market doesn't exist anymore.

They imagine that it was the other way around, that the economic process is secondary to the community, that the community _created_ the economic process of web development, and can now control the economics of that.

This is backwards. The web dev community only ever existed because there was a large and distributed economic need for lots of custom websites. Now that there is no economic motivation -- no outside money flowing into that community -- the community cannot sustain itself, except in greatly reduced form among a few hobbyists and high-end specialists.

You might compare it to the community of horse saddle manufacturers. It was a huge industry 150 years ago. Today, only a few hobbyist and specialist shops still make saddles, because there is not much economic need for them now as compared to the previous period. It wouldn't have made any difference if all horse saddle manufacturers organized their community in 1910 or so -- most of them would still have gone out of business anyway, because cars took over the economic niche that drove their industry. They were disrupted, in startup- speak.

No amount of wishful thinking or movement-building on the part of the community can change the underlying economics. The broad middle market for custom websites simply no longer exists. The best way to help the community of middle market web developers is to help each other retrain on other skillsets.

<comment><USER27> Between VPs trying to predict the unicorn bubble burst, the end of half of Yahoo, and the fall of the website design market, they're starting to convince me that a lot of developers will soon be on the market and the crisis is back. Now, I'm an entrepreneur, is it a good time to hire ;)

<comment><USER28> Sounds like you misspelled vulture. I say that knowing the downvotes are seconds away.

<comment><USER29> He just suggested that now is a good time to give jobs to people who are losing them as a result of market conditions beyond his control. That is a strange definition of 'vulture'.

<comment><USER28> I read the statement differently. The implication I picked up on is demand is slacking off so now's a good time to hire developers for reduced wages. I may have brought some baggage to the table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There has been one really significant general ecosystem change in the "web design" space: much higher quality HTML themes.

I think these have just obliterated the low end of the market as for $50 and a little developer elbow grease you can have a very professional looking site.

These are displacing web design jobs that would otherwise be in the $3k to $15k range and often times are better quality (tons of built in templates for different page types, retina ready, responsive, etc.) and no need for PSD2HTML work.

<comment><USER31> Some of the people who sell a $50 theme have made millions from them. So overall for those willing to take a risk, things are actually better than before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Honestly, I'm pretty okay with this.

The city where I live (which I imagine is indicative of other cities as well) the local population of freelancers and small studios forms a pyramid.

The top half of the pyramid is made up of really phenomenal freelancers and small teams. Individually, they have pretty cool industry experience and have learned a lot from their careers, to the point where they have the negotiating power to operate as a well-payed contractor. As for the small studios, if they really wanted to they could use their in-house skills to create really amazing products and make money that way, but the personalities of the people who work there are more aligned with work where they can work on a multitude of exciting things at any different time.

The bottom half of the pyramid has some people who are in a transitional state, who will eventually move to the top half, but it's mostly made of a lot of mediocre generalists. They saw that a lot of businesses just wanted a damn website, they figured out they could make that damn website, they figured out they could potentially make a lot of money this way, so they learned the basics of the LAMP stack, learned how to use Wordpress, and threw themselves into a crowded ring.

To be fair, I've met a few of the bottom-halfers, and they seem like alright guys, but talking shop with them is pretty awful. They're not really life-long learners, or they have this unbalanced focus towards business and marketing with the idea that they can communicate the value of what they can do better, but not really looking into actually delivering more value through better skills.

To sum it up, the top-halfers move with the changing market, the bottom- halfers just sort of sit there and wonder why more small businesses don't want custom Wordpress sites.

I realize this can seem callous and harsh, but at the same time I've also seen the bottom half of the pyramid screw over small businesses on the regular. The don't explicitly brag about it, but they kinda do on an implicit level, and it's sad for the small business and it's sad that the person bragging has this weird sense of value exchange.

Besides that, it's not like life ends of these freelancers either. So long as they're humble about the fact that they need to learn new skills, they can probably use their experience to get a pretty great job. It probably won't pay as much, but it's still going to pay pretty well. If they can't accept this, then I don't know if I can sympathize.

<comment><USER33> Sometimes I wonder if anyone has ever posted to HN not believing they are in the top 50%, 10%, or 1%. It's like how everyone's kid is above average. The topic of how everyone else sucks seems to be evergreen.

Everyone's just trying to get by. If someone gets less work, that isn't reason to think that they have poor skills, or are screwing over small businesses.

<comment><USER32> That's why I made sure to include that there are people in the bottom half of that pyramid who I think will get to the top half, because eventually I believe they'll move either to the top half of the pyramid, or outside of the pyramid altogether.

But I stand firm in my belief that a lot of the people who are firmly planted there have poor skills or they're delivering far less value than what could be gotten through, say, Squarespace.

<comment><USER34> I agree with this, I've seen a lot of "custom" sites done for small businesses which, in the end, looked worse than setting up a Squarespace site with a some pretty photos.

The custom sites took tons of time, lots of client back and forth, and in the end probably weren't as well optimized as a Squarespace site. A great designer can definitely do some amazing things, but a lot of people in the lower half should just focus on sending out some Squarespace promo codes, at least they can get some free hosting that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I came to this realization a few months ago that I had been riding for several years on the wave of retrofitting and then migrating the desktop-focused web to mobile devices.

Once every business with deep pockets in my circle had sufficiently mobile- optimized their website, my services were becoming less and less urgent.

I've been freelancing / consulting for 15 years, so having to re-skill or market myself differently is a periodic necessity. But generally I'm accustomed to making moves into other web-related areas.

There's a new reality evolving that I'm not accustomed to dealing with. No growth in investment, no new bleeding-edge tech or hip design trend to sell to clients. The people who need web talent every day already have them in-house by now. The ones who don't, hook together SAAS products to get what they need done.

I've become very skilled at hooking together SAAS products for online marketing use cases, but the more I do it the more I realize I'm slowing chipping away my clients' need for hiring designers / developers.

The market is becoming increasingly saturated with competing talent, a lot of whom were sold General Assembly type training as an easy solution to low employment prospects, on top of experienced folks who are scratching their heads over the stagnation like I am.

Really thinking it might even be time to jump ship into another business altogether. I feel bad for all the folks who are entering the market right now, must be so disappointing

</comment><comment><USER36> Web design work hasn't really dried up, they just call themselves UI/UX designers now. And they work on designing and prototyping applications instead of building brochureware sites for small businesses. The skills required are a bit different because technology has changed.

Web designers are like photographers. Camera technology advanced so that anyone can now be a mediocre photographer, just like anyone can now be a mediocre web designer. Until recently the technology (for both photographers and web designers) was difficult enough to use, that just knowing how to use it was a valuable skill.

But, software is still eating the world, and it won't be done doing that for long while. All that software still needs people who are experts in human machine interaction--UI/UX designers.

On another note, I think that companies having easier access to VC money may have encouraged some of them to hire full time designers where they used to use short term contractors.

</comment><comment><USER37> A major trend in the past few years has been an increasing focus on conversion optimization. Companies no longer care quite so much about their website being beautiful; they care about whether it's helping their business.

Indeed that's what they have always wanted - but 5 years ago they didn't realize they could measure that directly, and aesthetics seemed like the best proxy.

I, for one, blame patio11.

<comment><USER38> I'm not sure people don't care about aesthetics. Every website I've seen is one massive image with infinite scroll. I don't think that yields the best conversion optimization but maybe that's just me

<comment><USER39>
      > very website I've seen is one massive image with
      > infinite scroll. I don't think that yields the
      > best conversion optimization

I've wondered that a lot, looking at some company's website, barely understanding what the product is, and asking myself, "Have they ever made a single sale or generated a single lead based on this website? What exactly is the purpose of this website?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> One web design agency I used to work for in the U.S. has exploded in growth. When I first started, they were a few dozen people. Now they have hundreds of employees and offices around the world.

Many of these employees left to start their own web design agency and all have again, grown in size and worked on very notable design projects.

While sites like Squarespace has made it easier for small and independent businesses to develop sites, medium to large businesses still don't mind going to agencies or firms. Agencies have the capacity to do other things like do professional photo shoots, influence branding, and give strategic consultation that DIY simply doesn't allow.

I do think there is an evolution to the web design position. Now, on top of understanding aesthetics, designers need to know how to prototype, code (basics), interpret and apply human research.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think there's actually more web sites being built than ever, and that the problem is that company's expect more for less.

The WordPress pollution has brought about a revolution in pricing within our field. Companies actually expect full e-commerce for under $1k because they've been spoiled with these easy-peasy systems that can be slapped together in no time at all.

How do I market a team of high end devs, engineers and security consultans to develop a company web presence which Joe Nobody is offering them for $599? Here lies the elephant. Not the folks turning quick bucks at our expense, but the mere fact that it's darned near impossible to convince clients to spend wisely.

There are still companies who know better, but in a world where everyone wants to be a 'startup', it's becoming less and less.

</comment><comment><USER42> As an independent consultant/software developer, I'm deeply sympathetic to the author and freelance web communities issues. However it seems like the issue here is not that web design work is drying up, it's that web design work _for freelancers_ is drying up. If all of the companies that used to contract out to freelancers now want permanent employees, then that's probably where you're going to need to go.

</comment><comment><USER43> In the early days of the web, web designer used to earn as much as £800 per day (~$1200 at the time) for handcrafting HTML in vi or Notepad, doing a bit of image manipulation in Paint Shop Pro.

Then Hotmetal Pro came along and we all had up learn the Dark Art of CGI scripting to maintain the daily rates. Then Cold Fusion took over, et cetera, et cetera.

Skills are constantly rendered redundant by technology and/or commoditised because they get taught in mainstream education.

You have to keep upgrading your skills.

<comment><USER44> I'm pretty sure there are people with driving licenses who weren't born the last time I heard HoTMetaL mentioned.

<comment><USER43> I'm pretty sure there are people with _children_ who weren't born the last time I heard HoTmEtAl mentioned...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Really what he's saying isn't that web design work is drying up, it's that _freelance_ or _external contractor_ web design work is drying up because more work is being done in house. That doesn't sound like its bad in any way.

> put as much time and effort into helping our community

What is this community? The community of web designers? Aren't the in-house web designers at Toyota or Google still part of this same community?

</comment><comment><USER46> This is a byproduct of the massive increase in tooling that we've seen over the past few years. Granted tooling has always advanced incredibly quickly but I do feel that somewhere in the 2014-2016 time period we hit an inflection point.

<comment><USER47> This is definitely a factor. Its never been easier to do web design with many excellent tools. Similar thing has happened in game development (i.e. unity, et.al) - technology is bringing the expertise required lower.

<comment><USER48> Similarly high-skilled and specialized people will always be in demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> There's a lot more competition externally too, which doesn't help any. Everyone with a computer and "an eye for it" has entered the market and underbids the experienced players. Similar things are happening in Photography where everyone buys a nice DSLR and then thinks they can do weddings.

When the new freelancers realize they aren't cut out for it, they just take a job at a bigco again (filling the same role of course), and new inexperienced freelancers come up the ranks to replace them.

This seems to be the new world we live in - the "gig economy" means there are a lot of gigs but a lot more competition from less-experienced players.

<comment><USER50> Surprisingly on my little Caribbean island a lot more people are picking up DSLR's and shooting wedding very well. My jaw dropped to see some of their work...then again they seem to really take this thing a lot more seriously than I did. I have an acquaintance that flies into the US to do work for clients there.

<comment><USER51> It's another example of the hollowed out middle that was mentioned upthread. It's much easier than it used to be for someone with a modicum of talent and interest to take an SLR and produce competent photos of weddings and events-- and to set themselves up online to run a small weekend side business.

Some will be better than others certainly. And we can probably stipulate that most won't be as good as someone who does this as a full-time profession. But, guess what. They're in a position to earn some extra spending money on weekends while undercutting anyone who has to make a living at it. And many will produce results that are quite competent. Competence at a relatively low price is good value for a lot of young couples without much money. (I shot a couple weddings myself when I was in school--back in the film days.)

Then on the other end you've got photographers with distinctive styles who deliver something special. They'll often be in great demand and command large premiums.

<comment><USER52> Thing is, a lot of professional photographers were truly lacking either talent or clue.

They'd have a studio - a room with lights and a handful of backgrounds - in a town or village somewhere, and they'd get most of the portrait, wedding, and yearbook work for an area. Sometimes they'd get work from a local paper.

But their output was average at best. They got work because they spent money on equipment, and they had enough basic competence to use it without making really obvious mistakes. But that was literally all they offered.

>And many will produce results that are quite competent.

Which is the core of the issue: it turns out that the basic creative skill level of much of the population is much higher than anyone realised.

There's still a huge gap between dabblers and geniuses. But if you make professional equipment cheap and easy to use, you'll find that a lot of people can produce results that used to be considered professional.

This is true of photography, music, video, and digital art - and now it's becoming true of programming.

In a way this is a good thing. But it means real experts with truly outstanding skills are going to find it harder to find a niche that pays well - just as many outstanding musicians, photographers, and video makers are struggling because the market for innovative and slightly difficult work is smaller than it used to be.

Web design + programming are going the same way.

Industrial web dev - giant systems that work at scale and which deal with huge data sets - is still valuable for now.

But small-scale freelance web dev is losing to automation and simplified design tools.

It's not the same as the photography/creative market, because the big industrial conglomerates still want talent, and so do start-ups that hope to become big industrial conglomerates.

But that basic level of mom 'n pop boutique "agency" design is going to die off completely within 5-10 years.

<comment><USER51> It's probably also true that the "geniuses" historically did a lot of pretty constrained rote work in photography to pay the bills. To the degree that work goes away, it becomes harder to fund the truly creative work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I've done a bit of freelance web design and development over the past few years, but recently I've found myself referring more and more people to services like Squarespace and Shopify. As potential clients are given more options – especially cheaper ones – of course the industry is going to become more competitive.

<comment><USER7> They're good options too. I use Squarespace for one of my businesses because it needs to be updated by non-web-savvy people and it was the easiest route for that particular business.

<comment><USER51> Squarespace seems to have really carved out a nice little niche for themselves. They've also really gone all in on podcast advertising. I'd be curious if/why there is some particular audience for podcasts that particularly aligns with Squarespace's product.

<comment><USER54> I hear their ads constantly on This American Life, Radiolab, Serial....or simply high quality general interest podcasts covering a wide range of subjects. I'm just guessing here, but I imagine the typical audience might be people that are educated, interested, curious, with good taste, somewhat close to the pulse of time, without necessarily falling into hipster territory, ...and not afraid of trying to build a website on their own (I'm guessing that's how they see using Squarespace), whether for their small business or their personal blog for niche interests.

Sure, a very general and possibly very wrong assumption on my part, but I think it makes sense to target those listeners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Not really a shock, evolve or die. I did a great deal of web design in my earlier years, but you have to keep up. I learned how to code, I learned databases, I learned system administration, learned the latest frameworks, I made sure I kept up my skill set.

I ended up in UI/UX, but since it's such a young field the variance in quality is completely crazy. You will get people that are 100% designers that have no concept of what is required to implement their ideas, on the other hand you get middling coders that know nothing about design. It's pretty interesting to see.

It was pretty clear where it was going 5-6 years ago. It's too easy to make a simple restaurant website, you have to bring far more to the table these days.

</comment><comment><USER56> Jobs get folded into other jobs all the time in the tech sector. Does anyone remember webmasters? They're the ones who would configure the web servers and host the files for you, set you up with FTP credentials etc... Now devops people fill the bill and so do most web developers I know but it's just a subset of what they do.

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm late to the conversation here, but I think the real elephant in the room is the short shelf life of the average independent contractor/freelancer/consultant. Unfortunately, and all too often on this site, the meme of the happy-go-lucky, working-on-a-beach independent contractor is paraded out and extolled as some wondrous opportunity that will net your average "web developer" enough riches and leisure time to live the dream lifestyle. In reality, this couldn't be further from the truth. Being an independent contractor means you are a business, full stop. You are the CEO, the marketer, the HR department and the worker. Like any other business, a few will make it, but most will fizzle out, go bankrupt or be replaced by ruthless competitors. Unless you are able to find and acquire those in-demand, niche skill sets or product offerings (of which "web design" and/or "web development" are no longer in this set), your business will suffer a significantly short shelf life, just as any other business.

</comment><comment><USER58> I think that like in most industries, the low-end has become commoditised.

Want to sell stuff online? It used to cost thousands of dollars to get an online store up and running.

Now you can sign up to Shopify and start selling your stuff the same day using a theme that, to be honest, is more than good enough for what it costs.

The same goes for brochure sites, a space now filled by Squarespace and Wix and so on. Cheap or free options have always been around, but now you can get a theme that is more than good enough.

But that's great for web designers, right? Anyone wanting to only pay $25/month for that kind of product is going to be a terrible client for anyone trying to make a proper living in the space.

Work for web designers isn't drying up overall, it's just that the low-end – the work we didn't want to really do anyway – has become commoditised.

The higher-end work – the more challenging problems to solve, the ones that need proper design thinking to solve – is still around, and it's become much more specialised.

<comment><USER13> >Work for web designers isn't drying up overall, it's just that the low-end – [...] – has become commoditised.

>The higher-end work – [...] – is still around, and it's become much more specialised

The specialisation means that work for "web designers" has declined IMO.

I used to do sites for local charities and SMEs. They tend now to use Wix or WordPress with a template, something along those lines.

Those who can afford something more bespoke have much greater expectations and web design as a field has grown. Just keeping up with the pace of change of browser tech is hard now, never mind everything else that goes in to a "simple" webpage - one needs a team to do it properly IMO. So the generalists, as I once was, are really not in demand anymore.

The web designer has been killed off by commoditisation and specialisation and there increased expectation and possibilities that are now part of the everyday web.

<comment><USER58> > The specialisation means that work for "web designers" has declined IMO.

Yep, exactly. There isn't really such thing as a "web designer" anymore (or rather, there isn't going to be). The job has been split into several different specialised roles.

It's no longer enough to just be able to design and build a good website, because that level of service has become commoditised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I don't think this is true at all. There's a million new jobs online every day.

There are a few problems I've realized about the industry:

1) Far too many clients are going with talent that will leave them in a bad place in the project. Usually this is to save a few thousand dollars now: a very modest $5,000 proposal gets shot down for "someone that can do it for a few hundred dollars."

2) Good clients, really good clients, are hard to find. This is because they're probably working with good developers. All the amazing clients I've found have been because their current dev is not able to handle the work for whatever reason and I got lucky to pick them up.

The business is there, but it's repeat business. Stop looking for one-off work. Start building real relationships with your clients.

</comment><comment><USER60> The issue here boils down to process. Turn-key solutions like Wix have sprung up to cater the low hanging fruit. For everything else, the diversification of our digital lives across web and mobile devices have forced new interactive constraints on the traditional graphic design process, meaning its print media process foundations are no longer workable. Rather, the modern design process has to be much more agile and interactive than a flat design file can allow. The result is that we now have programmers trying to design, and designers trying to program.

But it's a short term problem, because design software with interactive and adaptive tools are being constructed to help designers accommodate the new constraints and allow them back into the process.

</comment><comment><USER61> > _On the stage, a very adept and confident speaker jokingly mentioned a web- > related joke that feels decades old (which she was sarcastically referring > to as being decades old) and the whole room fell about laughing; it was the > first time they had heard this reference._

It's really killing me to not know what the joke being referenced is. Never before have I so desperately wanted an author to "Show, don't tell."

> _We used to have to sell the benefits of being online to our clients._

I remember when it was like this. In 1999 I was trying to drum up business for a web-development startup, going business-to-business offering cheap packages to get online. I got laughed out of a lot of shops and offices before I finally couldn't take the rejection anymore.

> _It didn't seem to matter who I spoke to last year, similar stories of > hiring internally rather than using external agencies /freelancers, cropped > up – and thus, a significant new breed of web designer was born. Companies > who would have once used small studios or freelancers to complete their > projects, no longer had a need to use them and work started to dry up for > people who had relied on the abundant freelance lifestyle that was once > afforded to them._

I think the author is making a mistake in focusing on this one reason for freelance web development work drying up. Large companies who need dedicated constantly-updated websites moved in-house, but the reality is that it doesn't take as much skill to setup a robust website anymore. My sister is a graphics designer with zero technical skills, she makes her freelance money with one- click wordpress installs and lets the customers manage their own sites.

Then there's the next generation of kids who are simply naturals at this stuff. They don't know how to code, but there are so many WYSIWYG applications out there to build what they want, they don't need to do any coding. Even my 75-year-old mother setup and administers a wordpress blog for her students.

Our skills made us special as innovators 10-20 years ago, but many of us are no longer cutting edge. Maybe some of these freelancers should look at becoming the in-house code-monkey for one of these larger companies if they are really hard-up for work.

<comment><USER7> Sorry to have frustrated you. The joke was [http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/](http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/)

<comment><USER62> I really wish that looked different in Chrome vs Firefox vs Safari.

<comment><USER63> Agreed. It misses out on the most obvious opportunity by not doing this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This is a bit meta, or not, as this is about web design.

I love the audio feature, where she reads her article. And the presentation of it - i.e. how long it takes to listen to.

Nice style. Very Lucy Kellaway, infact.

<comment><USER65> I like it a lot. As a non native speaker I liked to ear how to pronounce the words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> All things have cycles. While you could argue Wix, Weekly and Squarespace are taking market share - there has always been that low end. Anyone remember Geocities?

Envato is also taking a certain market though they are often the tire kickers who think they can do it themselves. You see a few of those who get so far but can't finish it. The instant their content doesn't match the length of the default content it starts to look bad or the template displays 4 key services, they have 5. What I find infuriating is the freelancers (or displaced marketing people) who just sell templates and even their own site is just an off-the-shelf template. The SEO space is similarly flooded with marketing people who can run SEMRush to get a report and spam your client base daily with long tail keyword suggestions they could get them ranking number one for.

There is a new type of customer who want something custom and vehemently don't what a template as well.

The big thing is mobile compatibility is still hard and hosting/security is hard. New browsers break stuff and many corporate clients still need it to look passable on XP. Customer Service is key and building a loyal customer base who you look after, will weather you through any slight change in the market.

<comment><USER67> Good points all around. As a small web shop, and I'm currently overflowingly busy, as I have been for the last few years. It's probably partially luck, but I'd like to think that there a certain value that I, as a web person, brings to the table that makes it worthwhile for my clients.

And let's not forget that while everyone may not want a custom design for their sites, there are a lot of people out there that don't want to maintain their own sites, and would rather pay someone else to do so. When that happens, what's the difference between building something custom vs. WordPress and a nice theme vs. SquareSpace and their offerings? The value isn't the deliverable as much as it's the comfort in knowing your web stuff is taken care of and you don't have to deal with it.

I suppose at that point you're not talking about "web design" per se, but a "small web business." But I'm OK with that. Additionally, there is still room with those options to provide value more than just set-up and maintain. Writing good content and creating good IA is still a challenge for all of those products. To me, all of these things are part of being a small web shop, and from what I can see are things that won't be going away or automated any time soon.

Although the once automated, we'll essentially have robots (creating content) fighting robots (search engine spiders), which I think is something we can all agree on as being fun to watch with a drink in hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A) the bar is being raised B) the bar is being raised particularly high where you are looking for work

PHP, Jquery, etc. won't get you as far as it used to in the Bay Area. But as an exercise look for job openings in the mid-west or north-west, and they're looking for... PHP, Jquery, (ASP.net), etc.

Markets move.. including the market for tech skills. You either move with the market or move markets. You shouldn't ever expect it to last forever.

</comment><comment><USER68> Having spent several years freelancing and now on my second stint as an employee, I have to say: giving up freelancing and becoming an employee is not the end of the world.

Sure you don't work with as wide of a variety of people and projects, but it _is_ still possible to work from home and have a fair amount of autonomy. Plus you can get paid vacation, sane hours, and reliable pay. It's also generally less stressful.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's all about positioning. The term "web designer" and "web developer" feels dated. If you have those skills you might consider rebranding yourself as a UI/UX Designer, a Product Designer or a Visual Designer. If you're good at JavaScript you could rebrand as a JavaScript Engineer, UI Engineer, or Frontend Developer.

I think what it boils down to is that companies just want 1-5 in house designers to do the work that they typically outsourced in the past. If your product is particularly complex that number will grow (with scale as well of course).

It's also worth noting that designers in the tech industry have, for better or worse, absorbed much of the tasks typically assigned to a frontend or web developer. Regardless of the prefix, if you're a designer you'll need solid HTMl/CSS/JS skills.

Lastly. If you're looking for the freedom of freelance with the security of a full-time job I can't recommend remote work enough.

</comment><comment><USER69> This reminds me. I've been wanting to ask (In fact I'm about to post a "Ask HN" about this in case anyone wants to have a discussion about it).

Similar to "Who is hiring", I am wondering if a monthly "Who is networking" would be a good idea. Or does something like this already happen here?

I'm thinking in terms of skilled people who are looking for other skilled people (with a different / complementary skillset) to collaborate on a side project. I'm doing just fine for myself as far as my career is concerned, but at this point I'm convinced startup life is in my blood so I am going to continue looking for that fix even if it's only to dedicate a few hours a week.

With all the news about VCs tightening their budgets, I imagine folks may want to start considering spreading their tentacles into many different side projects to see if anyone out there would be a solid partner.

</comment><comment><USER70> Weebly, Wix, Yola, etc... People can make their own websites now - They don't need web developers. Some bigger firms with more advanced requirements might still need web developers but 90% of websites don't require that much skill anymore.

I think the entire software development profession is under threat. I think in the not-so-distant future, there will be drag-and-drop UI tools for businesses to build their own application frontends and they will hook them up into various plug-and-play backend services for a monthly fee (without hosting their own servers).

The only software developers/engineers remaining will be the ones working for backend service (e.g. BaaS) providers - The others will be designers.

<comment><USER71> And why wouldn't there be competition in the drag-and-drop UI tool space?

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> who moved my cheese?

There is lots of opportunities now around Embedded Systems for web engineers due to the IoT (say what?). More precisely the _" Web of Things"_ [1] (see also WoT W3 WG). I always considered the web my thing and only recently jumped (after long reluctance) onto this. There is a real get-go attitude in this domain and you can tell companies are willing to spend money on it which makes the same jobs less of an uphill struggle.

Most web developers I know wouldn't touch anything embedded with a stick but this is really an interesting topic to get into. To explain why this is a good match consider that a lot of the fundamental skills stay same because it will essentially be built on the same concept of linkable data so you can take along all you know (e.g. REST, TCP/IP, JavaScript, NodeJS). Also look into these IoT counterparts:

       * JSON => JSON-LD [2]
       * HTTP => CoAP [3]

If you like security there are massive challenges due to the real-life damage an exploit can cause (hacked insulin pumps, or vehicles etc.) but from skills pov again pretty much the same skills you can just carry across and apply them there.

[1] [http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/05/30/the-web-of- th...](http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/05/30/the-web-of-things-needs- your-support/) [2] [http://json-ld.org/](http://json-ld.org/) [3] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252)

</comment><comment><USER73> This is more or less the direct rise of "digitisation".

Companies now realise that their online/mobile experience is no longer a "me too", but good customer experience is a powerful differentiator in market.

Freelance will go away. High value consulting will not. If you're not helping the average Digital Director in solving their challenges (be they scaling, conversion rates, cross device compatibility, load times, security, cost of maintenance, uptime).

</comment><comment><USER74> There is a lot of work. You are just looking for the wrong type.

<comment><USER7> There is, but it appears to be harder than ever for newbies to get hold of it.

<comment><USER75> Isn't that because that entire area of work (Wordpress blogs/basic websites/basic webfronts/etc) has been supplanted by Squarespace and all? Web documentation and tools have also gotten _vastly_ better in the past few years, thereby allowing more people to get into the web industry, which then leads to a glut of supply while demand remains the same. I can hammer out a semi-functional webapp in a weekend now with backend in Meteor with a UI in React, whereas if I wanted to do this ~5 years ago I probably would've been stuck writing my own UI on top of Rails. Your article frames it as a bad thing, and I'm not sure it is a bad thing, it just means that demand has shifted to higher, more specialized web developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I was assuming this was about how the easier design aspects are becoming more standardized and available as code.

I think this is really what the issue is and she completely missed it.

</comment><comment><USER77> This is good news to those of us that detest the way web design agencies work. These web design agencies only have themselves to blame. Far too often web design agencies see the finish line as the site going live. Actually, that is just the start.

These web design agencies also under-bid and under-deliver, leaving the client at a loss for support. Even if they wanted support the web design agency are already on their next under-bid job that has to be churned out with no consideration of building a maintainable site.

The other failure is the way these web design agencies work. Up until relatively recently all I was seeing was some PDF printouts drawn by some kid that learned how to do CMYK stuff vaguely in Photoshop at some second-rate educational facility. To hell with mobile, accessibility and all those things. Why use content when you can obliterate your clients copy with 'lorem boring ipsum' everywhere and totally ignore having engaging content that actually fits the boxes. Why have a homepage that can be easily updated by the client to suit their business needs to be always fresh when you can bake in something that looks pretty but doesn't have anything to do with the underlying information architecture of the client's copy?

Typically these web design agencies also have micro managers on full time staff to then hire and fire developers to deliver the deliverables. These developers are always treated like mushrooms - kept in the dark - and what they deliver has to be a kludge. For instance, the kid armed with Photoshop that has put together the 'lorem ipsum' PDFs that the client has signed off on knows nothing of real design (how it works) so page headings float about all over the place from page to page, often with bespoke kerning that kind of insults the reader and the font designer. Therefore, frontend developer has no choice but to have about 432 lines of CSS just for H1 tags once the CSS has been compiled. There could be just the one H1 style for the whole site but the design process makes that totally impossible.

These web design agencies with their micro-managers also play a game of Chinese Whispers. You know the deal - conference calls which take as long to get started as the actual meeting lasts, with everyone on the call except the guys doing the work. This then gets briefed down to the actual web developers with some drip feed that means the guys doing the actual work don't get to build something that has a 'systems approach' to it, instead everything is a kludge.

For people that know nothing of 'git' I hope that there is absolutely no work for them, they should never have been wasting clients time in the first place, forever selling them snake oil and half baked 'solutions'. For those of us that do use ye-olde-version-control the future is as bright and busy now as it ever has been. My inbox is always full with people begging me to work for them.

Too many companies have evolved from a normal business to a web business where all kinds of departments use the web for their actual needs. The website is core to their business and not some 'must have' add on that some daft agency has put together for them. Good on them for bringing talent on from in-house, these folk understand the business, the customers and the internal stake holders needs. This is what we do want to see, not this Chinese Whispers games with so-called web agencies that have useless micro-managers and totally undervalue genuine talent.

I may sound a bit over-generalising but I have worked on both sides of the table, in-house and with these useless 'award winning' agencies. As well as these web design agencies I also hope these SEO companies die a quick death. Hours can be wasted with these folk agonising over links that nobody cares about, with them adding on turgid tracking stats javascript rubbish that doesn't deliver.

<comment><USER78> Yeah, that's harsh, but i've worked on both sides as well, and can't say you're wrong. Maybe there are some top-quality agencies building maintainable sites, but I'm yet to see any.

Unless it's a throwaway, postcard-type site, design agencies seem a holdover from print, pre-internet, where that model worked. But lower end they're not needed, and once there are real things to do, I don't see how they can compete with internal teams that know the business and can build incrementally refined, VC controlled applications.

I work for a big B2B company with a multitude of subcompanies, and maybe it's just bad experiences, but every agency-designed site we have is a badly- architectured piece of crap. Some look shiny, but they're all clearly rushed out, massively overpriced, and integrations with product databases/vendor systems/factory systems are close-to-impossible. And the latter part is key; building UI over those is the key part of my job, I'm designing interfaces to allow people to buy things easily, and agencies don't seem to be geared toward interfaces, rather they're set up to make pretty pictures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> There just isn't a market for mediocre websites as a craft anymore - <USER2> need social media profiles plus a squarespace, and then they're done.

</comment><comment><USER80> So basically the web design work that anyone could do with little to no training now has to be done by people with degrees and a deep understanding for how the web operates and that can adapt to shifting web design paradigms without significant retooling of skills.

</comment><comment><USER81> My strong point is that I am a UI/UX Designer who uses code to design; design and code .. get feedback.. reiterate once or twice and boom your site is done.

One thing I lack is strong JS skills and I'm sure if I don't ramp them up it's going to hurt me in the next few years.

</comment><comment><USER82> How much has social media and mobile affected things. I'd imagine having a good social media presence and an iphone app would be seen as more important then the website for a lot of companies nowadays. Can you transfer web design skills to app design?

</comment><comment><USER83> Web design goes in-house when there's a need for more than just "web design". It's now a total design package, from web to social to print.

Agencies are still fighting for that work. There's an ebb & flow in every industry.

</comment><comment><USER84> I get that it's frustrating for freelancers who used to be able to make a nice living doing web work, but this just reads as someone complaining that their skills are no longer in such short supply.

</comment><comment><USER85> I wonder what's the initial joke.

</comment><comment><USER86> It's reporting a 500 server error - does anyone have a mirror/archive?

<comment><USER87> The server has dried up, too

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> The audio narration of the blog is a brilliant idea.

</comment><comment><USER89> To only know webdesign is a very limited focus.

</comment><comment><USER90> That's great.

</comment><comment><USER91> bootstrap?

<comment><USER92> I guess this got downvoted due to brevity, but I would guess this is contributing, along with Wordpress themes. Not on the level of e.g. Squarespace, but definitely a factor. For a while every site I looked at having to do with bitcoin looked to be a Bootstrap site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> The times are a changing o..O

</comment><comment><USER94> Intuitively I feel like this is true and it kind of makes sense. The same thing is (or will soon be) happening to mobile app developers.

One of the reasons is that technology is getting better and more standard compliant - that means browsers, operating systems, servers/CMSes, etc.

Compare laying out your content using flexbox with old-school CSS black magic which also worked on IE 6. It's beyond comparison!

Then there is the "new blood" coming into the industry every year. Millions of young developers, with access to superior training materials/tutorials and libraries. These new people "dilute" the market and make it easier for businesses to hire full time web devs than look for freelancers.

The third reason - and I don't like to say it because some people take this very emotionally, but it's the truth - is open source.

Take jQuery and Bootstrap. Back in the day, people had to re-implement parts of these libraries inside their projects by hand with various degrees of success. This was both necessary and time consuming - time which could be billed to your client. This represented between 30% - 80% of the amount of work on a website. Now it is no longer necessary.

I could continue with these examples and move on to the "backend" and so on, but you get the point.

I think the trend will continue to accelerate and will envelop app developers, "back end" developers and most "generalist" developers.

We have to face it - software is getting cheaper and a lot less "magical" than it used to be. To top it off, I could add another two letters to the cake - AI, which will eat the lunch of maybe half of the existing devs in the next decade or so.</comment>


Ask HN: How good are the "MasterClass" online classes? - <AUTHOR> To be clear, I'm referring to https://www.masterclass.com/.
I'm not really a professional in any of the fields they offer classes in, and am looking to take it out of curiosity, to get a sense of the different industries (like space exploration, investigative journalism etc). For those who have taken classes, how has your experience been? Is it worth the money and time? Do they come off more as a documentary (I felt the trailers do) or are there clear, useful takeaways? <comment><USER2> I pirated the Steve Martin comedy one.

Generally, it was not very structured, just Steve talking about his experiences, telling stories, and generic tips. Not super technical, its almost like they just whipped it up on the spot, kind of expected when you're dealing with busy celebrities who may not have experience actually teaching.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those in the top of their industry for many years still pulling in millions of people every time they create something (music, movies, soundtracks, TV episodes) and have a large video, streaming, Youtube or TV presence, are pretty good along with those that have been doing their thing for 20+ years.

You can normally tell how good it is by how high quality their trailer video is (the best made their own and are actually doing things, besides just looking back at the camera) on the site along with viewing their free Youtube videos and interviews. Even better when their name is almost synonymous with their industry

Most notable on the site are: Armin Van Buuren, Hans Zimmer, Gordon Ramsay, R.L. Stine, Deadmau5, Samuel L. jakson, Gordon Ramsay, Christina Aguilera

</comment><comment><USER4> Though I don't like any of James Patterson's books, I decided to check out his class since he's a top selling, prolific, fiction writer. He had some decent tips for banging outlines combined with unnecessary, though briefly motivating antidotes. I suspect the format of these classes are all similar. I'm of the opinion that if you're in a mental rut, then do anything to get out of it. In that sense, Patterson's class was useful. I am curious if Werner Herzog's class has any structure.

</comment><comment><USER5> They're okay, nothing mindblowing, some are good. I've really enjoyed Judd Apatow's class on screenwriting.

They offer a free trial, you can watch all the courses for a week for free without a limit.

</comment><comment><USER6> FWIW, Reddit has several reviews that answer your question. You may also want to skim through threads there.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can recommend Kevin Spacey's acting class and especially his work on monologue.

</comment><comment><USER8> Depending on your geo you can do a free trial now.

</comment><comment><USER9> Did anyone watch Hans Zimmer's master class?</comment>


Piper Disney Pixar 1080p [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/189901272 <comment><USER2> Spectacular. The quality of the water, sand, and their interplay is a little mind-bending. Storytelling drives technology drives storytelling.

I'm reminded, once again, why Pixar is in a league of its own.

</comment><comment><USER3> For those that didn't see _Finding Dory_ in theatres, this is the short that ran before the movie.

</comment><comment><USER4> gone 404</comment>


The Hitchhiker's Guide to PlantUML - <AUTHOR> https://crashedmind.github.io/PlantUMLHitchhikersGuide/ <comment><USER2> A hidden gem in the about page:

[https://real-world-plantuml.com/](https://real-world-plantuml.com/)

which appears to be harvested from GitHub searches: [https://github.com/yfuruyama/real-world- plantuml/blob/master...](https://github.com/yfuruyama/real-world- plantuml/blob/master/scraping/scraping.js#L46-L50)

</comment><comment><USER3> For those unfamiliar with it, PlantUML enables you to create many types of diagrams (both UML and Visio-like) using code. Quick overview here: [https://crashedmind.github.io/PlantUMLHitchhikersGuide/about...](https://crashedmind.github.io/PlantUMLHitchhikersGuide/about/AboutPlantUML.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I like plantUML, I really do. but I think more people will be attracted by it, if they improve design and colors, so it looks modern out of box without any hacking

<comment><USER5> I was originally a proponent of it, but I find these days i prefer Mermaid. It doesnt hurt that there are more Markdown editors/viewers integrated with Mermaid than PlantUML.

<comment><USER6> Until mermaid comes up with the vast list of diagrams one can create in Plant UML, I don't see it as operating in the same weight class. E.g., wireframes, basic Gantts, AWS diagrams, component diagrams with graphviz (thought I confess I hate this dependency), archimate diagrams if you're really hardcore.

<comment><USER7> for UML it seems mermaid is indeed good enough, I used mermaid but never used it for OOD UML, after a quick read it looks very simple and straightforward for UML comparing to plantuml, especially you can embed mermaid right into markdown as text

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >It has a simple intuitive syntax

The code example reminds me of Latex: [https://crashedmind.github.io/PlantUMLHitchhikersGuide/Netwo...](https://crashedmind.github.io/PlantUMLHitchhikersGuide/NetworkUsersMachines/NetworkUsersMachines.html#id19)

<comment><USER9> It's not so bad. What do you propose instead?

<comment><USER10> I think OP meant that as a compliment, not a criticism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> PlantUML has morphed into a two part tool. Its original purpose was to visualise various forms of UML diagrams.

More recently it has utilised its underlying graphviz to create a more general 'graphviz on steroids' diagramming tool (referred to as the PlantUML standard library).

The original UML diagrams can be styled to look modern, but normally are shown in a default slightly old-fashioned and uninspiring visual style. Such a shame if that's your impression.

As mdaniel posted, just a refresh of the colour scheme can modernise the look of UML diagrams

[https://real-world-plantuml.com/umls/4831648155697152](https://real-world- plantuml.com/umls/4831648155697152)

The second part covered by this hitchhikers guide shows a modern take on visualising component relationships.

Both parts allow visualisation as code, but otherwise have different purposes.

I wish we'd see more UML examples in a modern style.

(I'd also recommend MarkDeep for documentation. Includes these + markdown, math, doxygen integration and more)

</comment><comment><USER12> If curious see also:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21426793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21426793)

</comment><comment><USER13> PlantUML is simply awesome. There is no other langauge that supports so many diagramming features. I use it for more then half decade now on all projects. You can create interface mocks, timelines, mindmaps, gant charts, uml diagrams, graphs, OOP diagrams, whatever really, if it was invented, it is in plantUML for sure, or will be. Also, devs are VERY responsive, if you have a good idea, they will for sure implement it.

The only thing that is going on my nerves sometimes is that you can't preciselly say position of elements and being happy with how concrete, albeit more complex diagram draws, is somewhat trial and error (you change direction, change arrow length here and there, change element order etc) but eventually you will make it likeable.

Other thing is that syntax differs a lot between diagrams and I always need to check out manual, no matter how much I use it, it just doesn't stick for me. Thankfully, this is all very easy to do.

For those on Windows, I created chocolatey package [1] that installs all dependencies along with PDF manual and you can have it on your CI or local server as simply as `cinst plantuml`. There is also vscode and mkdocs plugins that are great so you can just insert plantuml diagram strait into markdown between other documentation (alternative is to prerender images which I also did in the past, and is very fast as plantuml regenerates only changed stuff). If you need mkdocs bundled with all this and other nice stuff, check out mm- docs [2].

I must honestly say that this is one of the best FOSS projects I encountered and that it definitelly needs more recognition and support.

[1]: [https://github.com/majkinetor/au- packages/tree/master/plantu...](https://github.com/majkinetor/au- packages/tree/master/plantuml)

[2]:[https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs- template](https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-docs-template)

</comment><comment><USER14> Can someone explain the difference with graphviz?

<comment><USER15> graphviz makes graphs, and PlantUML makes UML diagrams:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language)

Not being flippant, that's the difference. graphviz/dot is general-purpose and can be configured to produce UML-like diagrams, but that's labor intensive.

PlantUML takes text and produces UML diagrams from it. It's configurable... as long as you want UML. If you want something else, reach for graphviz.

In my own work, I use dot/graphviz for diagramming abstract syntax trees, while I've used PlantUML a couple times to diagram the layout of structs and to map the high-level relationships between modules in large software projects.

org-mode does a very nice job of integrating both of those formats into documents, fyi.

<comment><USER16> Putting the emphasis on UML is a bit misleading actually (even though it is literally in the name of the tool). I use it for basically any kind of ad hoc diagramming. Essentially, an equivalent of Markdown for PowerPoint charts if that makes sense. A few quick lines in text that look mostly like what they come out as in the diagram and you have a very nice representation of a workflow etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sort of tangential. While there are lots of tools to convert code into diagram, I wonder if there are tools to convert diagram into code with defined rules.

Am asking because there are lots of programming illiterate colleagues. By encoding the business rules into drawing rules, one could potentially delegate the business logic writing part to non-coding staff

<comment><USER18> webgme.org, with a fair amount of work

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the pointer! Will check it out

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It took 3 clicks to get to the code. [https://crashedmind.github.io/PlantUMLHitchhikersGuide/Netwo...](https://crashedmind.github.io/PlantUMLHitchhikersGuide/NetworkUsersMachines/NetworkUsersMachines.html)

<comment><USER2> Did you mean _code_ like [https://github.com/Crashedmind/PlantUMLHitchhikersGuide](https://github.com/Crashedmind/PlantUMLHitchhikersGuide) (which appears to be just the generated code from [https://github.com/Crashedmind/PlayingWithPlantUMLSource](https://github.com/Crashedmind/PlayingWithPlantUMLSource) for some reason)

<comment><USER19> No, I meant the UML words instead of UML pictures.</comment></comment></comment>


Dutch train station installs slide as 'transfer accelerator' - <AUTHOR> http://thedailyedge.thejournal.ie/wheee-dutch-train-station-installs-slide-as-transfer-accelerator-188217-Jul2011/

<comment><USER2> Submitted a week ago to a deathly silence. No comments, very few upvotes:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789794>

Will this submission fare any better?</comment>


Show HN: Get into physical computing with Docker and Raspberry Pi (workshop) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexellis/docker-blinkt-workshop <comment><USER2> What's the overhead of Docker when running on RPi? How many such small docker images could be run on RPi3?

(RPi3 has 4 cores (arm8) and 1GB memory, like a 4 year old smartphone.)

<comment><USER3> The overhead I suspect will mostly be IO bound, which is already at a premium on the Pi.

<comment><AUTHOR> Use of Linux kernel features such as namespaces and cgroups (aka containers) should have minimal impact on I/O. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool, if you are interested you can add 100% on-device Voice AI to your Raspberry Pi with our platform [https://snips.ai](https://snips.ai)</comment>


Show HN: Bitfuture – Lock in the Bitcoin exchange rate - <AUTHOR> https://www.bitfuture.com

<comment><USER2> This really should show more before you sign in. How are the contracts structured? What is the order book?

<comment><AUTHOR> The contracts are 60-minute forwards; you are agreeing to buy/sell Bitcoin at the current price (determined by the CoinDesk BPI) but 60 minutes from now. At that time the Bitcoin is transferred from the seller to the buyer, and the strike price (denominated in $) is paid in Bitcoin at the current price. The net effect is that the seller nets a small amount of Bitcoin if the price falls, giving them an amount equivalent to the original exchange rate. If the price rises the buyer nets a small amount. This is essentially a way of locking-in the rate now if for various reasons (waiting on blockchain confirmation for example) you cannot immediately sell off a parcel of Bitcoin. This would be very useful to payment operators, ATM operators, and merchants, for example.

The order book right now is shallow and comprised of our own funds; however we are in the process of onboarding several interested parties so I know that will improve in time.

Showing more before signup is an excellent suggestion; if you are not averse to submitting an email address you can try the paper trading site with 100 fake Bitcoins at paper-trade-bitfuture.com . Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER3> Good luck with the project. I suggest getting these details on the front page above the signup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No details, almost blank homepage asking for sign-up and a suspicious idea to begin with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our previous versions were solicited to friends and family, people who were going to sign up anyway and who knew roughly that we were trying to build a platform for Bitcoin derivatives. I suppose I've been way too focused on getting the double-entry bookkeeping and other accounting layers perfect to think "would I sign up for this landing page". So yes, this is very helpful feedback (even if it does make me feel a bit silly).

Previous feedback had been that our tutorials were extremely long and that our interface was too cluttered; I think it's probable we swung too far in the opposite direction and need to find a healthy medium.

I don't think it's a suspicious idea if you start to think about the problem that volatility causes with Bitcoin adoption. There are many derivatives platforms out there now beginning to grow but most cater to offshore sophisticated investors and speculators. We are trying to build a market around a derivative product that would be eminently useful to Bitcoin businesses and make serious steps towards other derivative products that would smooth out the bumps in the Bitcoin price.

Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER4> Ugh, Bitcoins aren't stock, but I suppose for those caught up in its (so- called) "volatility" and whatever "derivatives" are supposed to be, this could be helpful. Sorry, not for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> The SEC agrees that they are not stock or securities! [1]

Bitcoin payment processing (or ATMs, or foreign remittances) is going to be a big business but many of the current operators are charging only 1-3% as a transaction fee. It's not uncommon for there to be drops of that magnitude during the time it takes the payment to process and the transaction to verify in the blockchain, let alone be sold off as fiat to balance the payment processor's books. This is one way of hedging against that.

It's also effectively a way to short Bitcoin in the short term (not to 0) since it gives you a way to profit from a downswing.

[1] - [http://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts- bulletins/investoral...](http://www.sec.gov/oiea/investor-alerts- bulletins/investoralertsia_bitcoin.html#.U8cRYY1dWkQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really cool idea!</comment>


MIPS Prospects (1992) - <AUTHOR> https://yarchive.net/comp/mips_prospects.html <comment><USER2> A higher clock rate means little. What each instruction does and how fast it does it is the real question; MIPS fails horribly here, as its instructions are both obscenely large and also do very little. RISC in general is misguided and MIPS is a nice monument to how a ''reduced'' instruction set eventually bloats from various reasons, such as increasing the register size.

From what I've seen, SuperH is much nicer, with multiple addressing modes and sixteen bit instructions. RISC-V has nice qualities, but being among the nicer RISC hardly means much.

It's unfortunate there's a dearth of high-level machines nowadays. Where are the hardware implementations of abstract machines that aren't the JVM? Where's the attribute memory that stores things such as array bounds and types? For that matter, where's the real notion of an array instead of offset memory?

That's all in the past now, unfortunately. MIPS is hardly something worth crying over. The only reason I give it any attention is because I own some exotic MIPS hardware.

<comment><USER3> >Where are the hardware implementations of abstract machines that aren't the JVM?

Why would anyone like to have such a CPU? CPUs should be generic, being able to run any language and any runtime, being easy target for compilation, giving the way for various optimizations (pipelines, branch prediction).

RISC is the best here. Abstract high level machines are slow, clumsy, useless in real world applications.

<comment><USER2> >Why would anyone like to have such a CPU?

Well, the common theme is, once processors won't become faster due to hardware improvements, they'll become faster through specialization. That's tangential, however, because it's clearly better to execute, say, Lisp on a machine with hardware support for lists or Forth on a machine with a hardware stack and so on and so forth.

>CPUs should be generic, being able to run any language and any runtime, being easy target for compilation, giving the way for various optimizations (pipelines, branch prediction).

Right, I forgot that if it runs C and UNIX, that automatically qualifies it as ''generic''. Firstly, anything that can emulate a Turing machine, sans memory, can run ''any language and any runtime'', in general. I know Genera had compilers for C and other several other languages; ironically, it's my understanding the C compiler had to use arrays of small integers to represent many things, as C ties itself irreparably to such details, no matter how tangential to the program.

Secondly, if you have an operation you'll be performing a great deal of, such as bounds checking, list manipulation, or abitrary-length arithmetic, it's worthwhile to have it supported in the hardware. Having smart instructions is leagues better than working around dumb instructions with pipelines and whatnot and, apparently, is easier to get right, knowing the recent Intel flaws and all of that.

<comment><USER3> > they'll become faster through specialization

Do you have any evidences of that? Because from my naive understanding, simple processors are easier to optimize: you could have hierarchical memory, pipelines, speculative execution, branch prediction, additional instructions, like vectors and so on.

Doesn't the specialization make such things harder to implement due to higher complexity. Do you have an example of specialized hardware that beats the contemporary highly optimized CPUs like ARM?

>Secondly, if you have an operation you'll be performing a great deal of, such as bounds checking, list manipulation, or abitrary-length arithmetic, it's worthwhile to have it supported in the hardware

Why would you like to have bounds checking or list manipulation in hardware? It's a waste of transistors.

A code like

       x := array[1]

should have one bounds check, yet

       for x in 0..n:
          sum := sum + array[x]

should also have one bounds check, not many. Thus you have to either use an inefficient instruction or implement a hardware iterator bloating your CPU beyond reasonable limits.

And why lists? Why not trees, hashtables, ephemerons?

<comment><USER2> >Do you have any evidences of that?

If you have a circuit that implements an algorithm, it can beat a program that implements the algorithm for a machine that lacks such a circuit. This is clear.

>Because from my naive understanding, simple processors are easier to optimize

I've already reasonably explained why that's not the case, but I want to note that these machines aren't necessarily simpler. The Lisp machine processors are far simpler than anything Intel, ARM, or MIPS have been putting out, and yet did more, just not as fast due to major hardware production advancements.

>Do you have an example of specialized hardware that beats the contemporary highly optimized CPUs like ARM?

I don't have an example in speed, no, but I can tell you that there are simpler processors that avoid entire classes of programming errors these machines are still vulnerable to. If you're only going to judge a machine by speed, I wonder if you own a car and, if so, if it has air bags, seat belts, and other such things.

>Why would you like to have bounds checking or list manipulation in hardware? It's a waste of transistors.

Having a large amount of a processor dedicated to fast memory to store groups of instructions for things such as bounds checking and list manipulation isn't?

        x := array[1]

This could likely be determined at compilation.

        for x in 0..n: sum := sum + array[x]

It's my understanding there were implementations of hardware, or at least descriptions thereof, explaining how such a bound could easily be cached and compared in tandem with other operations, for each new iteration, which would be equivalent to checking when the loop should terminate.

>And why lists? Why not trees, hashtables, ephemerons?

Why not? It's not unreasonable to expect the machine to have canonical and supported representations for commonly used forms of data and operations on such.

<comment><USER3> > If you have a circuit that implements an algorithm, it can beat a program > that implements the algorithm for a machine that lacks such a circuit. This > is clear.

You can't have all the algorithms implemented in hardware. How well would your CPU work for any algorithm unknown in advance? Would it beat a generic RISC CPU in some generic task, a video codec, for example?

>The Lisp machine processors are far simpler than anything Intel, ARM, or MIPS have been putting out

Do you have any benchmarks comparing Lisp processors to ARMs and MIPS in day- to-day tasks like compression algorithms, codecs, 3d rendering?

> It's my understanding there were implementations of hardware, or at least > descriptions thereof, explaining how such a bound could easily be cached and > compared in tandem with other operations

Do you have any resources on that? Would it work for complex convolutions (e.g. arrays of arrays of complex nums convoluted with arbitrary kernels)? In my statically typed programming language I know the matrix sizes in advance and could easily omit the runtime checks. Letting the CPU do so, I'm not sure if it would be as efficient as in compile time.

>Why not? It's not unreasonable to expect the machine to have canonical and supported representations for commonly used forms of data and operations on such.

Lists are not the main data structure anywhere beyond Lisp. And lists are frequently used in Lisp because of how Lisp is inexpressive in terms of data structures.

Even in functional languages like ML or Haskell we use other data structures a lot: tuples, maps, hash tables, arrays, some ad-hoc inductive data structures. All of these are more effective when are not implemented in terms of lists. Architecture supporting at least tuples (arbitrary cons cells) would be bloated beyond any reason already. At least if you want them be as effective as cons cells on lisp machines.

<comment><USER2> >You can't have all the algorithms implemented in hardware. How well would your CPU work for any algorithm unknown in advance?

That depends. There are, clearly, however, some algorithms that are common enough to warrant inclusion in hardware. I feel you're not arguing in good faith if you believe basic arithmetic is warranted, but something extremely common, such as support for arbitrary-length arithmetic or exception systems aren't.

>Do you have any benchmarks comparing Lisp processors to ARMs and MIPS in day- to-day tasks like compression algorithms, codecs, 3d rendering?

No.

>Do you have any resources on that?

I dislike Wikipedia, but here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine)

>Would it work for complex convolutions (e.g. arrays of arrays of complex nums convoluted with arbitrary kernels)?

If the hardware supported it. If not, you'd likely build it out of the hardware support for simpler arrays. Having arrays of arrays is an easy solution, since then each axis could be checked in turn.

>Letting the CPU do so, I'm not sure if it would be as efficient as in compile time.

Again, it's not just about efficiency, but safety. This is an entire class of error prevented in hardware. That's useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did some work on a MIPS platform relatively recently (2014), for a payment processing application. I don't know if the last 5 years has finally killed it, but there still seemed to be enough of it about back then that it wasn't massively exotic.

With the appropriate RAM (which we didn't have) it was even capable of running linux. It had various features that were useful to us in keeping our code compact (we had 256K of flash memory to play with, and 128k of RAM). Mixed- mode 16 and 32 bit instructions was one of the neater ones I remember.

MIPS new owner as of last year appear to have announced an Open and Royalty- free model, which is pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER5> The office postal addresses (and dates) on each of these usenet posts tell a story of their own.</comment>


Minimalist Gmail by Matt Constantine - <AUTHOR> http://mattconstantine.com/mg <comment><USER2> No mention of Helvetimail (<http://www.josefrichter.com/helvetimail/>) yet?

</comment><comment><USER3> This removes many of the features I use regularly. Generally the only reason I use the web interface is to search, to mark items read, and to mark all those junk messages which my desktop email client already classified as junk.

So this removes 66% or more of the features I actually use.

<comment><USER4> But you can select what to hide and what not (link in the upper right corner).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the fact that it is possible to switch off/on individual parts of the website (link in the upper-right corner). It would be cool if someone came up with a general solution applicable to all websites.

<comment><USER5> For a case-by-case basis, check out the Printliminator -- really neat use of JS & CSS to hide pesky elements

<http://css-tricks.com/examples/ThePrintliminator/>

Now if this could be scripted with greasemonkey! Imagine getting rid of a few elements, then hitting 'save' in the plugin -- any subsequent visits to the page would apply the relevant css.

<comment><USER6> <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/737>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just installed it and the largest problem I'm having is with access to search. Hitting '/' no longer focuses the search box and hitting the arrow is cumbersome. Anyone have a workaround aside from enabling the clunky header?

</comment><comment><USER8> Has anyone seen this same work applied to Google Reader? There's quite a large header that takes up a lot of space on my netbook screen. I didn't see anything on the zenhabits.com site after a quick search either.

Maybe I just need to start tinkering...

<comment><USER9> <http://helvetireader.com/>

<comment><USER8> Thanks - I'll check that out when I get home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone know what their chat status is while chat is hidden?

</comment><comment><USER11> Just a heads up, for some reason it didn't work too too well in Firefox 3.0.x; I didn't investigate further. It's fine in the latest 3.5 though.

<comment><USER12> Ditto for 184.108.40.206 --- installed fine without complaint, but didn't seem to have any effect on viewing.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This makes Gmail, what is should have been.simple and Just Email App. +1

</comment><comment><USER13> If this is greasemonkey script, anyone tried it with Chrome?

</comment><comment><USER14> great link/look, just wish it was available in a more general-purpose form (ie not a firefox tool)

<comment><USER15> My minimalist gmail interface is called "pine", which I believe is still considered to be the reference IMAP client implementation. If I were have to make this decision today, I might use something more powerful and extensible like "mutt", but for me pine is just fine.

I started using it again a year back or so when Mail.app became too slow for me to use on some giant mailboxes I have. Deleting 5k messages from an IMAP folder in pine takes maybe 5-10 seconds. Try doing that in Mail.app. I found my email productivity went way up after switching, so I ended up using it exclusively, despite the ribbing my co-workers give me for using prehistoric email tools.

<comment><USER16> Alpine is UW's successor to Pine:

<http://www.washington.edu/alpine/></comment></comment></comment>


SPARK by Example - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tofgarion/spark-by-example <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that this article is about the SPARK programming language--a formally verifiable subset of Ada--and not about Apache Spark.

<comment><USER3> When I clicked through, I expected an article about Laravel Spark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to learn it, here's the main book people are using:

[https://www.amazon.com/Building-High-Integrity- Applications-...](https://www.amazon.com/Building-High-Integrity-Applications- SPARK/dp/1107040736)

</comment><comment><USER5> Did this get highly ranked because everyone thought it was about the other kind of spark? :D

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised that this is only algorithms. I didn't thought that was the main use-case of Ada/SPARK, but rather some kinds of concurrent realtime control applications. I would be interested in seeing examples in that direction.

</comment><comment><USER7> is there a way to store multidimensional arrays in spark? e.g pytorch tensors?

<comment><USER8> The article isn't about Apache Spark. But no there isn't. Spark doesn't have row indices like pandas. It has pretty much the same querying capabilities as a SQL table.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you take subway regularly in a big city? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
In New York City recently they switched to recorded announcements to announce the station that train is entering, transfers etc. I thought that was very dehumanizing. But asking in this forum http://www.nyctransitforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26180 to my surprise I saw that people actually like recorded messages.
I would like to ask the international crowd here if you use subway in a major city and if they make recorded announcements. Thanks. <comment><USER2> My experience in London is that it's easier to make out the words and thus understand a recorded announcement.

Set against that, I find that hearing the same recorded announcement several times in quick succession (e.g. generic "look out for terrorists" announcements) grates, when it would not if it was being read live every time.</comment>