Why Can't Startups Find Designers? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/03/31/why-cant-startups-find-designers/ <comment><USER2> _A related pitfall is insisting on hiring the absolute best designers. If your startup is only a couple months old, what makes you think an established designer will put their freelancing or agency career on hold to join you on your wild adventure?_

same for engineers. roll through the YC startup list, probably half of them are a business model and a rails app.

but you know what? it doesn't matter if they want to say they want the best engineers in their job post. They will attract the type of people they need. We've all heard "A hires A and B hires C", and, well, a twenty something hacker probably isn't trying to attract someone _better_ than him, because, then, why isn't the new hire the CTO?

Engineers and designers exist on a spectrum of value. The businesses that need the best, run by the best, know how to attract the best. The ones that are solving less hard technical problems (but maybe really interesting business problems), they say they only hire the best, but they don't actually need the very best, and this isn't a bad thing. This is all self-evident, and yet people somehow continue to match themselves with the right opportunities, so who the hell cares.

Let's all just stop writing about it, yeah?

</comment><comment><USER3> Another issue that I've personally run across is negotiating how much control a (non-founding) designer has over the product.

In an early stage startup, it makes sense that one of the founders will run the product side of the company. But really good designers often want to have a good amount of control over the product, knowing that putting a glossy coating on a product with bad UX is a losing proposition.

This often means getting more involved in product research/strategy/prioritization process. This can be problematic, since non- founding designers are often hired mostly for their UI design/front-end implementation skills.

My feeling is that very good designers are ideally suited to taking a larger role in running the product side of the company. If startups are willing to offer this, I think they can lure more good designers to their company.

Personally, this is the position I'm in. I'm an experienced designer, looking for an early stage startup to work with. Many founders I speak with are hesitant when I say that I'm interested in working on the big picture vision for the product. I'm still looking for the right fit in this regard.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you entirely about the extent to which design is integral. I don't think design and making are effectively separable activities in software, especially at a startup.

But I think that doesn't mesh well with what a lot of people who identify as designers see as their role. From your portfolio you clearly don't fit the stereotype I'm describing, but a lot of self-identified designers (especially those with an agency background) want a lot of power to control others, rather than direct ability to create themselves. That is, they define "design" as something separate from coding, shipping, supporting, and studying the usage of a product.

That kind of hands-off approach to design won't work in a startup smaller that a dozen people or so; there just isn't enough of it to do. And even if there were, that sort of designer becomes a bottleneck, slowing iteration and reducing effectiveness. That's especially bad at small startups, because, as you say, at least one founder already believes they can do a lot of that work.

In your shoes, I'd look for a company where _everybody_ is involved in product research, strategy, and prioritization. Sure, you'll do a lot of front end implementation to begin with, because that's what a startup needs. But if you also pick up some product tasks (e.g., organizing user tests, distilling site data into useful feature guidance, solving business problems via feature changes) I think you'll end up with the kind of involvement you want.

<comment><USER5> > _In your shoes, I'd look for a company where everybody is involved in > product research, strategy, and prioritization._

Speaking as one member of a three-person startup which is struggling to operate like this, I'm skeptical that such a company can work well. Three opinionated co-founders is a crowd; I can't imagine that having more would help. It might work in a case where there is a clear vision is which is shared by all members, but then the product development would already be more-or-less done.

There needs to be one founder or maybe two, who can lead the team by earning their trust. Loyal team-members will work like dogs; without that trust/loyalty (which again, needs to be bought or earned) you're herding cats.

The GP should find a compatible co-founder. With three co-founders (in our case at least), shipping a product is like stuffing three cats into one wrapped gift box.

<comment><USER6> I'm a big fan of the model of teamwork where everyone is welcome to offer their opinion on and spend a bit of time thinking about and working on any aspect of the product, but there are fairly clearly defined responsibilities regarding who has the final say on what goes to the final product. Or to put it other way, everyone is involved in everything, but each thing has only one person responsible for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Two interesting issues I've come across:

1) A lot of designers work at an agency at one point or another. The environment there encourages behavior very different than what startups need. E.g., long cycles vs rapid iteration, "final" deliverables vs incremental release, an emphasis on what clients want vs what users need, hopping from project to project vs really digging in on one thing, ability to specialize vs necessity of being an adequate generalist, high-church design vs getting one's hands dirty, and being hip vs being passionate.

2) One gets to be a really good designer by designing a lot of different things and keeping very current on trends. But startups require a long-term focus on a single product, which takes people out of the design game. That's a very hard sell.

At our startup we outsource individual pieces of design (e.g., logo creation, color and layout selection, coming up with a new look for something). But that ends up serving as raw material for the in-house activities. Most of the design ends up being done by the product manager, the engineers, or both collaboratively. That works for us because we do a lot of user testing and iterate frequently, and also because we know when to hand some piece of visual creation off to an expert.

<comment><USER7> This contributes to the problem the article illustrates. You outsource your design, as you put it the "logos, color and layout selection, or a new look for something," and then say that the PM and engineers wing the UI and UX?

So you outsource your design and art, and then don't even really have a resource, outsourced or not, for user experience.

Also, it's quite a shame that you're associated designers with being "hip and not passionate" and "specializing and not being an adequate generalist."

Imagine if your post was reversed, and described why design-based startups can't find good programmers. All the pejorative "this vs. that" statements you could write about a programmer and what their "environment encourages."

<comment><USER8> > Imagine if your post was reversed, and described why design-based startups > can't find good programmers. All the pejorative "this vs. that" statements > you could write about a programmer and what their "environment encourages."

I imagined it. And?

There are places where programmers are treated as commodity, and there are places where programmers are prized possessions, and same holds for design, business, sales or any other stream of work. If I feel that all I need is someone to do a $25 logo because basically I don't give a shit about the logo and code is what that matters, it's totally my prerogative. I am under no obligation to appease random people's sense of entitlement.

If you run a design shop or are one of those "idea guys" who need a code monkey to do the easy job of coding so that you can work on the hard parts, would I do it? Fuck no. But that doesn't mean there aren't people who would do it or you are wrong to have such expectations.

I don't know why people feel that the whole world owe them something, and complain about being prosecuted when their perceived debt isn't paid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bullshit. The article offers a couple of anecdotes to support the argument. There are thousands of talented designers looking for work. The problem is a lot of startups are unwilling to invest in good creative. Good designers cost money. I'm a designer and get peppered with requests for work. However I get offered peanuts. One startup looking to compete with Flow was only willing to pay $1000 for a website design, another wanted a logo done for $60. If you're a startup and you believe in your product, back yourself and back good creative.

<comment><USER10> I think a big part of the problem is sites like 99designs and crowdspring that de-value the creative and design process to pennies on the dollar. These sites turn great artists into sweatshop workers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As briefly mentioned in the article, all startups want "unicorn designers". A person who is good at Visual Design, Front end skills, Interaction Design, Content Strategy, Usability, A/B Testing etc. is very very rare. And recruiting that peson for your startup is impossible unless your startup is awesome like Dropbox or Instagram. It'd be better if founders look for any two of the aforementioned skills and let the person grow in that role. There are lot of designers in the valley but everyone is looking for "unicorn designers"

<comment><USER12> Yep, very true and very insightful. But you can't tell these people to hire someone with talent and help them grow into the role. Startups have imbibed the unicorn philosophy that they must have a multitasking design "rockstar" or "ninja" and they won't accept anything less. Then they wonder why the job has been open for half a year and they can't find a designer that "fits."

<comment><USER11> Exactly. And such job postings also create negative effect. I'm a designer/engineer hybrid and some of my designer friends cringe when they see "we want unicorn designer who can manage everything" postings. Because:

1.It shows founding team has no design experience, which means designer's voice can be undermined (which is the major gripe for lot of designers)

2\. Founding team has no clue about what they want to do on product design

As saying goes, if you are not technical then god help you to hire rockstars engineers on your startup. Same can be said, if your founding team lacks design talent/experience then it will be hard for you to hire ninja designer.

Tip: Ask your designer friends to help you out with hiring other designers if you lack design talent in founding team. From wording of your job posting to portfolio reviews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think designers prefer to work on many sites a year, especially the good ones and that's how they got so good. Having a full time job working on one site, doesn't really suit that - for example how many times you can redesign the website before you annoy the users? (Imagine being the designer for Gmail for example)

Programmers are much more comfortable working on one project for a long time, since it's actually easier and you get deeper into the coding problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the contrary, it can be a lot more gratifying for a designer to be deeply involved in a product's design and make a long-term vision come to life. Gmail is not a good example since it's a fairly mature product, but I'm pretty sure a designer will never run out of things to do at most startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a 100% creative type. I used to be a visual designer, and now I focus on UX design with visuals taking a secondary role. As just the type of designer they are describing, Don Draper on Mad Men summed it up:

"[...]we're the least important, most important thing there is."

Traditionally, design (and user experience) is the last thing to be added, and the first thing to be cut. If you have 2 founders, a business guy, and a engineer, you can make a product. No design required. But a designer and a business guy? They can make a prototype, but nothing functional.

And we live in a world (the startup, internet world) where function always supersedes form. For every 1 site with good design and bad functionality, there are 50 with bad design and good functionality.

It just so happens that a great many startups are started by technical people. And typically, they can develop a working product, or very advanced prototype, with no designer help at all. And when you add in the "inmates are running the asylum" mentality, most technical founders and engineers don't notice/care if their design (ux, ui, graphic arts) aren't superb because that's just "lipstick and lace."

There are a lot of engineers and technical founders that realize this isn't the case, but they are in the minority.

</comment><comment><USER14> I believe these guys are trying to help with that: <http://www.scoutzie.com/>

<comment><USER15> Great, thanks. Have they thought about hiring themselves to make the site friendlier to mobile browsers? If you know them, could you tell them please? I already did, but i guess coming from you the signal would be stronger. I had a hard time browsing on my phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Startups need designer co-founders. Design is that essential. Instead startups try to _hire_ a founder role. And that is a shitty deal few would take.

<comment><USER4> You overstate your case quite a bit. There are a lot of products for which great visual design or very-well tuned usability are, frankly, not necessary for market success. Consider, for example, this very site. Some startups do indeed need great design, though.

Even for those startups where design is crucial, I think I'd only go as far as saying that the founding team needs someone with a strong design sense and some specific design skill. But that person needs to be a lot more than a designer.

Consider Chad Hurley, for example. YouTube beat out many competitors partly because of a much more usable design. But Hurley was also CEO and head of product, and he handed off the details of design early on to others. Even years later he still reviewed all the new features before they went live, but that's much more about his ability to evaluate design (and design's impact on metrics, which YouTube used heavily) than it is about being a designer.

<comment><USER17> Design evaluation and quantitative analysis based on analytics are part of what designers do to validate design decisions (identifying bottlenecks in task-driven applications, optimizing Ui and user flows to increase conversion rates, etc). These techniques are part of a beta or post-launch iterative design process.

Your point about Hurley having entrepreneurial skills above his particular profession applies to technical founders as well (or any founder for that matter), not just designers. Unless you think that just by having the skills to do programming at early stages of a startup can alone make for a good founder in the long run.

Even for products that don't have an UI at all there are many aspects of the customer experience that will require conscious design efforts to give you a competitive edge. A designer perspective can bring creative and fresh solutions to many types of business challenges due to overlaps with Marketing and business strategy. Integrating behavioral economics principles to your business through design can have a huge impact on marketing and sales regardless of what your product or service is about.

Design DOES mean business, and the fact that it is recognized more every day is a prove of that. I would have Ives as my cofounder and not just because he can design great products, but because he can design a great company. He also has an amazing networking, I bet.

This myope perspective about design is probably the main reason why companies and startups can't get experienced designers to join.

<comment><USER4> I believe everybody at a startup should think and care a lot about design, so I think we mostly agree.

I would like "designer" to mean what you say it means, but I think a relatively small fraction of people who identify as designers can actually do what you describe.

My point about Hurley wasn't that he had entrepreneurial skills on top of design skills. My point was that even for a billion-dollar success for which usability was a major success factor, it wasn't his visual design skills that made the difference: it was that he valued usability and had the ability to evaluate usability impacts. It is true that some designers have that, but one does not have to be a designer to have those skills.

<comment><USER17> I think you are right, we mostly agree on this. It is just the way you refer to visual design and usability evaluation what was confusing me. They both come with the design endeavor, but being able to evaluate its impact and to execute based on this is not exclusive to designers. Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the TL/DR:

If you want to increase your chances of finding a designer for your startup, you should * Hang out on designer sites like <http://dribbble.com> or <http://behance.com>, not just Hacker News.

* Stop looking for someone that can do logos, web design, UI design, and even code HTML/CSS and JavaScript on top of that.

* Consider hiring someone with less experience and letting them learn on the job.

* Don't limit your search to the US, there are tons of great designers abroad too.

* Look at hiring a freelancer if a full-time position is too hard to fill.

<comment><USER18> That sounds a lot like what we say about people who can't hire programmers.

That, and "pony up, you pay peanuts and get monkeys".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think "design" is a vague term here. What most people think of as design is "making it pretty" or designing individual graphical elements such as logos etc.

What a startup really needs is somebody who can make their app "feel" right,;i.e be easy to use, accessible , press all the right emotional buttons and have an attractive visual style that fits the app.

In my experience most of the people I have encountered in design, even in web design are the former rather than the latter. We were looking for a designer to redesign a website some time ago and had one highly recommended. I was optimistic until I looked at her portfolio. Entirely Flash websites serving upwards of 10MB to get the first page down, animation everywhere , all text was images , "mystery meat" navigation , no SEO whatsoever etc etc.

Now no doubt she was a very talented and skilled artist, but obviously somebody who held high end visuals as a priority above everything. I knew at that point that I categorically could not work with someone like that. She could probably have designed some nice logos, buttons and other things for us but I could not hand direction of an entire website over to someone like that.

On the other hands, I can't draw for shit or even choose good colors but I have been using computer applications for long enough to have some idea as to what UI elements should be included, where they should be placed. How to logically organize a UI etc but I wouldn't call myself a "designer" but I think these are skills that are essential to web app designers.

</comment><comment><USER20> I feel that the main issue is that "Designers" that are great at design, often are pretty difficult to work into the dev processes of a bootstrapped startup, without slowing things down. Therefore design gets prioritized lower than features and this has an undesirable outcome for everyone.

A great designer (for an early stage company of 1-2 people) should be able to turn a PSD into HTML/CSS and work with tools like smarty templates.

Its just my two cents, and the requirement certainly changes over time...but in the early days, the most useful thing a startup could get us someone that can easily integrate with the dev process.

</comment><comment><USER21> For startups that are looking for designers, the Product Design Guild offers sponsorship opportunities for our events (<http://www.productdesignguild.com/#sponsorship>).

We think it's one of the easiest and most effective ways of putting your story out in front of some of the most connected designers in the Bay Area. email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you're interested in sponsorship.

</comment><comment><USER22> The biggest problem I see with startups searching for designers is that many fundamentally misunderstand what design is all about. They see the job of folk with design/UX skills as simply making there product pretty. A nice logo, some good icons, etc.

Design/UX, like development, is a far deeper domain than that. Design/UX, like development, will significantly affect the business/product. Far too often I see recruitment for roles that are exploiting only a small subset of a good designers skill set - and those are naturally going to be hard positions to fill.

There are strong parallels to the issues non-technical founders have recruiting developers - when what they really need is a technical co-founder / CTO type role.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is considered good design? I'm having a bit of trouble reading it.

<http://maxvoltar.com/>

<comment><USER24> At some point, when you're just as popular as him, you will get away with having a personal page looking whichever way you want it to be. Also, it's quote possible that he's just too busy doing other work and home page isn't a priority.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to help with this as well :) <http://folyo.me>

</comment><comment><USER25> Why is Hipmunk mentioned as an example of a site that is successful because of design?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because Hipmunk has been successful by mainly innovating on UI and UX in a very competitive category with strong established players. Although they also have some cool technology powering all this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> copy of my comments:

Honestly, the problem is not finding a designer, but a good designer. And that leads to the larger problem: expectations are too high by those looking. They are expecting apple quality polish on a small budget. Good design isn't cheap. Good designers are hard to find because they are working on quality products, not your dinky startup app with a budget of 50,000 a year for a designer.

I will also add that as a designer and front end developer, its not that I am not interested in startups, it's that I either needs to be a larger part of the ownership, or payed what I am worth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even startups with a sizable budget can have a hard time finding designers. It's not just a question of money, but also knowing where to look and what kind of profile to look for.

Of course, the same is true for developers, but I feel that due to the recent focus on design's importance for startups, the problem might become even more present for design than development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Hang out on design communities like Dribble

In related news, an article "Why Can't Startups Find Programmers" is suggesting to hang out on programmer communities like Hawker News.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm a designer and user experience guru and front-end dev, I want startups to find me and I want (and have) to find good startups.

</comment><comment><USER29> _The following is just how I personally work and see UX+UI+Graphic Design. Mine is just 1 of many viewpoints._

It's complicated:

1) Grouping all designers together and assuming we're all good at design, graphics, ui, ux, and info architecture is like grouping all programmers together and assuming they're all good at php, C++, java, ruby, mysql, oracle, javascript, visual basic, python, and perl. See what I mean. When you want a designer, you need to understand WHICH type of designer do you want. The same way you need to know what kind of programmer you need. In many elements of design such as Typography, layout, logos, branding, color, information architecture, visual graphics, user experience, and interface design. Finding a designer that does ALL of these well is extremely difficult. And it may not be a good idea to hire them either. Would you want to hire someone that has a little experience in every commonly used programming language or someone who specializes very well in just 2?

(All designers have a few necessary overlapping skills and often can work together very well and smoothly if they stay out of each other's way)

\- UX Designer - In charge of what the user "FEELS" and what the user will get out of the site. Sets up user experience guidelines, helps create, pull, or finalize all features, user stories, usability studies, navigation maps, wire- frames, prototypes, persona storyboards. If the UX designers does their job wrong the user can "feel" confused about the site or doubt its legitimacy or ability to solve the user's problem and within 5 seconds leave, never to return. So emotion and feeling is extremely important. The UX designer crafts the foundation of the site based on predicting what the target audience wants and how they expect the site to help them achieve it.

\- UI Designer - In charge of "HOW" the user interacts with the site. Sets up user interface guidelines, eye flows, layouts, button and input controls, control over all visual elements and what they do and how they interact with the user and a lot of overlapping responsibilities with the UX designer.

\- Graphics Designer - In charge of what the user "SEES". Branding, logos, company colors, typography and custom fonts, sets up color & visual guidelines (buttons, logos, etc...), frequently works with photos and vector illustrations, often photographers.

See how different designers can be? In general you want to start with the UX guy, then the UI and Graphics Designer. You can have all 3 in the room but I personally believe the UX designer should ALWAYS be the first in.

2) Chasing the mythical designer + coder + know-it-all. Some of us can do design very well and a bit of front end coding. Design (visual) and programming (logical + mathematical) are so different. All the good programmers I've seen are terrible with visual design and all the great graphics designers I know are bad programmers. This is for a reason. It's very rare that someone has acquired both talents.

3) Don't make your designer do ALL of your front end coding. Because that just wastes everyone's time and assumes your designer is an efficient javascrip / jquery / css + xhtml coder. I personally love to start with css+xhtml THEN photoshop if needed. But as soon as I hit heavy javascript coding I start sinking. I would love to be able to get my design done and pass it on to someone who can code up the javascript quicker and better than I can. In a startup environment where speed and iteration are crucial this is really important. Everyone specializes in something and does that something very well and very quickly. Rather than having only a few people try to do everything they're not good at and end up doing a mediocre job that took three times as long as it should have.

4) Your broad requirements make us feel insecure. I'm a user interface + user experience + information architecture type of designer. Color, graphics, logos, custom fonts are NOT my strength and I cannot in any way compete with graphics artists who specialize in areas. I can do front end coding but only to an extent. I can make really easy to use sites but I can't give them that color + icons + logo + custom fonts + graphics themeing that a graphics artist can. Likewise the web is showered with websites made by graphics artists who aren't good at ux + ui + info architecture. These websites look pretty, have great icons, colors, & buttons but the layouts and site architecture are horrendous which leads to the user experience being horrendous as well. So when you ask for a designer that can "make everything pretty" I immediately skip the job offer because I don't want to disappoint you. When a visual designer sees the job opening they'll send you their portfolio of pretty websites that have improper eye flow, and terrible ux and you'll decline hiring them. Had you taken out that "graphics designer" must-have-requirement I would have gladly spent hours chatting with you in person (never online) on the direction you can take.

5) Hire me (UX + UI + Info Architecture) BEFORE you've hired a general graphics designer (icons + colors + logo + custom fonts). Otherwise It's useless. It's like hiring a painter before you've got your drywall put up.

Long Story Short, many startups don't know what kind of designer they need. If they hire a UX+UI designer they need to do that at the very beginning, then after they've got their beta product/service tried and tested they should go for a really nice graphics designer to help them with branding and look and feel. If you do it the other way around you just end up wasting time, and cause a lot of frustration for both designers because they have to RE-do all their work when ironing out design conflicts.

A UX designer is someone that you need to hire at the very beginning. You would sit down with them for Hours and hours over the course of MANY days (so pick someone you can stand) with huge sheets of paper and will start drafting out what it is the site MUST do and what it must NOT do. Finalize requirements and features, list content required, intents, user stories, and a million other things. There will be a lot of compromises having to be made, and there will be a lot of back and forth decision making. You will talk with your UX designer more than any of the others.

A UI designer is focused on the users, not you. They'll be off doing usability and predictability studies and designing the interface that the users will be using to solve the problems that the UX designer outlined.

A Graphics Designer can telecommute more, and can be left alone, send you mockups and seek feedback and a/b testing from users. They'll take everything from the UX and UI designer and add emotional appeal using color, lines, graphics, imagery, and photography, typography, logos, & icons.

All 3 are very important. If just ->1<\- of these designers does their job wrong your website will be off (which may or may not hurt you). Look at craigslist, it's visual design is horrendous but it's ease of use thanks to a decent UI made up for it. Unforunately there's lots of spam and other problems that is killing' it's user experience.

<comment><USER17> This silo-ed paradigm is one of the bigger issues the UX community keeps embracing and promoting. By exception of some applications design (branding and corporate identity), I think this silo-ed approach that UX offers is hurting the product design/development process.

The more silos and "roles" you add to a any process, the more efforts need to go into coordination (meetings) and documentation to keep things consistent and flowing. This impacts time-to-market and increases overall project cost. Also, it doesn't allow to react to changes effectively (if at all).

A designer should be educated in all the different disciplines involved in digital product design. Look at Architecture, Fashion or Industrial Design: they spend years getting training across multiple disciplines (aesthetics, semiotics, ergonomics, design theory, research, history of arts, project management, budgeting, etc) including technical disciplines as it applies to their careers (structural analysis, materials, construction techniques, functional and tangible prototyping, technical drafting, and other).

<comment><USER29> Everything you said is absolutely correct in theory but realistically flawed. Every designer wants to be disciplined and master all those roles, but that takes decades of experience. And to expect that type of person to come work for your startup is like expecting to seduce a senior programmer from Google to come join your startup.

To achieve those God-like design skills that include everything from being a good artist (which everyone is NOT) to creating good logos and understanding branding and identity (which is difficult to master) to front end coding including css+xhtml+javascript+jquery is ludicrous. You might as well ask that your designer do the back-end of the site, incorporate your company, and handle your taxes and bookkeeping. At some point people have to realize that we can't do it all. Designers that CAN do it all, are freelancing and getting paid a ton of more money doing interesting and different things every month /OR/ starting their own companies with their skills and getting paid a crap load more with 100% complete creative control and freedom. Why would they want to commit themselves to working at the same company working on the same problems?

Being "educated" in all disciplines is possible. I can correctly choose fonts, logos, icons and graphics. But I'm not specialized in producing those from scratch. To be specialized in that is a whole other career path that takes years to learn and master. Digital Art.

So yes I do eventually wish to become the senior designer that you described. And in 10-20 years I'm sure I'll acheive that level of understanding. But that's the problem. It'll take 10-20 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > _If you're looking for a designer who can come up with your identity, design > your site, create UIs with great user experience for your web and mobile > apps, and on top of that code his or her work in HTML/CSS (and why not throw > in Javascript in the mix!), then I'm sorry to inform you that you're hunting > unicorns._

I can do all of that. And I can do it all _really_ well. I don't normally toot my own horn, but this all just seems like part of the job. These are skills that I've acquired over 13 years (I'm only 23), and apparently the combination is more desirable/rare than I thought.

Here's the thing, though: I don't consider myself a 'designer'. I think the title is too limiting, because it doesn't encompass other skills (like coding). And while I would never call myself a 'designer', I could probably outperform 99% of the designers I've come across.

Some recent work:

<http://grubwithus.com> (if anything is ugly/weird here, we're heavily A/B testing right now)

<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grubwithus/id492155022?mt=8>

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/11/grubwithus-goes-mobile- with...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/11/grubwithus-goes-mobile-with-a- really-pretty-iphone-app/)

<comment><USER4> Since your horn-tooting post will rightly get downvoted into illegibility, I wanted to extract the bit that I thought a useful contribution to the discussion:

> Here's the thing, though: I don't consider myself a 'designer'. I think the > title is too limiting, because it doesn't encompass other skills (like > coding).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Travel spontaneously on a budget - <AUTHOR> http://www.wander.am <comment><USER2> I like the idea, but it needs more work.

Bug 1: After searching, I clicked to another tab for a couple of minutes, and then back to it. It popped up a dialog saying "it's been a while, we need to refresh your results", and then reset my search to the original form state. Quite annoying, especially since I'm on a VPN and location-detection therefore has me in a different state.

Bug 2: OK, so I stuck with the original $1000 budget. It offered me a trip to New York, NY, for several nights. I click into New York, and now it shows hotel rooms starting from $2500 and down -- i.e. it forgets the budget as soon as you start looking at details, making the entire premise of it useless. When you click into a "package" why don't you divide results into frugal ("save on accomodation to have more spending money"), on-budget ("here's what you can afford"), and spend-a-little-extra ("for a bit more, you can upgrade to...") sections?

Bug 3: And as said elsewhere, get rid of the dark patterns. It makes you look scammy.

<comment><USER3> I've noticed that nearly every travel website does this--you search within a budget, find something you really like, but once you go through the checkout flows, you realize it _actually_ costs 25-50% more than what they said it did.

It's such an annoying dark pattern that me and my wife have been working on our own weekend travel website [0] that is upfront about all pricing, e.g. we include fees in the price when possible, e.g. deposits for rentals, cleaning fees, etc. And we won't show outdated flight information (some of these sites show fares from over 24hrs ago).

[0]: [https://travelalpacamybags.com](https://travelalpacamybags.com)

<comment><USER4> The url is a bit large, maybe shorten it to travalpaca.com or alpacamybags.com? I love it overall though.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, the owner of alpacamybags.com wants ~$2,500, which is a little too far out of this site's allotted budget at the moment. I've tried to negotiate other amounts. Will look into it in the future for sure, but right now I think it's fine. Most people that find us don't type the URL anyways.

Just snagged travelalpaca.com, though. Thanks for the tip!

<comment><USER5> If you can get in touch with the owner, I imagine they would be willing to drop that price significantly since it's a good fit for you but you clearly don't "need it."

$1,000 in the hand is way better than $2,500 that never comes.

<comment><USER3> I've actually already tried negotiations via domainagents.com--they don't seem to want to go below $2,000, which is unfortunate. But like I said, not a big deal either way. Maybe later on.

<comment><USER6> Heh, well, sucks to be that guy, then. Because uBlock blocks that domain as it stands right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Switch off notifications, remove the "X people looking at this" (creepy), make sure to have city-wide codes not just airports, don't offer travel to the SAME city the user is already known to be in. (EDIT: didn't see that it listed it as car+hotel when in my own city - makes sense but was still surprised. Including trips to the same city should perhaps be an option in the search?).

Edit: also: rarely interested in flights with 2 stops for a 1 night holiday - "direct only" needs to be an option.

Also I'd like to see a savings calculator. If I'm in Oslo, a $500 trip to Copenhagen feels like I could find it almost every day (the normal might be $520) but next to it might be a $500 trip to New Zealand - that HAS to be a more rare deal that I really should jump on. Or is it?

Otherwise - great idea and neat execution.

<comment><USER8> The X people looking at this is something hotels.com and such do as well - mind you it's probably one of the many dark patterns that sites like that employ to create fake scarcity / popularity, similar to "x people booked in the last y hours" or "only x seats / rooms left at this price"

<comment><USER9> >"The X people looking at this is something hotels.com and such do as well - mind you it's probably one of the many dark patterns that sites like that employ to create fake scarcity / popularity, similar to "x people booked in the last y hours" or "only x seats / rooms left at this price"

I have started to refuse to use sites that employ this "high pressure" nonsense such as booking.com/hotels.com. Even if you could trust this information who cares how many people are currently looking or have booked a hotel room in the last day? It makes for a really sleazy feeling experience and and a visual nightmare. It's like a virtual used car salesman.

Would you shop at a store that insisted on annoying you with such "pressure tactics" while you trying to buy food or clothes?

Vote with your wallet if possible.

<comment><USER10> Don't high pressure sales tactics get stock sellers in trouble?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just as some feedback, it saw that I was based in London, auto-selected Heathrow as my base airport and the first trip it offered me was a $800 trip to London. Don't think I'll be taking you guys up on that offer.

<comment><USER12> Had a similar experience where I live. It looks like the algorithm decides you don't need a flight to where you live, just a hotel, so the overall amount ends up cheaper. Switching from Flight + Hotel to Flight Only gave me a more meaningful result.

<comment><USER13> Weird. "You don't need a flight to the place you already live" makes sense, but why would you need a hotel?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be neat if you could work in visa requirements as well so that it only includes visa-free or visa-on-arrival destinations.

I find easy visas a privilege that not many western travellers are aware of; If I wanted to travel somewhere most of the time I need to first apply for a visa (which can take several weeks). This includes a fee, photographs and fingerprints, and an interview. Not to mention the airline tickets and hotel bookings. When I talk with American friends they complain that their visa-on- arrival is only for 60 days instead of 90 and "it's so unfair". /rant

<comment><USER15> Visa requirements depend on a lot of things, including obviously what passport you hold (multiple selection), there's transit issues too -- if you hold an Afghan passport you can travel to Svalbard without a visa, but you can't fly there from Oslo because that requires a Schengen visa. In fact you can't even transit airside at Schipol. However if you hold a specific type of Canada residency permit you can.

And even once you clear the visa problems, you then get into yellow fever documentation. Do you need to take a yellow fever certificate if you transit via Addis Abiba on the way to South Africa?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hotels, flights: Maybe. But not all of "Travel". I was offered a flight to Amsterdam for 850 or so US$. Not living that far from there the cheapest train ticket to there is 40€. And that's from my train station a few minutes of walking away, not an airport an hour's drive away & with all the airport related hassles.

I've seen this kind of service before. It's not new. Flight search engines are common. Don't many already have something like this integrated?

That said: an _actual_ "Travel spontaneously on a budget" site would be great, but it'd be _much_ larger in scope.

You might want to team up with some travel site like TripAdvisor or Lonely Planet and integrate local budget (we're on a _budget_ ) offers like the DB Sparpreisfinder.

<comment><USER17> For transport theres [https://www.rome2rio.com/](https://www.rome2rio.com/) which is pretty nice about showing the different modes you have available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why are you trying to get permissions for browser notifications? That is incredibly annoying and immediately makes me distrust the site.

<comment><USER19> It's so frustrating the number of websites that ask for this when you land on their page now days. It reminds me of the bad old days of popups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Flight search UI is janky as fuck, recommended I spend €4,000 on a hotel for a six night "budget" trip, and the FOMO notifications are infuriating. Hard pass.

</comment><comment><USER21> It looks nice, but it feels a bit anachronistic to exclusively focus on air travel in 2018 considering the environmental impact of aeroplanes. Recommending flights from Schiphol (Amsterdam) to nearby Brussels or London without showing more eco-friendly alternatives (Thalys and Eurostar, or even ferries) is a bit disappointing.

Travel does not necessarily mean taking a flight somewhere (especially in Europe).

<comment><USER22> Agreed, that's exactly what I've been felt is missing. I'm not sure about flights+hotels, but for flights alone the tools already existed (Adioso, Google Flights).

Alas, I still haven't found any that let me do the same for trains and buses. GoEuro already lets you search, but you have to choose a specific destination.

<comment><USER21> Cheap buses shouldn't be too hard with the proliferation of Flixbus etc. (Amsterdam → Berlin starts at €29), but as a 200cm Dutchman travelling by coach definitely does not fall within my definition of an acceptable mode of travel for leisure (neither does flying for that matter).

Finding cheap train fairs is indeed a puzzle sometimes! It helps a lot to have some familiarity with the major European train companies, the major high-speed connections, and how to book the discounted tickets in advance (incidentally, Amsterdam → Berlin starts at €39,90 when booked two months in advance). Of course seat61.com is useful too as a general source of information.

What I really miss is a tool that shows me destinations that can be comfortably reached by a combination of day-time and sleeper trains on dates that still have discount tickets available. Nothing beats waking up early in the morning in Vienna or Munich in a sleeper train; it's like getting a free day of travel, and you arrive fairly well-rested instead of weary from travel. I'm not doing anything useful in my sleep (besides sleeping), so I might as well spend that time travelling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Seeing this picture for one of the European capitals is funny: [https://d19wm5yhteu8df.cloudfront.net/destination/images/att...](https://d19wm5yhteu8df.cloudfront.net/destination/images/attachments/000/000/097/large/slovakia.jpg?1503758567) . Slovaks will find it less amusing I think.

Also, when I click the picture (it's for Bratislava), I see mismatched cities:

        Flights to Bratislava
        (Flights from Prague (PRG) to Vienna (VIE))

Looks like there's still some QA to do.

<comment><USER24> It's not our capital, but Haifa with some quarter million people has places like that right in the middle of the city. Small isolated house on a hill, dirt road and all.

<comment> V-2 It's not about that such places can't exist, just whether they are representative of the destination

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> SkyScanner is still the king when searching for flights coupled with the "Explore" option which will return the cheapest flight destinations. You can also simply search for a country such as "Greece" and the results will rank the cheapest airports from your departure.

When including other travel options such as Trains, Buses (Flixbus), GoEuro shows these methods, but without the "Explore" capability.

SkyScanner just announced the ability to include train travel which hopefully will be a marriage of these technologies.

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/skyscanner-adds-train- trav...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/03/skyscanner-adds-train-travel- booking-starting-in-uk/)

<comment><USER26> to compare multiple modes and even combine them [https://www.rome2rio.com/](https://www.rome2rio.com/) is great

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why must the search be constrained by dates? If I'm providing a start location, and a budget, I'd like to see options for travel regardless of dates - indeed I'd hope this would allow for more flexibility to stay within the budget.

<comment><USER28> I've always wondered this myself. Wouldn't travel companies want to open this information up? It seems like it would be a good use of price discrimination.

</comment></comment><comment> V-2 2018 and no Unicode support? _" Gdańsk Lech Wałęsa Airport (GDN)"_ shows as _" Gda?sk Lech Wa??sa Airport (GDN)"_ in the _" what's your home base"_ box.

</comment><comment><USER15> Correctly identified my local airport (Manchester), however failed to recognise my local currency (GBP).

Hilarious costs too for a "budget", and a default of 10 days away isn't spontaneous. My shortest short-distance flight booking was 82 minutes, my shorted long haul was 18 hours (for work), and 3 days (for leisure)

</comment><comment><USER29> My dos centavos ... Running NoScript, giving full js permission to the primary domain and all (apparently) relevant 2ndary domains, home page still doesn't resolve.

If you need google, facebook and pinterest just to display a landing page, I'm never gonna use your site.

</comment><comment><USER30> For me it's an immediate turnoff if my browser tells me a site wants to show notifications. A notification means a site wants the right to bug me for my attention when I want to be doing something else. I can think of about 1 site that I think deserves that right. Especially because most content sites want to abuse that right to pull your attention back if you forgot to close the tab after you were done. So I always hit 'Block', and then I feel less warm about the site for asking.

Ditto the annoying Intercom popup that takes up way too much screen real estate. If I want to ask a question, I'll come to you.

It may be just me, but I suspect a lot of HN is has similar grumpiness levels about this sort of thing.

<comment><USER31> Same for the "18 people are currently looking at this route".

I know a lot of travel sites do it, but I don't see how it adds any value for me to know that (if it is even true)

<comment><USER32> This is a dark pattern akin to booking.com, to create time pressure for you, not provide actual value.

If the latter were true, then sometimes it should say "You are the only one looking at this hotel. Take your time!"

But no. Travelling to the most obscure places across Asia I have NEVER seen anything but hordes people looking at my hotel in Kampong Cham. Probably different dates too.

I am willing to bet it is derived from /dev/urandom adjusted to the size of the establishment.

<comment><USER33> >Travelling to the most obscure places across Asia I have NEVER seen anything but hordes people looking at my hotel in Kampong Cham

Haha, this is so relatable. Not a long time ago I arrived at my "high in demand, better book RIGHT NOW" guesthouse somewhere in Mondul Kiri Province and had to wake up personnel in their hammocks. Turns out they had no bookings for some days …

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I love the ability to search departures from my home city. When I change it from "1 Passenger" to "2 Passengers", it would be helpful if the price reflected the total cost of 2 passengers.

</comment><comment><USER35> What I would like to get is a travel search engine for which you give you give origin, destination and luggage specifications (how many pieces, weight and special luggages). Then the system compares total cost and time for the journey, not only flights taking into account the special luggage costs but train, rental cars etc. Ideally then one click shopping for all of the required connections.

<comment><USER36> I'd be love to have a unified train search and purchasing for Europe. Search is fine, purchasing is a mess. Especially because you can buy the same ticket from multiple different places for very different prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Some quick feedback:

1\. You seem to be missing SXF, Berlin's Schönefeld Airport.

2\. Once that's in, It would be nice to just enter the city, in case I don't mind which airport I'm flying from.

3\. The top result was traveling from Berlin to Berlin...

4\. I'd like to be able to specify 'fuzzy' departure and arrival times. For when I want a trip that fits within my budget, but am flexible with regards to when I travel.

<comment><USER38> This is shameless self-promotion, but if you have an iOS device the Hopper app has a feature that lets you watch flight prices for flexible dates/length of stays/destinations and will send you a notification when there's a deal for any of those things.

Disclaimer: I work for Hopper

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Quick bug report: when accessing the site from Israel, the footer's "Nearby Airports" section includes:

* Ramon Air Base (no civilian flights)

* Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport (Israeli/Lebanese border is closed)

* Damascus International Airport (Israeli/Syrian border is closed)

Simply asking "what's within X radius" is not a sufficiently robust algorithm for this problem.

</comment><comment><USER40> Like the overall idea. One important feedback - needs the ability to specify a 'departure' city not just airport. E.g. London has 5 main airports, and most people would be able to fly from any of these. An umbrella search that is "London" and aggregates across all the airports for the city is key.

<comment><USER41> You were showing as shadowbanned for some reason.

I would add that rather than a city, I would like to be able to specify a general area, or a list of airports. From my place, I don't care much if I must depart from Amsterdam, Paris or Brussels, and London is fine as well if it's cheaper. Every time I look for flights, it gets tedious to try every of these departure locations to check the flights I can take.

<comment><USER40> huh, is there any way to find out why you were shadowbanned? some kind of request for information process?

Is this something which applies to my whole user account, or just this particular comment got flagged up?

Maybe questions I should send to the mods really.

<comment><USER41> Well, this comment was greyed out as well (I clicked "vouch" for both) so it looks like it's something with your account.

I think I'd send an email to the mods, as I have no idea what got you flagged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's been a while since I worked with anything air travel related but why do all the flight search engine UIs operate very similarly? Is it just because it's the best way to do it or are these booking engines still tied to the GDS systems (Sabre, Amadeus, etc)?

<comment><USER43> I'm working on a travel web app right now and sadly it's still tied to GDS unless you want to affiliate link your users out to some other site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Selecting a list of airports, or an area, or city with distance range would be nice. From where I live, there are multiple airports about the same distance away, and I don't care much which one I use; but it might make a huge difference due to different airlines.

</comment><comment><USER45> Excellent idea, but I couldn't make it work in Chrome. I got empty results, unexpected UI weirdness, stuff that never showed up. If you can make it work, it'll be my new favorite thing, but it's not there yet.

</comment><comment><USER46> I don't see anything that sets this service apart from flight and hotel aggregators. I was hoping it would be for flash deals or alertnative / thrifty vacation ideas. Instead it seems more like a worse Kayak.

</comment><comment><USER47> The deals seem particularly expensive and the site in general is very slow.

</comment><comment><USER48> An issue I hit: while the geolocation correctly located me in Berlin, the first suggestion for a trip will be Berlin itself, which is kind of not what I expected.

</comment><comment><USER49> I built a business travel app a couple of years back.

I think budget filter is not enough to create enough value as most people set a budget for entire trip and not just travel. If you could crowd source data of avg expense for taxi, and stuff then this could get really interesting.

In our case we could map project budget for travel to trips using historical data(not so accurate but good for ballpark)

</comment><comment><USER17> Can't open result in new tab, slow loading, and prices that are way higher than they would be if I searched on my own. Not really sure whats the use case. Google flights does a lot of this and does it fast. I can view the whole world and estimated prices on the fly. Also needs an airline filter.

Also no results when clicking through a listing.

</comment><comment><USER50> Congratulations on getting as far as you have. There is plenty of actionable feedback from HN.

What are you prioritizing for your next release? I would recommend including the most often repeated UX complaints from this "Show HN". Iterate quickly and get another round of feedback. Keep up the momentum.

</comment><comment><USER51> Neat idea. Does anyone know how these relatively small operations all have the flight and hotel search API integrated? My understanding was that flight commission's are quite low, and unless you have serious traffic it's not profitable to run these types of sites?

<comment><USER52> Flight commissions are tiny. Hotel commissions are not - probably in the 10% range off the top for smaller operators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> The flights seem quite a bit more expensive than what I am used to seeing between major cities.

</comment><comment><USER54> I try a $1000 for two based from the local regional airport and all I get are the cities with the two international airports that are ~2 hours drive away. We usually drive to those for flights anyway because they are so much cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER55> Cool, but it's "on a budget" for the States.

In Europe, I can go from cold to the beach with EUR15 with Ryan Air, and AirBnB for as low as EUR20/night in a decent apartment in many towns.

That's on a budget European style! :-)

<comment><USER22> Agreed. I've spent a weekend in Paris, and the whole thing (travel by bus + two nights stay + 2 museum tickets) cost me less than their minimum budget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> A minor UI suggestion to improve information availability.

[https://imgur.com/a/5paZy](https://imgur.com/a/5paZy)

How am I supposed to know if I am interested in "Monteg.."?

</comment><comment><USER57> What a great idea!

Curiously, first recommended city to visit is the one I set as the home base.

Also, when going for eg two weeks, it might be interesting to suggest to spend the first and second weeks in different places.

<comment><USER58> Indeed, a great idea. And I have the same issue.

On the one hand, since I do live in San Francisco, taking a "staycation" is not a terrible idea. It might be fun to live like a tourist. But the first 5 options for me are 1) San Francisco, 2) Oakland, 3) Sacramento, 4) San Jose, and 5) Reno. For a site that is promising me exotic adventure, leading things that are so quotidian is a disappointment. Sure, put in the staycation options, but rank them lower.

I eventually just switched off the hotels and looked at flights only, as I wasn't confident that the algorithm would do as good a job of picking a hotel as I would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Can someone enlighten me what the "on a budget" in the title means? Do they have some special deals? Feels like a booking.com with a "take me anywhere" button on first look.

<comment><USER60> You can set your max budget on the search

<comment><USER59> ok, not a native speaker, thought "on a budget" refers to cheap/saving money/low in price.

<comment><USER61> You are correct. Most of us are "on a budget" when we travel in the sense that we have certain price ranges in mind even if we tend to prioritize saving time over $$ and stay in fairly nice places. Budget travel or traveling on a budget carries the implication that you're looking for cheaper options like buses, hostels, free attractions, no-frills airlines, etc. Think the original Lonely Planet demographic (though not any longer).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Site literally just keeps telling me to up my budget. Apparently nothing fun to do when you're flying out of DBQ.

</comment><comment><USER63> Bugreport: the search list disappears after a while. Maybe to load a new result set? I didn't wait for it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I would like a feature where I could add a group of people that are traveling from different areas.

</comment><comment><USER64> I love this! I would really like a map view that shows all the destinations in the search.

</comment><comment><USER65> See also: Scott's Cheap Flights. Daily flash ticket sales to a random place in the world.

No affiliation.

</comment><comment><USER66> Right side is cut off on my iPhone 6s (iOS 11.2.6) in verical orientation.

</comment><comment><USER67> I don't like it when a website tries to load tons of javacripts.

</comment><comment><USER68> when selecting JFK as airport the first result was NYC. why would I want to stay at NYC if I already selected the airport looking for places to go to

</comment><comment><USER69> so many wrong images of the destinations. Off by continents.. Does not incite confidence

</comment><comment><USER70> doesnt render properly in firefox.</comment>


Encryption, Privacy Are Larger Issues Than Fighting Terrorism - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2016/03/14/470347719/encryption-and-privacy-are-larger-issues-than-fighting-terrorism-clarke-says <comment><USER2> > No, David. If I were in the job now, I would have simply told the FBI to > call Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and NSA > would have solved this problem for them. They're not as interested in > solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent.

That's quite the quote, especially given his history of employment.

The weirdest thing about this whole cell-phone saga to me is that the perps are dead, did not appear to be part of some organized group and that very little could be done to them that hasn't been done already based on evidence found on the phone.

Then there is the bit that a lot of the information that is on the phone is _also_ already in the log files of the carriers. It's as if that phone somehow magically is going to yield an entirely new class of information that may not even exist in the first place.

To me it has been evident from day one that this is not about this phone or the data that's on it but just about the legal precedent, getting it in black- and-white from the former head of counter terrorism is quite an indictment of his successors.

<comment><USER3> No the weirdest thing is that Apple is standing up to the government. Isn't that just wrong? You, the people choose the government, so in effect Apple is standing up to the people of America and saying 'no'. If you the people didn't want the FBI to be bullish then choose a different government.

It feels to me (an outsider) that it's the government that is out of control and is not accountable to the people.

<comment><USER4> It seems like the country is 50-50 divided on this. But more importantly, individual liberty is more important than majority rule. When the founding fathers created this country, they cared deeply about individual liberty, and worried about a tyranny of the majority. Even if a super-majority wants to deprive an individual or a minority group of its rights, they should not be allowed to.

A free country's first commitment is to personal liberty, and only secondly to democracy.

<comment><USER5> by definition a democracy is a tyranny of majority.... i think you mean secondary to the republic

<comment><USER6> No, it's to the Republic to make sure the ideals of true democracy take a secondary place to individual liberty for the very reason that true democracy can be tyrannical. That's why the Republic comes before the democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Before you comment, please consider whether you'd prefer to vent your frustration in online message boards with like-minded people, or spend that potential energy in other ways:

"What you can do about it:

\-- You can contact the Obama White House online to comment on strong encryption.

[https://www.whitehouse.gov/webform/share-your-thoughts- onstr...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/webform/share-your-thoughts-onstrong- encryption)

\-- You can contact your state Senators and Representatives via the contact information supplied by ContactingTheCongress.org.

[http://www.contactingthecongress.org/](http://www.contactingthecongress.org/)

\-- You can specifically contact Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to express concerns about their bill intended to force companies to weaken or work around encryption under court orders.

[http://www.contactingthecongress.org/cgi- bin/newseek.cgi?sit...](http://www.contactingthecongress.org/cgi- bin/newseek.cgi?site=ctc2011&state=nc)

[http://www.contactingthecongress.org/cgi- bin/newseek.cgi?sit...](http://www.contactingthecongress.org/cgi- bin/newseek.cgi?site=ctc2011&state=ca)

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/03/09/proposed-senate- bi...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/03/09/proposed-senate-bill- penalizing-resistance-to-decryption-requests-nears-completion-could-be- introduced-next-week)

Express yourself with the honesty and clarity that the government's charm offensive is lacking."

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/03/14/take-a-stand- again...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/03/14/take-a-stand-against-the- obama-fbi-anti-encryption-charm-offensive)

<comment><USER8> And what about the rest of the world? Can we do anything other than just trusting the US citizens to get their government to do the right thing?

<comment><USER9> Make your own country less corrupt, more free, and better for the economically-worst-off, so that your own entrepreneurs may eventually overtake the authoritarian superpowers?

<comment><USER10> >and better for the economically-worst-off,

Not that I disagree with this, but how is this supposed to help entrepreneurs? If anything, it will just increase the tax burden of running a business.

<comment><USER11> If you do stuff like building infrastructure, creating efficient health care systems (because you can do stuff for all the people lowering the price and having a bigger positive effect on overall health) you actually make it better for startups, cause they can use the infrastructure, need to pay lower wages (because health care and infrastructure are cheaper/taken care of).

If you use tax money on education you also have a positive effect for both startups and poor people.

You also even out the divide between new and and established companies, established companies having non innovative advantages, such as brand names, maybe their own "infrastructure". So you even get rid of companies that try to keep status quo and have innovation stall.

The sad thing is that currently some governments/parties/politicians create inhuman, even counter productive productive competition between humans while at the same time have companies be cartels and monopolies and more importantly create counter productive anti-competition laws such as intellectual property, to a degree really awful patent systems, brand protection stuff, etc.

It's kind of destructive in regards of innovation and progress.

<comment><USER10> All good points. Thanks for the well-reasoned response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there's no key - there's no door at all - then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?

It's so disappointing to me to hear a quote like that from the President.

<comment><USER13> So how DO you disrupt criminal plots, then? Do you allow people to conspire to commit crimes?

You're going to find, that once you think it through, that you'll end up limiting the rights and freedoms of individuals... there's no getting around that.

Life sucks that way. People were never their own little countries. I just feel sorry for the middle-class suckers that thought they had freedom. Poor guys - they never figured out they were the tools of the wealthy and powerful telling them they had freedom, in order to make them work harder against the lower- class.

<comment><USER14> > So how DO you disrupt criminal plots, then? Do you allow people to conspire > to commit crimes?

Suppose they meet in person to conspire. Would you suggest having every citizen carry un-blockeable microphones just in case?

This is not a "my freedom to swing my fist ends where your nose begins" kinda issue, this is "are we willing to build a police state if it reduced the risk of certain crimes by X%? Even at the cost of creating entry points into all of our communications that can be exploited by unauthorized and misauthorized actors alike..." issue. The ability to retrieve past conversations about conspiracies is a new capability here, not the ability to keep past private conversations secret (that was never as hard in pre-internet/pre-electronic times).

The interviewer in the article says:

"GREENE: But can you just explain why you would compare, you know, a company helping the government design a way to unlock an iPhone to something extreme as torture and ankle bracelets? I mean, that sounds like a very extreme jump."

But actually, an ankle bracelet that reports your location and audio might actually be less invasive of your private conversations in today's world that reporting the contents of your phone.

<comment><USER15> >But actually, an ankle bracelet that reports your location and audio might actually be less invasive of your private conversations in today's world that reporting the contents of your phone.

Not at all. I have the choice to carry / use a phone.

<comment><USER16> Today you do. This may not be the case in the future.

We have no idea what the political and technical landscapes will look like in 5, 15, or 25 years. It is not inconceivable that your governmental identification "card" will morph from the plastic of today into an embedded device in the phones of tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The larger issue, by far, is whether we are a _free people_.

From the article:

      CLARKE: No, the point I'm trying to make is there are
      limits. And what this is is a case where the federal
      government, using a 1789 law, is trying to compel speech.
      And courts have ruled in the past, appropriately, that
      the government cannot compel speech. What the FBI and the
      Justice Department are trying to do is to make code
      writers at Apple - to make them write code that they do
      not want to write that will make their systems less
      secure.

If the FBI gets its way in this case, forcing Apple employees to perform a service for the government, then it sets the precedent for the government to _compel anyone to do anything the government wants_. When you are forced to work for someone against your will, this is called _slavery_.

Of course the FBI used a terrorist attack to try and get what it's always wanted, and it will abuse the unlock power in the future if it gets it now, but judges could easily cite this case as a defense for the government to compel other action from the people.

Clarke makes it sound like there is court precedent against this compulsion, but that would be overturned if the FBI wins.

Indeed, encryption and privacy are very important, but our very liberty is more important.

<comment><USER18> This is way overblown. Yes, the government should not be able compel Apple to build back doors, but this isn't some kind of new precedent about compulsion. There are plenty of industries where the cost of doing business includes creating something to satisfy a regulatory requirement.

<comment><USER19> I believe that it is indeed a new precident about compulsion. If say, I want to make airplane parts I need to satisfy regulatory requirements. I know those requirements in advance, and can decide if I want to be a parts manufacturer or not. Lets say I instead decide to make drone parts for hobbyists because there's less regulation. Should the government be able to compel me to obtain an AS9100 cert so that they can bolt some of my hobby parts on a DHS operated drone? I would call that slavery. The FBI is attempting to compel Apple to do work that they never anticipated in order to comply with laws that do not yet exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems clear to me that if all the money we spent on fighting terrorism since 9/11 were instead spent on, say, reducing traffic fatalities, it would have saved a lot more people.

<comment><USER21> That's so clear and so mathematically obvious, +100 karma point for you !

That's basic risk analysis

<comment><USER20> I mean, it's "clear and obvious" to me, but since it's a major issue every campaign season and the risks presented by our old and crumbling infrastructure, global warming, and other menaces that don't make gruesome cell phone videos is not most people don't seem to have noticed.

<comment><USER21> 100% agree... My old age tells me that politics are a necessary evil...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think Apple and all other tech companies that support it move as the FBI (or whoever controls the FBI) expected or wanted.

What was revealed a few years ago was the fact that big tech companies betrayed people's trust. So quite naturally they should attempt to regain that trust. Because if majority of people stop trusting tech companies and start using end-to-end encryption, use of encryption stops working as a signifier that indicates a higher likelihood that the user's doing something wrong. Thus it's crucial to keep ordinary people away from using encryption. In order to achieve this, it's important to make people trust big tech companies again.

In my opinion, this is what the writer of the plot of the dispute between the FBI and Apple thinks.

</comment><comment><USER23> "You dont need a gun"

"You don't need encryption"

It's not the bill of needs. I was born with these rights. This is the danger of eroding the constitution, the arguments can be used against whatever issue you want. If we want it changed, do it the right way and pass an amendment. But please, protect the integrity of the most important document we have.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sometime I wonder if the FBI and other security agencies lost perspectives or they know something that we don't.

Time and time again, their argumentation are not particularly persuasive.

I don't doubt the existence of terrorists, but it seems that they are more boogeymen rather than an actual threats.

And when it came down to it, the power of terrorists is to inspire fear, rather than kill people. They can change us because we felt the need to change.

<comment><USER25> Politicians need to appear strong.

For some reason, especially in the U.S., "leaders" have to appear strong. When there's no war going on, they have to start one. Terrorism is easy. There's really nobody to fight, but you get to fight them anyway. Politicians LOVE this.

Law enforcement loves it too. They get to trot it out as an excuse to lengthen their leashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Other governments are definitely going to force manufacturers to make their phones unlockable or not for sale in their country.

China, Russia, Saudia Arabia, all forced Blackberry to turn over their encryption keys long ago.

US politicians should set an example and say we are NOT going to be like China and Russia and other repressive regimes and that when people's lives are literally on their phones, they have a reasonable right to privacy and protection from search and seizure, you know like in our constitution but ignored everyday.

<comment><USER27> Well the winds have changed on that stance, at least in Europe. I've seen a couple of leading politicians say something in the line of: "If china can do it so can we" concerning the Chinese firewall and blocking "unwanted" content on the web, which is scary.

<comment><USER28> If it happens, it'll become precedent, then all countries will want to do it.

The next logical step is to outlaw phones and devices that are incapable of breaking into. Then they'll make it so you need a license to employ cryptography.

It sounds crazy, but where we are right now would have sounded just as crazy 15 years ago.

<comment><USER29> > The next logical step is to outlaw phones and devices that are incapable of > breaking into. Then they'll make it so you need a license to employ > cryptography.

Welcome to the 90s: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States#PC_era) [0]

> It sounds crazy, but where we are right now would have sounded just as crazy > 15 years ago.

Hardly. 15 years ago, the US were just barely past their encryption export ban, and we had yet to deal with the (still ongoing) fallout from it.

[0] although back then the US only tried to backdoor or ban strong encryption for the international market, not for the domestic one, for simplicity reasons the domestic versions of exported products often used "export-grade" (shit) encryption

<comment><USER28> I read the "we're back to the 90s again" articles. I think I would be careful not to overstate the case. I coded in the 90s. I did light crypto in the 90s. This isn't the 90s.

The world was so different then that the analogy wears thin. It was mostly client-server, the web was just taking off, and vast cloud server farms weren't even on the horizon. As you noted, the laws back then weren't for _creating_ crypto -- it was for exporting it. At least in the states, we saw a healthy market for all sorts of new crypto tech: DES, AES, and RSA started in the 90s. (RSA became public in the 90s).

Note that I'm talking from the viewpoint of the average developer making applications. The business side, the international side, and the exporting mess? Yes, it's very similar. My comment was about changes Joe Dev is seeing now. The 90s was "write it, but only sell it locally", the 2020s are likely to be "don't write it unless you have permission", which is a completely different can of worms.

Agreed that the development community as a whole is still recovering from the 90s. The damage we're doing right now will take as long or longer to recover from, if we ever do.

<comment><USER30> The only thing I think that directly ties back to the Zimmermann case would be the public nature of this fight.

..but since we're referencing the 90's: If the feds succeed in gaining the IOS source and signing keys I would say it's more like Phiple Troenix 2.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _" You know, we could, at the far extreme to make the FBI's job easier, put ankle bracelets on everybody so that we'd know where everybody was all the time. That's a ridiculous example, but my point is encryption and privacy are larger issues than fighting terrorism."_

Ok so replace "ankle bracelets" with "GPS/cell triangulated device" and it's a ridiculous example because what, things that are already real aren't really "examples"?

</comment><comment><USER31> I am surprised that a search for "math" only turned up one result in this thread, about car accidents vs terrorist victims.

Isn't it true that encryption legislation or policy is sort of irrelevant next to the very clear math that says encryption will always be ahead of decryption? Even in a (hopefully avoidable) dystopia where encryption is illegal, would that really stop technology companies from continuing to do what they've always done?

John Oliver has a great segment[1] where he notes that the majority of cheap, available encryption applications aren't even US-based, and so it becomes nigh-impossible for our (or any) government to stop any pedestrian from encrypting.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjZ2r9Ygzw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjZ2r9Ygzw)

<comment><USER32> Yep. Cory Doctorow has talked about this: how the universe "makes it easy" to secure communications because mathematically, it's really easy to encrypt (verify that a number is prime) and really difficult to decrypt through hacking (factor a huge prime number).

And because of that, outlawing encryption is really outlawing math, which is ridiculous. Math is a universal API everyone has access to simply by existing. You can't outlaw math.

<comment><USER33> Do you have a link to that? Because I know a guy who really needs to counterpoint it. High-security engineer, Clive Robinson, always said security is about physics if you look at it down to the hardware. The physics try to connect things in ways you didn't see coming. That allows unauthorized communications. The physics also try to corrupt the operation of your chips. That compromises computational security mechanisms. Even encryption algorithms had tons of problems when they were implemented to the point that it takes pro's with years of experience to implement them with any assurance. Those are often broken later.

So, if Doctorow said that, he couldn't be further from the truth. The universe seems to do everything it can to make security difficult via physics itself. Throw in economics and biology (evolving malicious attackers) to top the argument off.

<comment><USER34> Security != encryption in every case. What you're describing is actually also what makes encryption stronger/easier than decryption:

A priori there's only 1 correct plaintext, while there are limitless chipertexts of any given plain text (assuming arbitrary IV lengths and key). You can't change that and this is basically what makes encryption so much stronger than decryption.

<comment><USER33> Only two sentences were about encryption. The others mainly covered the foundations, like kernels or MMU's, encryption depends on or can be bypassed with. You should look up TEMPEST Level 1 safes, PC's, peripherals, and rooms. That's just EMSEC part tgat requires all thst because physics fights us. Then, look up NSA Type 1 hardware and physical separation with Red/Black model to see how you start on endpoints. Rad-hard and fault-tolerant circuitry too where you'll see probabilities instead of certainties.

Add it all up to say that, outside a few products, your security mechanisms from CPU go crypto arent secure. Physics and intrinsic complexity work together to ensure this. Systems fighting all of it have less features, are heavy, more manual steps, less battery life, and cost several times more. Economics takes over there where physics leaves off.

"A priori there's only 1 correct plaintext, while there are limitless chipertexts of any given plain text (assuming arbitrary IV lengths and key)."

A priori there's electrical signals going through analog and digital circuitry that implements a form of it with malicious hardware, software, or networks connected to it. There's tons of ways to intercept or leak those secrets. These are not in the formal model of crypto. Once included, the picture changes considerably and leans my way.

<comment><USER34> Except of course I can create an unbreakable encryption with two pieces of paper and a pencil by constructing a one-time pad. And that encryption has nothing to do with computers except for the fact that doing encryption by hand would take ages these days and we therefore choose to delegate it.

The fact that our computers are too unreliable to be trusted with encryption does not mean that the universe does not favour encryption.

Unless you constantly keep inventing malicous hardware or hidden 'observers' in the paper and pencil scenario there's no way you can say that decryption is easier than decryption.

<comment><USER33> I saw that counter coming. A little bit different, better argument. Several things in here. So, let's look at them.

re paper encryption

That was defeated regularly in the Cold War in a number of ways. Easy or not, the mathematical proof didn't translate directly into the real world due to human issues and physical ones like intercept or observation. FBI's crypo unit has been defeating custom pencil and paper ciphers of criminals for a long time, too. So, we can say the best, provable encryption makes the job more difficult if no observation of the act of encryption, KEYMAT, or decryption take place. That's a lot more limited than mathematicians pronouncements imply. ;)

re universe

"universe does not favor encryption"

Oh, I think it doesn't. For one, encryption only happened one time in known universe that we know of. When it did, it screwed up more often than it worked. Then, even the best forms are defeated by stuff above thanks to other properties of the universe. Universe seems to favor plain text to me. Its own codes are plain to observe, too. Obfuscated at worst.

re computers

That was a nice dismissal but computers are the whole point, right? We talk encryption that we're going to use on a computer most likely. Then someone says some stuff like how we can trust the math. Then I have to point out we run electrical impulses representing machine instructions, not math. Then the conversation drifts to pencil and paper or arcane stuff.

At least you admitted we can't trust the math on a computer because it doesn't represent what it does. Often not on pencil and paper either or in speech if under surveillance. So, we can't trust the math at all. It's always math + all kinds of circumstances and methods. Even then, we can only trust it with probability C as in odds of Compromise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Encryption and privacy are what make this reality work. You think you are you. I think I am me. This reality's ability to keep those separate is a privacy feature. From a Buddhist's perspective our understanding (Dharma) is that we are, on some level, all the same entity.

One of the early sutras put it this way:

> "Discrimination is consciousness. Nondiscrimination is wisdom. Clinging to > consciousness will bring disgrace but clinging to wisdom will bring purity. > Disgrace leads to birth and death but purity leads to Nirvana."

Encryption gives the means by which we can enable privacy between ourselves, or what we think of as self. If we enable complete privacy from all others, we drop into a self-world. If we disable privacy, and join all the others disabling privacy, we drop into an isolated type of Nirvana, with the implication everything becomes quite boring. I have compared this in the past to the observed push and pull of public and private cloud business models.

One solution may come via virtual realities where we can arrive at consensus in a fair and measured way without centralized control. It is my belief that immutable data structures backed by encryption, such as a blockchain, are the path out of this mess.

Here's Alan Watts talking about this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBOcFwUzIIQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBOcFwUzIIQ)

</comment><comment><USER36> >We could put ankle bracelets on everybody so we'd know where everyone was all the time.

How does everyone carrying phones not already make this the case?

<comment><USER37> It's a choice. Duh. Don't have a phone so they can't monitor you while you are not at home.

<comment><USER38> How easy is it to be part of society without a phone? The way people communicate, organize, meet, is all via these devices.

Yes, whether to have these devices is technically a choice, but when the social cost of choosing not to have one is so high, the choice is made for you.

<comment><USER39> Dont be so dramatic. You can have a phone and leave it at home if your gone do something where you don't want to get tracket. Thats just the most simple option. Its not a binary choice.

<comment><USER40> I don't want to be tracked when I go to work (or ever), but I have to bring my cell phone to work because I need it to do my job.

So, yes it's a "choice": I can have my privacy or I can have my job.

<comment><USER41> Get a dumb phone for work.

<comment><USER42> Dump phones still allow tracking you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The Apple situation annoys me because it's no longer about the web. It's about breaking crypto on a device which is vendor-locked. The same thing as breaking homegrown crypto, or DVD crypto; easy and trivial. The fact that Apple doesn't use ephemeral keys and can't simply throw away the key in the event of an incident is worrisome enough.

Real crypto needs to be more compartmented than that. A bank is not secure because of the massive door - it's safe because it would take a thief weeks to empty every safety deposit box.

It's also made even safer when the key is (more or less) thrown away for periods of time and nobody can get it. Even with manual over-ride. Literally somebody could be dying inside the safe and nobody could save them.

In properly implemented crypto nobody should hear you scream.

<comment><USER39> The hole concept of end to end encryption works far better if the ends are actually secure. We use end to end encryption to protect our communucation one the move and our endpoint are protected with secure hardware.

Weakening end point security is certantly not as bad as going after tls (for example) but its still a vital piece of our trust chain.

And the smartphone will grow in importance as an authentification factor and that makes it even more vital.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I just had a thought: what happens if Apple complies with the order (say they lose the legal battle or something), but individual employees refuse to build the software? I think the verdict is out on whether or not Apple, a corporation, can be compelled to do this, but what if they can't find anyone to do it?

Just thinking it _should_ be much harder to compel individuals to do something like this than it is to compel a corporation.

<comment><USER45> Ha! Folks will line up to do the job. I've refused to violate federal regulations (re wireless devices, bands and transmission rules) as a contractor and had the regular employees jump right in and volunteer for the job. At a Midwest manufacturer in a liberal (college) town.

<comment><USER44> Not actually interested in if people are willing to do ethically questionable engineering work; I'm interested in whether or not the government can compel them to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Gun rights are larger issues than fighting mass shootings.

</comment><comment><USER25> Edit: Posted to wrong article. My apologies.

<comment><USER47> Wrong article. You probably meant to reply to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11288841](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11288841)

<comment><USER25> Yes, my apologies. Too many tabs open.</comment></comment></comment>


Developers: User Experience is everything - <AUTHOR> http://chrismdp.github.com/2010/05/ux-is-everything/

<comment><USER2> No it's not. And I say that as a UX professional. Marketing. Brand. Code. UX isn't everything.</comment>


Gmail graduates 3 Labs features - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/12/06/gmail-graduates-3-labs-features-send-and-archive-default-reply-to-all-and-quote-selected-text/ <comment><USER2> I realized the other day that web scale makes differentiation hard. Gmail is the poster child for it.

I hate Gmail, at first I was neutral on it, then I went to work for Google and got to see it used "in production" as it were and found how it could be really useful, then stuff I liked (layout, features) got changed and/or deleted and I now I don't like it.

Now there is nothing wrong per se with Gmail, its doing its thing and I'm doing mine, but I cannot step off the train. I can't just not buy the upgrade and stay with the feature set I like, the train keeps moving, I get sucked along with it. We pay for Gmail for our company, as a paying customer the majority of our users wanted to stay with the old format, we could not. Not an option. I supposed that it true of IT shops that are built on top of Notes or Exchange as well, you get what you get.

I stopped using Gmail labs features when I realized that if they don't "graduate" they vanish. And if you've grown to depend on them, you're screwed.

Sigh.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's expected for users to be fickle. One day they'll like something and the next day they'll leave. Gmail simply provides a platform for facilitating this phenomenon without divulging too much of their resources. I'd say it's a win- win?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yay, "Send and Archive" is my favorite labs feature. It saves me _seconds_ every day. Okay, that might not sound like much but it also makes responding to my email that much less of a chore, which makes me happy.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, it was broken with the gmail redesign and is still broken. I open a thread with 30 new messages, select part of a message half way down, hit 'r', and find myself editing a reply to the very last message. Instead, I have to click an extra time to change the focus to the message (with no visual indication) before selecting it. Selecting text from a message should be sufficient indication to reply to that message, without needing to reposition the invisible focus. This bug costs me minutes per day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well Google Labs seems to be an innovative approach to product development. Quite surprised that I can't name other company which follow that approach. Could work if you have some truly passionate users.

Although they missed a few potential features (see Rapportive and friends).

<comment><USER6> Nokia Beta Labs since 2007.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Direct link to the official announcement:

<https://plus.google.com/u/0/+Gmail/posts/H1mkyyY2nW4>

</comment><comment><USER8> Some discussion about the quote one from last week:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838810>

Spoiler: some people strongly dislike it.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Default reply to all"

This isn't a feature. It's a bug.

<comment><USER10> I see many mistaken "Reply"'s every month, and I think I've only seen one mistaken "Reply to all" in my _life_.

<comment><USER11> You've never seen an email storm then? They're most often started by a mistaken "Reply all". <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_storm>

<comment><USER12> In my experience, they've been caused by misconfigured listservs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Every time I see a new batch of features graduated from labs I still look to see if they've deigned to bring back the right-click-and-hold navigation to labs. It broke my usage habits for months when they "retired" it (and still does, every now and then).

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there somebody at Google who made $200,000 by inserting the widget for `Reply to All`?

<comment><USER15> Deploying _any_ change to 400m+ users is extremely non-trivial.</comment></comment>


ShoeDazzle No Longer Dazzling - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/09/25/shoedazzle-no-longer-dazzling/

<comment><USER2> Seems like a worthless fluff of an article since the reason behind abandoning a seemingly extremely successful business model was not laid out. The closest the article got to addressing it was basically "the board wanted it".</comment>


Gusto launches a free HR product for small businesses - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/16/gusto-free-hr-basics/ <comment><USER2> Gusto is good stuff. Happy customer am I. Please, keep your focus and stay good at what you do. Don't wander off into the 'new revenue channel' weeds and lose sight of what's made you great.

<comment><USER3> This. Gusto (unlike Zenefits) actually seems to care about the product and their customers - don't lose that!

<comment><USER4> Thirded. Struggled with payroll through three other (terrible) companies, have been DELIRIOUSLY happy with Gusto. Please oh please, don't ever change (or lose focus)

<comment><USER5> That's pretty high praise! Mind me asking what you like about Gusto vs other payroll offerings?

<comment><USER4> They do what they say on the tin. It's just that easy. If you're a small business owner, go get ignored by ADP for a couple of quarters (and pay them 2x Gusto's rates), send the late-filings notices to your increasingly- exasperated accountant, and bask in the warm indifference of a massive corporate behemoth who (thankfully, mistakenly) believes they're the only game in town. Then switch to Gusto, and try to describe to us how different it is, without glib hyperbole such as "...everything. And it's amazeballs!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Gusto's payroll product has been exceptionally good, especially when compared to the other systems in the space. We always wished for something similar in HR/benefits, so this is great news.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does Gusto plan to expand their business outside of the US? In Europe every country has its own actors in this market, mostly small companies with a few hundred customers. I wonder why there is still no company providing a solution working (almost) everywhere. Stripe but for HR.

<comment><USER8> Because HR regulations, taxes, benefits, etc. vary widely between countries. And they change all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have used Gusto since it was Zen Payroll (for myself and my clients) and love it. In looking at this product release, I am not sure how this is different than their current product offering. Isn't this already on their Core plan, which has been available for quite a while now. What am I missing here?

</comment><comment><USER10> The 'welcome wall' is a nice feature, but I imagine it is only as good as its input, and could be quite detrimental if new employees just saw a blank page.

</comment><comment><USER11> Happy Gusto customer for two years now, this looks promising.

</comment><comment><USER12> What's the free part? 1 month trial free? I don't see any free offerings besides that. Click bait.

<comment><USER13> Took me a while to find it too, even though it's linked in the article. The product is called HR Basics and includes onboarding, employee directory/resource lists, and PTO management: [https://gusto.com/free- hr](https://gusto.com/free-hr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really love what Gusto is working on bringing high quality HR solutions to very early stage startups. It especially helps with reducing toil on the founders trying to figure out how to run a company for the first time, as well as bridging the expectations for employees that are used to more sophisticated HR systems in large companies.

<comment><USER15> There is a real need of these software in INdia also. Orange is so far doing great in this field but sure there is a room for many good Hr softwares</comment></comment>