Amazon Buys Zappos  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/22/amazon-buys-zappos/ <comment><USER2> Here's the CEO's letter to employees, which has a little more info: <http://blogs.zappos.com/ceoletter>

<comment><USER3> A lot more info! If only more people would upvote the original source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazon bought zappos because zappos is a top notch shipping, fulfillment, and logistics company. That happens to sell shoes but they can easily transition to something else like how they experimented with accessories and even computer goods. Amazon made a cheap deal to buy a younger smaller amazon to add to their existing expertise.

Tony Hseih is amazing to me. LinkExhange sold to Microsoft when he was in his mid 20's and now this. Amazing.

<comment><USER5> actually i would suspect that Amazon partnered with zappos because zappos has a great company culture and brand, and amazon are having problems retaining theirs as they get bigger.

I am sure amazon doesn't need help doing supply chain - in fact I am certain there'd be significant savings to have amazon fulfill zappos' orders.

<comment><USER6> i cant imagine Amazon would pay $840m just for zappos' culture and brand

<comment><USER7> The actual letter from the CEO mentions that Amazon may be using Zappos' warehouse space, which is "closest" to the UPS Worldport.

(Incidentally, Louisville may be UPS' hub, but my Amazon packages arrive fastest when they ship from the Indiana warehouse.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find it vaguely surreal that I work at Amazon, yet I read about this on TechCrunch before I found out "officially".

<comment><USER9> Welcome to the world of publicly traded companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This deal _feels_ right. Both companies seem to be committed to customer service as their number one goal. Based on what I've been reading about Zappos, Tony & Co deserver this. Great company, great management, great culture, great news!

<comment><USER11> Doesn't it feel like a pretty low-ball deal for Zappos? Only $40M in cash and only $850M overall. I get that they're a lower margin business, but still... I'm SHOCKED that they didn't get more out of it.

<comment><USER12> You realise this is nearly a 1 billion dollar deal for a fledgling clothing shop, right?

<comment><USER13> They're ten years old and doing over a billion in gross sales annually. Hardly fledgling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats to Tony on his second acquisition. (He sold LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265M in 1998)

</comment><comment><USER15> It seems a good fit, but I always do worry when great grassroots-type great- culture great-customer-service company gets acquired by a much larger company (even if it's Amazon, which is much better than others - I worked there, I know). It's very hard to avoid the intermixing, and the bad things flow much better than the good.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what the profit is like over at Zappos. We know that they did $1.1ish Billion in revenues but profit figures may be much lower (I've heard as low as $50M pre-tax). My guess though is that Amazon's shipping chain will allow Zappos to lower their costs, increasing EBIT. Still though, does not seem like a cheap deal.

At least Amazon will be able to leverage the Zappos brand should they decide to expand more into Apparel. This would probably work out well in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER17> Congrats to Zappos. This deal seemed to fly under the radar. I think this is good buy for Amazon as long as they're leaving management in place.

</comment><comment><USER18> I recommend zappos to everyone. I haven't bought footwear anywhere else for at least the past 5 years. It seems bizarre it took so long for an online retailer to figure out a great barrier for online shoppers is the return shipping if the item doesn't work out. They got my loyalty based on that even though their prices aren't the absolute cheapest on the net.

</comment><comment><USER9> the negative quantity mistake is pretty funny

</comment><comment><USER19> Good for them, they are two of my favorite online retailers.

<comment><USER20> Agreed, I hope that even though they will be run as two separate companies they will maintain the corporate culture of zappos even under pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like a very good partnership for both parties

</comment><comment><USER21> My first thought when I read this announcement was if my Amazon Prime would work with Zappos eventually.

It sure would be nice, but I'm not counting on it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Too bad zapazon.com is already taken. :)

</comment><comment><USER23> "They sell fuckin shoes! People were selling shoes before them" - dhh.

That quote really struck a chord with me from his talk in 2008. It is quite possibly one of my favorite quotes ever.</comment>


Human voice cloning using just a 5 second sample - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/clone-a-voice-using-just-a-5-second-sample-with-the-help-of-ai-f8dc3cff606b <comment><USER2> Wow, this is very interesting:

[https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adapt...](https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adaptation/)

</comment><comment><USER3> loginless link [http://archive.fo/IZGsY](http://archive.fo/IZGsY)</comment>


Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design - <AUTHOR> https://brutalist-web.design/ <comment><USER3> "A friend gave me design advice once. He said to start with left-aligned black text on a white background, and to apply styling only to solve a specific problem. This is good advice. Embrace this, and you embrace Brutalist Web Design. Focus on your content and your visitors will enjoy you and your website. Focus on decoration or tricking your visitors into clicking ads, and your content will suffer, along with your visitors."

That's something I'm going to keep in mind.

<comment><USER4> Please don't. Pure-white pages are _painful_ to look at, let alone try to read -- just because our monitors can go all the way to #fff doesn't mean that's a good color to use more than once in a (rare) while.

<comment><USER5> I feel like this is an idea for a simple browser plugin. If the site is #000 text on a #fff background, apply a stylesheet with lower contrast.

If high contrast is painful to look at, and you can't control web designers throughout the world, but you can control your own web browser... then why are you still suffering?

<comment><USER6> There's an extension for that. [http://darkreader.org/](http://darkreader.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you've never tried, load something like "lite.cnn.io" and be _amazed_ at how quickly you can see 50 different headlines and links, on any type of device. Similarly, "old.reddit.com" and other simplified designs.

I now strictly bookmark only what I consider the "sensible" versions of a site. And if there isn't a sensible version, I stop using the site entirely.

Also, in 2018 you are doing yourself a disservice on the desktop if you don't have the best content blockers installed. (I use "uBlock Origin" and "uMatrix", not because I want sites to suffer but because _web browsing IS intolerable_ without a blocker.)

<comment><USER8> Doesnt uMatrix use the uBlock origin list? Why have both?

<comment><USER9> I like to use uBlock Origin's element picker to remove parts of websites that I don't want to look at. I don't think uMatrix can do that, although it covers the most basic adblocker functionality.

<comment><USER10> How do you make that persist?

When I tried it seemed I had to type stuff into an edit field, but I'm probably wrong.

<comment><USER11> The lightning bolt "zapper mode" does not persist by design. The eye-dropper "element picker mode" persists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think brutalist web design would be different. These design elements like hyperlink styles, colours... these are not so much a representation of the cconstruction materials. They just feel like arbitrary design choices that through the power of 'default' become ubiquitous and so damn played out that they are offensive to the eye imho.

The construction of websites these days would be revealed in visible responsive columns. Visible cookies... Visible scripts, indented into the page, modular html5 tags...

Sticky nav bars are brutalist I think. Don't they just feel brutalist? It's the blocky additional toolbar vibe, it feels like a utilitarian UI choice.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the OP's idea of brutalism feels a little lazy. It feels more anti-design then true to brutalism. The brutalist buildings in my city don't feel like textfiles. They feel raw, geometric and useful.. kind of like the fan of my old PC tower...

If nothing else, then for the sake of my eyes please just change your colours a bit and go to google fonts and switch it up. This isn't Morse code.

Also, there is no way a brutalist architect would put their profile picture at the base of their building.

<comment><USER13> I get what you're saying. But the OP addresses this argument, shifting attention away from code and more towards the purpose of the site:

"A website's materials aren't HTML tags, CSS, or JavaScript code. Rather, they are its content and the context in which it's consumed. A website is for a visitor, using a browser, running on a computer to read, watch, listen, or perhaps to interact. A website that embraces Brutalist Web Design is raw in its focus on content, and prioritization of the website visitor."

<comment><USER14> same for buildings though... You don't go to a brutalist building to experience the building. The building has the "content" you came for inside. The building houses the content. The webpage isn't the content, it also houses the content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > brutalist buildings often reflect back the forms used to make them

I like the core concept of brutalism, but I see problems with brutalism in general and in applicability to web design...

The problem I see with brutalism in general is that it doesn't go far enough! removing the veneer and doing away with facades is the first step, the point is to be honest; not to intentionally make things aesthetically displeasing. Once it's honest you can focus on good function and beauty emerging from within.

This principle isn't entirely incompatible with web design, however there is a significant difference that needs to be understood: With web design the aesthetics are not completely separable from the function, because in the most fundamental way - you operate a web page by _looking at it_.

Because of this, I prefer to focus on minimalism and typography when it comes to creating highly functional, no bullshit web design. In other words, look at how books have been doing it for the past 1000 years, because beyond having to turn a page their basic function is very similar.

<comment><USER16> The problem I see with brutalist webdesign is that it focuses on the _result_ instead of the _process_. Applying brutalism principles on the process (the upfront design and the actual code) would let beauty emerge by itself indeed, in a much more honest way.

<comment><USER17> The process is what is focused on the result: if you carefully avoid putting useless cruft in your pages, you get clean pages.

It isn't a trivial principle because it has to be applied to a great variety of design choices with a great variety of technical means to meet a great variety of purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As much as I hate bloated page sizes, breaking the back button is the absolute worst thing a website can do. It is a disgusting violation of the user's experience. It's like locking the door behind a customer when they enter your store and then forcing them to jump through the window if they want to leave.

<comment><USER19> Why do websites do this?

<comment><USER20> Breaking the back button is an unfortunate consequence of SPA (single page application) frameworks like React. You'd be amazed at just how easy it is to do. Put a junior on a feature and unless there's process in place to look for back button breakage, it can easily find its way into production. Even if you have QA resources, browser history management is not going to be within their wheelhouse so all they can do is note that it's happening and _maybe_ they can give you a rough idea of which feature caused it.

Essentially, SPA architecture replace page loads with changing the DOM directly. Changes to the DOM don't change browser history unless you tell it to. Breakage can happen in two ways. First you can change things without updating browser history, or you can make changes that update history without actually changing the page. Both break the natural flow of the back and forward buttons.

The easy answer is to tell devs to just make new page loads when necessary, but apps can complicate to the point where page loads mean a great deal of reloading stuff. Then the next answer given to devs is to not load lots of stuff, but loading lots of stuff is often dictated by business needs and is over the devs' heads. Good luck moralizing on business people.

Once I saw how often such breakage slipped into the web app that I work on, I got a lot more patient with other websites. It's actually a really hard problem that I'd put right up there with cache invalidation and naming things. There's no established doctrine for browser history management.

<comment><USER21> I've never had this problem using Vue Router.

Use router links and router pushes for all navigation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We desperately need this and similar ecologically-sound programming philosophies in high places right now.

Just considering news--Moby Dick is 1.2mb uncompressed in plain-text. That's lower than the "average" news website by quite a bit--I just loaded the New York Times front page. It was 6.6mb. that's more than 5 copies of Moby Dick, solely for a gateway to the actual content that I want. A secondary reload was only 5mb.

I then opened a random article. The article itself was about 1,400 words long, but the page was 5.9mb. That's about 4kb per word without including the gateway (which is required if you're not using social media). Including the gateway, that's about 8kb per word, which is actually about the size of the actual content of the article itself.

So all told, to read just one article from the New York Times, I had to download the equivalent of ten copies of Moby Dick. That's about 4,600 pages. That's approaching the entirety of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, without appendices.

So all told, if I check the NY Times just 4 times a day and read three articles each time, I'm downloading 100mb worth of stuff (83 Moby-Dicks) to read 72kb worth of plaintext.

Even ignoring first-principles ecological conservatism, that's just insanely inefficient and wasteful, regardless of how inexpensive bandwidth and computing power are in the west.

<comment><USER23> That's one of the reasons why so many mobile users prefer to get their news through Facebook now: the articles simply load faster.

<comment><USER24> Faster, sure, once you have facebook loaded. Unless, of course, you have a news app, which loads the RSS feeds, which, by nature, is way faster than both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> While I like the sentiments here, a few things stand out is very weird and counter-productive to the message:

1) This is obviously hosted on some kind of dynamic site. Producing 8kb took over 20ms, with most of it in TTFB. Even clearly static resources had this.

2) The stylesheet is 2x the size of the page and contains tons of extraneous content.

3) For a brutalist style, it's quite fiddly about letting userscripts touch its styling. The stylesheet contains a ton of directives with !important and not all are about positioning.

(If accessibility and performance really are features, it feels like the author didn't care to work too hard on those features even in the simplest case.)

4) Also: I do not appreciate seeing ANY tracking pings from something like gaug.es. You certainly didn't inform me that you were sharing my presence with a third party that doesn't recognize any of my rights. If you're gonna do this, at least do it on your compute and I/O time and don't waste someone else's. Have your server pass connection details up to your analytics. That also limits the amount of fingerprinting the tracking ping can do to me, were I not blocking it.

<comment><USER26> >1) This is obviously hosted on some kind of dynamic site. Producing 8kb took over 20ms, with most of it in TTFB. Even clearly static resources had this.

If you check the headers, it's served from s3 via cloudfront. At the bottom of the page, there is a link to a github page that confirms it's a static site.

>2) The stylesheet is 2x the size of the page and contains tons of extraneous content.

>3) For a brutalist style, it's quite fiddly about letting userscripts touch its styling. The stylesheet contains a ton of directives with !important and not all are about positioning.

It looks like it contains at least 2 frameworks, which could explain why. I'm guessing they're needed for the "normal" website comparisons.

>4) Also: I do not appreciate seeing ANY tracking pings from something like gaug.es. You certainly didn't inform me that you were sharing my presence with a third party that doesn't recognize any of my rights.

Your "rights? You're being a little melodramatic here. If you don't want random code to be executed, you should have disabled javascript. I use noscript and it works fine without scripts.

>If you're gonna do this, at least do it on your compute and I/O time and don't waste someone else's.

Who cares? It's not like they're mining cryptocurrencies. They wasted _maybe_ $0.000001 worth of your precious computing resources.

>Have your server pass connection details up to your analytics. That also limits the amount of fingerprinting the tracking ping can do to me, were I not blocking it.

not really viable for a static website hosted on S3

<comment><USER12> For me though, if you are going to make a site all about how hardcore your design style is... So hardcore that you can't be bothered to at least choose some less painful colours and typography. Then I want to open your code and get a hardcore hacker vibe like it was made with a punch card or something.

<comment><USER27> This article isn't really about code design. It's about information and interaction design primarily. The audience the author was writing for is probably more focused on the design rather than code.

With that said, this site is open source and so the community could help it become a example of cleaner/clearer/more minimal coding practices too.

<comment><USER25> Brutalism was about the honest use of materials. In my opinion, any conversation extending that to web pages that doesn't talk about how they're built ignores the spirit of that for another punch take at "use big text."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The design of this page is a breath of fresh air. I wish the web would be more like this in general.

It's totally enjoyable to read the content on that page.

Even the ad is ok. And I would expect it to perform better then the average Adsense ad.

<comment><USER29> I liked how scrolling actually worked, there was minimal jank, the text was large enough, flow was predictable, and it felt fast. I know places have to keep the lights on which requires a u-turn from this but it was surely refreshing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Brutalism is the worst architectonic style. I spent quite a bit of time in brutalist buildings and they impact you negatively. Idk why anyone would want to reference that.

<comment><USER31> Like any school of archeticture, there are good examples and bad. Largely, over time, only the good examples survive. The older the school, the higher percentage of it will be good, surviving examples.

I find the Barbican in London — which I walk through most days — to be a very uplifting building!

<comment><USER32> I was just about to say that the Barbican is probably one of the few Brutalist designs that is actually aesthetically appealing (to me).

Most all other examples just feel like dystopian nightmares.

<comment><USER31> Partly this is because the Barbican is exceptionally well kept (much brutalist architecture is associated with slum estates, whereas the Barbican is mostly inhabited by richer people). The concrete is clean, the ponds and fountains are working, the balconies overflow with plants.

There are many exceptional examples of brutalist architecture in Paris, some well kept, some not so much:

[http://www.anothermag.com/design-living/9587/the- brutalist-b...](http://www.anothermag.com/design-living/9587/the-brutalist- buildings-to-visit-in-paris)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Great read. This could have just as well been titled "Guidelines for Web Design That Respects The User" or "Web Design that Doesn't Suck"

Summarizing:

1\. Don't break accessibility

2\. Clearly label hyperlinks

3\. Make sure your buttons look like buttons

4\. Dont paginate for the sole purpose of padding engagement numbers

5\. No to decorations that distract from the content

6\. Dont break the back button

7\. 'Performance is not a feature'

<comment><USER34> > 7\. Performance is a NOT a feature.

I think you meant to say "Performance IS a feature." (That is what the page says as well)

<comment><USER35> I have no idea what that section is trying to say? It isn't a feature but a requirement is the common argument. It isn't a primary feature but a result of following minimalist criteria is another..

The example that a long book of text downloads in a second seems to be saying the latter..

<comment><USER36> > It isn't a feature but a requirement is the common argument.

An argument that no one listens to, which is why the web isn't performant and is instead full of bloated junk. They are acting like performance isn't even a feature, like users don't care about it and shouldn't have it. This is wrong.

^-- Is what that section is saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Reminds me of:

[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com)

[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com)

[https://thebestmotherfucking.website](https://thebestmotherfucking.website)

> Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and > accessible. You break them.

Always puts a smile on my face.

<comment><USER38> I feel like that last one misses the point. The first two were good, but the last one has colors everywhere, links every other word, random pictures in text, random images, all this random small text. It's pretty much what the original motherfuckingwebsite was lambasting, minus the jquery.

For example: "It uses some cool technologies like JavaScript JavaScript logo, CSS3 CSS3 logo and HTML5 HTML5 Logo"

Okay.... why? Why does this site need JS? Or CSS? What do those technologies do that furthers the message of this site? You're using them just because they're cool? That's the opposite of the point of motherfuckingwebsite. Is this site trying to parody itself and I'm missing the joke?

<comment><USER39> The third link is just extending the second website's idea to include JS, and some other nice things. Though, I don't see how it goes against the point of motherfuckingwebsite? The point of motherfuckingwebsite was to keep it accessible and fast, which the third site certainly does.

Sure it doesn't need JS, but it can certainly help make the site better. (The JS is for the inverted view button, and some text that shifts through colors. I wish more sites had a dark mode.)

<comment><USER38> > Though, I don't see how it goes against the point of motherfuckingwebsite? > The point of motherfuckingwebsite was to keep it accessible and fast, which > the third site certainly does.

No, I don't think that was the point. The point of the original was that all the extra stuff the "best" version added to improve the orignial is unnecessary in the first place. For example, from the original:

"You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no. Responsive means that it responds to whatever motherfucking screensize it's viewed on. This site doesn't care if you're on an iMac or a motherfucking Tamagotchi."

From the "best"

"Every asshole that visits this website can use it without any problem well, kind of" "It's accessible, so everyone can enjoy it but not everyone can read this - this text is Ant-Accessible" "It doesn't use a single media query well, not really"

All of the above seems to be explicitly against the aesthetic of the original. The original was 6Kb, while the "Best" is 600% larger, and really doesn't have much more content wise. Certainly not 600% more. And what do you get with all that bloat? Nothing that makes the site _more_ accessible or easier to read than the first. Everything about this "best" is worse than the first and second.

This has got to be parody or else it makes no sense.

> The JS is for the inverted view button, and some text that shifts through > colors. I wish more sites had a dark mode.)

If more sites focused on just content the way motherfucking website advocates, it would be easy to style it however you please. It shouldn't be the website's job to adjust itself to your preferred reading conditions. It should give you the content, and then you can decide on fonts and colors. Opera does this right, with a mode that will strip out the stylesheet and replace it with your own, so you can invert any website you like. The problem is, it doesn't work well on sites that get too fancy with JS and CSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I made this on behalf of family on last Friday.

[https://ourmemorysite.com/richard-james- grote/](https://ourmemorysite.com/richard-james-grote/)

Thinking about offering a free static hosting for obituaries and other life events.

First theme is pretty brutal and newspaper like. Minimal and HTML5.

Disclosure: Guest book is powered by Remarkbox, a project I'm bootstrapping.

If you need to host an obituary, send a pull request.

[https://github.com/russellballestrini/ourmemorysite.com](https://github.com/russellballestrini/ourmemorysite.com)

I'm thinking about setting up a trust to make sure this site stays online for as long as the Internet is a thing. No link rot, etc.

</comment><comment><USER41> > The term brutalism is derived from the French betón brut, meaning "raw > concrete".

I guess that's true in the case of brutalist architecture ; but more importantly it takes it one step further than « brut » and refers to « brutal » to take the idea into violent territory. Having a raw experience which pays too much attention to the well-being of its users is not brutalist, it's just minimalist.

<comment><USER42> That's a myth, based on a coincidence of the words and the post-hoc fact that people found concrete to be ugly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Tachyons, the CSS component library he used, has a fucking gorgeous website.

[http://tachyons.io/](http://tachyons.io/)

<comment><USER44> See, I don't like this. Shit floating all over the place, poor contrast, bad font sizes.

I see what it's getting at and I can understand why you'd like that general style, but I don't think this is a good example of it.

<comment><USER43> Upon second look, I might agree with you. At least on mobile, I'm only really fond of the yellow section.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I appreciate the throwback to more reasonable websites, but really these days you can get something quite good with Vue. Its not hard to get a site under 200 kb. Webassembly is bound to make sites even 2-5x smaller in the near future.

The real problem is poliferation of ads and site owners that "don't care" if sites are hard to load on slow devices and connections. It's not something people really optimize for anymore.

The real problem, which Google tried to "fix" with their dubious AMP program, is that search engines don't punish huge and dog slow websites. Basically every large site is optimized for ads and SEO. Something we wouldn't see if the largest search engine didn't base their business on the same.

If a search engine half as good as Google appears that doesn't tolerate such trash in the search results all these slow sites will go away overnight

<comment><USER46> I'm just baffled by this, there are many high profile sites that barely work on the misc mobile browsers I use. I avoid them, obviously. I can't be the only one. The only thing I can think of is that due to business demands, and code cruft, the developers just "make things work" on their desktop.

Then when the managers ask them to speed up the site, they literally can't do it.

<comment><USER45> I've worked at plenty of places like this. Sales team wants another analytics WordPress plugin because they barely know how to login to the tools we already have. Slows down page loads by 50%. Sales team complains they they will lose sales, developers told to make the plugin faster because we need it.

Try to load the plugin async and run the hairball through closure compiler. Now only slows down site by 30%. Sales team happy, development manager happy. Cue a repeat in a month

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> If you look at this backwards, brutalist web design is not a merely "back to basic" because at dawn of the web there was no CSS, neither JS and very little tools at your disposal.

HTML pages back then looked too brutal to our eyes, so we visually borrowed from what it was more aesthetically close: Print Design.

We used data tables to design layouts. We used print design tools (PhotoShop, etc) to design shapes, shadows, gradients, custom fonts, even rounded corner (Web 2.0 all-rounded trend came out when browser implemented the border-radius propriety).

Nowadays CSS let us design complex layouts without the need of graphic software. But more than that, in all these years we developed a common "web aesthetic": Today HTML looks less brutal to our eyes than 27 years ago.

This was true even for photography: it took almost 100 years before it was seen as something else other than an "art for failed painters".

</comment><comment><USER48> Two things:

1\. I wish they had mentioned _not_ messing with the "visited" color of hyperlinks. It's so useful and so many sites set it to the same color as unvisited links.

2\. "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams[1] is fantastic and I highly recommend it. It's not specifically about website design but it pretty much all applies.

[1] Not the actor/comedian, she just has the same name. She also wrote a manual for _PageMaker_ (remember that!?) that was so good I still enjoy reading it today, years after the program it's for has been left in the dust.

<comment><USER49> 1\. True, but "visited" is much less use on dynamic sites, where you may have visited the page, but the page itself has changed since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is how it begins.

You want a simple blog just to share your ideas and that's it.

Okay, will add one email sign up form so people can know when I update the blog.

Oh, if they prefer Twitter I should have a link to my twitter so they can add that and know when I update.

Well, I retweet stuff of interest so I should have a small twitter feed on the side, adds content.

How will people find my old stuff? I'll put an archive link.

Oh, there are so many topics I should link by topic and organize it in a tree structure.

Well some links are way more popular so I'll style them so people see them.

I should also have a search.

What if people want to sort according to their own criteria?

How about a feedback rating?

Might need nested comments.

<comment><USER51> None of this stuff violates the "rules" defined in the article. This isn't minimalism, it seems to be about making the formatting simple and purposeful.

The sites that do the things you list are horrid because they just throw libraries at the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This guy's not a professional designer and the typography on the page is not very good. What's he doing making design guidelines? I guess us programmers are experts in everything.

</comment><comment><USER53> this is more like a guide to first principles web design -- giving it a name like brutalist web design is really needlessly complicating things. this is all great but what would be even better is if we could get some brutalist web browsers and some brutalist application layer protocols.

html, javascript and css are terrible for 90 percent of the content that they are used to convey. they are bloated, too complicated, too open-ended and open the way for many security problems. also their complicated nature, mainly javascipt, makes implementing browsers too difficult which results in the current situation where there are only two browsers and neither is a reflection of what users want.

for 90 percent of content on the web, we don't need a turing complete programming language or the infinite variability that is afforded by html and css. we need an application layer protocol that is designed around the discreet use-cases that have emerged now that the web is mature. once we have that we can have better browsers that benefit from competition. and once we have all that, brutalist web design might not be a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER54> I love the idea but was anyone else aware of just how much the different font styles stood out? There seemed to be 3 or 4 styles, different kerning, sans and it was distracting. Funny how something usually in the background makes such a big impact.

Is there any reason to switch so much? Would not switching be better? I'm not sure either way.

</comment><comment><USER55> Is this really brutalist or just ... simple?

<comment><USER56> I don't think this is Brutalist. At best it's minimalist.

The problem is, the design here is comfortable and pleasant to read, but every example of Brutalist architecture I've seen exudes... well.. _brutality._ Those buildings look like they come from a dystopian future where fascist robots took over.

It's a good guide, but poor branding. To me, an actual Brutalist website would be what you see when you view a site's source - raw, unparsed HTML, left to the viewer to make sense of.

<comment><USER55> Maybe a good example would be a "site" / server you have to visit with Postman ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I generally agree that websites should be simple. Website for me means that it's a page that shows mostly static information and there is minimal or no interaction other than reading. For that I think having simple or event brutalist design works fine.

But now, lot of "websites" are actually apps, where there are complex interactions, dynamic information, complex workflows and tools. I don't think the same approach works anymore

I don't think anyone who complains about the complex or visual designs of web apps, complains that same way about their native or mobile apps. Do you really want your desktop windows to be all full screen boxes on white background, every action as a blue underlined link? Do you want your programming ide look this way? Do you want that every time you change a view in your apps there is a full page reload of the content? This is where the complex designs, react, animation, data and state management comes in to make the user experience more fluid, enjoyable, understandable, and hopefully meeting the needs of the users.

There is some fair critisim that some or many websites are over designed and over engineered for various reasons. I also see that lot of the web frontend basics are now forgotten or ignored, you just create everything with JavaScript, and then spend half of the time trying fix or rebuild the functionality browsers provide with html out of the box.

<comment><USER58> Nobody complains about Google Docs being "an app". If a program like that doesn't have "normal scrolling" and a functional "back" button people will tend to forgive them.

Most sites aren't that, though, even if their devs think they are. LinkedIn and Twitter and Reddit are just plain old boring mostly-static collections of pages.

They might have a few good reasons to screw up their UI anyway, though:

\- They can attract devs who want on the bandwagon,

\- The "man on the street" might actually _like_ crap like the Reddit redesign. Let's not blindly assume that our aesthetic preferences are shared by the public, even if they seem like a clear moral good to us (and _especially_ if that moral intuition is informed by a technical background that is not widely shared.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Craigslist is a perfect example of this. I've seen a few competitors pop up like letgo on mobile but it's hard to beat Craigslist's simplicity. The downside to following this approach is that your website can end up looking like Craigslist, at least that's what this site reminds me of.

It looks like CL is hiring a React and Mobile Developer, so it will be interesting to see if that leads anywhere new. Personally, I hope their site looks the same in another 20 years.

<comment><USER60> There are numerous Craigslist redesign projects on Behance that looks visually stunning down to the smallest details. But, I think there's something about mirroring the text-only aspect of newspaper classifieds that makes Craigslist feel familiar and appropriate.

Obviously that plain text style wouldn't work for Facebook, but probably equally so a highly visual/slick look wouldn't with as well for Craigslist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> spot on article describing a cure to an illness spreading through the web designs of today. for those interested in actual examples of brutalist websites, scroll through [http://brutalistwebsites.com/](http://brutalistwebsites.com/). and the obligatory [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) should be bookmarked right away!

<comment><USER62> I feel like the sites on [http://brutalistwebsites.com/](http://brutalistwebsites.com/) aren't really what's described in the OP link, conversely they look full of redundant CSS and JS that hinders efficient reading. Now, [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) that fits very well, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I wish there was an easy way (e.g. browser feature or extension) for people viewing a siteto get the best automated approximation of this for any web site. (actually my firefox extension Aardvark kinda tried/tries -- since 2005! :) -- there's a way of selecting and area of the page and hitting "b" to go black and white, but it also sort of normalizes font sizes, etc and gives most sites something pretty close)

I also wish that web publishers could customize this behavior, possibly simply by have a different css file for it.

It would be great if users could choose to view the web this way as a default, but I don't know if I would choose that option. And I can't get on board wishing every site, or even most sites, were like this. It would be like living in a neighborhood where all the houses were the same shade of white, or that every meal I had was the same thing. I find colors and fonts and graphics appealing, even if they are subtle and played-down like Hacker News.

If you like this look, that's great, but I wouldn't advise it for a web site that wants lots of viewers/users.

(aardvark still works as a bookmarklet: [http://www.karmatics.com/aardvark/](http://www.karmatics.com/aardvark/) )

</comment><comment><USER64> The idea that text can be essentially meaningful without a medium that demonstrates competence or craft is an expression of contempt for the reader.

Brutalism as an architectural movement was about creating anti-human symbols that exalted totalitarian institutions, and was a naive mockery of human experience.

Brutalist buildings are abominations we only keep around to serve as a reminder of our capability for hubris. I can only assume brutalist web design serves the same purpose.

<comment><USER65> Do you have any specific complaints about the design of the linked page? Because you seem to be assuming that the properties of Brutalist architecture that you hate would necessarily be inherited by a web design style named after it. I see no reason that should be the case. We have an example of the style directly at hand, so why not speak in specifics?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> This is general good advice but isn't great advice. To explain, the 1st part is to get your message across which is really behind the good part. If you don't do that, you are missing the point so this author is stressing to only worry about point 1 which is good advice for most people as most people aren't super skilled. Great advice is to of course go with point 1 but also point 2 in that you should delight and amaze to pull them in after that point to have an emotional response. [https://www.tesla.com/](https://www.tesla.com/) and [https://www.magicleap.com/](https://www.magicleap.com/) are more extreme examples of point 2 as they have a stronger emotional play but most people focusing on point 1 will do just fine if that's all they ever did. Apple is probably the best example I can think of though all around in both point 1 and point 2.

</comment><comment><USER67> Yes. No.

Short: Good advice, if you include your expectations as a "default" or "reset" style that is applied before.

Long: This advice only works as long as browser vendors or users don't take up the liberty the specs grant them: to build a completely customized default ostyle (as mentioned in another comment "white page, left-aligned, black text").

</comment><comment><USER68> That's funny to see how so many people are pro-brutalist for buildings.. At work we have an on-site coffee bar, they used the "industrial-look": exposed pipes and ceiling, it's very annoying because it's very _noisy_ , I suspect that many brutalist buildings are the same: very unpleasant for those who work there.

</comment><comment><USER69> I generally agree with the principles. There's so much bloat and poor usability around that it's worth going back to basics. However, part of the pleasure of using a website is the design - put a 'brutalist' site and a 'brutalist with a design pass' infront of people and see which they prefer...

</comment><comment><USER70> It seems like a any particular fad in UI design has just enough time to get well-defined before it goes out of fashion.

</comment><comment><USER71> [https://elementcss.neocities.org](https://elementcss.neocities.org) might qualify. I'll review. The main change I think is to underline links.

Great idea! I've been hankering for simpler, cleaner web design for a while.

</comment><comment><USER72> Relevant bit from Dieter Rams: good design...

Is innovative

Makes a product useful

Is aesthetic

Makes a product understandable

Is unobtrusive

Is honest

Is long-lasting

Is thorough down to the last detail

Is environmentally friendly

Involves as little design as possible

</comment><comment><USER73> Love the function-first design approach -- e.g., "start with left-aligned black text on a white background, and to apply styling only to solve a specific problem."!

But I'm not sure that "Brutalist" is the best name for it, as it carries a connotation of harsh, even ugly architecture designed around the materials, which brutalizes the user, whereas this web design is all about presenting the content in the best, least distracting way for the user ("When in doubt, do what Tron does: fight for the users.").

Sure the name is edgy & gets attention, but...

<comment><USER74> I completely agree, I was about to write the same: that name is VERY badly chosen, it conveys the wrong idea to anybody who has not read the origin of the term, and makes it sound horribly pretentious (something I hate).

Whereas the ideas are quite sound (and common sense). I also find it weird, to say the least, that so many people seem to rediscover those ideas that have been known -and advocated- FOREVER by people with a clue (look at Jacob Nielsen for an example).

I also enjoy the irony that the writer uses a VERY BIG font for the titles (H1), that "brutalizes" (LOL) my eyes, especially the HUGE title of the article: they are MUCH too big.

BTW, it's "béton brut" not "betón brut", the typo makes it seem really weird for french people. Cf. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut) .

<comment><USER75> The term is not the author's (though perhaps it was misunderstood), it is a fairly established style in current web design culture:

[http://brutalistwebsites.com/](http://brutalistwebsites.com/)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=web%20brutalism](https://www.google.com/search?q=web%20brutalism)

<comment><USER76> These are the exact opposite of what the original post is advocating for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Sadly this site makes mo mention of the hell that is web fonts. Few things frustrate me more than loading a site, then waiting to read the content because the author thought I cared about whatever pretty fonts they wanted to use. I actually have a collection of screenshots of websites in this sad pathetic half-rendered state where you can make out where the text is supposed to be but is missing because the browser is downloading 10Mb of some font that looks barely different from the native font anyways...

</comment><comment><USER78> I consider my personal site to be Brutalist, in that it matches the features that people mean when they say "Brutalist web design" [0]. I didn't intend that when I made it, I just like my sites to match the system on which they run as much as possible and I got sick of maintaining overly complex sites, and went with"start with black text".

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

</comment><comment><USER79> Could we somehow estimate how much electricity unnecessary design - <USER2> meaning unnecessary js running on pages - costs the planet? I guess it was done already...

<comment> amiga-workbench Javascript is probably second only to bitcoin from a carbon footprint standpoint.

<comment><USER80> Please elborate. Because javascript burns battery om a laptop?

<comment><USER81> Yes, running JS takes energy. Also, transferring this extra data over the network, running servers that process data transferred by JS (ad tracking) and running computers used by frontend developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> That was one the clearest guideline description I've ever readen in my life.

Obviously I'm not surprise this was written by an Engineer , it's very clear about what to do and what not.

Usually trainings and guidelines made from Designer are useless to developer , they talk about emotion , colors , moods etc... Which is key for marketing and UX but does not help a developer improve it's skill in UI .

<comment><USER83> Skill in UI, or if something should work generally for everybody, or optimized for a specific audience, is audience dependent. Design is basically cultural anthropology, extracting real world types and positioning products to adress those types.

Technically it's tough to sperate both worlds, because layout (grids) and behavior (transitions, animations) have strong stylistic implications. This then means that a developer skilled in UI (making it work generally) can't adress specific audiences, most likely racing to the bottom (too many others doing the same and competing for the same general audience).

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> > The term brutalism is derived from the French betón brut

it's "béton", not "betón". And I'm pretty sure the term comes from the word "brutal" because the style was deemed as such, figuratively, and not the use of concrete "brut", which makes no sense to begin with as buildings would be built with "béton armé" or "béton fibré".

<comment><USER42> "béton armé" or "béton fibré" refer to the _inside_ of the concret.

"Béton_brut" referes tothe _surface_

A concrete building can be both "brut" and "armé" at the same time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9ton_brut)

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I like the idea, but the weird mixed sizing of the headings throws me off a bit

I suppose a weird mix of sizings is a key characteristic of brutalism though!

</comment><comment><USER86> Keep it functional and beautiful. If you had to choose one, choose functionality over design. I believe that's what this article is essentially saying. Bad design hurts functionality, in that case it's better to have little to no design at all. If you can keep it functional while applying beautiful design do it by all means.

</comment><comment><USER87> This page slapped me in the face... But in a good way.

I'm not much of a designer, so I wonder what the main differences between "minimalism" and "brutalism" are. To me, I'm ok with sites running analytics and an ad or two, so long as I can read all the content in one go without the page stuttering on my phone or redirecting me suddenly.

<comment><USER88> I'd say minimalism is characterized by trying to remove as much non-content as possible, while this philosophy is more about everything serving a purpose. A minimalist might want to get rid of ads because they are not content, while this kind of brutalism prescribes designing the ad in a way that doesn't detract from the content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> here's a nice critique of this 'brutalist web design' nonsense [https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2018/05/29/et-tu- brutalist/](https://www.tommoody.us/archives/2018/05/29/et-tu-brutalist/)

<comment><USER90> I'm glad not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid.

This is pretentious nonsense. It was indeed satisfying to scroll to the bottom of the page and see the author's "Colophon". It immediately reminded me of the footer in Maciej Cegłowski's site, [http://idlewords.com/](http://idlewords.com/).

> This is where a douchier person would write 'colophon'

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> [http://www.hyperfiddle.net/](http://www.hyperfiddle.net/), an exotic fullstack web framework, enforces brutalist design! (cofounded by me) Database effects are buttons and navigation is links, and the rest too. What do you think, HN, does it work?

</comment><comment><USER92> Great idea, but the source of the website is in opposition to it: it's completely unreadable one-liner.

</comment><comment><USER93> While I lived in Denys Lasdun's halls of residence at the University of East Anglia it was normal for complete strangers to climb through the kitchen window, as that was the easiest way to get around. I only take negative inspiration from Brutalism when I think of usability.

</comment><comment><USER94> I did brutalist webdesign, before it was cool: [http://mrtno.com/](http://mrtno.com/) (hire me for pure html+css wonders, no images) and I promise: it won't work on your silly smartphone!

</comment><comment><USER95> Lighthouse from Google can help to achieve some of the points and others not listed.

</comment><comment><USER96> HN does not follow all these rules but I would wager it is a better experience. For example, if every link were underlined, the page would be very cluttered visually.

</comment><comment><USER97> This is the first attempt (of the many attempts out there) at "brutalist" web design I've seen that seems to approach the actual ideas of brutalism.

</comment><comment><USER98> >The term brutalism is derived from the French betón brut, meaning "raw concrete".

Really? I would have thought it's derived from the term brutal, which predates concrete.

<comment><USER99> The "raw concrete" etymology seems to be correct.

[https://www.wmf.org/project/british- brutalism](https://www.wmf.org/project/british-brutalism)

<comment><USER98> Multiple sites quoting the same soundbite doesn't make it correct.

Plus even the supposed french origin (Béton brut) is derived from the word brutal...again predating concrete. Beton = Concrete, so even that "origin" is fairly recent.

<comment><USER100> > the word brutal...again predating concrete.

I don't necessarily disagree with your main point — I don't know enough to say either way — but that statement isn't true unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Concrete was used extensively by the Romans, and also before them.

The earliest citations in the OED for "brutal" are 16th century (in English). (It also says "Compare French _brutal_ , 16th cent.") It is derived from a Latin word, but even then it likely doesn't predate concrete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> White sans-serif with occasional monospace, against black background is the best option, with `<meta viewport="width=device-width">`

</comment><comment><USER102> I hate brutalism in architecture. You can have usability without losing warmth. That said, I love minimalism on the web (and not just because I'm a programmer and not a designer). I love plain html sites, and I think spending all your design time on typography can yield a really zen and snappy website. Unfortunately, what the web really lacks is uniformity across sites, which can be confusing to users. I'd much prefer everyone use semantics tags and let the user decide on the styling, or use a browser default. CSS shouldn't even be a thing.

</comment><comment><USER103> You will love [http://fastbmk.com/](http://fastbmk.com/) if you like Brutalist Web Design!

</comment><comment><USER104> A friend's site:

[https://loveanddeathincharlottesville.com](https://loveanddeathincharlottesville.com)

</comment><comment><USER105> My older sites are like this. XHTML, even. Really fast loading, because they pull in nothing but the HTML page and their own images.

</comment><comment><USER106> > That was an ad for one of my books. It was clearly marked

I thought it was an example belonging to the text. I had to click it to check.

</comment><comment><USER107> Yes! I would argue this steers away from brutalism into a much more sensible, usable place. Definitely the kind of UI I advocate strongly in my book. <shameless type="plug"> [http://uxbook.io](http://uxbook.io) </shameless>

</comment><comment><USER108> I like this. Kind of feels like a web page processed by Readability.

Has anyone read his book?

</comment><comment><USER109> This is plain old HTML as it was intended by W3C. It's good to go back to first principles but no need for new nomenclatures such as "brutalist" to do that —- I find that slightly pretentious.

</comment><comment><USER110> Obligatory link to [0] (has some profanity) which looks good to me and loads fast on my edge connection and has about 7 lines of css.

[0] [http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com)

</comment><comment><USER111> Such a relief: basically, Safari Reader view.

</comment><comment><USER112> Would wikipedia count as brutalist?

</comment><comment><USER113> Fantastic stuff!!!

</comment><comment><USER114> Agreed on sentiments, critical discussion is important.

The navigation uses anchor tags, these are identified by 'id' and not 'name', therefore not HTML5. This only works because some browsers are generous like that.

The document is not complicated, there are H1 tags followed by lots of p tags in sections.

There is no reason to use classes to style this content or to use a stylesheet that is 96% unused. There is also no need for a huge amount of normalise.css if you are not using forms or anything else 'tricky'.

The content unstyled is still readable on some lame Internet Explorer browser, so normalise is not needed. Stuff can look different. That is allowed.

For visual hierarchy those h1 tags could be h2 after the document title/heading. CSS grid would work nicely to get the white space right with a handful of lines of CSS. Such a trimmed stylesheet for this document could fit on a screen and could therefore be inlined, not externally loaded and made 20 times bigger than it should be.

Actually if you look at the document outline it is all over the place. Things get nested deeper and deeper. The structure should look better than that but it gets thrown off by things like the advert in the middle making subsequent sections sub-sections of the advert according to the outline. A <nav> tag around the TOC would help with the document outline.

The address tag should also be used for attribution at the bottom and the figure tag should be used for images if accessibility matters, coupled with picture and srcsets if you can magically generate them.

A couple of points regarding the content of the article:

I question the insistence on 'ask a designer' as I don't believe the best designers always call themselves 'designers'. Any 'ask a designer' comment is best qualified, e.g. 'ask an experienced user experience designer'.

The premise of 'design for a small screen first' is a conversation that needs to be re-framed as 'design for all devices, all input methods and all orientations' rather than this wireframe for mobile and that wireframe for desktop approach.

Responsive Web Design was a great idea five years ago but the game has moved on. Fluid typography, custom properties and other new HTML5 things such as CSS Grid can't be mocked up with Sketch or Adobe products. The design tools are stuck a generation behind what can be achieved, as are those that only know how to use said tools.

It is fine to have that content as unordered lists and lots of sections whilst you are working on your document structure. It is no good thinking 'burger menu first'. It is as silly to working on a car engine and confining yourself to working in just the engine bay and not on the workbench guided by someone's drawing of what the car with the bonnet/hood closed looks like.

</comment><comment><USER115> This is a gem. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER116> The "Web 2.0" design is cancer

Well, I owe few years that kickstarted my career at a very nice income level to it, but all 3 years as a webdev I hated with passion every request of squeezing js animation into every part of the page. God thanks web development is a thing of the past for me

Though, that dude who incessantly pushes his imaginary "design trend" to every major website is not much a "lesser evil"

It is an "ingenious" business model to raise up hype over "the new great design trend" nobody heard about, and then sell your expertise in it and your design "services" at six digits per project

<comment><USER31> JS is fine, as long as it has purpose. I think the original idea of progressive enhancement needs a renaissance: use little bits of JS to improve the lives of people who have it enabled (e.g., by autocompleting an input, filtering a large form), but add it _after_ you've made it work without JS.

<comment><USER117> Only for sites whose primary purpose is text content delivery. Which isn't really the majority of useful sites these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> When I saw the title I thought to myself: yet another pretentious art student with an unreadable website.

But then I opened the link and was pleasantly surprised: finally a website that uses the term "brutalist" properly!

</comment><comment><USER118> I wish there was a brutalist browser that just turns every website into a brutalist designed page. It'd make me me suoer happy. Might even pay for it.

<comment><USER81> You can enable reader mode for all websites in Safari. On iOS, just hold the reader mode icon and select 'always enable'. I do it when reading news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> Because of Spam, I give a bogus link by default to all forms, then update it to the correct one with JavaScript.

I still log all post requests. After five years I've gotten less than 10 non spam submissions to the bogus link.

</comment><comment><USER120> Twenty points for him linking to a site (his non-brutalist stitch-fix link) that gave me an aneurysm after trying to scroll for a few pages. Not sure what he's trying to say there. "I learned how not to respect my user"? ( [https://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/](https://algorithms- tour.stitchfix.com/) , should you also want to punish your cortex ).

</comment><comment><USER121> I like the general design philosophy, but I think this website as an example is weakly executed and shows the author's poor commitment to his own philosophical ideals. Specifically, the author claims to maintain a 'Truth to materials', which is summarized on the Wikipedia page he links to as "any material should be used where it is most appropriate and its nature should not be hidden". However, he then goes on to include hidden JavaScript tracker code in the footer of his page:

      $ xidel https://brutalist-web.design -s --css='script'
      var _gauges = _gauges || [];
          (function() {
            var t   = document.createElement('script');
            t.type  = 'text/javascript';
            t.async = true;
            t.id    = 'gauges-tracker';
            t.setAttribute('data-site-id', '5aff5aa154a1b97a229142e1');
            t.setAttribute('data-track-path', 'https://track.gaug.es/track.gif');
            t.src = 'https://d2fuc4clr7gvcn.cloudfront.net/track.js';
            var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
            s.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s);
          })();

Note that this injects a _further_ JavaScript blob into the DOM ([https://d2fuc4clr7gvcn.cloudfront.net/track.js](https://d2fuc4clr7gvcn.cloudfront.net/track.js)). Anything but 'truth to materials' here.

Beyond this, the author also minifies his 'built by hand' HTML and includes a few other blobs of webpack-bundled JavaScript code. Sure, this is all not- unexpected for run-of-the-mill websites these days, I was just expecting a better example from a web-design manifesto advocating the exact opposite.

<comment><USER122> Those examples are not design related...

<comment><USER121> > Those examples are not design related...

I disagree. I'll grant that if you narrowly idealize 'the visitor' to be a content-consumer who never chooses to 'view source' (let alone use a command- line user-agent to interact with a website), minifying/bundling HTML/JS doesn't affect the 'visitor experience' design.

However, hidden tracker JavaScript definitely impacts every visitor's experience, and directly betrays the 'honest and transparent interaction with a visitor' the author desires:

> a button agrees to submit the visitors information to the server. Hiding > this interaction behind a hyperlink or unadorned text betrays the core > nature of a website.

The JavaScript tracker hides its interaction behind the browser's JavaScript engine, which is a much greater betrayal than any poorly-styled hyperlink or button.</comment></comment></comment>


IOS color picker the easy way - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codecropper.com/2011/04/ios-color-picker-the-easy-way/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is my first technical post, so I'd like to hear from you what you think of it. Good points? bad points? Any feedback is appreciated</comment>


Introducing the Qualcomm Toq Smartwatch, Mirasol Display (Video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzTrqifCOhs&feature=youtube_gdata

<comment><USER2> I don't really care about the smartwatch, but the Mirasol display should really get more attention from other OEM's. It's probably the best compromise between e-ink like battery life, and having colorful animated screens (nowhere near the color richness of the latest IPS LCD's or AMOLED's though, but it seems good enough for something like a smartwatch).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why so far from all the smartwatches being announced out there, this one grabbed my attention. Though to be honest, I'm still disappointed in the design aesthetics.</comment></comment>


Show HN: BARE Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/claytongulick/BARE <comment><USER2> Quite nice. I especially like the concept of application state. Well worth the read.</comment>


Are special glasses needed for regular computer users? - <AUTHOR> http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/02/23/1494041/are-special-glasses-needed-for.html <comment><USER2> I'm not an M.D. or similar, but this is good advice:

 _Q: What's the 20-20-20 rule?

A: People get on the screen and they don't take their eyes off for way too long. We recommend that every 20 minutes, they look at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds. We're taking the eyes from this turned-in contracted muscle position and stretching them out for a short period of time._

<comment><USER3> Is there anything beside intuition that makes you think this would help anything? It seems plausible to me too, but I have zero evidence that it would help anyone's eyes.

<comment><USER2> Three reasons: it sounds reasonable, because the eye muscles are probably not 'designed' for prolonged use in short distance focus. Second, I've seen similar things mentioned from other sources, which also seemed credible. Third, my experience - I can't abuse my eyes the way I did twenty years ago, and the "pause and look at a distant thing" seems to help. Actually, I prefer 20 yards/meters or more, instead of just 20 feet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a pair of Gunnar Optiks (<http://www.gunnars.com/>) that I LOVE.

I used to have ridiculous eye strain when staring at the computer screen for hours, but after getting a pair it's all but gone away. Like many here, I spend all day in front of a computer programming. Now I can't go anywhere I'll be using a computer for a prolonged period of time without them. When I bought them I thought they were a bit of a gimmick that worked mostly on the placebo effect, but after using them for close to a year, I can honestly say they have made a great impact on my ability to do work. I'd highly recommend that anyone who hasn't and has issues with eye strain give them a try.

Note, I do not work with Gunnar, nor am I associated with them in any way shape or form other than being a happy consumer.

<comment><USER5> I find the info on their site _very_ difficult to evaluate... i.e., to tell if they are just blowing smoke... full of slick images, slack on facts/data.

What are supposed to be the mechanisms by which their products might possibly reduce eye strain?

<comment><USER4> I felt the same way.

Basically, first you'll notice the lenses are colored yellowish. They make everything feel a bit "warmer." I know that's extremely subjective, but I can't explain it any other way. I suppose one could argue the same thing could be accomplished by tweaking your graphics card settings or monitor, but this just automatically makes things feel nicer. Also, it's not so extreme that everything looks yellowy, it's very subtle.

But the main thing is that it has a different focal length. What I was able to gather is the following. Most reading glasses have a focal length that you'd have for reading. (~12-18 inches or so) These have a focal length which is 2-3 feet which is the viewing distance for staring at a computer screen. I'm pretty sure this is the main thing that helps eliminate the eye strain that I used to experience.

<comment><USER6> This is possible by adjusting software settings. I noticed a huge difference when I changed the colour temperature of my monitor from 9300 K to 5000 K. It made everything look "warmer," as you describe.

In addition to generally feeling less eye strain, my eyes no longer tear up and hurt after a number of hours, and I don't have trouble sleeping after using my computer at night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used to experience "weird vision", which was diagnosed as ocular migraines. I was prescribed reading glasses but was skeptical - my vision has always been perfect. I bought a cheap $20 pair of glasses to disprove that theory, and have been wearing them for over a year now with none of the symptoms I used to have.

The optometrist's theory was the same as stated in this interview - that I had a bit of trouble focusing at book/monitor distance, which was magnified by the amount of time I spent working. The reading glasses take the strain off of my eyes = no more migraines. It's been awesome.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish I had some kind of glasses like that a decade ago, when my monitor was a small crappy CRT. That thing was painful to use, in the proper sense.

Nowadays, I don't care that much, the currently available LCDs are pretty good.</comment>


The 15 most promising start-ups and products of 2013. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/2c78010467f2

<comment><USER2> Byron - that's a pretty impressive list. What about PocketSuite ([http://pocketsuite.io](http://pocketsuite.io)). It's a mobile app that makes it easy for independent contractors, freelancers, and busy people to book and pay each other while on the go.

</comment><comment><USER3> " Snapzu is a social sharing and discovery platform similar to reddit that focuses on quality over quantity."

Really, we need another one of these?</comment>


Finding Meteor Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.discovermeteor.com/2013/11/22/getting-a-job-coding-meteor-apps/

<comment><USER2> The article comes off as a bit desperate - they want all developers who want to bill themselves as Meteor experts to list it as a skill & promote it as such, but developers shouldn't be shoehorning themselves like that.

Devs enthusiastic about your tech will be evangelizing it/talking about it without being spurred to. An article like this shouldn't be necessary.

<comment><USER3> I think you really missed the point on that. I barely keep my profile updated on LinkedIn and they are trying to spur the community to update their profiles to be more relevant to what they are doing now.

That isn't desperate, just a smart way to grow. The Meteor Development Group is very interested in helping companies using Meteor to find solid developers. I went to an unconference a few weeks ago and it was clearly at the top of Matt Debergalis' list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would be careful about overselling the Meteor as well. Not all projects are trivial web-apps, some enterprise clients will benefit from strongly typed languages on server-side as opposed to legacy ones.

</comment><comment><USER5> While it's technically true that "a large majority of clients won't care one bit if you code their app in Meteor or Fortran as long as it just works," I take issue with the quote, "We sell them on Meteor because JavaScript is a universal language and it will be easier to hire for later when they replace us."

When your application is built using a framework (or "platform") today, the underlying language often matters very little and you will realistically _need_ a framework expert. Yes, you might be willing to pay somebody talented to learn, but a lot of good developers won't even want to touch a new framework unless they believe it will take them in a direction they already want to go in the first place.

I don't envy the companies that are being sold on the frameworks and NoSQL databases du jour. Most of them are merely buying themselves a limited labor pool and high salaries/hourly rates.

<comment><USER6> I think the point Josh was making is that all things being equal, it's easier to find a JavaScript coder than, say a Scala coder.

But yeah, the framework definitely matters as much as the language.</comment></comment>


JOII: Simple object inheritance for JavaScript. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/haroldiedema/joii

<comment><USER2> I don't think those are actually traits. They look more like mixins.

If they were traits, there wouldn't be any point to also having interfaces, since traits are a strict superset of them.

<comment><USER3> Built based on this: [http://php.net/trait](http://php.net/trait)

Depending on the language, I think they're pretty much the same thing; implementation of (read: copy) functionality from a stateless object.</comment></comment>


The Machine Learning Race Is Really a Data Race - <AUTHOR> https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-machine-learning-race-is-really-a-data-race/ <comment><USER3> It's incredible. The last company I worked for before going it alone (I was the front-end engineer and moved away from ML based business models) was trying to automate statistical analysis. I came from an academic background in economics and I tried to propose modelling to them in simple terms and they jumped to, "it sounds like you're talking about forecasting, let's go with that." And they started trying to implement python models from academic papers with highly limited training data and my reaction was generally, WTF?! You can't even start to forecast without a reliable base model. But they went ahead trying to sell stuff like churn prediction to companies with 0 understanding of how these models work at the basest levels.

And yeah, Google started to throw their hat in the game with Analytics 360 and an enormously larger training base. Amazon's another major player.

Weirdly enough though, people do still blindly pay my previous employers to figure stuff out because easy answers are always actionable, even if they're wrong. It's just crazy because the CEO explained to me that lying about the service to potential customers and investors was necessary because "Faking it til you make it" was a sound business principle in his mind like 1980's Michael J Fox was his primary sources of business info.

Long story short, don't waste your time with these little companies purporting ML holy grails. They're probably just lying to you, whether intentionally or not. ML is a game for the big boys with access to market level aggregates. The models that last company came up with were wildly inaccurate.

<comment><USER4> I only partially agree. Building good ML models and even outperforming the ML services of the big players is absolutely feasible. Have e.g. a look at this talk from PyCon DE (in English: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XniwzOCWi2c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XniwzOCWi2c)), which shows how a small team built a machine vision system to read car registration numbers from official documents. The system was built and trained with an extremely small dataset (I think around 60 scanned documents with some data augmentation) and was able to easily beat the Google Cloud ML algorithm by an impressive margin (Google ML had an intolerably high error rate for this seemingly simple problem).

So I'd say if you have a very specific area that you're investigating you have a very good chance of beating larger players that don't specialize as much as you can. Of course competing against Google in self-driving cars or machine translation might be a bad idea, but even in those areas there are small startups that produce impressive results (e.g. DeepL: [https://www.deepl.com/en/translator](https://www.deepl.com/en/translator)). Also, big companies regularly exaggerate their capabilities as well (sometimes more than startups), just have a look at how IBM markets their Watson AI/ML solutions, and what they deliver in reality.

So personally I'd say it has never been that easy to build relevant and interesting ML/AI based solutions as a small team, and it is possible to beat large players if you have the right approach and the right (very narrow) problem.

<comment><USER5> DeepL is a very promising thing. I was very sceptic on the future of automatic translation seeing as Google Translate seems to have stagnated for the last two years or so, but I've just recently tried DeepL on a German newspaper article a couple of days ago and it did a very good job. Granted, I don't know German (hence why I used DeepL) but nevertheless the English translation provided by DeepL seemed more polished than what Google Translate usually does.

<comment><USER6> I've used it a fair amount, and continue to be amazed with the quality it puts out. There are still some issues with formal pronouns, subject-matter-specific contractions etc, but otherwise it does a great job with both EN->DE and DE->EN

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Data quantity and quality are key. Both, though. This is why it's foolish to go up against an ML product from Google, Facebook, or (maybe) Microsoft. You just can't compete with the volume and quality of data they can access.

In sectors like automotive, where every brand is competing to try and build the best predictors using only their own data, there is a huge opportunity available for the first two companies to share data with each other. Doubling your data quantity brings a significant improvement to any model, and would put them ahead of any competition. That advantage only grows the more players you add to the sharing pool.

I believe that if humanity is really going to harness machine learning, the concept of a bulk data commons is an inevitable requirement.

This makes decentralized personal data control, homomorphic encryption, and similar technologies incredibly important.

<comment><USER8> > This is why it's foolish to go up against an ML product from Google, > Facebook, or (maybe) Microsoft.

I was sure someone will say this. I think it only applies for advertising, commerce and insurance. When it comes to learning ML models on images, text and games, big corporations don't have a unique trove of data. They only have the data advantage when it comes to personal data.

The more important advantage big corporations have is hiring the best and hiring more ML scientists and engineers. The job demand far outstrips the offer.

<comment><USER9> ImageNet has 14 million images. How many images does Google have available to them? They've got about 1000+ of my personal photos backed up on Google Photos, so if each of their 200M monthly active users is like me, that's 200 _billion_ images from Google Photos alone. Then add every image crawled from the WWW for image search (that was several tens of billion when I was there, each tagged with text & structured data from its page of origin), every Street View photo (that was thousands of hard drives worth, measuring in the petabytes total), and high-res satellite images of the entire earth through their SkyBox/TerraBella acquisition.

The Big Tech companies like to understate the size of their data advantage because it tempts competitors into doing stupid things that won't work in the market. Don't be fooled though - the majority of useful data is locked up inside proprietary silos.

<comment><USER10> Sure they have those images, but so what, it's all unlabeled data.

I think the labeled datasets we create for them with e.g. reCAPTCHA is infinitely more useful for training.

<comment><USER11> Are they unlabeled though? If location sharing metadata exists, that's a decent chunk of location-tagged photos of places to have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article is decent, but I see two mistakes: the author assumes that AI/ML can't produce unique insights from public data; and she conflates AI/ML with automation. While it's true that you won't find anything that your competitors haven't if you use the same data _and the same AI /ML techniques_, there's nothing stopping companies from differentiating on the techniques in addition to (or even instead of) the data. If you just use plug-and-play AI, then sure, you'll need a unique data set if you want unique results.

The section about finding faster, less error-prone ways to apply existing insights sounds more like automation than AI. There's certainly overlap, but they're two different things.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's a data race because we've run up against another wall on the algorithms side. Find a technique that works better than GBDT for the same type of problem. Other than some minor tweaks described in the academic literature, it's been a while since something really advanced the state of the art.

Small datasets still have massive predictive potential; we just need better algorithms. (As an extreme example, suppose I give you the first 30 digits of pi or e and ask you to predict what comes next. Despite being a small amount of data of low algorithmic complexity, machine learning cannot currently handle this type of problem.)

<comment><USER14> The pi and e example seems more complicated than it looks. If you ask a human who doesn't know about pi or e, how much effort would it take for them to figure out the next digits? Seems like they'd have to rediscover the math first (or I suppose, perform a google search)

<comment><USER15> Yes, it would be a hugely complicated undertaking and probably impossible for most humans with little academic mathematical knowledge. But the point is that it _would_ be possible, which indicates that the problem does not necessarily lie in the amount of data but in the algorithmic approach itself.

ML is a great tool that is creating very real and tangible value, but it still has ways to go. Just adding more computational capabilities and more data will only bring marginal improvements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> THIS.

I was just saying to our partner (as well as to my wife!) how lucky we are to work on Healthcare solutions. We have access to data about medications, opioids, patients and physicians behaviors that so very little of others (who can have any clue about data analytics) has.

The realization of sitting on a goldmine of impossible-to-access-data + capability of developing cutting edge analytics solutions that could change the world is the best place to be.

<comment><USER17> Google partners with the NHS to get medical data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The sample efficiency of ML systems are increasing rapidly in the theoretical realm, though the available data are growing magnitudes faster than the progress in ML sample efficiency. The article has a valid point: It's far cheaper to hoard data than to invent a more efficient ML system, thus we will see people race towards data rather than technical complexity.

<comment><USER19> >The sample efficiency of NN are increasing rapidly in the theoretical realm.

Can you provide some references for this?

<comment><USER18> Sure. I don't have any holistic survey to prove my point, but an example of recent progress in terms of sample efficiency is this paper[0]. Derivatives of this paper have been used to solve Sudoku[1], Starcraft II[2] and more [3]. This paper enabled more efficient use of data by creating a probabilistic graphical model between logical sets.

[0][https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.01427](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.01427) [1][https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.08028](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.08028) [2][https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01830](https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01830) [3][https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01822](https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01822)

<comment><USER20> I like the 3D datasets in these papers since, like a scientist in a lab, you can setup the experiment and explore the domain. Adding time in would be cool too (e.g. Are the blue and red ball going to collide in 10 seconds?)

It also helps to be able to show you can answer some of these questions in principle with your model. It gives you hope that it might be able to cover real world images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The neat thing about big data is that there are massive diminishing returns on the amount of data vs. model quality.

What's more important is data _quality_ (e.g. structured and unbiased), and an incumbent with the right approach can have a strong impact.

<comment><USER22> It's not just quality but it's also the available features in the data. Quality is just a signal to noise problem. If you have enough data, you generally can reasonably segment it to get higher quality. Obtaining features not present in other data sets is probably the most significant factor.

For example, let's say you want to build a speech rec engine. You need 15K hours of data to build/validate a model. How would you get that? You could farm it out to some people on mechanical turk and get 15K hours of audio transcribed. With enough money, you could duplicate the transcriptions enough times to actually be pretty sure about the quality of the data set. If you're clever and have a large enough dataset, segmentation generally gets you decent quality. The big gains come in when you have features not present. For example, google realized when you build a speech rec engine, you can include video data and image processing to actually use the way people move their mouths to significantly increase the quality of an automated transcription.

<comment><USER20> I think creative new ways of harvesting data will continue to be profitable.

That's fine with today's mindset, but over time it seems like we'll want to go beyond big data and think about how it is that a child can become quite capable without seeing millions of instances of people crossing a road, etc... We have to make our machines make models and 'want' to gather data to test them. By having the machines do the work of today's data scientist, they may well put themselves out of business, and quickly everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> as a data scientist, it has always been about the data. it has always been a data race. google has known that, which is why they spent billions trying to protect their search moat.

<comment><USER24> This. All things being equal - and assuming similar data quality among competitors - the one with the most data has a stronger strategic position. This is because, all things being equal, more data means a larger number of available choices and insights (I'm making some simplifying assumptions here).

Business strategy is fundamentally about trade-offs, though, so we do need a caveat. Naturally, more choices and more insights can, at times, be a weakness. You always have to prioritize, and as data volume increases it doesn't seem the ability for quality prioritization grows in parallel (or at least, necessarily does).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Mark my words - organizations like Amazon, Google, etc will soon start offering a Data Marketplace (intended for both buyers and sellers of all sorts of "alternative" data - everything from small business metrics to enterprise/b2b and anything in-between. The next logical step would be to offer insight/models as a service as a layer built on top of this..

I've been studying their moves carefully and have no doubt this is where they're headed. While I don't work for Amazon I think AWS in particular is uniquely positioned for these next couple of moves to a level that may make it challenging for others to compete. Interesting times...

<comment><USER26> Indeed, the clever thing would be to have an API flexible enough to allow a user to utilize their own ML architecture and training process but it still keep that user from accessing the raw data.

The ideal approach would somehow allow this anonymized access to multiple large databases simultaneously. I don't know how you'd do that but if you claim Etherium would help, you'd arrive at buzzword nirvana even if you were wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Me personally I'm not 100% convinced that the current ML/AI approaches (that I'm aware of) will yield new big steps forward.

Neuromorphic computing could have the potential I think, if we can build hardware that's good enough.

<comment><USER8> This year brought to us huge improvements in handling text (BERT), speech (Google TTS, especially the Allo demo), images (ProGAN, StyleGAN, BigGAN) and activities such as games (Alpha Zero), and robotics. Even music composition is improving a lot. I don't feel it is slowing down yet. And when it will eventually slow down, it will be all for the better - we will have time to reopen all those different approaches that have been more or less ignored because of the DL hype.

I think the key fields in AI will become simulator based learning (RL) and graph processing neural nets, because graphs can express any kind of highly dimensional data and are useful for reasoning tasks. They marry the symbolic and connectionist approaches. These two subdomains have had rapid evolution over the last couple of years. They also solve the data problem - <USER2> simulation you can produce as much data as you want, and graphs have combinatorial generalisation, thus they work on new configurations without retraining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It kinda can't be any other way though.

What are models? They're a way to describe the data. So this is where a load of philosophical stuff like Occam's Razor comes in and favours things like having fewer degrees of freedom, lower errors, etc.

What is data? It's what makes one model a more likely explanation than another.

You can make up any number of ways to describe some phenomenon, but without data there's no way to tell which of them is better. Or rather, you will fall back on some model with fewer specifics, because of those considerations we mentioned earlier.

So getting smarter (ie more complex) with models can't help on its own.

<comment><USER26> Human beings can be smart in using a fairly small set of data. Humans have an enormous store of data to work with but when confronted with a bit of new data on a new subject, they can sometimes do very well.

This is a result of the ML paradigm essentially starting new with whatever data set it is trying to "solve" but overall, the paradigm doesn't have to be that.

<comment><USER29> IMHO pretty much every example I've seen for how humans can get good results with using a fairly small set of data actually involves successful generalization / transfer of "generic life experience" or "generic audiovisual processing" to that new problem instead of actual learning from limited data. We know how to do that in ML, in general - we can do transfer learning from few examples quite well if the underlying generic data is good enough. However, we currently don't have good enough underlying generic data to match the years of generic life data that any human kid has accumulated.

A human learning to play an Atari game that involves an agent jumping over a pit has to learn only the mechanics of that game, and that can be done in minutes. Learning that game _from scratch_ , on the other hand, requires also learning interpreting vision and the whole concept that the world has objects that may move around - which takes months of learning for human brain. So comparing sample efficiency is an apples to elephants comparison if we disregard the ability to reuse/transfer knowledge from related tasks that all humans learn during childhood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Model is cheap, data is HARD.

Plus investing is data is much more predictable: the outcome is always going to get better, though the margin will be diminishing, but better is better.

While modeling is not, hiring 100 machine learning 'experts' will not solve the problem 100 times better than 10 of them. On the other side, 100 labelers are surely going to provide 10 times of throughput provided the same upscale.

<comment><USER31> > though the margin will be diminishing

So by the metric of model performance (the only thing that matters here), what you're saying is that hiring more labelers is actually not linear.

<comment><USER30> True, of course. We can only go as high as 100% for accuracy, right?

However the labellers are scalable in terms of their throughput and coverage of the data, you can always find bad examples or holes in your current data plane, and that is the time when labelers, not the scientists, are going to rescue you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> No, it's a process race. The data is just the most visible "asset" in play.

The entities that own the best data mining process will win. This includes data collection + ETL/storage + model training/deployment.

Obtaining a vertical monopoly on this process is the goal.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Machines need a lot more data than humans do in order to get smart" \- is that true?

<comment><USER34> Yes. On average the human brain just needs dozens or hundreds of examples (turns, exercises, you name it) to "learn" something. A decent machine learning model needs hundreds of thousands to millions of samples to gain good confidence and can still be fooled easily afterwards with subtile changes.

<comment><USER35> Actually, I don't think this is strictly speaking accurate. In order to train from those dozens/hundreds of samples, human brain needs to first be developed enough by accumulating experience from billions of samples in related domains. This "pre-training" process literally takes years, and it still does not sufficiently prepare some people for some tasks.

<comment><USER36> I just think machines are good at some things, and people are good at others. If it really took billions of samples in related domains we wouldn't develop nearly as fast as we do after being born.

<comment><USER35> I'm not sure I'd call it "fast" either. For the first three months babies can barely see anything, and for at least nine they can't form anything even remotely resembling speech and can't walk. What's amazing is that all this learning is very sparsely supervised and all "subsystems" train at the same time.

<comment><USER37> This is a human peculiarity. Many animal babies are born with fully developed abilities. I am sure we have all seen the NatGeo videos of antelope babies stumbling 2-3 times and then immediately start walking and even running.

Human babies have bigger head-to-body ratio compared to all other species due to our brain being bigger. Our babies have to be born earlier or otherwise they cannot make it out of the mother alive.

Outside of that, we develop pretty quickly. As you pointed out, everything in us is developing in parallel which is quite impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What will happen is that we will move toward an agent-centric system like Holochain, and put all data about our environment there.

Only when people will realize that transparency is better than privacy, will they start putting all their quantified self data on there.

This will become a Decentralized Artificial Intelligence network, from which consciousness and AGI will emerge.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't understand how this is a race at all. There is no way to finish it, and "going fast" is likely to cause major issues in developing sound technologies. Maybe changing the attitude of this article to a more scientifically sound position would increase it's relevance.

</comment><comment><USER40> I have just started working with Ocean Protocol ([https://oceanprotocol.com/](https://oceanprotocol.com/)) and I have set up a local meetup in January for local entrepreneurs looking for access to machine learning data.

</comment><comment><USER38> Don't they have more than enough data by now? What are they waiting for?

</comment><comment><USER41> Data is cheap though and a very effective way to get them is crowdsourcing. The differentiation may not last long.

</comment><comment><USER42> There are reliable ways to generate unbiased, synthetic and even big data for almost any industrial domain out there plus a lot of applied research fields in the STEM curricula. The most important issue nowadays is the accountability of results aka ablation studies following too many false positives and a number of recent, blatant scams.

</comment><comment><USER43> Clearly, the solution is to develop a machine learning framework in Rust - Rust is 100% immune to data races!</comment>


Writing more efficient queries with Entity Framework Code First - <AUTHOR> http://www.davepaquette.com/archive/2013/02/05/writing-efficient-queries-with-entity-framework-code-first-part-1.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a series of 3 posts that explores 3 different strategies for improving performance of Entity Framework queries</comment>


The NSA Python instructional manual [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://nsa.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/comp3321.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I edited the title and removed the word "declassified" since I don't think this was ever classified info in the first place.

It is, however, a nicely graded intro-to-advanced Python manual.</comment>