Loop: a programming language for the JVM inspired by Haskell and Ruby - <AUTHOR> http://looplang.org

<comment><USER3> Syntax looks very clean, but probably more like CoffeeScript mixed with Ruby. "Inspired by Haskell" is going a bit far. You took pattern matching and `where` and none of the semantics.

Object patterns are absolutely awesome. Every OOP/FP hybrid ought to have that. Especially if you're not going to support algebraic data types. That point is worth bringing up, though: are they missing because of the presents of objects? I'm concerned about the interaction between pattern matching, duck typing and Java's static typechecker. Based on a quick glance, it's hard to see what that interaction is going to be like. At the very least, it does raise the question: what makes the pattern matching on lists and other built- in types special? In Haskell, for example, there's nothing magic about the cons operator and lists; it's just regular pattern matching on algebraic types.

I suspect your magic Nothing type is also necessary to make object pattern matching powerful, and I have some concerns about this kind of null safety. I wonder if programs are going to wind up turning into "gray goo" of Nothing, and what the debug scenario is for that case.

Exception handling looks a bit odd to me. Maybe it all works out in the end, but it looks like you're going to wind up with code like this:

        foo(x) except handler
          where
            handler(e) =>
              IOException : e.stuff
              ...

I think this is going to wind up being a bit gassy for local exception handling, where in Java you would see something like this, that avoids the intermediate name:

        try {
          foo(x);
        }
        catch (IOException e) {
          e.stuff
        }
        ...

Is it going to look better with closures?

        foo(x) except @(e) -> {
          IOException : e.stuff
          ...
        }

It's probably fine, but I dunno, most languages use more syntax in this area.

Overall, this is fairly impressive. It looks a bit like the greatest hits of Ruby and ML. The JVM has been host to a surprising number of interesting languages lately, and this is clearly one of the better recent offerings. Definitely worth a deeper look.

<comment><USER4> All the major OOP/FP I know support matching on objects. It is indeed a very powerful feature. See active patterns and extractors.

<comment><USER3> You must mean Scala and F#, which I haven't used. Haven't seen this feature in OCaml or Clojure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I take issue with

       Haskell programmers may be familiar with this as a do
       block, and for Schemers, this is the equivalent of a
       begin sequence. However, unlike Haskell, in Loop, a
       sequence is guaranteed to execute in order.

A do block is syntactic sugar over >>= (bind) and is monadic in nature. And the IO monad (which is relevant to the example that involved printing things.) is a construct which guarantees that the parts will execute in order. That's kinda the point. That he got it wrong makes me not trust the language. He shouldn't claim to have been "Inspired by Haskell" if he doesn't really know it.

Also in Haskell the pattern [x:xs] matches a list with one element, which is a list with at least one element, so [[1,2,3]] (== (1:2:3:[]):[]) gets matched with x = 1 and xs = [2,3]. That differs from loop's pattern matching. But [x] still matches a list with only one element. What does [x:[]] match? If you are going by [x:xs] matches [1] with x = 1 and xs = [], then surely [x:[]] will match as well.

Also, if you are making a functional programming language, you know one that uses recursions instead fo for loops, why do you call it Loop? I didn't see one loop in any of the examples. It's just silly.

EDIT: Oh, and if Nothing really is a subtype of everything, then 5 + Nothing should typecheck right? Not " It is a type error to attempt to compute with Nothing." Since Nothing is a Integer, since it subtypes everything. I don't understand. Is + special in hating Nothing? Nothing.add(5) would return Nothing, right? So why not Nothing + 5. Oh, but wait, Nothing is a subtype of string, so Nothing + 5 means string concatenation, right? You did say a + b where a is a string casts b to a string, didn't you? It's inconsistent and I don't think it has the proper semantics.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it's quite misleading to list Haskell in the title: the only common thing between Loop and Haskell that I've found is pattern matching, and that's not even exclusive to Haskell -- other languages have it. Besides, it's not clear from the intro that Loop's pattern matching is as powerful as Haskell's (especially with all the extensions). Finally, pattern matching is really a syntactic sugar over the case/switch construct present in many, many languages. Although, I liked the type-patterns.

<comment><USER7> Pattern-matching is not sugar over "case".

Pattern-matching means that the branching primitive not only dispatches to different code based on an input tag, but also that it places different values of different types in scope according to the branch.

Most languages only branch on booleans, without gaining any type information at all. This is actually a big problem and relates to the nullability problem, explained at: [http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean- blin...](http://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/boolean-blindness/)

For example, in C:

      switch(ptr) {
      case NULL: ... handle null case ...
      default: ... use ptr as if it weren't NULL ...
      }

This is unsafe -- because nothing prevents you from using ptr in the "NULL" case, and the compiler does not give you anything in the non-NULL case.

In Haskell:

      case ptr of
        Nothing -> ... can't use ptr as a value here,
                       it's wrapped with Maybe ...
        Just x -> ... pattern-matching gave us "x" of
                      the correct type.
                      We can now safely use it.

<comment><USER6> As Tyr42 has so astutely observed, I have meant that pattern matches in function declarations, let-bindings and list comprehensions are desugared into the case expression. Also, it would be kind of pointless to compare C switch and Haskell case. Especially, in your example Haskell, probably, 'wins' because primarilt because a more powerful type system and algebraic data-types (and absence of pointers, hehe). That said, it's not like you can't emulate the pattern matching (with placing nested values/subtrees in scope): <https://gist.github.com/2832755> (it's in JavaScript, because I felt like it -- but I'm pretty sure you can devise something similar in C). Of course, it's plain ugly and doesn't carry any nice static guarantees that the Haskell type- system will give you (like warning about incomplete patterns)... but, hey, it works. Anyway, the point of my comment was that pattern-matching is hardly a feature characterizing and exclusive to Haskell (ML/OCaml/F#, Coq, Scheme have it, probably other functional languages too). Although, it's still the one I enjoy every day :)

<comment><USER7> In a dynamically typed language, whether you do pattern matching or boolean- blind branching doesn't matter that much. You'll catch any error at runtime anyway.

In the presence of static typing, "emulating" pattern matching defeats the purpose, because the purpose of pattern matching is removing boolean blindness. With the "emulated" code you still get runtime-failing boolean- blind code.

By the way, pattern-matching is indeed very much related to sum types (part of "Algebraic data types"), which C lacks. To have pattern matching in a statically typed language, you would need to have sum types as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks a lot for sharing this - particularly the full source code of your implementation. It looks very clean and well written.

I personally like that you wrote your own recursive descent parser and lexer rather than using some tool to generate one. This is my preference too.

The result is that the source code makes for a great reference for anyone thinking of implementing a language on top of the JVM.

Pay no heed to the "bah humbug" comments elsewhere on this story - I think what you've done is great.

</comment><comment><USER9> Haven't had the chance to download and look through it but an example caught my eye.

Was anyone else confused that this,

# filter list => [ 'ipod', 'ipad', 'iphone' ]

('i' + p) for p in ['mac', 'pod', 'pad', 'phone'] if p.startsWith('p')

applies a filter against the list, rather than limit what gets prefixed with an 'i'?

I'm assuming then there's some code to keep the mapping and the entire list as well. Something like this?

('i' + p) if p.startsWith('p') for p in ['mac', 'pod', 'pad', 'phone']

It just seemed surprising to me that an if statement can cause a change in the list length.

Edit: Ah this seems to be how filtering works in python

<comment><USER10> The list comprehension rules seem to be lifted straight from Python, where the "foo for bar" part always comes first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Perhaps this isn't the place for the question, but I'll ask anyway. Is there any JVM-based language that excludes any code from being compiled that is not directly implemented in that language? For example, any code that would deny the use of java.io or java.lang?

The reason I ask is because Clojure and Scala both suffer from the ability to call legacy code. While some think this is a good idea, it makes the whole scalable, safe/functional paradigm completely unstable. Is there any language out there that forces the developer to use only things written in the specific language its since that would be the only safe platform?

<comment><USER12> I haven't heard of one that does this. In fact an oft stated selling point of JVM based languages is the ability to call and interact with existing Java code and libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Closures, or anonymous functions, are quite useful...

Apparently these days one doesn't need to know the difference between closures and anonymous functions to be a language designer.

</comment><comment><USER14> The name is unfortunate, especially when the documentation sometimes omits to capitalize "Loop", which introduces even more confusion than there already is.

<comment><USER15> The name is unfortunate indeed. There were languages like LOOPS (Lisp Object Oriented Programming System) which evolved into CLOS. Common Lisp loop macro is a kind of special DSL of its own. While the oldest LOOP language may be from 1967 article by Meyer and Ritchie (DMR as in UNIX), a kind of mini language for computation of primitive recursive functions and dealing with computational complexity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good to know there are newer takes on JVM based languages! I like its minimalist design as opposed to being a kitchen sink language. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER17> _Being functional in nature, Loop doesn't have any of the baggage of the host platform (Java)_

I don't see much that's functional in this language, but this statement made me laugh. It looks like a lot of Java's baggage is still alive and well in this language, like exceptions (quite un-Haskell-like)

<comment><USER6> > like exceptions (quite un-Haskell-like)

Haskell has exceptions [1].

[1] <http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Exception>

<comment><USER5> It has them, but I don't see them being used very often. More commonly just a Maybe will do. And really, monadic exceptions aren't like java exceptions. I would call them un-Haskell-like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks great. I wonder why the author went for a specific syntax for interned strings, as opposed to doing what Java does (automatically interning String literals).

</comment><comment><USER19> Another cool language from the past, 'nice', had a similar issue that sentenced it to obscurity. A totally ungooglable name :-(

<comment><USER13> Do you really believe that was the reason? Is C very googlable? Or how about python or ruby?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13>
      Sequences

      increment(num) ->
        print(num),
        num + 1

This is considered to be one of the worst parts of Erlang syntax. Too bad loop borrows it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Now available on Arch Linux via AUR: <https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=59624>

</comment><comment><USER21> Capital-J Java as in 'Java -version'? Examples should be tested. @ is heavily overloaded. Other than that, worth a second look.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wish it was ported to Android platform.

</comment><comment><USER23> there is nothing like out there resemblance with haskell :D

</comment><comment><USER24> Is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER25> Hmm, going to have to look into this later.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Polymorphism in this instance is simply allowing you to call the same > function with an integer and string respectively.

Er... no, that's not polymorphism, that's overloading.

<comment><USER26> In computer science, polymorphism is a programming language feature that allows values of different data types to be handled in a uniform manner.

This may be ad hoc polymorphism (often synonymous with overloading) - <USER2> parametric polymorphism (as in ML or Haskell); but it's unclear what they actually do without some language semantics.

<comment><USER27> And to be more complete, OO-style polymorphism is usually referred to as "subtype polymorphism" and the parametric polymorphism dons talked about is like C++ or Java "generics"</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Realtime snow chain requirements for Lake Tahoe - <AUTHOR> http://tahoeroads.info/ <comment><USER2> Helpful, but note that present content is limited to _South_ Tahoe (Highway 50), not the more-travelled I-80 Donner Pass route north of the lake.</comment>


IE9 to be GPU-accelerated  - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/ie9-to-be-gpu-accelerated-20100316/

<comment><USER2> I guess they missed the fact (in their claim to be the first to have GPU- accelerated graphics) that Safari (and any modern Mac application) has been GPU-accelerated since about 10 years ago (moving more and more into the GPU with Core Graphics over that time).

<comment><USER3> No they don't. Core Graphics still works mainly on the CPU. Only compositing is GPU-accelerated by default. (CG actually has an option to put window backing stores in video memory, called QuartzGL, but even though it's been there since 10.4 it's still not the default - pretty much only Preview uses it.)

<comment><USER2> Note that compositing is involved in nearly every graphical operation, which means that nearly everything benefits from the GPU acceleration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been experimenting with GPU accelerating computations from Javascript using WebGL. It is pretty bleeding edge but I've succeeded in speeding up matrix multiply. Here is a link for anyone interested: <http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?p=1828>

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm happy to read the flight simulator easter egg will finally be playable.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand why they need hardware acceleration just to reach almost- par with the existing browsers.

Also, no UI work whatsoever in tech preview. One would hope they realize their competition is lightyears ahead of them UI wise.

<comment><USER7> UI polishing is generally one of the last things you slap on before shipping. That is, unless the release is all about UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Will it work with Remote Desktop (Microsoft Windows one)? It will with VNC, and stuff based around VNC, but VNC captures the whole screen, while RDC relies somehow on the driver and it's more optimal.

The problem with RDC is that it fully replaces the graphics driver, making any GPU accelerated stuff to disappear.

Also how it would work with people which machines have been locked after 15 minutes?

<comment><USER9> A bit of a tangent, but what exactly is the problem with GPU acceleration and screens coming back from power-save mode? I'm having a problem with a GL context not drawing correctly after my monitor wakes up (Windows). I'm not quite sure how to google the problem without getting a bunch of hardware results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honest question: Is rendering really a bottleneck in a browser? It seems to me that the overhead of one or two HTTP handshakes would surely out-weigh any performance benefit in the rendering code?

<comment><USER11> For old school browsing, maybe not. But modern DHTML doesn't necessarily have network activity before every render.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The only difference between this and, say, O3D:

a) it's not a browser plugin b) it's ambiguous whether or not it will be compatible with the working WebGL spec (I'm guessing not)

<comment><USER13> These aren't the same category. O3D/WebGL uses the GPU to draw 3D graphics; IE9/Firefox uses the GPU to draw regular 2D Web pages.

[http://www.betanews.com/article/Will-Firefox-beat-IE9-to- Dir...](http://www.betanews.com/article/Will-Firefox-beat-IE9-to- Direct2D-rendering/1259084302)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm had no idea what IExplorer 9 is about ... and what's interesting to me is that they are adding HTML 5 support.

And they are supporting SVG too?

<comment><USER15> > I'm had no idea what IExplorer 9 is about

It's all about buzzword compliance and preventing IE from being so broken Windows users would migrate away from it while keeping it broken enough as to prevent as many people as possible from moving to web-only applications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Let the hyping of semi-vaporware commence!

Haven't we learned anything at all from the W95 -> Chicago -> Memphis -> Cairo -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP -> Longhorn -> Vista -> Windows 7 replacement hype cycles? Oh, sure: That'll be fixed in X, for sufficiently far away versions of X.

NT was the "first OS with a merged file system and heap cache" or some such, when Solaris and others had the same thing for years. Even the hype terms get appropriated from elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER15> I see Microsoft is piling up every buzzword available on top of IE9.

After you watch them for a couple decades, they become amazingly predictable.</comment>


12.04.1961 - First human in outer space. - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gagarin

<comment><USER2> What's sad is that I've become so accustomed to seeing American date formats everywhere, then when one is in the correct order (like this one), I still read it wrong.

Some time ago I started using only two formats, 1961-04-12 or 12-APR-1961, to help me avoid this ambiguity.

<comment><USER3> I always find myself feeling annoyed with whoever uses ##-## as a date format, no matter if it's normal or American style. Of course, I get (slightly) annoyed by forms that ask you to enter dates in dd-mm-yyyy format.

Using formats like dd-mm and mm-dd is something no one who cares even the slightest about his/her international public should do. Even if it's unambiguous (day 13 or up), it still requires someone to compare the numbers and reparse the date.

The ISO datestyle is good for technical people who really should know about these things. It's also very nice because it sorts lexically, which is very nice in computer programs.

For contracts and other places where somebody not accustomed to the ISO date format, writing the month in full or shortening it in letters (like you do), is probably much nicer. Of course, that leaves the added problem of translation, but it's a little better for an international public even if just in English, since there are English-speaking countries that use one and that use the other. Not to mention the whole "English is not my native tongue but I speak it quite well"-crowd.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for talking about an ISO standard! It changed my mind about writing dates as dd-mm-yyyy. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are world-wide parties to celebrate this:

<http://yurisnight.net/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Very sad, Google did not change the logo, like they do for even less honorable dates.

<comment><USER6> Here you are:

<http://www.google.co.uk/logos/yuri_gagarin.gif>

And they also did Sputnik:

<http://www.google.com/logos/google_sputnik.gif></comment></comment>


Army Ousts Egypt's President - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/world/middleeast/egypt.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> Dear Sir, we regret to inform you that your services as head of state are no longer required. A security officer will allow you to gather your things and escort you from the premises after collecting your keys.

</comment><comment><USER3> This "social media spreading democracy around the world" may need to be re- evaluated soon.</comment>


Blockimmo launches on Product Hunt – Real estate made accessible, liquid, simple - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/blockimmo <comment><AUTHOR> Our platform is live! We invite you to on-board and participate in the demo Phoenix Property. Only a week remaining! Quick start Invest in tokenized real estate today with blockimmo — Ethereum DApp tutorial / user guide: [https://medium.com/blockimmo/quickstart-guide-get-started- to...](https://medium.com/blockimmo/quickstart-guide-get-started-today- cab2d5329a0f)

Our Product Hunt page: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/blockimmo](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/blockimmo)

We're looking forward to the community's feedback to help us continue to iterate and improve our product!</comment>


Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/syn-07/Shannon1.pdf

<comment><USER2> What?! There's no math!

[http://cm.bell- labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pd...](http://cm.bell- labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf)

That's more like it, no?

<comment><USER3> Well, the subtitle of the submitted article is _"a study of the style and context of his work up to the genesis of information theory"_. Shannon did a lot of amazing work before the seminal 1948 paper. As an example, here are his M.Sc. and Ph.D. thesis:

 _A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits_ : <http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/11173>

_An algebra for theoretical genetics_ : <http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/11174>

Shannon was quite a unique thinker. I would dare to say that very few people had such tremendous impact on the world via abstract thinking. He single- handedly enabled the digital revolution. And though a lot is known about his contributions, less is known about his personality, interests and style. Thus, I believe the submitted article is indeed quite an interesting read, despite the fact that it's not about the mathematical theory of communication.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I agree with you wholeheartedly (except for the single-handedly part; many people had a hand in it).

But the title of your post says "Mathematical Theory of Claude Shannon." And there's no math. Even though it _is_ relevant and interesting, it's mis- labelled.

<comment><USER4> English not being my first language I may be prone to if not false then alternative interpretations, but I can't help finding the title with its connotations pretty elegant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Review my app - Philtro: a Personal Noise Filter for Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.philtro.com

<comment><USER2> I liked the first page design.

When I logged in, that design disappeared.

Can't get back to first page anymore :( Oh, some global site error :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that, we're working on making this a little more stable. :) Any other feedback at all?

<comment><USER2> When you are logged in, you can't see first page. The one with registering etc

I didn't understood how it differs from twitter homepage. Oh I get it. You get to train it for long time for it to become useful.

How about idea for folder for users. Or tagging. Some will be friends, some will be corporate etc.

But sadly I won't use your site because I read twitter from iphone (and rarely)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Oh, visual glitches on left menu when you scroll your tweets with mouse (ff 3.5.2)</comment>


IETF: Terminology, Power and Oppressive Language - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-00.html <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr

Suggested alternatives to the terminology master-slave:

Primary-secondary, Leader-follower, Active-standby, Primary-replica, Writer- reader, Coordinator-worker, Parent-helper

Suggested alternatives to the terminology whitelist-blacklist:

Blocklist-allowlist, Block-permit</comment>


Introducing Silvrback: Hosted, Markdown-Powered Blogging - <AUTHOR> https://www.silvrback.com/dsowers/introducing-silvrback <comment><USER2> Don't pay attention to all of the comments saying there are enough blog platforms in the world already -- they said the same thing when WordPress started.

I signed up and paid to support the project, and even if you don't end up doing this full-time we're looking for a Markdown hacker @ Automattic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Hearing kind words from the founder of Wordpress is definitely encouraging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just signed up. This is literally _exactly_ what I want.

The only thing I'd add is that I hope at some point down the line there's some level of customization (even the ability to add an external stylesheet.) For this kind of thing, I'm much more attracted to the backend than the frontend, and the ability to tinker with fonts and what not is important to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am very sad that, Medium as a platform is so completely misunderstood here. It's not trying to be a place where writers are the center of attention. It's one of the few attempts, I think is somewhat successful, in democratizing the content, not the writer. I thought Quora was on it back in the day, but it drifted off now, completely.

I am also not sure why anyone who is serious about his personal-branding as to pay $29 would want to stick to a common-theme, especially when there are so many free super-customizable alternatives. People who are serious enough to pay might as well consider paying someone else to design the personal-theme and have it setup with Markdown somewhere for free.

What's even more disheartening is to see someone who is such a skilled person to ram up the themes from Medium and setup a product with such ease, is the person who misunderstood the Medium and add more product-clutter into the market, indifferent to the work of the designers of Medium with a great and noble vision.

Edit: I said 'misunderstood' because of following

> _Medium is great for readers but it is bad for writers._

I am sorry, but it's great for writers, you don't need to be among the elite to share an idea with world. And that's something very powerful.

<comment><USER5> With regards to "branding", I agree with this comment elsewhere[1]:

> _I think the 'brand' problem people have with Medium is less "my post looks > like the same as all of these other posts!" and more "when people want to > read more of my posts, they're more inclined to go to medium.com instead of > my personal site!"._

Medium is a very compelling product, but it isn't for everyone. I'm not sure what your argument is, other than "Medium is misunderstood, so people should not create similar offerings."

I think the OP understands Medium, and opted to create something that would suit his needs as well as possibly others'.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6251620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6251620)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks interesting, as I'm looking at alternatives to blogger for my new site. Going down my checklist, you'll support a custom domain and comments (via disqus).

Here's what's left unticked on my checklist...

       Image hosting. (Will you host my pictures or do I have to find external server space for them?)
       RSS/ATOM feeds.
       Multiple writers on a single blog.
       Mobile theme.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

It supports image hosting. I didn't want to have to upload images to another server somewhere. It even supports multiple versions of your images (e.g. retina and regular).

It's fully responsive so it's good for mobile.

I have RSS on the roadmap, but it won't be there on day 1. Have too many things to do right now. It also won't have support for multiple writers on day 1.

<comment><USER7> How much does it cost? The pay button leads me nowhere.

        <a href="#" id="payment_btn">
            <i class="icon-credit-card" style="margin-right:10px">
            </i>
            Click Here To Enter Payment Information
        </a>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, that's weird. That button opens up a stripe payment overlay. Do you have javascript disabled?

<comment><USER7> I think I forgot to disable NoScript. Sorry about that. I should have tried it in Chrome as well. I just assumed you were still working on the details... like money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This lacks a lot of the nice things that makes Medium great. Just off the top:

1) The sidebar's navigation feels bloated and useless at the same time. Needs to be tighter and more useful. Why not put the last five posts' title in there? Move the social icons in there as well, they are super distracting floating on the right side. Simplify the page presentation.

2) The footer of the site should link to the post I made before this one. Similar to how medium links to a random post.

3) The hover effect on the list of posts is brutal. Way too harsh. The list itself is also weird. Why do I care when it was last edited? Show the subtitle if there is one instead.

4) Medium putting the author bio at the top is really nice. Same with who helped you write it and last updated. I miss it in your design. Medium also has a much better homepage with a really nice bio bar.

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who thinks it's weird to be writing blog posts inside a web browser? What's wrong with a text editor? Is it just the "publish" button? Or do people find it actually helps the writing process itself? (It doesn't for me, I edit my blog posts locally and push them with rsync when they're ready to publish.)

<comment><USER3> I currently use Jekyll + GitHub Pages. The work involved in correcting a one- character typo is annoying if I'm on my laptop, but nigh-impossible if I'm on my phone.

<comment><USER10> Can't you just edit the file directly on Github? It's what I did recently with a one word typo I noticed while I was out of town and only had my phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks interesting, but I find the name choice odd since there already exists [http://silverbackapp.com](http://silverbackapp.com).

<comment><USER12> There's also SilverStripe, a pretty well known CMS.

[http://www.silverstripe.com/](http://www.silverstripe.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What circumstances would cause you to shut down this project in a year or two, and how likely are those circumstances?

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't mean to be negative, but why should I pay $29/year for blogging platform when I can install something like Jekyll on a free Heroku (or insert your favorite PaaS) and host my posts on another free blogging site, like Tumblr.

Basically I'm asking what's so great about Silvrback over other free alternatives?

<comment><USER15> If you can install Jekyll or set up your own VPS and find the prospect of having to do so to have a personal blog enjoyable rather than a hassle, you're really not the target customer for these sorts of things.

<comment><USER14> So, it's convenience? Which is okay, I guess I'm just so used of setting up stuff like that, that I didn't even consider it a "restraint", but now that I think of it I can see how for some people it's not worth the time to struggle through the setup process and just pay the fee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks great, and I've been wanting to start blogging for a while now. I hesitated on the $29, even though it is not much because, why pay for something I possibly will not use (e.g. I never get around to writing anything more than a few, if any, posts).

But then I realized (a) I would not be charged until receiving an invite, and (b) if I've put money down for this, that alone puts some pressure on forcing myself to write.

So I've signed up.

</comment><comment><USER16> I recently started looking for a markdown powered blogging platform to host my site[0]. I wanted to be able to write markdown documents, arrange them in directories, and then have a site built from that. Also, I am not a designer so I would like it if there were premade themes out there.

I settled on using Pelican[1] for generation and Github Pages[2] for hosting. Pelican does exactly what I wanted, and there is a collection of free community created themes that look great. Github Pages is absolutely free hosting that even supports custom domains.

It might take a little more hacking than Silvrback, but I have been slowly working on a git repo that anyone could simply clone, populate with markdown files, and then push. I need to clean up the few scripts a little, but if you want you can find it here[3]

[0] [http://jack.minardi.org](http://jack.minardi.org)

[1] [http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.2/](http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.2/)

[2] [http://pages.github.com/](http://pages.github.com/)

[3] [https://github.com/jminardi/jminardi.github.io](https://github.com/jminardi/jminardi.github.io)

<comment><USER17> Octopress, Jekyll, Hakyll and probably a ton of others do the same thing, manage gh-pages hosted blog.

That said, if you care about branding and outreach, Silvrback appears to offer value beyond what the free alternatives do.

<comment><USER18> Not to be sarcastic, but what is offered beyond the free alternatives exactly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like the idea a lot, and I like the UI and aesthetic. From a writer's point of view though, you're marketing page and these requests for info in the comments seem too focused on the tech details. I would guess that bubbling up the problems you're solving here for writers on your marketing message would help you gain more traction.

Sure, talking about servers, backends and all the nitty gritty is great fun and what I'd expect from HN absolutely, but the goal of writing is to communicate an idea to others, and how well you're service solves that problem will greatly pique my interest. The tech behind it is fun and important, but less so to solving the core problem of writing/communicating.

For example, I'd love to hear this expanded upon: "I built Silvrback because none of the existing blogging platforms satisfied me completely."

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm glad I learned about typography and CSS so I could do my own blog, but if I hadn't this is exactly what I wanted. Is there an example of code formatting anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER21> At least it loads quickly, unlike Medium which seems to get stuck for a few seconds before it renders the entire page.

</comment><comment><USER22> I just set up a new blog using Pelican. My considerations were much like what you've listed. The price point seems right as well. I'm tempted to sign on, but my workflow is holding me back. I've got my Pelican based blog set up so I never have to leave Vim to write/organize/publish. Every other workflow I've tried for blogging has quickly decreased my output to... nil.

It seems to me if I switched to Silvrback I'd have to either use the admin interface to write (I assume it doesn't have Vim keybindings) or copy and paste from Vim.

<comment><USER23> I did the same thing, and I really love Pelican. Silvrback does about 80% of what I need for [http://steveasleep.com/](http://steveasleep.com/) but that's more like 100% for most people.

To me it's actually easier to write a post in Vim and then 'make gh-pages' to push it to the internet. But I don't count that against this service at all.

The main reason I won't be using this service is that I pop out more open source projects than blog posts, and my site is more about project commentary than blogging, so the "post" format doesn't really work for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't really understand the desire to have more blogging platforms, there is already like 15 billion.

However I do prefer this style to Medium/ what ever that s one is.

<comment><USER25> I've been playing with a lot of blogging platforms lately and they're all bad in some way. Having more options is good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great idea and execution. You're filling a need that many people have and nailed the design. Naturally, this thread is full of legitimate suggestions for improvement, but you've got an excellent first iteration.

I'm not quite the type of person who needs your site, but I'm close enough to recognize its value. Keep it up and pay no mind to the "Why not X instead?" people. This is unique and worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER26> So a price has been placed on an almost exact copy of Medium without the benefits of Medium (an existing readership, existing capital), it's a copy right down to the typeface and even the green coloured buttons. How does one have complete control over their brand with Silvrback? There's no ability to customise the design beyond what already exists. There's nothing marketable about this product yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is nothing close to an exact copy of Medium. I spent a ton of time on this UI. It's definitely inspired by Medium. I'm not hiding that fact.

<comment><USER27> I agree; it's really not that similar to Medium. Medium don't have a trademark on off-black text on an off-white background!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> hosted is good but i require the option to easily host it myself (like github pages).

My content is my life and I want it to be around in 40 years. Even if facebook bans my account for a TOS violation where they changed the terms out from under me. Even if google hands my account to law enforcement because another country's government doesn't agree with my free speech.

I need to own my content.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can export your posts at any time with Silvrback. You have full ownership. That's why I'm making it a paid solution, otherwise there would be the risk of your data being sold to advertisers.

<comment><USER28> it needs to be trivial to rehost. I've been through a blog content migration before, it was difficult enough that I didn't bother to migrate a portion of my data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do you have a "data liberation" type policy? Eg, if someone wanted all their content, how do they get it out?

I've gotten burned by that before with Blogger and Posterous, and now use Octopress for this reason. Open to better alternatives, but need a clear and easy way to get my content back out if I ever decide to change services.

<comment><USER29> _My_ idea of the perfect system would be something hosted that would allow me to have a shared folder in Dropbox, Google Drive or something like that. It would have two folders, drafts and posts, and putting a markdown file in either would publish it as a draft or a post.

I've looked at a few static site generators, but there are some dynamic things I want to do, so, for now, my own, custom-built blogging engine ([http://stavros.io](http://stavros.io) for the curious) is what works best for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've signed up, I'm hopeful it will spur me to write and worry less about how it looks.

Have you given any thought to being able to import existing posts that are in markdown format? I'm currently using scriptogr.am and have a number of posts that ideally I'd like to import.

</comment><comment><USER31> I made Mardown-Powered SkyDrive-Hosted blogging platform a few weeks back.

All you had to do is claim a username/url (by navigating to it), login with SkyDrive and start adding markdown files to the "StratosPress" (name of the service) directory in SkyDrive. No need to manually sync/push/publish. Just save and as soon as the file gets synced, your blog post is updated.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to use SkyDrive. And even if they did, who would give a random guy on the internet access to all of their SkyDrive files. I know I wouldn't. Too bad there's no way to restrict file access to third-party services.

Silvrback looks alright, but it still seems a bit too bloated to my taste. I'm not sure why exactly.

<comment><USER29> This issue can be solved with Dropbox (you can make an app which doesn't have access to the rest of the files). See above for "my ideal blogging system", it's pretty much this. I may have to add support to my blogging system for this.

<comment><USER31> You mean Calepin.co?

<comment><USER29> Something like that, I spent a few hours last night and added Dropbox integration to my blog, and it's fantastic. Much superior to online editing interfaces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> What about [http://tryghost.org](http://tryghost.org)? How is this going to be any different?

<comment><USER33> It is a hosted solution and you pay for it, for starters. Ghost will be open source, you host it.

<comment><USER34> Ghost will have a hosted platform as well [1].

      * November 2013 - Release of the hosted platform to Kickstarter backers
      * January 2014 - Release of the hosted platform to the general public

[1] - [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost- just-a-...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a- blogging-platform)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This looks great! Do you plan to support comments? I know it's a difficult thing to do so I'm not expecting that, just curious. I also know about Disqus, but that is no good for a technical blog since they took away the ability to post code samples a year or two ago.

<comment><USER36> With a minimal amount of work, dsowers could implement support for hull.io and implement comments exactly as he'd want to - disclaimer: I work there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> On a related note, I found an app called Haroopad which is a cross-platform offline Markdown editor[1]. It even supports some GitHub flavored Markdown.

[1] - [http://pad.haroopress.com/](http://pad.haroopress.com/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Could you provide more details? How many servers, where is the data stored, what type of support will you offer, is it an LLC, how many people behind it, company roadmap, application roadmap, what happens with it if you die tomorrow, etc?

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good questions. I will follow up with a blog post addressing these issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Looks like nice execution and everything, but guys, I have to ask, is Wordpress really that hard to set up? Copying Medium's theme shouldn't be THAT much work...

<comment><USER38> Wordpress is easy to install if you're already familiar with setting up a LAMP stack. A lot of people who just want to blog are not. It's easy to get running and install themes, but honestly it's almost a full-time job to keep it running right. You have to keep up with security updates and deal with confusing config options for custom domains. wp_config, Apache, and MySQL are not something you can use casually.

Also, performance is terrible unless you cache aggressively, which most people don't because it's a lot of work, even with W3. The nice thing about real hosted solutions is they can handle extra load if it happens.

I get why it's popular. The blogging interface is very good, but trying to setup/maintain a server makes me want to pull my hair out.

<comment><USER2> There's no reason you need to maintain all of that -- do a one-click install someplace like Bluehost, Dreamhost, or ZippyKid and they'll manage everything, and do core WP upgrades as well automatically. There's also WP.com.

All are more expensive than 29/yr though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't really understand the existence of these blog services aimed at developers when so many thousands of static site generators and rsync exist.

</comment><comment><USER40> Do you think WordPress has outlived its utility as a personal blogging platform? I am planning to move my blog from WordPress to something more simpler.

</comment><comment><USER41> Looks quite nice, but do you really need a loading indicator for an image of your logo that's a single colour?

</comment><comment><USER42> I like the idea but I still prefer using Github pages for my blog. Not to mention it's free.

</comment><comment><USER43> cool - thanks. i almost wrote the same thing, alas... i had other priorities.

will defintely check it out, but if i dont like it... you might have some competition

</comment><comment><USER44> Why not Posthaven?

<comment><USER45> For a start, their launch page has terrible typesetting and no useful info about their service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Will you offer MathJax support?

</comment><comment><USER47> How do I leave a comment on his blog? WTF is up with people disabling commenting... if you don't want any feedback then I don't care to hear what you got to say.</comment>


Ask HN: What stack you use for web app? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> My priorities have been full stack and solo developer.

I'm back on Google App Engine Java 8 runtime with a Clojure(Script) stack. I haven't found anything comparable yet that offers this amount of flexibility, scalability and generous free tier to get started.

Google seems to take Steve Yegge's Platform Rant [0] as a blueprint to try to beat Amazon at the Cloud game and creates an API for anything you can think of.

As usual, the documentation and their support is terrible, but who needs support or documentation when you have a REPL?

It's been a real pleasure to work with and I'm currently in the process of open sourcing some tooling libraries to smooth out the rough edges (Caveat: These are not stable yet, so use at your own risk).

Currently working on a CLJC REPL over HTTP integrated with Emacs, but the following are available already -

Example ring project:

[https://github.com/alpeware/jaq-example](https://github.com/alpeware/jaq- example)

Leinigen plugin:

[https://github.com/alpeware/lein-jaq](https://github.com/alpeware/lein-jaq)

Clojure bindings for App Engine services:

[https://github.com/alpeware/jaq-services](https://github.com/alpeware/jaq- services)

[0] [https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

<comment><USER4> [https://media0.giphy.com/media/l0MYu38R0PPhIXe36/giphy- tumbl...](https://media0.giphy.com/media/l0MYu38R0PPhIXe36/giphy-tumblr.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work in Elixir/Phoenix/React on a day-to-day basis.

The last few personal projects I've handled had been Elixir/Phoenix/jQuery, but I'm now switching out jQuery for Elm and am really liking it so far. I'm building a CI system which is more or less a small state machine which Elm benefits from. Moreover, Elm seems to be really loved by the Phoenix community and integrating between Phoenix channels and Elm subscriptions was super easy

</comment><comment><USER6> Me LAMP, other people? maybe other stuff.

Picking a stack is a combination of the tools which will effectively solve whatever issues you have that work for how you develop as well as work with your computing platform(s) of choice.

a) start with whats readily available and what you can understand and learn/build from there. b) find what widely popular for your market (solutions will vary) and start with that.

A better question is "I am wanting to do [this] (and maybe [that]), what stacks work best for it? and why?"

I do data based web APPS, PHP/MySQL are well suited, they are pretty unrestrictive and very flexible - in that you need to be aware to code for security: watch your inputs and how code can be called and learn some good programming practices to avoid spaghetti code. They also scale pretty easily. They aren't bleeding edge exciting but get the job done quite easily.

Besides just asking find web apps you like and research what they are created with.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm a C++/Python dev by day, so web apps are all personal projects.

I've been using Python + Flask on personal projects just because Python.

On the front-end, I try to use as little JavaScript as I can get away with. Recently, I've been playing with Bulma, a CSS framework, and I've been liking it so far.

I've been meaning to learn some React for some parts of my apps that require more interactivity.

I highly recommend Flask for people with some Python knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER8> Python/Flask React. Hosted on a linux box (ubuntu) in the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER9> We have an all-Scala stack with some nice properties:

* Code sharing between client and server

* Typed AJAX between client and server

* Component based UI on the frontend

Frontend: React4s (shameless plug I suppose)

[http://www.react4s.org/examples/todo- list](http://www.react4s.org/examples/todo-list)

Backend: Akka HTTP

[https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka- http/current/index.html](https://doc.akka.io/docs/akka- http/current/index.html)

Typed AJAX: Autowire with uPickle

</comment><comment><USER10> Almost the same question was asked a few days ago, lots of answers:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16508965](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16508965)

General popularity of LAMP python and rails, with very few js FOTM stacks mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER11> Check out Enonic XP - [https://enonic.com](https://enonic.com). Runs in any cloud and you can build your server side logic in Javascript. Embedded NoSQL, search engine, identity and (headless) CMS. Open Source on github.

<comment><USER12> I think it's fair to add a disclaimer the commenter works for enomic. (self promotion itself is totally fine of course).

<comment><USER11> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Solo-developer on my side project...

* Frontend: Vue.js 2, JavaScript ECMA 2017

* Backend: Erlang/OTP 20, Elixir 1.6.3, Phoenix 1.3.2

* Persistence: Postgres 18.104.22.168

* Hosting: Vultr

</comment><comment><USER14> Used to be django and postgres. For the next one, I might swap django out for something golang.

</comment><comment><USER15> Work: ASP.NET MVC + KnockoutJS on my team (other teams using React etc.)

Home: Elm + BaaS (Parse)

</comment><comment><USER16> PHP7, Laravel, and MySQL.

</comment><comment><USER17> Everything JavaScript

</comment><comment><USER18> ROR for web with html, Golang as api sever.

Postgresql as databases

</comment><comment><USER19> Scala with Play framework. Angular for front end.

</comment><comment><USER20> React - GraphQL (with Graphcool Prisma)

</comment><comment><USER4> React - nodejs - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER21> Opinions on ASP.NET Core ?

<comment><USER22> I use it for a web app and find that version 2 is super stable and though there are some minor issues, I am able to work on Mac with Visual Studio Code while my teammate uses Visual Studio on Windows. It's the best of all worlds at this point and Microsoft is investing in it to the point that it doesn't feel like a potential liability the way some of their dead end projects have ended up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> nextjs && node for api. some laravel on backend</comment>


Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/16/oracle_targets_java_users_non_compliance/ <comment><USER2> For anyone interested in a list of "advanced and suite" products, this is the best I could find:

[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaseproducts/overvi...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javaseproducts/overview/index.html#features)

* Java Mission Control (JMC)

* Java Flight Recorder (JFR)

* Java Advanced Management Console (AMC)

* Microsoft Windows Installer (MSI) Enterprise JRE Installer

* Java Usage Tracker (JUT)

</comment><comment><USER3> TLDR: "Java SE is free (for desktops, notebooks, smartphones and tablets) but Java SE Advanced Desktop, Advanced and Suite are not."</comment>


Practical Hadoop Streaming -- Dealing with Brittle Code - <AUTHOR> http://devblog.factual.com/practical-hadoop-streaming-dealing-with-brittle-code

<comment><USER2> Whenever I have an app or library that "wtf segfaults" more than once, I try to fix the bug or not use that library. I don't try to run the job 1000 times and hope it works once.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty good article!</comment>


Am I Happy At Work? Analyzing my entire career - <AUTHOR> https://www.trackinghappiness.com/happy-at-work/ <comment><USER4> I don't want to sound an asshole, but I will sound an assholle nevertheless.

I was damn happy as one can be at 3.5 years in my career. 10 years in, I feel like my happiness and awesomeness has been slowly consumed by corporate politics, unfair promotions and layoffs, bad work ethics and the such.

I still like my work. I really really enjoy it when it's productive, and I still feel amazed to see the green checkmark on my CI after a long and challenging git push - but after so many years and a couple companies it's just work.

There are some real cool places and projects to work though, you just need to dig through the "look we're cool let us enslave you" crap.

<comment><USER5> I feel exactly the same way and also just hit the 10-year mark. I'm literally working at the worst place I have ever worked at in my career. Next Friday will be my last day.

I'm seriously considering trying to get out of tech forever after this last gig. I'm moving to Asia in a few weeks to try to work on bootstrapping a small company.

<comment><USER6> Good for you and good luck!

just curious which Asian country?

<comment><USER5> Thailand first. Then maybe I'll roam around. Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They wouldn't call it work/life balance if work was really part of your life. It's dead time, lost time. I've always felt that way anyhow. You can convince yourself otherwise maybe, if you're a musician or something. For most people though that's the truth of it.

<comment><USER8> I think you have it the other way around. People for whom work is dead, lost time really need to get their work/life balance sorted out. If you view work as part of your life, then it's a much less binary view of prioritisation. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't prioritise. It just means that the prioritisation is more nuanced than: do what I don't like for 8 hours and then do what I _do_ like for the rest of the day.

In my way of thinking, there are a lot of things you have to do in your day that you may not really want to do. For example, you've got to brush your teeth. I don't have a "brush my teeth"/life balance. I brush my teeth because I want my teeth brushed. Sometimes I enjoy brushing my teeth. Spending some time to look after myself can be very rewarding. Most of the time, I'm thinking about my other priorities.

The same goes for cleaning the house, doing your dishes, doing your laundry, cooking, doing yard work, visiting your family, washing your car, fixing things around the house, etc, etc. At various times, those tasks are the highest priority even though you might not want to do them. You still have to do them. But people who find a way to enjoy at least some of those tasks are going to be a _lot_ happier overall than people who don't.

I think you are right that for most people that the binary point of view is the truth of it, but to be perfectly frank, for most people their only free time is being taken up by watching people being nasty to each other on reality TV shows. Just because it is common, doesn't mean it's a good idea.

You've got 8 hours of your day being taken up by work. You've got lunch at work. You've got your commute. You've got getting ready for work. You've got unwinding from the stress of work. That's a _crap load_ of your life! You can waste it being miserable if you like, but I really don't recommend it.

In any job there is _something_ you can find to enjoy. You may not enjoy it every single day, but the more you succeed in getting into the enjoyment zone, the better your life is going to be. Or at least, that's the way I look at it.

<comment><USER7> Well I think my point is that it feels completely different when it's self directed. I built a shed this summer with my brothers- and it didn't feel anything like work does- it felt joyful, playful. I get some of the same feelings when I'm working on my own programming projects. But at work? No, I'm creating something for someone else, to make someone else richer, and if I left tomorrow nobody would care.

You might be able fool yourself for a while with the power of positive thinking but a happy servant is still a servant.

<comment><USER8> A happy servant is happier than a sad servant. Being happy or sad does not change your status as a servant. Don't cut off your nose to spite your face, is all I'm trying to say.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was very unhappy with my job for the first 12 years between two jobs. Except for one brief period of a year.

I had been a hobbyist hacker for 10 years, since 6th grade, including four years in college. I then got my first job that I was greatly over qualified for as a computer operator. But that was my best opportunity to get to a big city because I had been an intern at the company the prior year.

I changed jobs 3 years later, got a nice 20K bump and another 10K bump over the next year, learned a lot and I thought I was doing well. That year and the next year was great.

Over the next 7 years, no growth in skills and only making $7K more over that time with measly raises and bonuses being cut, I hated my job but I felt so unqualified that I didn't make a move and I was just miserable.

I finally woke up and changed companies and started back gaining new skills and seeing a salary increase.

Over the next 10 years, I can honestly say I never hated my job for more than a month. Once I started hating my job and I learned all I could, I had the skill set and the optionally to jump ship. Even if I didn't leave immediately, I never felt "stuck".

I guess that's just a long winded way of saying that I only hate my job when I don't feel like I'm growing and/or have any optionality.

I also realized that I work next in small companies with little red tape.

<comment><USER10> > Over the next 10 years, I can honestly say I never hated my job for more > than a month. Once I started hating my job and I learned all I could, I had > the skill set and the optionally to jump ship. Even if I didn't leave > immediately, I never felt "stuck".

How often did this happen? Did you have problems with being perceived as a job hopper?

<comment><USER9> Four.

It's about having a story to tell and yes you do have to be able to have a good explanation without sounding negative. It also helps that I have the CTO of the first company as a reference and the hiring manager of the third company as a reference who had the same issues I had.

1\. The company went out of business - that was an easy one.

2\. Large company hired fast to develop a new .net project but two years in all of the business was on their legacy PHP product, no one wanted to do PHP. There is no money in saying "I developed a PHP app"

3\. Cant go into details without doxing myself but it was highly political and we working in a remote office away from the seats of power.

4\. It was a contract to perm and when they gave me a permanent offer they told me up front that they didn't want to be a software development shop but they wanted me to lead two initiatives. I saw the writing on the wall.

There were other reasons for leaving the 2-4 one but that's the story I tell which are all true.

<comment><USER10> Hmm, these definitely seem more exciting than my case, which is usually more "feeling uninspired and feel that others at work don't care about the product".

<comment><USER9> I'm much more cynical now. I don't get my "inspiration" from my job. The only reason I went to work up until my current job was to get a paycheck and learn skills to get a larger paycheck. As long as that was happening, I was happy.

Now, things are different. I've come close to maxing our as an individual contributor in my local market, I have no desire to be a manager, and a dev lead position doesn't pay enough more (about $10-$15K) to be worth the extra headache (been there done that).

I am continuously learning to keep my options open in case something changes, but I really like my job even though it can get crazy but its not because of the people.

As much as I say in theory that you should always leave a job if you feel like you're stagnating, I'm not sure that I would have the discipline to leave a job a like just for that reason as long as I'm making enough to live the lifestyle I want and my compensation is not to out of whack with the market.

<comment><USER10> I think that's generally the part I don't like about most jobs. It seems everyone is checked out and is just there to collect a paycheck and build their resume.

My job is fine in terms of paycheck and learning, but it feels like I'd have an easier time if I just ignored issues but that's not really the kind of person I want to become.

<comment><USER9> I wish I could say that attitude was in me and that's the advice I would give others. But, I'm at the point where either I either want to be a team lead at a large company, be an architect by responsible if not title at a small company where there isn't too much red tape, or just a consultant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> He's still very young. When I was his age and even for many years prior I loved working, genuinely enjoyed it and was eager to be there, in the milieu, in the flow, killing problems, etc.

Come back to me when you've been at it for 30 years. At year 5 or 6 of working FT professionally, which came after ten years of working through college, I started getting jaded, same thing, same stupid "mistakes" (choices really), etc. Towards the end of my sixth year, I ended up getting a full, unfiltered view of inequity and the brutal sausage making that is all sizable organizations.

30 years in you realize that sitting all day and killing it to 2am takes a huge toll on your body and even 8 hour stunts may not be all that good, standing desk or no.

By the time you lose your youthful bliss, it's too late to start saving. You need to take it on faith that future you has seen more of the operational realities of the world and this has not improved their existence.

The whole FIRE thing is a way to package and sell stuff; the dominant bloggers In the community who are "retired" are doing between 40k and 500k a year in web ad revenue. They mostly do not actually live the life they are suggesting: they have not retired, they've changed to a higher risk career. (Exception: earlyretirementnow.com ).

That said, like sites dedicated to exercise or eating well, the basic message is a good one and not a new one (see The Richest Man In Babylon, Your Mobey Or Your Life, etc.). So in that sense, anything that sells the mindset is a net good.

</comment><comment><USER12> In my (relatively short) life, I've always been far more happy in my periods of unemployment than when I was "gainfully employed." Don't expect a single person on HN to share this view, but there it is.

<comment><USER13> I'm the same way. I took a year off once, and it was awesome. I regret not being a lucky trust fund kid.

<comment><USER14> I did the exact same thing. It was great.

I don't understand these people who can't find things to keep them occupied outside work. I don't have enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to do. Work is just 8 hours per day that I can't do those things.

<comment><USER12> I'm kind of the opposite, I just love laying around all day doing nothing but reading. I spent most of my time at my last job doing this, but surrounded by people, noise, and fluorescent lighting.

Plus, being able to attend events spontaneously and stay out as late as you want is pretty great.

<comment><USER14> Reading is one of the things I'd like to do that is prevented by that 8 hours per day of work.

<comment><USER12> Well cheers to that, mate. Hope you find a way to get more of your time to yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is great! I wish I'd started doing something like this long ago. The closest thing I've found to this that I'm able to at least remind myself to use regularly is this, [https://daylio.webflow.io/](https://daylio.webflow.io/)

It'd be interesting to leverage something like this to decide when I should take vacation... If my happiness is slowly decreasing and visualized like this, it'd serve as a nice reminder to schedule some vacation. I'd also be interested to see how long after vacations the "high" wears off

<comment><USER16> I just tried this one, (and another one, Journal which both seems to be Google 'editors choice'), but I found that both only had 5 possible moods (basically: exstatic, good, meh, bad, terrible) , and I fear me data will just be 90% "good".

Do you know if it can be configured to have more levels? Or if other apps have more specificity?

<comment><USER17> Try MoodDiary[1], it has a scale of 10 but also allows tracking multiple metrics (e.g. I track 4 metrics: sleep, mood, energy level and overwhelmed vs. undercontrol)

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.jonathansau...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.jonathansautter.stimmungstagebuch)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nope. Not happy. I make enough money now that salary is no longer a major consideration when it comes to my job satisfaction. I move around every couple of years, hoping to get more challenging assignments, more responsibility, etc., which never materialize. It really is the same crap everywhere I go. Office politics, PHBs, incompetent coworkers, etc.

I've decided I'm not a "cultural fit" for corporate environments. But I've been working in corporate environments so long, everybody assumes I wouldn't be fit for anything else.

</comment><comment><USER19> Really interesting. It must take such discipline to collect this data for 3.5 years.

Trying to answer the question of "does work make me happy?" is much more complex than comparing happiness levels between work and non-work days - <USER2> are not independent. How much of your happiness of a non-work day is precisely because it is a day off? An imperfect analogy would be the feeling of enjoying a holiday but also being glad to be home at the end of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. It's much more complex. Comparing happiness levels between work and non-work days was one way of trying to answer it. This method is still distorted by a lot of things, like you mention. I'm open for any different methods! If you have any ideas, I'd love to know :)

It takes me about 3 minutes every day to track happiness, and the advantages go much further than just the collection of data. It's also a moment of self- reflection and meditation in a way. It puts my mind at rest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ctrl-f + "fire" in comments... Nothing??

The author mentioned FIRE (Financially Independent, Retired Early) which, IMHO, a big factor in your happiness at work based on my own experience being on both ends of having money and nothing.

Some background context - worked for a decade+, quit job to go travel for 6 months with sizable savings in bank account, came back almost broke, now back in the workforce.

So I am one of the lucky ones in the world to absolutely love the industry I am in hence never hated "work". Colleagues, office politics, etc is another matter but "work" itself was always interesting thus I was happy in the sense that I never hated doing my actual "work". What I noticed that contributed to my happiness at "work" was how correlated it was to the savings in my bank account. The more my bank account grew, the less I worried about the "other things" (crazy bosses, stifling politics, strange colleagues, etc) and the more I could relish enjoying the challenges of doing my actual "work".[1]

Fast forward a decade, I then quit my job to travel and it was absolute bliss of happiness! Kind of a taste of retirement life. HOWEVER, while I had a huge chunk of savings, it wasn't exactly FU forever money so as the bank account started dwindling while traveling, I noticed my happiness was correlated again and I started enjoying traveling less.

Once my bank account was down to an unacceptable level (for my own standards), I made the decision to go back to work to replenish it and work again towards my FIRE goal. I managed to get another job in an industry that I enjoyed doing the "work" but I wasn't exactly feeling happy this time round due to the constant worry about being laid off, having to pander to colleagues and/or bosses, dealing with politics, etc. Doing the work was fine but a lot of my unhappiness came from worrying about "everything else" at work due to me depending on the paycheck.

Fast forward to today, my savings are back to healthy levels and once again, I'm happy at "work" even though nothing has changed in terms of "everything else". Makes me realise that anecdotally for me at least, _having FU money_ in my bank account contributes A LOT to my happiness at work - assuming of course with a caveat that you love doing what you are doing at work.

[1] I put apostrophes (") around the word work because I defined work in this context as not the job/position as a whole but the actual thing that I do. I.e. If work is Software Engineer at Google, I defined "work" as doing code related stuff.

<comment><USER21> I can relate but it's a treacherous, rocky path to follow the pot of gold. Sometimes it's a compass. And if you live in a very expensive part of the world, it can quickly land you in a pressure cooker environment. Now, the issue is that as you get older, you start to explore other paths. Ideally, rather than travel for six months like you do, laudable in itself, I try to use that money to invest in stuff for the future. One hopes then to have even more relaxing six month adventures, if I still have the energy.

<comment><USER20> I completely agree that some people pursuing FIRE can be too fanatical about chasing the pot of goal and only waiting until old age to "enjoy". I kind of skirt in the middle (i'm more of a FatFIRE) and think of FIRE more as a North Star. :)

I should mention that I do live in an expensive part of the world (think SF but not SF) and the bank account was just the liquid assets bit of the portfolio. Been on the FIRE journey for 10 years now so I have some illiquid assets (properties, stocks, etc) but I tend to not think of touching it ever.

<comment><USER21> Listen, I totally agree and would do the same thing. However what you've not mentioned above in your 6-month-travel-til-cash-burnt-out story is the assets. I noticed the plural on properties. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In principle it's an interesting idea, however, I'm not sure how meaningful this kind of tracking is. Even the author seems to wonder about this - <USER3> a work day as an 8, but realizing it was the relaxing he did that day that effected his happiness. And unless you're reflecting back weeks when making your rating, this kind of tracking could be susceptible to the idea of "boiling the frog".

<comment><USER23> Maybe compartmentalizing happiness scores to how one felt during work time, during personal time and overall for the day would help mitigate this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think I'd be happy in a job if I could have self-direction and work on whatever I find interesting or important. That's a lot more important to me than working remotely or having a flexible schedule. I really don't like being told exactly what to work on and having all my ideas shot down.

I'm a solo founder of a small startup, and I really enjoy the freedom to work on whatever I want. I'm making lots of mistakes and not growing as fast as I could be, but I'm learning a lot and I enjoy almost everything that I'm working on. I'm even enjoying the marketing, sales, and support, because it's fun to talk to people and personally solve their problems.

I'm not sure if I ever want to bring on a co-founder or hire some people, but I think it could be interesting to work with a small group of generalists where everyone just works on whatever they think is important. There's a famous quote from Steve Jobs: "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do." I don't think it's a very radical idea, but I don't know if many companies actually put it into practice. I think that kind of decision-making is usually reserved for cofounders or C-level executives, and it probably breaks down after 10+ employees. But would be fun to try with a small team.

</comment><comment><USER25> What's the trick to be happy & joyous (without any strings attached) ? How does one train the mind to not be achievement driven (especially if you are on HN everyday) ?

Can anyone recommend a course or a book to achieve that ? Something that makes you happy naturally (not forced).

</comment><comment><USER26> Let me change the word "happy" to "satisfied".

I don't believe I can feel happy all the time or even most of the time. But the feeling that I want to have at the end of the day is that I am being productive and that I feel satisfied at the end of every day.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is an awesome way to quantify the happiness you feel as a order of time. I wish I did this on a daily basis so that I could see the things that contribute and take away from my personal happiness. I tend to be a pretty introspective guy so I think about this kind of stuff on a regular basis, but I'd be curious to see if analyzing when I'm working out, vs playing videogames has an affect on my real happiness VS the blah feeling that you get when you are able to turn your brain off for a bit.

Kudos on this, and I assume there's a link to how you track your happiness in there somewhere. I've got to dive deeper.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, agreed, it seems valuable to track your happiness and the factors that contributed to (or detracted from) it. Looks like there are a few apps for this like: [https://www.trackyourhappiness.org/](https://www.trackyourhappiness.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I enjoy my day when I am allowed to work uninterrupted. The task doesn't generally matter, but some are not as "cool" as others. However, I can find joy in reducing cyclomatic complexity of code, improving readability etc. of whatever dumb fuck feature marketing thinks is important.

Today I changed how our promotions work. Do I think its a wise use of resources? Nope. It was probably a waste of 2 hours of my time. Marketing will probably ask me to switch it back in a few months because they have no idea what they are doing. After stepping away from the task for 5 minutes and ending the arguments in my head against the task. I hopped into the code. I began enjoying figuring how to organize the code in a way that creating unit tests would be easy. I refactored some small things here and there and checked off the task. I was pleased with what I created despite being displeased with the task. I then moved on to a more interesting and useful task.

What kills me. Is a bug that interrupts my flow. Each day I create a list of a few work items I will accomplish. There may be a meeting, a few small tasks, and then a piece of a larger project I am working on. When that gets thrown off by some asshole trying to hijack the sprint or a critical bug it pretty much shatters my day. I feel so unproductive. Resolving a must-fix-now bug is both handling debt and incurring debt (through loss of time). It really fucking kills me.

<comment><USER30> Heads up mate, last time I had been building an "intelligent banner system" for two months, adding a one megabyte payload to the initial site load, "because marketing".

When I feel grumpy because of popup bugs, asap tasks and really stupid marketing/seo requests I usually tell my self that hey, I still get my paycheck so if this is what makes them happy, then let's make them happy.</comment></comment>


Startup looking for front-end developer asap - remote - <AUTHOR>

I normally don't post this type of stuff but we're in a time crunch and just lost our front end developer.
We have all the .psds finished and need someone to do the html/css/js. Can work remotely.
We were just covered in Mashable: http://mashable.com/2013/08/23/allpaws/
Required skills
- HTML, CSS, JS
- Responsive using css media queries (must have examples to show)
If interested please email me at email@example.com with some info about you, rates and a portfolio with code samples.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> protip: [http://www.psd2html.com/](http://www.psd2html.com/)</comment>


HackIDE – Open-Source Online Code Editor/Compiler/Interpreter - <AUTHOR> http://hackide.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

Show HN Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I think I can't edit it now.</comment></comment>


A VC: Superdistribution - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/03/superdistributi.html <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea. If your consumer's are going to redistribute your product anyways just embrace and encourage them as distribution channels.

The if you can't beat 'em, join 'em approach to piracy.

Interesting to think about the logistics of how it might/could work? How do companies take affiliate networks and apply them to all their customers, allowing the customers to make affiliate sales to any the come across on or offline? Would it even be feasible offline? Cell phones?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I see all sorts of problems to iron out before this could be feasible on a wide scale. I'm all about progress as long as it actually progresses something and isn't just about doing it differently. Offline further complicates it, even indicating a greater integration of technology into the most ephemeral of daily activities.</comment></comment>


Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web - <AUTHOR> https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/media-websites-vs-facebook/ <comment><USER3> From the article: _" The web definitely has a speed problem due to over-design and the junkyard of tools people feel they have to include on every single web page. However, I don't agree that the web has an inherent slowness. The articles for the new Facebook feature will be sent over exactly the same connection as web pages. However, the web versions of the articles have an extra layer of cruft attached to them, and that's what makes the web slow to load. The speed problem is not inherent to the web; it's a consequence of what passes for modern web development. Remove the cruft and we can compete again."_

I've been bitching about this ever since it became clear that CSS made web pages bulkier. (Yeah, it was supposed to make them shorter. Didn't happen.) We had much faster loading pages when people created HTML 3.2 with Dreamweaver and tables, and _most of them looked about the same_. Now we need HTTP2 so that all the "assets" can be loaded more effectively. There are even content management systems which generate bloated custom CSS for every page, with huge numbers of classed tags customized for each page. This eliminates any useful caching.

Some major sites have figured this out. The Wall Street Journal's home page has become shorter and simpler at the HTML level. Two years I looked at it, and some content management system was inserting the entire sign-up-for-a- subscription machinery on _every page_. They've fixed that. The Washington Post is inserting the same block of Javascript for each story. Somebody should tell those guys about functions.

I have a web service which strips all active content (Javascript, Flash, Active-X, Silverlight, etc.) from a page, parses it, and redisplays it. Most major news sites seem to work OK in that mode. Instagram is fine. (WhatsApp looks awful.) Much of the junk that slows page loading is providing little, if any, benefit to the user.

<comment><USER4> I saved a Washington Post page -- a short interview -- and it came to 3054KB. I saved a NY Post page and it came to 2843K. For all I know, there could have been piles of background junk that weren't saved with the page.

It does seem a bit remarkable that these sites need to ship 3 megabytes of stuff to deliver 20K of text....

I think I need your web service ;-)

<comment><USER3> If you want to try it, try

      http://www.sitetruth.com/fcgi/viewer.fcgi?url=news.ycombinator.com

replacing the URL parameter with the desired web site. It's a tool we use to see how our crawler views a page. It reads the first 1MB from a URL, converts everything to UTF-8 based on the strict rules for charsets (no guessing), parses it with a HTML5 parser to create a parse tree, throws out the Javascript and Flash, makes all the links absolute, and emits a pretty-printed version.

Most sites have readable text after this, although some features may not work. The ones that don't do something like creating the page with document.write(), or one of those "parallax" formats. It's a reasonable test to see if the web designers went completely overboard. If you're getting a blank page, search engines probably aren't indexing that page very well.

<comment><USER4> Many thanks, will have a play...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article really highlights something that I'm constantly amazed by - <USER2> how SLOW major media organisations are prepared to allow their websites to be.

When I'm designing a landing page for anything significant (product, movie, whatever), I'm looking for sub-second load times - ideally below 500ms. Why? Because there are tons of studies showing that page load speed makes a huge difference to user experience, retention, CTR, the whole nine yards.

How come bigger media companies, whose expense accounts for team lunch are probable larger than my entire Web budget, fail to learn this?

I'm baffled.

<comment><USER6> You are not kidding. The user experience of most media sites is appalling, mostly down to performance.

Here's a great example I saw recently when I hit the Daily Mash without Ghostery enabled: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/seu0run7pn4tbc6/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/seu0run7pn4tbc6/Screenshot%202015-06-19%2011.26.39.png?dl=0) \- in excess of fifty(!!) third-party scripts and trackers, rendering the browser unusable for multiple seconds. It's a frustrating, miserable experience.

<comment><USER7> Mozilla reported an _average_ pageload performance of 40% by just blocking the _tracking_ scripts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article was better than I expected from the title.

It's not about Facebook, and it's not exactly about online media either. It's about failed expectations with (particularly mobile) online media, and how conflicting needs far too often neglect the user experience.

Speed matters. Performance is crucial. Load times are atrocious. And above all: screen real estate on mobile is _precious_. A badly transferred advert that happens to sort of work on desktop, when the user has >20Mbps connection - it murders the UX on mobile. And as a result, makes the entire site unusable. As a result, users are moving to anything that makes the content load faster, and where the ads are not as intrusive.

The irony of it all? FB is better at serving media than the producers and _publishers_ themselves.

UX >> UI.

</comment><comment><USER9> I agree with the overall sentiment expressed that web developers can and should do better as it comes to performance. There were a few inaccurate or misleading remarks in the article that I'd like to draw attention to:

 _1) Guess how those Instant Articles are formatted? HTML. Guess how those articles get to the app? HTTP._

This is misleading because it seems to equate pulling in content with loading an article. By loading these articles into the app (as opposed to launching a browser), Facebook gains the ability to do the following:

\- Provide the basic styles from app-install time. Most of your css doesn't need to be downloaded.

\- Skip app boot time. App's take a while to cold start, meaning I don't have to start safari before I start the web request.

\- Prefetch. I don't know if they do or will do this, but facebook could reasonably prefetch articles and their resources before you click

 _2) Stop buying into the 'native is better' myth. (It's just different.)_

Another phrase for "different" is "better at different things". It turns out that the app model provides some amazing guarantees that the web can't match (and vice-versa):

\- Preloaded styles and logic. Content changes, but presentation stays the same. Only download content. (no caching is not a valid solution, because exercising new parts of the code would require a download. Though some appmanifest magic may let you get pretty close)

\- Cheap library inclusion. If an app is an extra MB or so it's no big deal most of the time. You can use that to load in libraries that vastly speed up developer work and can do "progressive enhancement" by supported new APIs on old OS versions. Libraries are way more costly on the web as the author points out.

\- Consistent (with the OS) UX and much cheaper animations

\- Lower memory footprint

These things do matter! The web is amazing, yes. No, it's not dying, but there is value in native apps and they're not equivalent. Smart engineers will make the choice based on their needs which is what both facebook and these news sources are doing.

<comment><USER10> For what it's worth the Facebook app takes forever to load (like 3 minutes or more) on my 3-year old iPhone 4, while browsing for stuff on Safari stills works reasonably well, bar the odd website which throws a huge advert at you.

People would probably advise me to change my phone, to get a newer one, but why should we change our phones every 2 years? Why create more waste? Why spend money uselessly on stuff that should work for at least 5 years?

<comment><USER11> Even on an iPhone 6 the Facebook app can feel sluggish and clunky. The mobile site in Safari is a good alternative and feels quicker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel like I'm living under a rock, sheltered from all this except when ever so often I click on a link on HN an get taken to some website from hell. Complaining about that world is like complaining about how pointless broadcast TV is. You can't fight it and there isn't anything there worth fighting for, you're not missing out on anything.

</comment><comment><USER13> The gist is for me: _The speed problem is not inherent to the web; it's a consequence of what passes for modern web development. Remove the cruft and we can compete again._

My guess is, the cruft will not be removed, but will just be sped up with WebAssembly etc. Building a web site that's functional and fast stays an art form that's not accessible to everyone. Native apps are just a quick-&-dirty cop-out from that problem.

<comment><USER14> WebAssembly won't do anything for the latency delays of a myriad of support files (javascript, CSS, images) which is the key problem for small apps and non-applicatino pages, HTTP2's better handling of multiple files (or for HTTP(S) grouping everything into one minified block) won't help if they are coming from different 3rd parties, ...

That is an issue that needs to be addressed by people changing how they currently build some pages/apps. It is particularly bothersome when mobile and stuck on a slow high-latency connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mozilla needs to have a separate web browser project that only focuses on cutting out the cruft of the top 100 websites plus top 50 news sites. Filter out the ads, filter out the JS that launches advertising modals, cache the content, in short do anything to make sure they load in under 2 seconds with 1 second or 500ms the goal.

When you control the client you can stop so many unnecessary requests and you can patch sites (GreaseMonkey and Stylish were/are the best extensions) when they arrive.

This is exactly why the web is built as it is; you don't _have_ to take whatever crap is shoved at your browser, _you_ are in control.

<comment><USER16> Except this probably violates everybody's Terms of Service....

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Your problem is that if you put your developers ahead of your customers, > you'll end up with just the developers.

This implies it's just a matter of priorities. In fact, it's a matter of cost. The OP admits that what he advocates "isn't easy", technically. That means it's more expensive. More developer hours, more highly-skilled developers, or both.

It is a matter of priorities in the sense that an organization needs to understand what a good product looks like and be willing to spend the money to create a good product, trusting the investment will ultimately be repaid (as the OP argues but is hardly guaranteed). But it's not avoiding "putting developers over customers", in fact they need to be spending more on developers than they are now to get a good product, they need to 'elevate' their developers further, always remembering the ultimate goal is serving users of course.

<comment><USER18> I hate to be the guy- but how about just serving some html and some css?

<comment><USER17> I dunno, what do you think are the reasons media sites aren't doing that?

Ads? Tracking? What they think is a good design/UX that users will like, find easy and enjoyable to read, and associate with professionalism and credibility? (are they right or wrong?) Good UX for multi-media presentations? Social media sharing icons? Good UX for mobile? Comments features? Other stuff?

<comment><USER19> Basically a little bit of everything, it's just feature bloating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> And facebook users are it's foot-soldiers. As long as people converge on Facebook and while Zuckerberg moves ever closer to his goal of replacing the internet with Facebook, the assault will not cease until the society has been subjugated and the internet domesticated.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here's a quick illustration I put together recently to show the cruft of mobile news sites: [https://dribbble.com/shots/2118552-DBC-News- Concept/attachme...](https://dribbble.com/shots/2118552-DBC-News- Concept/attachments/384411)

I hope this whole discussion is a bit of a wake-up call for news sites to get their priorities and tech straightened out.</comment>