Die, robocalls, die: A how-to guide to stop spammers and exact revenge - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/04/die-robocalls-die-how-to-guide-stop-spammers-exact-revenge/ <comment><USER2> Web archive link for non-subscribers: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190405054132/https://www.washi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190405054132/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/04/04/die- robocalls-die-how-to-guide-stop-spammers-exact-revenge/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Personally I think robocalls show the need to upgrade the phone protocols to something more robust and identifiable. The current system is very insecure and I would love an option for say certificate identification of callers. I am well aware a switchover would be messy.

</comment><comment><USER4> The phone carriers know exactly where this traffic is coming from, they just DGAF because they can upsell people on $4/mo "spam prevention" services.</comment>


Ask HN: What can your company do to fight the Wuhan coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Unless your company is Abbvie or Gilead, I don't think there's a lot your average company can specifically do.

The best thing any company can do is to offer paid sick leave and make employees feel psychologically safe for choosing to stay home and recover when they are sick so they never feel pressured to show up with a cold or flu and get everyone else sick.

<comment><USER3> > _best thing any company can do is to offer paid sick leave and make > employees feel psychologically safe for choosing to stay home and recover_

Most companies don't do this, so it sounds like there's a lot of progress to be made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One quick idea is to limit travel when video conferencing will do. This is also good for carbon footprint, and profit and work life balance.</comment>


Car engines: The old motor roars back - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11919344 <comment><USER2> We're just delaying the inevitable. Superchargers and turbo's have been in use and refined for a long time. Superchargers rely on horsepower at the crank to power them so to make power you need some power in the first place. Turbos now have variable veins making them less lag prone.

However electric motors produce all the torque at 0 rpm and remains constant to the end. Once we find a suitable battery source I don't see why the IC engine wouldn't be retired to museums and enthusiast garages. But I could be wrong.</comment>


Ask HN: Finding the Right Problem - <AUTHOR>

Hi everybody,
Many entrepreneurs know that to find the right startup idea, you need to first find a problem or pain-point to solve.
So, I wanted to ask the audience: what are some problems you have, you would be willing to pay for someone else to solve? <comment><USER2> Hi, let me know if you still wanted to chat about your legal start up. I answered your comment a few days after you posted, not sure if you saw it.</comment>


CEO's Plan to Save Sears Would Hand His Hedge Fund $1B - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/lampert-s-sears-plan-would-hand-lampert-s-hedge-fund-1-billion <comment><USER2> Eddie Lampert's mismanagement of Sears is the _reducto ad absurdum_ of financial "wizards" attempting to succeed as business operators.

I will never forget reading this article (from 2011): [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204517204577042...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204517204577042442598865710).

'While retail experts estimate that store chains traditionally spend $6 to $8 per square foot on annual maintenance, Sears is spending a fraction of that amount, said Matthew McGinley, managing director of International Strategy & Investment Group, an investor research firm.

"With roughly 250 million square feet domestically, [Sears] is spending about $1.90 a foot, which is a quarter of what you need to maintain share and keep it as an acceptable place to shop," Mr. McGinley said.'

\---

Nor will I forget reading about his management philosophy where different Sears departments have to compete for money in the budget. Money to advertise, to purchase inventory, etc. ([https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at- sears-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie- lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-troubles))

To the average "person on the street", it may be patently obvious that when your stores are filthy and understaffed, no one will want to shop there. To Eddie Lampert, the way to juice EBITDA for a few years is to slash that maintenance money.

Pour one out for the death of multiple iconic American brands (Craftsman, Kenmore, and eventually Sears itself). Don't shed a tear for Lampert, since he's set himself up for a "heads, investors, customers, and employees lose" and "tails, I win" situation.

<comment><USER3> There's a kmart (which is owned by Sears and therefore in the same situation) near my old office and it's downright depressing to go in there. The lighting isn't bright enough, the store is run with a skeleton staff and everything looks a bit old or dirty. For example, the floor tiles are overdue for a replacement. Want to buy a watch? Good luck finding an employee to help you at the watch counter. But the most eerie part is that the store is so devoid of customers.

When I go to a nearby Target, you can hardly move around all the shopping carts in there. The Kmart, which is a similar size, might only have a few customers in the store at a time. Maybe Target is slightly more upscale, but even the Walmart nearby looks much nicer, plus has a better selection and similar if not lower prices.

Unlike many other retail stores, it doesn't even feel like Kmart is _trying_ to adapt. Bestbuy has it's superior customer service (not exactly world class, but better than competitors). T.J.Maxx/Homegoods has an ever-changing selection of bargains and the feeling of being in a treasure hunt. Even J.C. Penney tried a new transparent pricing scheme (which failed). But I haven't seen Kmart/Sears try to do something similar.

Edit: changed _the store is run on a skeleton staff_ to _the store is run with a skeleton staff_

<comment><USER4> I had a similar experience the last time I was in a Kmart. No employees, no other customers, empty shelves. Go to the electronics department and you'll find games for systems that were obsolete a decade ago. I don't understand how they've managed to stay open so long.

<comment><USER5> In some neighborhoods, the local KMart was the only local clothing store for miles. This was the case in the neighborhood a few miles away from me until the mid 2000s and the rise of Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Standard practice. The retailer's assets are converted to profit for some financial firm and the retailer dies. Hedge funds gain enough control to saddle them with debt, then cash out.

These major retailers failing? They're engineered to fail by the parasite that is the financial industry that vacuums up money into its control.

It is no surprise that the CEO, who owns the hedge fund that will give him a pretty penny of a 1 Billion with B cashout, wants to axe the company his somehow CEO of, for his own profit. It would not surprise me if the hedge fund got to install him though owning enough of the company.

This is nothing but the modern reincarnation of Gordon Gekko. Greed is good. Only they've evolved their methods of extracting and consolidating wealth from the public since then.

<comment><USER7> In the 80's this was called Corporate Raiding. There's even a movie with a young(ish) Danny Devito called Other People's Money.

The execution has changed (pun intended), but it's an old trick.

<comment><USER8> Also worth watching: "The Crimson Permanent Assurance"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The CEO of Sears is why Sears is going out of business, near as I can tell - he's purposefully running the company into the ground.

<comment><USER10> I doubt it's purposeful - more just that retail in the Amazon era is difficult and he has demonstrated no particular talent or qualifications for running such a business. He used to get talked up as the next Warren Buffett, but I don't really think his skills as an investor have held up to scrutiny either.

<comment><USER11> The irony is that Sears could have been Amazon themselves. They already had all the necessary pieces. But they didn't even bother to try.

<comment><USER12> In a sense Sears was the Amazon of 100 years ago. They started life in the 1800's as a mail-order catalog, when the communication and distribution technology of the time had just become advanced enough to make mail-order a possibility. Like Amazon, they only opened physical stores decades after they started as a company.

It's pretty hard to ride all the business trends correctly for over 100 years so I forgive Sears for missing out on the internet.

<comment><USER13> It still blows my mind that you could buy an entire house from Sears through their catalog, and many people did. And not just a mobile home or shed either – we're talking full-on bungalows and multi-story residences.

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

<comment><USER14> Kit homes are still around. I think they are not so common in the US because the big builders have streamlined home construction so much that there's no savings in pre-fab.

The Sears homes are pretty neat though. I live in a region where they were very popular.

<comment><USER15> I keep seeing pre-fab articles pop up on HN, but I think it's having difficulty gaining traction because construction requires a different process --design, sourcing, code approval, labor. Supposedly it can be substantially cheaper, both single family homes and apartment buildings.

My uninformed guess is that it won't be widely adopted until the various pre- fab companies with competing strategies and designs work toward some sort of standardization such that knowledge and skills can readily transfer. I bet it's also a patent minefield, precluding standardization and commoditization.

Perhaps some large homebuilder will acquire one of the pre-fab companies and then we'll start to see some volume. Maybe San Francisco should acquire one and just begin building a ton of cheap apartment buildings....

<comment><USER13> Did you see the link that just went up on HN a couple of days ago about land use regulations in San Francisco? I chuckle to think of the prospects of a pre-fab developer making headway against all of the forces SF has arrayed against them...

[https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/demolishing-the- ca...](https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/demolishing-the-california- dream/)

In particular, the article mentions Richmond Specials, which are "generic boxy buildings" that are designed to "maximize the size limits on each lot." Sounds kind of like what pre-fabbed apartments might turn out like, right? Unfortunately, they appear to be widely loathed.

<comment><USER15> I did read it. :)

I think the so-called Richmond Specials (there are at least 2 on my block--I didn't know the name until reading that article but recognize them everywhere) have aged enough that they've become part of the accepted architectural landscape.

Anything new will be hated by people. But why spend a fortune to be hated when you could spend much less and be hated all the same. San Francisco requires almost every building to prominently incorporate bay windows as part of the facade. (Richmond Specials lack this, which is why they stand out.) Every era of housing does this differently. As long as the pre-fab does it at least as well (very low bar), they'd fit right in. Plus, stucco is an extremely common street-facing exterior finish, and all the pre-fab stuff seems to have similarly textured exteriors.

I'm no architect, but I think if you can mimic the Edwardian or Spanish Revival styles (which are already quite simplified and boxy) which dominate much of the city you can grease the wheels. I don't understand why architects expend so much effort trying to do anything else; all it does is invite more attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a great reddit post that absolutely goes into Lampert and the mismangement of Sears. [https://np.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/5sqsed/sears_is_c...](https://np.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/5sqsed/sears_is_crumbling_fun_fact_since_2007_shld_is/ddhe6ci/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I think my favorite part of the whole "Sears flushed itself down the toilet" story is that crappy management can play the "We got outplayed by Amazon" card to shrug off responsibility, meaning no stingy management at other companies and corporations will learn from this mistake

<comment><USER18> I couldn't help but think of Barnes and Noble as a case of bad management using Amazon as their excuse to fail.

<comment><USER19> One could walk into nearly any Barnes and Noble and see that that is far from the case.

<comment><USER18> Specifically this story: [http://audreyii- fic.tumblr.com/post/170886347853/the-entirel...](http://audreyii- fic.tumblr.com/post/170886347853/the-entirely-unnecessary-demise-of-barnes- noble)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389342)

<comment><USER20> Daaamn. How do you prevent monopoly when the underdogs are utterly destroying themselves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone know what (if any) haircut the pension-recipients would need to take if he actually runs the company into the ground? Does the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (aka PBGC aka USA aks "us") have to pay pensioners 100 cents on the dollar? Does the defined benefits plan get turned into a defined- contribution plan as of current value?

I feel bad for the employees of Sears...but i'm also selfishly worried that the US Government ("we") ends up having to pay out absurd pension schemes with absurd 7% annual return assumptions.

<comment><USER22> 7% annual return is high, but not really absurd when including dividends, if managed for the long term and accepting some risk.

<comment><USER23> It is absurd, and that's why the IFRS and US government forced corporation pension funds to use discount rates that match high grade corporate bond yield curves (which are no where near 7%).

See Pension Protection Act of 2006:

[https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/economic- policy/cor...](https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/economic-policy/corp- bond-yield/Documents/hqm_pres.pdf)

<comment><USER24> I mean, the comparison should be against the stock market, not high grade corporate bonds.

Stick the money in the s&p 500 and it will easily get 7%. (The real number over the last 100 years is 9.7%). Having the number br 2.7% lower then that is a fair compromise to take into account risk.

<comment><USER23> What is your source for 9.7%? I suspect it's subject to survivorship bias.

There's plenty of research on choosing discount rates for defined benefit pensions and annuities, and many papers to read. And there are myriad reasons you can't just stick the money for a pension in the s&p 500, but suffice to say, everhone in finance sticks to the IFRS numbers and knows US GAAP is garbage.

<comment><USER24> My source is the S&P 500, which has been around for a hundred years.

You can pick the DOW if you like, as it has similar returns over the last hundred years.

Although, FYI, the 9.7% number I was using was not inflation adjusted. Perhaps that 7% number was inflation adjusted? That would make sense as the s&p inflation adjusted number comes out to be 7% almost exactly.

This is not survivorship bias, as the way investing in the s&p 500 works is that it is a moving list of the top 500 companies market cap.

IE, if a company goes down in price, and drops out of the top 500 companies, then so would your investment in it. And total returns take this into account.

It is perfectly possible to simply invest in the market, and recieve market returns, if you are also willing to accept market risks.

The stuff you are talking about, regarding risks, only matters to people who care about short term returns, not people who care about long term returns.

And a pension fund, which has a time horizon of decades, seems like the very best example of a fund that would not care the slightly about short term risk, and can instead optimize for long term returns.

<comment><USER23> Pension funds need to pay out all the time, in good times and bad, so they also have a short term component to worry about it. And they do invest in index funds, but going all in into sp500 isn't the same as diversifying. Here are some good responses:

[https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-pension-funds-university- endo...](https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-pension-funds-university-endowments- etc-use-index-funds-Shouldnt-they-do-so)

<comment><USER22> Pension funds also have money flowing in. They invest more money in down markets than good ones because they need to 'catch up' in bad markets and can scale back in good ones. The risk is the company failing to keep up in a bad year.

Diversification is also a relative term. Compared to owning a single stock the sp500 is more diversified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Apparently I can't read the article in my RSS reader because it's a TOS violation for Bloomberg.

That's ok though. If it's a TOS violation to read the article without giving my info to their 23 trackers and 6 intrusive advertisements I'm all set anyway.

<comment><USER26> I've been getting that apparently due to the VPN that I use -- if I temporarily switch it off, I have no problem reading their articles despite my adblocker.

<comment><USER27> What VPN do you use? Are you going through VPN as a matter-of-coarse to browse the web?

<comment><USER26> I happen to be using SurfEasy VPN, not that I recommend them other than that they're cheap, and this is on a phone where I keep it on as much as possible. So far only Bloomberg's website and one app are allergic to the VPN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Used to do business with Sears years ago and visited the Hoffman Estates headquarters. I'll never forget the impression of truly massive bureaucracy that the place conveyed. I'll also never forget how they dismantled their whole catalog operation just a couple of years before internet shopping took off.

</comment><comment><USER29> The really big irony in all of this is that, if I'm not mistaken, it was the old Sears Roebuck catalogs that used to say something like "it's folly to purchase items on credit". Then the next generation took advantage of consumer folly, making financing a core part of the business. And now debt is killing this originally-anti-debt company.

<comment><USER30> I love financial irony

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can't go into too much detail but had a meeting with some of their top tech peeps (title wise) and it was really, really clear they have no clue how to run an effective eCommerce business.

It was also incredibly hard for me to sit there and watch a company I fondly remembered visiting with my father to pick up some tools (back when it was run much, much better) have such minimal vision for their eCommerce + little leverage at the table.

Feels really bad for the employees.

<comment><USER32> I don't want to turn this into a "laissez-faire capitalism vs state-planned economy" debate, but I'm noticing this is the rule rather than the exception.

With so many incredibly gifted and hungry tech rockstars just searching for _just one lucky break_ out there, how on Earth is it that all these clueless individuals continuously get to run major tech initiatives at major companies?

<comment><USER31> Well, honestly I'm not entirely sure but overall the feeling was they had impressive resumes (big tech backgrounds) but really just seemed like they skated along as I just curiously asked what they did/worked on and it was really like a mile wide, inch deep responses.

I dunno, it was also really weird to have tech people show up to a large tech company's office in full suits during the summer. Felt really out of touch honestly.

<comment><USER32> Either Eddie is not so smart in peering through paper qualifications, or he deliberately put idiots in charge so he could continue to siphon off Sears' assets under the cover of falling revenue and "crisis" :) .... what a world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It is just so sad that a company that was built on the catalog business couldn't transition into putting their catalog on the web. The Xmas catalog was an event each year for a lot of kids.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was really hoping to see some follow-up from this amazing Reddit post from 2017:[https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/5m90gv/im_17_2...](https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/5m90gv/im_17_2_years_ago_i_inherited_100k_from_my/)

The poster inherited about $100,000 and their parent, controlling the money, invested it in SHLD in March 2015 (circa $40/share). I've always wondered whether that person managed to get the money out (in 2017 at $8/share) or whether it's still there now (at $1/share).

<comment><USER32> Good Lord. If there was ever a better way to say "cash is king".

I would be dejected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> No conflict of interest there!

<comment><USER36> Who cares about such pesky things nowadays? "Morality is for losers" is the current Zeitgeist. Phew

<comment><USER35> I live in an affluent area and the Sears by us closed. If Sears can't survive there, it's done. I feel bad for the people who worked there. Whenever I went in, they were always helpful. Now they are looking for something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I'm reading the article correctly, Lampert's fund has put $2.5B into Sears, so the kickback would mean they "only" lose $1.5B instead. That's a very different story than how I thought the title read, which was: "CEO's hedge fund walks away $1B richer."

I hope investors are taking ESL's management of Sears into account when deciding if it's a hedge fund they will continue to support. There's risk, and then there's incompetence...

</comment><comment><USER37> Involuntary bankruptcy is pretty rare in the USA, but Sears sounds like a good candidate for it. Kmart and Sears are obviously cruising towards Chapter 7 or 11. If I were a sizable creditor, I would rather get the company into bankruptcy court early, before the CEO was able to pillage all the cash holdings.

(Source: I'm a former bankruptcy lawyer)

<comment><USER32> Does he just straight up bonus it to himself in this scenario or does he like funnel Sears contracts (for example like employee toilet paper or something) to businesses that he owns 100% privately, like "EDDIE'S PAYPA FUHFILFMENT CO. INC."?

</comment></comment><comment> cde-v Eat the rich.

<comment><USER38> they taste like chicken!

<comment><USER14> More like veal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Sears needs to go back to the drawing board or just hit on crazy ideas, it's a perfect time to revitalize their now historic, prefabricated homes.

</comment><comment><USER40> amp article has less tracking junk on it [https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-09-27/lampe...](https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-09-27/lampert- s-sears-plan-would-hand-lampert-s-hedge-fund-1-billion)

</comment><comment><USER41> Sounds like he's trying to get his money out from a business he knows isn't being saved.

With a share price that low, they should announce a pivot to cryptocurrency and drop an ICO, lol.</comment>


Monolith vs. Microservices: A Tale from Python at "Scale" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jimjh/monolith-vs-microservices-a0322100160f <comment><USER2> this is a well written and reasonable (i.e not religious) take on monolith vs microservices and the tradeoffs and considerations.

also, Conway's law is the biggest factor and he touches on that without saying Conway's law explicitly</comment>


20 Years Later, Humans Still No Match for Computers on the Chessboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/10/24/499162905/20-years-later-humans-still-no-match-for-computers-on-the-chessboard <comment><USER2> Was there an expectation this would reverse somehow? Seems like a silly title.</comment>


GTK Javascript Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://www.zetcode.com/gui/javascriptgtktutorial/

<comment><USER2> Can someone explain to me why I would build an application in GTK(+) verses html? Given the availability of webkit bindings available for most languages, why wouldn't I call a webkit html rendering area and create my application in there? Is it to take advantage of system-wide styling?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a link as to why GTK might be good for your project vs what you suggest: <http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-gtk1/index.html></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Is Linux Tested? - <AUTHOR> I came across https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-explains-why-bugs-in-windows-updates-increased/
saying the bugs in windows 10 increased, because Microsoft cut its QA team.
I'm curious how Linux is tested? There isn't a QA team or is there? <comment><USER2> [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3177338/how-is-the- linux...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3177338/how-is-the-linux-kernel- tested)

</comment><comment><USER3> gonna take a wild guess at this coz yeah it's a good question, but basically my guess is if there's a security problem the community, depending on the OS or distro, probably puts that out in the open, then the community fixes it. say there is a 'driver problem' with xyz chipset, same deal, enough folks bring attention to it through the community someone with too much coffee in them probably starts fixing it then releases it for review etc. if you look at say some of the builds from Arch Linux User Repository or "AUR" feedback on their site often brings attention to the maintainer, but again it all depends on who all is maintaining xyz MAKEPKG where it pulls from say github, who is behind xyz software say at github. my own opinion on this is well just my own, and yeah as they say 'could be wrong' but one scenario that i think has hurt companies configd like microsoft is the simple fact their business model put them in a bad position to not use the biggest resource they actually had: their customers. but remember that company came up in a time where the average joe on the street wasn't a geek, didn't have the world wide web in his/her pocket. today, that's not the case, the kid down the street might find a 'hole' or 'problem' with say linux and report it to whoever runs the distro he or she was goofing with. the other thing is it's almost impossible to ask any one single company, a small group of programmers hired by xyz company to find stuff wrong with software that goes around the world. what i'm getting at is for example the way you may look at, use, or implement your distro even if we both were on the same distro could be completely different than the way i use it. the other problem is again the business model, when you find a problem with linux well no stock prices go down, meaning a 'company' doesn't lose money, if anything it adds value to the release of the software. i'm not a guru and one of the reasons i love linux is because well, i'm not a guru. if i have a problem or fix something till i break it, either google, irc or any number of the forums online, social media, i got a 'tech' usually a message away. all the help i've had over the years with linux, even if i won the lottery no way i'd be able to pay everyone back with all the help they gave to me for free. i'm not anti microsoft or anti proprietary software or even anti make money but yeah at times sometimes the business models need changed for a company so their products can keep up with their customers. windows 98 second edition and windows 2000 plus windows 7 was some good software, lots of talented folks at microsoft.

<comment><USER4> This would be a lot easier to digest with some line breaks separating paragraphs and capitalizing the first letter of each sentence.

The paragraphs would help in keeping track of which line I'm on, because it would give more shape to the text. The capitalizing would help in scanning for the beginning of sentences in order to search for the main ideas presented here more quickly, and then go back to fill in the details.

Regarding why I would scan, it's because there seems to be a fair amount of filler. For example the beginning:

> gonna take a wild guess at this coz yeah it's a good question, but basically > my guess is

contributes nothing to the idea you're trying to present. You could literally just cut that out and you wouldn't lose content.

I'm just trying to advise. You can disregard me if you want.</comment></comment>


Heat map of cellphones on a single Florida beach during spring break - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/goldengateblond/status/1243402906469949440 <comment><AUTHOR> Poster here. The title is a copy & paste of the tweet, as per HN guidelines. It is the topic of the tweet.

However, cellphones on a Florida beach is not that interesting (well, to me anyway). It's the data displayed to make the point and it's implications that's interesting. The data is (I think) an ad in disguise. It may not have the effect the wanted and be taken down, so I've mirrored it here:

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ckax1R8pmT1jwpycjP7t8TgDHCO...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ckax1R8pmT1jwpycjP7t8TgDHCOrjnhR/view)

</comment><comment><USER2> Troubling from the privacy aspect...

I'd prefer to see a different visual than a heat map, those just end up looking like population maps. [https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)</comment>


Show HN: Bravo to Zero – the quickest way to get back to Inbox Zero - <AUTHOR> http://www.bravotozero.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my entry for the 2014 Rails Rumble, built in 48 hours.

You may be understandably reluctant to hand over access to your email to a third party, so if you think it looks useful but don't want to do that I've released the code [1] so you can run it locally or deploy your own instance to heroku.

Hopefully it's also interesting as a hectic but full stack example of a Rails and Ember app that does something useful. Figuring out how to get the google apis wired up was quite painful so hopefully it will be useful if you're interested in playing around with the new Gmail apis without bashing your head against a wall too much!

If you like it you can vote for it in the rails rumble by logging in with heroku or twitter [2] [1] [https://github.com/railsrumble/r14-team-94](https://github.com/railsrumble/r14-team-94) [2] [http://railsrumble.com/entries/94-bravo-to- zero](http://railsrumble.com/entries/94-bravo-to-zero)

</comment><comment><USER2> Absolutely love this, only thing I wish it had was a "Delete Permanently" button as a lot of the stuff in my inbox is junk that I don't need archived.

Great job on this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely a missing feature, I will add this at some point. It shouldn't be too hard as it will be very similar to archiving.</comment></comment>


Why Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF - <AUTHOR> https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should-be-published-in-html-and-not-pdf/ <comment><USER2> I've worked with gov.uk. They are essentially a startup inside a huge organization, and their great work reflects that. One of the things they told me that struck me: most websites have customers, we have users. What they mean by this is that being a customer implies choice, whereas there is no alternative to .gov.uk, hence users don't have a choice. So it's gov.uk's responsibility to make their website as clear, accessible and useful as possible.

<comment><USER3> I think there are some parallels between "just leave (insert technology provider here)" and "just leave the country you call home".

> most websites have customers, we have users.

Interesting thought: Do Facebook, Google, etc have "users" and not "customers" for their consumer products?

For many people, leaving digitally can have bad effects on their social life. It's arguably not as bad as moving out of the country, but it's still a practically impossible hurdle for a lot of people.

<comment><USER4> > Interesting thought: Do Facebook, Google, etc have "users" and not > "customers" for their consumer products?

Advertisers are the customers. Non-advertisers are the product. The goal is not to provide a good service to the product, it's to drive engagement of the product up so customers are happy.

<comment><USER5> Both are customers though. As long as there is paying tier on the end user side, it is also a customer who has a presence in the decision that are made.

To Google's credit, Youtube Red for instance goes in that direction. Same for Google Suite customers, Google Play users etc.

Of course the power balance is tipped toward the companies who are willing to pay more, but that's a balance, and not a one sided relation.

For facebook I think the picture is darker, but then that's facebook afterall.

<comment><USER6> The paying tier are customers (sort of). All the rest are product. It's quite a specific product, because it has to be seduced and tempted by perceived benefits to forfeit its privacy, but still a product it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I listened to a talk at a web development conference from one of the UK government's accessibility developers. Among other things, they do extensive accessibility testing and discovered things you wouldn't expect. For example, to people who didn't grow up with them, dropdown boxes are apparently unintuitive, so gov.uk avoids them. I was very impressed.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Mj7_0Lok0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Mj7_0Lok0)

<comment><USER8> I find irony in the fact that this is a YouTube video with no text transcript, massively reducing its accessibility to both those with disabilities and those who aren't in an environment where they can sit and watch a 20-minute video.

Does YouTube have the ability for authors to attach or display a text version of their video?

<comment><USER7> 1) The conference did the uploading, not the speaker

2) I think the videos were thrown up on YouTube in a "why not" sort of way, with minimal effort. Notice how the whole channel is just that specific event over that couple of days. I'm glad they posted them, but it was primarily an in-person event.

<comment><USER9> Deaf and hard of hearing people get routinely left out of the public sphere because people excuse themselves from their obligation to provide accessibly. People say "I wouldn't make this if I had to caption it."

In reality, captioning isn't that hard. Very few people are willing to go to the trouble of uploading a video but won't caption it.

<comment><USER10> > because people excuse themselves from their obligation to provide accessibly

What obligation? They're not even obligated to put the video up; it's just a gesture of public service. Giving people the obligation to put captions when they upload videos for free consumption is like giving a beggar part of your lunch out of generosity and he complaining that he likes his sandwiches with more cheese.

Not to specifically liken the deaf and hard of hearing to beggars, since all YouTube viewers are beggars in my analogy. However, the point I'm getting at is that when someone does you a favor like upload a video for free for your consumption you should generally be grateful and do what you can with it, not complain and demand more. It's just not the right attitude.

It's like FOSS. You can ask the developer for more, but not demand it.

I think if we want more captions from videos submitted without remuneration, it's gonna need to be automated. Have the machine do the work. I think YouTube already does this, now that I think about it.

EDIT: Added some more on the analogy in case people thought I had something against deaf people.

<comment><USER11> You don't even need automation, that's why we have platforms like Mechanical Turk.

In fact I would be very surprised if people were not already using gig platforms like that for captioning already.

<comment><USER12> correct me if i'm wrong, but its not the advertisers paying the mechanical turk?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> When gov.uk first started to replace the previous online presence, they were like first-level tech support: brilliant if your question is in the FAQ, useless otherwise. A lot of detailed information on aspects of running a charitable organisation, which I presume weren't accessed every day, simply disappeared. For a while, the web archive of the old site was my lifeline.

My feeling is that gov.uk has got a lot better since, but it's low- information-density by design. This is absolutely the right thing to do for a lot of their users in a lot of cases, and doubly so when targeting users who might not speak good English for whatever reason. But I still feel that information meant for professionals could be presented in a more useful way.

On the web design side, they definitely deserve 5 out of 5. Good general design, sensible spacing, not requiring a huge javascript framework just to display some text - there's so much right with this site.

<comment><USER14> As a UK national living outside the UK, the website is fantastic. It has exactly what I need and is highly discoverable, no more than a few levels of depth to the form or submission I need. The multilingual support is also excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Having interacted with a number of government websites, I have to say the UK government does an excellent job of theirs. Most things are simple to understand and clearly presented. Even though I only use it for the the most mundane of things, using it is generally a very pleasant experience!

<comment><USER16> Could not agree more. In fact, I'd go as far as to say they're not just the best .gov site out there, but one of the best sites, full stop.

(I know a few people who worked on various parts of it and for what it's worth: they're all legit. They care, and they're good. It should come as no surprise that the site turned out the way it did, if they're hiring these sorts of people.)

<comment><USER17> I recollect reading about the UK GDS in Tim O'Reilly's book from last year "WTF: What's The Future And Why It's Up To Us". In the chapter "Government as a platform" he's got a small, amusing anecdote about the service.

Having looked up the relevant part, let me transcribe it for you:

> "One of the first things that struck Jen and me as we entered the GDS office > on an upper floor of an old office building high above a busy London street > was a large sheet of butcher paper covering the picture window in the lobby. > In the paper was a small cutout through which you could see the people on > the street below. The cutout had a large arrow pointing to it, labeled > "Users", reminding everyone when they walked in just whom the unit was meant > to serve."

I found it really drove home the service's users-first approach. Following that anecdote he elaborates on the service's "10 commandments" (the 10 GDS Design Principles). They're also quite interesting, but I'm sure a search engine lookup can help you there. I really recommend the book if you want an optimist's outlook on the future of technology, government and economy.

<comment><USER18> "Be consistent, not uniform" is gold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can see for dynamic information PDF definitely has limitations but a lot of what I get from gov.uk I feel is better in PDF. The web pages are fine for navigation and overviews but for hard information I much prefer a PDF.

A PDF document can be dated and versioned, you download a report from April 2010 and you can keep that as a document. You can then download a newer one if you want, the older version is still available and largely immutable. Archiving a dynamic web page is a lot harder.

<comment><USER20> > A PDF document can be dated and versioned

So can an HTML page.

> you download a report from April 2010 and you can keep that as a document... > Archiving a dynamic web page is a lot harder.

Right click, save page as... Am I missing something?

<comment><USER21> If it's not in archive, you will NOT find the old HTML at all, whereas old PDFs are usually easy to find because _someone_ will have it.

In addition saving web pages is a huge pain with all the scripts and CSS to save as well, so then you need to compress that.

At last, saving and browsing saved HTML is a pain on mobile and similar devices without a specialized tool.

<comment><USER20> > If it's not in archive, you will NOT find the old HTML at all, whereas old > PDFs are usually easy to find because someone will have it.

I don't understand this argument at all. The _exact same thing_ can be said for HTML pages.

> In addition saving web pages is a huge pain with all the scripts and CSS to > save as well, so then you need to compress that.

That's what the webarchive format is for.

<comment><USER22> The GDS themselves state that users are more likely to archive their own copies of PDF documents than HTML documents: "users are more likely to download a PDF and continue to refer to it and share it offline"

Part of the reason may be that some browsers download PDFs for display in the user's native reader. Though, even in-browser PDF readers like Firefox on desktop have a toolbar with a prominent save button. The use of PDF is a signal to the user that the document can be saved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wouldn't like HTML for government documents. They are perfectly fine for website, or live documents. But for anything published by government there will likely be a printed version, and the online "file" will need to be in sync with the printed version as well. As a paper / documents based format, nothing beats PDF/A.

I remember Obama said something along the line to tech leaders, "Your job is a lot easier when you only have selected group of customers to please, but when you have to cater for everybody and every interest group, things are a lot harder." Paper based document will continue to be used for a decade or two more.

Why cant we just have both? Too much man power in auditing or publishing? Well that is what tech is for, automate it. The tech should be catering for its users, which is not just the public but civil servants as well ( I cant believe I just wrote that ), not trying to force the tech on everyone else.

P.S - I thought PDF/A is an open standard. Why is everyone suggesting PDF is a closed format?

<comment><USER24> PDF/A is an open standard, but it's pretty rare to see a PDF document in the wild that is actually PDF/A compliant. People generally just use the built-in PDF export in some word processor (usually no PDF/A option at all) or use Acrobat (doesn't do PDF/A by default). And non-PDF/A documents can have a laundry list of odd closed features that may or may not be supported by various readers.

In general the landscape of PDF compatibility has improved a lot, but it's still a lot worse than HTML.

<comment><USER23> >And non-PDF/A documents can have a laundry list of odd closed features that may or may not be supported by various readers.

Are there test suit for PDF/A compatibility?

<comment><USER25> Yes. [http://verapdf.org/](http://verapdf.org/) At the Dutch publication office we use this for spot-check testing for PDF/A-1a compliance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> One thing I find terrible about PDFs is when organisations embed useful data in them, in tables or graphs. Usually in the context of an annual report, or study, or some sort of policy document.

They look great printed on paper, but not very transferrable.

I know there is software [1] out there that tries to parse tables out of PDF documents, but from my experience you'll still end up doing manual adjustments afterwards to correct what the parser could not infer.

That's the main reason why I support this motion. At least make the data both PDF + HTML, so you have options.

[1] [https://tabula.technology/](https://tabula.technology/)

<comment> nv-vn For data in general, I don't think either HTML or PDF is perfect. Both are designed for you to lay out how a document is displayed, rather than the content specifically. For example, some content in HTML is invisible or split between different divs/spans/whatevers. A lot of it is generated dynamically by JavaScript and async requests. Something like JSON or XML is much more powerful for data storage. For example, you can store the data for graphs as raw data so that the consumer can render the graph however it wants. Display- agnostic data is always more flexible, and I think the best way to provide data on a webpage is both as a visual version and as raw data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is good. One of the biggest (in my opinion) failures of accessibility in academia is that everything is published as PDFs generated from latex, which is THE least accessable format in existence (word's PDFs are fine, so it is Latex's fault they are so bad).

Some people provide their latex, which improves matters, but most people don't.

<comment><USER28> What's inaccessible about LaTeX-generated PDF?

<comment><USER29> It used to be a problem that you couldn't cut and paste text from TeX- generated PDFs, and I assume this would be a problem for screen readers. I think the dvi->pdf conversion produced a PDF consisting mostly of coordinates and characters (in a non-standard encoding), which PDF readers couldn't put back together into words. This seems mostly fixed on recent pdfs, but I don't know if it's TeX (pdflatex?) or the readers that have gotten smarter.

Funnily, Donald Knuth's AoCP fascicles ship as postscript files, which Preview.app converts to PDFs that can't be copied from.

<comment><USER30> If you're using a screen reader anyway, why not export to text instead of pdf? You're just wasting more storage for no benefit you can perceive.

This relies on what should be a reasonable assumption that the latex source is provided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can see no reason why it can't be HTML _AND_ PDF. A well-composed HTML document can be turned into a well-composed PDF automatically on the server side or in a couple of clicks on the client side. It is always more convenient to use PDF rather than HTML when you want to save a document to your computer or put it on a USB drive to print it on a nearby printer.

<comment><USER32> The article makes exactly this point. The argument is against material being published with layout software (or printed from Microsoft Word) as a PDF. They argue that the canonical version of such documents should be in HTML, which can in turn be transformed to be suitable for desktop, mobile or print output.

<comment><USER31> I don't really know about Microsoft Word but LibreOffice can produce fairly good PDFs including a table of contents if the original document is outlined properly AFAIK and it can even include the source document in the PDF so the user can open it for editing. Your commentary actually makes me curious what might be some problems of Word/LibreOffice-produced PDFs, can you name some?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This tradeoff between the relative virtues of PDF and HTML is a good argument for looking at Pollen (pollenpub.com) a framework for designing your own markup language that is capable of targeting HTML and PDF (or any output you need: audio, Kindle, whatever).

A proof of concept is here: [https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/](https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/) On every page at that micro-site, you can view the Pollen markup source, or the PDF version. The PDF and the HTML are generated at the same time, from the same source.

Another example is my blog The Notepad ([https://thenotepad.org/](https://thenotepad.org/)). Both sites have links to their source on Github.

<comment><USER34> I'm a big fan of asciidoc and quite sad that it didn't take of as a default format for documents.

<comment><USER33> I think what's sad about formats per se is that you rely on toolmakers to implement them, and to decide how to translate them into the target format; and for all toolmakers to support them in ways that are coherent with each other.

You also end up with this awkward two-step between the format and the tools. If some capability is missing, you wait for the format to define a way to do it, then the toolmakers to support it; or less ideally, the toolmakers define their own incompatible ways of doing it without waiting for consensus.

This covers the problems I have with Markdown. It as wide support, but because vanilla Markdown only covers a 1995-era subset of HTML, there are all kinds of things (footnotes, figures, formatted code blocks etc) that people want it to do. Any given editor or CMS or site generator will support 95% of your preferred flavor's way of doing things and disagree with your other tools about the last 5%.

The difference with Pollen is that it isn't a format or a markup specification; it's a programming environment. So you design the markup, and you tell it how to get from the source markup to your target format. The format is yours and the implementation is yours; they are one and the same.

It is a bit more work, true, but it's less work in Pollen than it would be in any other environment because it does parsing for you and applies your transformations in a logical, ordered way.

<comment><USER34> That sounds interesting. I will check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Somewhere in the realm of Adobe, the PDF design/spec, and open source software, there are big problems properly supporting forms and signing.

Adobe Acrobat Reader is now only supported on macOS and Windows. And only Acrobat Reader fully supports all the varieties of forms in various PDF specs. I think it's a big problem for government to in effect require the use of a monolithic and proprietary operating system to fill out government forms.

And then the whole state of signing PDFs is a confusing mess. Learning how to create or buy a certificate is irritatingly confusing, and then where the certificate goes and how to use it. Google search guides and it's completely different instructions depending on platform and Acrobat version. The latest versions of Acrobat Reader let you do a thing called signing a document, but it doesn't use certificates, doesn't let you add a password to the document to prevent modification, but you can add text/image/drawing of a "signature" \- no doubt this confusing thing exists because the certificate based signing is so difficult. And then verifying digital signatures isn't something people know how to do: technical companies I work with do not accept them unless the digital signature includes a visible human signature and the PDF security options enable printing the PDF!

</comment><comment><USER36> One of the hardest things I remember from my time as a web consultant was explaining to my customers why PDF is not a suitable replacement for HTML. They always tried to replace half of their pages with pdf documents...

<comment><USER37> Well don't leave us in suspense, why isn't PDF a suitable replacement?

* If your internal workflow is designing documents then the conversion to a web document will be clunky at best.

* Every end-user device has a PDF reader and their web browser probably opens it transparently.

* You need the PDF either way way because the website will never be the authoritative source so now you have the problem of making sure they don't get out of sync.

* You probably have a few internal graphic designers that can do wonders with print but it's unlikely you have an internal web development team.

* It's much easier to make a PDF accessible than a website. (Before you disagree remember that the offices we're talking about likely don't have a dedicated web designer) You can be sure it will print correctly, and for most users it's automatically offline.

<comment><USER38> > accessible

Let's take perhaps the simplest most important accessibility feature: How do I increase the font size without making the content absurdly wide, while viewing a PDF?

<comment><USER39> As a visually impaired user, this is my single biggest gripe with PDFs. Its also annoying that zooming on many websites completely breaks the layout, often overlapping text or pushing important elements off of the screen. I find this particularly sad, since HTML largely supports a separation of content and presentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > We cannot get as much information from analytics about how people are using > PDFs

This might be considered a positive.

<comment><USER41> Not on Surveillance Island

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm a huge fan having used HMR&C web portal from overseas, the sea-change in how good the UI is, and data collecting on what we want from the UI is also impressive.

I set myself low-bar goals measuring government engagement. The Australian whole-of-government portal is abjectly awful, it has well done 2FA but continually nags me with badly designed 'do we have your permission' and 'remember you're talking to government' intersititials.

State government planning web, uses a web design method which is simply unworkable on touch: the 'permit us to say we want you to agree to terms and conditions' overlay won't scroll. when the underlying page does, so the [agree] button can't be pressed because its off-screen. Gak!

</comment><comment><USER43> Overall, decisions like this are compromises, with pros and cons:

"They're not designed for reading on screens"

That's a subjective distinction.

"It's harder to track their use"

Not relevant for most .gov use cases. Also, sounds like something that isn't a user problem.

"They cause difficulties for navigation and orientation"

So does responsive design that makes discovery of content difficult in many scenarios, especially atypical scenarios.

"They can be hard for some users to access"

So does HTML where a poor accessibility process is in place.

"They're less likely to be kept up to date"

Conversely, they more easy for a consumer understand when changes take place, and encourage a stronger release process.

"They're hard to reuse"

That may or may not be a bad thing.

<comment><USER44> I think the point is: it's harder to do those things properly in PDF format.

Also, I'm not sure how 'not designed for reading on screens' is subjective. PDFs are paper-document oriented and don't display well for reading on anything other than a large size monitor in virtually every case I've seen. When delivering content in a web browser, why on earth would someone prefer to view PDF vs a reasonably well laid out HTML version?

I think PDFs are common in gov't websites because much of the internal culture is paper-document centred, and having those nicely printed PDFs solve internal problems for gov't employees, not because they are actually any better for the users of the website.

Canadian Gov't websites are full of PDF content too. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I generally agree, as PDF's were designed for (and are best used for) making documents for printing on paper. BUT: "We cannot get as much information from analytics about how people are using PDFs. We can get data on how many times a PDF has been downloaded from GOV.UK, but we cannot measure views of the file offline." ...that section made me wonder if perhaps I have been missing a possible upside to PDF's.

</comment><comment><USER46> "[PDFs: ] They're quick and easy to create

... they can be easily created from popular applications that people are already using to author and share documents."

This appears under the heading "Why do people use PDFs?"

However I would have listed this as the sole reason that documents should be distributed as HTML. The reasoning is simple.

Imagine a hypothetical where one has a choice of distributing documents in two formats, A and B, and there are particular advantages to each format. As such, some users prefer format A, while others prefer format B. Not to mention those users who would like to have both formats available.

In the hypothetical, _users can easily convert from format A to B_ however converting from format B to A is difficult.

Assuming one can distribute the documents in format A, it makes no sense to distribute in format B. Users who prefer format A will be unhappy.

Distributing in format A keeps users who like format B happy because they can easily convert from A to B.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'll make a defense of pdf publishing here. The points the author makes are good, but also show why pdf has a role to play. Responsive design being the most difficult. Imagine you're producing a scientific paper, and it contains a big table. It's unreasonable to ask an author to figure out how make every table and figure display correctly on every screen.

Think of it this way. If you're publishing a pdf, then you master the formatting using your word processor (latex, word, what have you). On the other hand, if you're publishing on a responsive web site, then you really ought to have a content management system to guide you through the requirements of the platform. It's a significantly higher hurdle, both for the authors and the platform owners.

<comment><USER48> Publishing shouldn't be about displaying nicely in screen though but rather about sharing the information.

As a bioinformatician, big tables inside pdfs are essentially useless. What's the point of a few hundred rows worth of a table if you can't manipulate it with whatever tool you prefer?

Moreover, I'm writing my thesis and dealing with many pdfs from the 90s in most of which I can't just highlight and copy text so I need to type it out like a savage. Is it guaranteed that today's pdfs will be easy to handle for future people?

In my opinion publishing should be done in plain text and .tsv files and the onus of displaying it on screen should fall on the editor (isn't that their job anyway ??)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> On a related note, I have to fill out a PDF form to make a GDPR complaint to the Data Commissioner (in Ireland). This is a plain-text form, the information could just as easily be sent in the body of an email.

Using PDF means having to deal with crappy PDF software, hurting accessibility and scriptability and adding needless overhead on the other end.

I wish these systems were designed by sane and benevolent programmers, rather than Pointy Haired Bureaucrats.

( [https://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/raise-a-concern- Form/m/17...](https://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/raise-a-concern- Form/m/1727.htm) )

<comment><USER50> That's bad but small silver lining is that it's not a word document that silently renders incorrectly in other editors so you don't even see some of the fields.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I love using PDF to create backups of webpages if I think I'll want to look at it in the future. I generated PDFs as backups for references in college assignments, and it really saved me when pages moved mid-assignment.

</comment><comment><USER52> Sadly, the great GDS team that is bringing about the great design/technical change in the UK gov is falling prey to politics from the same people that brought you #brexit. GDS used to be an initiative directly from the Cabinet Office, it has now been moved to the ministry of Culture and Sport.

You might think what does sport have to do with gov website UX? But it's all politics - GDS delivered and it is making the other politicians and gov officials look bad so they are being undermined. That's my reading of that anyway - no good deed goes unpunished.

<comment><USER53> Actually, once you get the name right, it being the _Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport_ , it becomes somewhat clearer what it has to do with this WWW site. But this then prompts the question of exactly when "digital" became a noun. (-:

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'd love to have a format that is just HTML + whatever zipped up that browsers and operating systems happily just open in a browser.

I like making HTML reports (rmarkdown), but sharing them requires telling people to download then open them in a browser. Google drive, for example, happily just shows you a preview but then if you click on the file you get _raw html_. Customers just don't understand.

PDF however, is absolutely fine to move around as a single chunk, but has problems in almost every other way.

<comment><USER4> > I'd love to have a format that is just HTML + whatever zipped up that > browsers and operating systems happily just open in a browser.

There is MHTML, sadly it fails the second bit because AFAIK Chrome dropped its support and FF and Safari can't open it natively. Apple has its own WebArchive format, and Firefox's MAF extension generated MAFF file but is not compatible with newer versions.

<comment><USER23> At one point in time, I thought MHTML was precisely what we need to get rid of PDF, double click, and everything works. Sadly everyone abandoned it, and Google doesn't want you to have down any webpage for archiving purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Your government uses PDF? My dear Britons, you're have it easy. The Italian government and Italian local administrations make massive use of MS Word documents, and I'm not talking about .docx, but the old, venerable, write- once-broken-everywhere Office 97 .doc. So, I wouldn't complain that much, because it could be much, much worse, especially when you have to fill up a 20-years old form that does not render anymore on any modern word processor. Oh, well.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is really interesting but it's missing discussion about what makes each format right for what kinds of information/pages. Even some examples of things currently commonly PDF that would be most helpful to switch to HTML. I have trouble believing that HTML is right for every kind of government document (for example, a quarterly or yearly report published by some agency seems like a reasonable PDF).

</comment><comment><USER57> PDF is easier for some authors: write in Word, export as PDF, mail to somebody who will upload to the web server and maybe print it for non digital distribution.

Web CMS were invented (among many other reasons) to let non technical people write and edit content directly inside the browser and publish it. I wonder if gov.uk doesn't have a CMS or their authors don't want to use it.

<comment><USER58> The gov.uk folks make heavy use of Markdown, and so they should - the sooner we leave this PDF/Word doc nonsense in the past the better.

HTML in the browser is the best tool for consuming documents; we can read and write on any device, bookmark documents or chapter headings, resize and style at will in a device independent manner, enhance documents and make them interactive[1], even add videos if required. The best part is that the source is all stored in plain text and is version controlled without requiring Sharepoint or similar.

[0] [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-publish-on-gov- uk/markdow...](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-publish-on-gov-uk/markdown) [1] [https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2013/08/21/barcharts-in- html...](https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2013/08/21/barcharts-in-html- publications-new-feature/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I'd like to see version controlled text files used for important legal documents and many other government docs. Allow the presentation layer to be handled on the end points. Maybe something like markdown will be sufficient.

I always look up to the fixed width font model used by IETF RFCs. They are extremely readable and searchable and last for a long time.

<comment><USER8> _I 'd like to see version controlled text files used for important legal documents and many other government docs._

Someone mentions "blockchain" in 3... 2... 1...

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Everyone always forgets about epub.

</comment><comment><USER61> The problem with HTML is that it's not a stable format. Will a browser in 2028 be able to render those pages correctly ? What about 2038 ? If the content needs to be available for a longer time PDF/A would be a much better choice than HTML.

<comment><USER28> What HTML + CSS from 1998 doesn't render usefully anymore?

<comment><USER61> What HTML + CSS from 1998 renders in exactly the same way (pixel perfect copy) on a modern browser as it did on a browser in 1998 ?

<comment><USER28> Notice how I specified "renders usefully". Few documents have to be pixel perfect, even fairly old HTML had tools to make individual parts where it might be more important pixel perfect, and given the higher level of standardization and standards compliance nowadays this would likely be better for documents created today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Big kudos to the work you are doing. Countries I've been living before -Spain, Italy terrific experiences with gov digital services- should take lessons from you on how to run a digital and accessible PA portal online

</comment><comment><USER63> I agree with the point of the article.

Still, there is so much out there that is available only in one of the MS Office formats, and Gov.UK is apparently doing better than that. So there is actually some cause for celebration here, IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER35> There's a distinction between PDF and PDF/A. I agree with favoring HTML over just any PDF, for all the reasons cited in the article. But for certain kinds of documents you'd want PDF/A over HTML or perhaps in addition to HTML.

PDF/A can certainly accept, and a government policy can require the use of, accessibility features and also even digital signatures.

</comment><comment><USER64> I don't understand why these should be mutually exclusive. Starting from a common parseable markup you can have both responsive HTML for browsers and formatted PDF for print. Why don't decouple content from presentation?

<comment><USER65> If the HTML is responsive, why can't it be good for print? And, for the sake of reducing waste, should we not discourage people from printing in the first place?

<comment><USER4> You'd probably want a dedicated print CSS to remove various bits of UI and decoration, as well as styling which works well on a screen but is terrible in print (e.g. the white-on-black and white-on-blue headers).

However gov.uk already does both so it's not an actual issue here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> They should publish in XML, which kind ever, not HTML.

</comment><comment><USER67> Gov.uk pages are still using google-analytics and reporting the activities of British Citizens' interactions with their own government to a US-based multinational I see.

And the only option to disable is to click through and install a browser add- on to opt-out.

This doesn't seem very GDPR-friendly.

<comment><USER68> No personally identifying information is sent to Google Analytics. IP addresses are anonymised, email addresses, dates, and postcodes are stripped too.

See [https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c...](https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c3fefe6608fc9e82883b09c2307513996f666/docs/analytics.md) and [https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c...](https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_frontend_toolkit/blob/cf1c3fefe6608fc9e82883b09c2307513996f666/javascripts/govuk/analytics/analytics.js)

<comment><USER67> It's present on every page, and it's loaded from google. Anonymisation is pointless.

The fact that they use Piwik on a couple of pages they consider sensitive (usually to do with payment) shows that even gov.uk know this cannot be relied upon to fully hide things.

It shouldn't be there and I've raised a complaint with the ICO.

Note that the page says that it can be configured to strip all that info, not that it does by default. One would have to look at each page to see how this is configured. And it could still be wrong to switch this on by default, under the GDPR.

<comment><USER69> > Anonymisation is pointless.

How's that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Because anyone can embed JavaScripts into PDF file and launch stuff. [https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/analyzing- malicious-p...](https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/analyzing-malicious- pdf/)

</comment><comment><USER48> I am currently doing some literature research for my phd thesis and all I have to say is : "fuck pdfs in the face"

</comment><comment><USER53> > _On a responsive website like GOV.UK, content and page elements shift around > to suit the size of the user's device and browser._

But they do not, _on that very page_. I resized the page up to full screen and then back again in a WWW browser and all that happened is that huge areas of whitespace opened and closed around the text, which remained word-wrapped in exactly the same places.

<comment><USER71> Yes, they do. The line width only increases up to a certain maximum because this is usability best-practice; there is an max optimal line length for readability.

<comment><USER53> No, they did not. I performed the experiment myself and know what I saw, thank you. If this is a question of my "device" always being above some maximum line length, then clearly this is _not_ suiting the size of the device. It is suiting some guidelines, _not_ the user's device.

<comment><USER71> Try another browser. I'm telling you it is clearly responsive on mine, and the down-votes are others telling you the same. Now if you're just trying to ret- con the definition of 'responsive design' to grind some personal axe, go do it somewhere relevant.

<comment><USER53> The down-votes are showing you why votes are not equal to truth, because this effect is easily reproducible in Opera, Vivaldi, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.

And it's clearly you who has some axe to grind. I merely point out that the behaviour _of the very page itself_ is not as the article describes the operation of that WWW site. It does not behave as advertised, and does not change to suit the size of my device. The headline remains word-wrapped after the word "should", for example, and huge areas of whitespace open and close around it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> [http://pandoc.org/](http://pandoc.org/)

"If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Pandoc can convert documents in (several dialects of) Markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, DocBook, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, TWiki markup, TikiWiki markup, Creole 1.0, Vimwiki markup, OPML, Emacs Org- Mode, Emacs Muse, txt2tags, Microsoft Word docx, LibreOffice ODT, EPUB, or Haddock markup to

HTML formats XHTML, HTML5, and HTML slide shows using Slidy, reveal.js, Slideous, S5, or DZSlides

Word processor formats Microsoft Word docx, OpenOffice/LibreOffice ODT, OpenDocument XML, Microsoft PowerPoint.

Ebooks EPUB version 2 or 3, FictionBook2

Documentation formats DocBook version 4 or 5, TEI Simple, GNU TexInfo, Groff man, Groff ms, Haddock markup

Archival formats JATS

Page layout formats InDesign ICML

Outline formats OPML

TeX formats LaTeX, ConTeXt, LaTeX Beamer slides

PDF via pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex, pdfroff, wkhtml2pdf, prince, or weasyprint.

Lightweight markup formats Markdown (including CommonMark and GitHub-flavored Markdown), reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, Emacs Org-Mode, Emacs Muse, Textile, txt2tags, MediaWiki markup, DokuWiki markup, TikiWiki markup, TWiki markup, Vimwiki markup, and ZimWiki markup.

Custom formats custom writers can be written in lua."

<comment><USER73> You can not have PDF as an input format in pandoc.

PDF is terrible because you can not easily/sensibly even parse the text. That also means it is hard to diff two versions and see the differences.

<comment><USER25> "Tagged" PDF files allow text extraction. Tagged PDF is often required for accessibility. Screen readers for the blind should be able to extract the text. This is possible with Tagged PDF. PDF/A-1a and PDF/A-1b are tagged PDF and required PDF formats in some governments.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf#Logical_structure_and_acce...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf#Logical_structure_and_accessibility)</comment></comment></comment>


Was Karl Max Right? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersComService4/idUSTRE49E99F20081015

<comment><USER2> No. Nor is this the appropriate place to discuss it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Each nation need both (Socialism + Capitalism)

1\. Prevent Race To The Bottom (aka Socialism) Free Public Transportation, Ration shops,Reservations,Basic Income Guarantee,Minimum Wages,Free Education etc

2\. Promote Race To The Top (aka Capitalism) Incentives,Subsidies,Markets,Extrinsic motivation,Appreciation,Awards, Rewards etc

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know that we can call Marx right; we can, however, definitively declare Francis Fukuyama wrong. History, even considered as merely a dialectic between opposing models of resource allocation, is far from over.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Capitalism as we used to know it is on its deathbed."

Come on people. Let's not forget that it was socialist principles (everyone deserves a house) that started this mess.

</comment><comment><USER6> Karl Max? Is that Peter Max's brother?

</comment><comment><USER7> In terms of the fact that capitalism goes in "rise and fall" cycles, yes, this much seems clear. In terms of the idea that the public ownership of wealth is inevitable, hardly.

As Thatcher wisely said, "There is no such thing as society."

So capitalism I think continues. Just a few folks will blow their brains out along the way. Survival of the fittest, what can I say. Don't blame Darwin or the capitalists. It is just the laws of nature. As Elton John sings, "Who makes the call and who gets to choose/who gets to win and who gets to lose/it's like rolling dice in the belly of the blues/and the blues never fade away."</comment>


Email Deliverability is crucial to achieve consumer Internet virality - <AUTHOR> http://summation.typepad.com/summation/2008/06/email-deliverability-is-crucial-to-achieve-consumer-internet-virality.html <comment><USER2> "Many B2C companies go viral by convincing current users to upload their address books and email their friends."

This is just 'legitimized' spam IMHO.

If your product is that good, you don't have to "convince current users" to help you spam... If you make your product really well, people will market it for you, because they like it and want to tell their friends.

<comment><USER3> Actually, it's not spam at all. It's just a system (let's not go down the "evils of giving someone my email user/pass" road again) that allows users to more easily send to _their_ contacts.

To look at it another way, if you like our widget.com site, we at widget.com are trying to make it as easy as possible to tell your friends. Re-entering your contacts into our system manually is such a pita, that almost no one does it. I don't know about you, but I have never received spam from MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Yelp. I have received invites from friends/associates/folks I kinda know. This is not spam, this is email from a someone I know using a different sender. Is it always welcome? No. Do I really mind it? No. If you do, you should have a filter on your mail that trashes all mail from addresses other than those in your contact list.

We all know that the centralized contact model with API's and public/private keys would just plain rock, but it's not here yet, and companies are just trying to live with what we have (long enough to get their next round).

Ok, and one more thing - for those of you who try to send emails, this post is a nice summation of the things you should do, have to look out for, should know about, and the sites you need to visit to improve the chances of your legitimate messages getting through.

<comment><USER2> Your definition of spam seems to be dependent on knowing the sender. I disagree completely with that definition. I receive quite a bit of spam from facebook, all under the guise of coming from my friends. More likely they have been told they must invite more people to unlock secret features (Probably to enable their virtual frog to grow wings or something).

Duping/bribing users into giving you their address book, so you can spam their friends, is not a good business practice IMHO.

I do agree though. If you have a _legitimate_ reason to email people who have opted in, or expressed a direct interest, some of the sites in the article are useful.

<comment><USER3> Let me clarify. Spam as defined as unsolicited bulk mail/messages. Often folks even throw the work "indiscriminate" into their definition. I don't consider someone that I know actively sending me an invite to something they find useful unsolicited or bulk. I ignore most of them, but where it came from someone I know, it's not spam. Now, if Facebook (or some craptastic App) sends things to me that are not actually from a friend/contact/someone I know or does so by duping someone into sending the mail, then yes, that's spam. I guess it's kinda the definition of porn thing ...

Again, aren't we, as web app folks / eutrepeneurs /start-up peeps only talking about _legitamate_ uses of sending email? I know I sure am and protecting my companies name / ability to send such mail and keep as much out of spam boxes and filters is of utmost importance. For folks who don't know much about the subject and want to know more, the OP is a good post to get rolling. Surely not the be all and end all though, but a good starting point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> With tens and hundreds of emails in the INBOX, going forward, how much would email contribute to the virality of the application? Can SMS work out to be an interesting alternative? SMS is guaranteed to be delivered, there is no SPAM filtering yet and the probability of reading SMS is much higher than an email.

<comment><USER5> Guaranteed in what sense? I think I'd be pretty unhappy to get random invites over sms, actually.

<comment><USER2> I'd be unhappy to get random invites via whatever method. Whatever happened to word of mouth? Of people telling other people about a cool app/site off their own back, because they like it and it's useful to them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also, consider using google as an email gateway. That's what I do, and it works perfectly. Only takes a few minutes to set up.

See [http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...](http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60730)</comment>


Curebit's at it again, stealing more than code this time - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/30/curebit-random-rab/

<comment><USER2> Not to diminish this problem, but do the people upvoting this realize how pwned they are by these journalists? The journalists know (1) HN is a giant pipe of page views, and (2) any story they write with new revelations about some misdeed by Curebit will be reflexively upvoted by enough users to rise high on the frontpage. And so they write said story, people upvote it as predicted, and this fluff is our news for the day.

I usually err on the side of not killing stories criticizing startups we'd funded, but if this was about a startup we didn't fund I'd kill it in a second. (Though of course I wouldn't have to, because few would upvote such a story, which means no journalist would bother writing it.) So I'm going to bury it. I'd rather seem like I'm censoring bad news about startups we funded than let Venturebeat fill HN with crap like this.

<comment><USER3> Please, then, don't be selective: ban the site. You ban lots of other sites. Venues that "pwn" HN shouldn't be allowed space on the front page. If they write something uncharacteristically excellent, someone is sure to blog it, and that person can collect the pageviews.

Also, Venturebeat is far from the worst offender. At least they (ostensibly) have reporters.

<comment><USER4> Here's my favorite O'Dell article, from last March: <http://mashable.com/2011/03/10/node-js/>

I'm not going to say that her having written a decent article a year ago confers a ton of respectability on VentureBeat but it's not _all_ bad.

<comment><USER3> The "bad" at Venturebeat (and Torrentfreak and Techdirt) outweighs the good, even before you consider that a bad story is more harmful to HN than a good story is helpful.

On those occasions where Venturebeat gets it right, someone will inevitably blog it. The blog posts won't get banned. People will find out about the article. Meanwhile, Venturebeat has that much less incentive to directly troll HN.

I have zero illusions that Venturebeat is going to get banned. The incentives are wrong for Paul Graham. Venturebeat writes more positive stuff about YC companies than negative stuff. But if Graham is serious about Venturebeat trolling the site --- which it clearly does, all the time --- he shouldn't be choosy about pushing back on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi everyone,

One of the curebit cofounders here. We spoke with the artist as soon as we got his message and began discussion to get the music licensed on Sunday. (Its possible Jolie O'Dell had some stale news as it was posted monday).

As of an hour ago, we have come to an agreement on acceptable licensing terms with Random Rab for the music we used, and an apology.

<https://twitter.com/#!/randomrab/status/164070854433570817>

We've been combing through our assets and code to make sure we have all the appropriate licenses (and obtaining/replacing) for any assets we do not. It may take some time to get through everything, but this is our first priority.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to bring anything to our attention, please let us know at email@example.com. We'll act on it promptly.

<comment><USER6> _"... As of an hour ago, we have come to an agreement on acceptable licensing terms with Random Rab for the music we used, and an apology. ..."_

It's not that you stuff up that matters, but how you recover. A tick in my book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a tough situation for Curebit. People are now looking for a pattern of behavior, and unfortunately for them, they're finding it. The company hasn't been given the opportunity to change their behavior. Should they? If you find a spouse cheating, should a history and pattern of dishonesty be ignored because they say "I didn't know it was wrong"?

I think the lesson here is to behave with the same integrity and respect for other people's work before funding as you would when you're a big and successful company.

<comment><USER8> It's a matter of degree. It's somewhat similar to the GoDaddy support of SOPA/PIPA and reversing their position after the online protests. On one hand they reversed their position but on the other they supported the shitty legislation in the first place.

How should GoDaddy be treated?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So during the SOPA protests the HN comment threads had a lot of people stating that copyright should be abolished, or that IP theft is a market failure, torrenting should be legal, etc, etc, etc...

I'm guessing those people are also against Curebit doing what it's done? Is there a rallying cry of "HTML is easy to steal and therefore it's a market problem and not Curebit's fault since it is so easy"?

I'm not saying it's a 100% parallel, but you see can see it. One one hand we have "IP theft is ok" and on the other "IP thieves! Get them!"

I know the difference is Curebit's potential profit motivations vs. "I'm a movie collector who wouldn't have bought these overpriced DVDs", but the irony is still present given the close timing between the two events.

<comment><USER10> I think it's important to scope the word "against" here. When one is "against" copyright, one is usually against extortion-esque tactics and expensive punitive judgments from courts against individuals in a campaign of intimidation. That's not really at play here, even discounting "potential profit motivations." There's just no threat of a lawsuit, and so that's probably why they'll be reasonably quiet on this article.

If you're a comedian, there is a professional artistic courtesy that you do not steal another comedian's joke -- that if you do, then you are "taking credit" for something which you did not produce. It strikes me that this is the same sort of irritation. The corporations who get mad that you've been seeding the Bourne movies on BitTorrent don't pretend to any sort of _artistic_ outrage, and if they did it would be absurd, because you're faceless and not claiming to any sort of artistic innovation. But we're quite clear, I think, on the fact that (a) they're executives, (b) the government gave them a monopoly on copying these films, and (c) they're upset because end-users didn't care about the monopoly and shared anyway.

Given all that, I'm not sure I find the discrepancy particularly ironic. Actually, I think I'd more or less expect it -- if only because developers have clear human faces, while the RIAA's lawyers and executives do not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One advantage that YC-funded startups have over everyone else starting businesses on the side is the coverage. Lots of eyeballs to admire and try out your work, give feedback, etc, without having to spam your twitter feed or beg family to try out your prototype yet again.

The flipside of starting a business under the limelight is the tabloid-like press that you get, which seems to intensify if you're YC, because a lot of people with seriously great hacker cred have basically personally endorsed your company and its people.

This is a good thing; it gives folks the chance to be a business on a hill and display exemplary ethical practices.

It is _not okay_ for any business entity to break copyright law, and if one has found themselves to be in error (people make mistakes) then one must immediately remedy the situation. This applies to all businesses, and YC companies happen to be under the microscope.

So take advantage of the enviable perks of having press and use the limelight as an opportunity to show stellar maturity and ethical behavior!

</comment><comment><USER12> For those of you who think people are piling on, understand that things could be much worse. They are company operating USA where copyright infringement is illegal, punishable by a fine and/or jail time. They can also be sued in court and cost the investors thousands on dollars. An internet mob lashing is not their biggest problem, a lack of integrity is.

</comment><comment><USER13> Could be a rough couple weeks for Curebit. Clearly the Internets is going to go through all their work with a fine tooth comb. I doubt any company could be 100% sure they haven't used non-licensed materials.

That said, Curebit seems to have a bit of a problem on their hands. Smoke, meet fire...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Curebit's demo video was created in 2010 so it's not as if they went about using the music illegally after the previous incident. Random Rab tweeted the founder of Curebit yesterday, he deserves some time. This seems like a hatred campaign...

<comment><USER14> How does the fact that they did this in the past make it any better? This just shows that their lack of judgment isn't a recent issue, or a fluke.

This looks terrible because it is terrible.

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact that they're being put under the microscope for everything they've done is unfair. They deserve time to change and improve. After all Random Rab only tweeted them yesterday, for all we know once the founder of Curebit sees it he will remove the video. Haven't even given him a chance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not trying to excuse this but I don't believe Curebit are the only startup to have ever done something similar. As benjlang said it seems a bit more like directed hatred.

</comment><comment><USER16> An internet company did something wrong. We'll make them pay by boosting their google page rank.

<comment><USER17> Not all PR is good PR: <http://cl.ly/1p0D1i1J3U133f0R3G1i>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Man, their new investors will go crazy. 2 scandals, just a few days after landing new funding...

</comment><comment><USER19> The glee with which people are piling criticism on these guys is disturbing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Quite a few people expressed confusion around the strength of emotion with which people were reacting.

One part of the answer is that the software company and the artist that Curebit stole from are _both_ darlings with strong fandoms.

I know I wouldn't have cared if they'd stolen from Oracle Corporation and The Jonas Brothers.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why is this a story? 4 clicks, and the artist can report the video on Youtube. Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER22> Here we go again...

</comment><comment><USER23> this is boring now. leave them alone

</comment><comment><USER24> a solution, investors need to fire Grant's ass immediately..

</comment><comment><USER25> Oh, common. This is getting ridiculous now. This is just some random people jumping on a free PR wagon while it rolls. It's neither interesting nor it's news. Flagged.

(edit) Feel free to downvote, but do tell me - do you really think this belongs to the front page of HN? And do you not think this looks even a little bit like a group bashing now?</comment>


Show HN: Determine if you can actually afford this car - <AUTHOR> http://www.caniaffordthiscar.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm curious about this part:

"Lastly, we have partnered with car maintenance shops that will tell us the average cost of service for your particular model."

When you say 'average cost of service', are you talking about:

A) The average cost of the regular annual maintenance and inspection?

B) Everything in A, but also the average cost of expected repairs for N years after purchase?

C) Something else?

When purchasing a car, I'd love to have a great estimate for B, because repairs are a significant proportion of total cost, especially for cars over 10 years old. And the chance of needing an expensive repair in the next N years varies significantly with:

\- Make and/or model

\- Age of car

\- Whether or not a certain repair has already been done (like if a 5 year old MacBook had just had the battery replaced)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank for the feedback. Unfortunately I can only get access to regular maintenance and inspection costs at the moment. Down the road I will try to incorporate repairs too!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for visiting. Apologies but there was an annoying error for the past few hours. Fixed now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something is broken.

</comment><comment><USER4> Application Error :(</comment>


How educated are world leaders? (visualization done in D3) - <AUTHOR> http://skyrill.com/leaders

<comment><USER2> This represents a classic confusion of education and schooling. There are plenty of examples of people who are well-educated but who have no schooling at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> How would you suggest codifying that? Education level, as a variable, has predictive power, as shown in a couple of studies that I've come across, one of which is cited there.

That's beside the point though. The visualization is descriptive; we're not making any conclusions here ;)

<comment><USER2> > Education level, as a variable, has predictive power ...

Yes, it certainly does. For example, here's a list of billionaire college dropouts:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_college_dropout_billionaires)

> ... as shown in a couple of studies that I've come across, one of which is > cited there.

It has precisely no predictive power in the cause-effect sense one expects to see in a scientific study. Studies that indicate otherwise are simply wrong -- are drawing conclusions not based on evidence.

There are any number of "studies" that describe without trying to explain (very common in the "social sciences"). Those that try to explain often do so by ignoring cause-effect possibilities other than the preferred one. Most such studies are funded by institutions of higher learning, institutions with a vested interest in a particular outcome.

> That's beside the point though.

No, it is the point. You're trying to show a correlation between political achievement and education, but you're using schooling as a convenient but very misleading indicator of education.

Today's important lesson: correlation is not causation.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation)

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't do much with your point about the trustworthiness of research in the social sciences given that it's anecdotal and I have nothing to compare it to (anecdotally), nor do I see how referencing a list of 31 college dropout billionaires has much to do with the argument about predictive power. I'm aware of logical implication and correlation vs causation and so that seems like a whopping non-sequitur.

I don't want to get into a pissing match, but I genuinely am interested in knowing how you would suggest codifying education?

<comment><USER2> > ... nor do I see how referencing a list of 31 college dropout billionaires > has much to do with the argument about predictive power.

You mean, apart from falsifying the notion that there's any meaningful correlation between education and worldly success?

> I'm aware of logical implication and correlation vs causation and so that > seems like a whopping non-sequitur.

Knowing that correlation is not causation doesn't constitute a license to ignore its implications.

> I genuinely am interested in knowing how you would suggest codifying > education?

You can't. Education is not biology, it is not neuroscience, it's psychology, and psychology is not a science. The reasons:

<http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology>

It's important to remember that there are things not open to meaningful scientific investigation. This is one of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nowhere do I claim that. What I said was that there is research that suggests that the educational level of political leaders is a significant positive predictor of economic growth, based on a sample of 2000 or so leaders over a period of 129 years.

That is quite different than showing "correlation between education and worldly success" as you paraphrased it into.

The final two points and link are appreciated. I'll read your article with my morning coffee tomorrow.

<comment><USER2> > Nowhere do I claim that.

No, you just provide graphs comparing educational achievement and worldly achievement that strongly imply that they're meaningfully correlated, i.e. show a cause-effect relationship.

> What I said was that there is research that suggests that the educational > level of political leaders is a significant positive predictor of economic > growth

Your use of the term "research" implies a scientific basis for the result. But there is no scientific basis for the claim --- it's a raw correlation with no real meaning, and beyond this, it pretends that there is a correlation between education and schooling. In other words, it relies on two meaningless correlations in series. Like this:

Worldly achievement <|> Years in school <|> Education

My advice is not to support such unscientific speculations by dressing them up in Web pages that try to confer unearned status to guesses.

Do you know what distinguishes what you're doing from science? In science, an _explanation_ is offered, one that can be tested and potentially falsified. Your page only describes, although it pretends to explain. But it cannot do that, for lack of evidence.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really lack the motivation to go on with this, as appreciative as I am of your passion for science and, apparently, experimental rigor.

If you're arguing against the agnosticism of a statistical regression model, then there's nothing I can say to that.

This isn't scientific investigation, nor is it masquerading as one. I'm not basing a dissertation on this nor am I using it to develop formal models for Curiosity. It's visualization, it's design, an aesthetic transformation - driven by data, which as I've already pointed out, the analysis of which is published and peer reviewed and available for your and others' scrutiny.

If you do not wish to accept it because of your distrust of or dislike for the social sciences for whatever anecdotal reason, then that's fine, but it's not an argument that I can do much with.

The standard you're using in this context is misplaced, the zeal unnecessarily antagonistic and a subset of arguments borderline fallacious.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Good Enough - <AUTHOR> http://programmingzen.com/2012/11/28/the-good-enough/ <comment><USER2> Another fork article FFS. Nobody cares what you people buy! Please stop submitting/voting this tripe.</comment>


No sex, please, they're robots, says Japanese android firm - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/28/no-sex-with-robots-says-japanese-android-firm-softbank <comment><USER2> So SoftBank is a "Japanese android firm" now?

Okay, fine. As long as they keep doing the Otousan commercials…</comment>