Problems coming for online publishing - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/03/23/nothing/ <comment><USER2> This is a rather asinine line of argumentation.

(a) The New York Time's newsroom and editorial staff are rather well-separated from their business department which makes decision about ad tech on their website. If you don't believe me, see this paragraph from a recent article at The Atlantic, which operates by the same principle:

 _As you read this article on The Atlantic, roughly three dozen ad trackers are watching you, adding your interest in this story to profiles they maintain on your online behavior. (If you want to know more about who's watching you, download Ghostery, a browser extension that tracks and can block these "third- party" trackers.)_ [0]

That's a reporter arguing against the financial interests of his employer. And they are not going to fire him.

(b) There's one big difference between Facebook and generic advertising technology: the New York Times doesn't require you to sign up. Every time you change devices or delete cookies, the ad targeting starts from a blank slate. And while some websites try to get you to sign up, it's trivially easy to switch to a new account every once in a while.

(c) Ad tracking knows which websites I visit. Facebook knows which nude parties I attended in 2005

(d) The New York Times has actually turned to subscription revenue as its main source of income. While the split used to be 50/50, it is not much closer to 75/25 (subscriptions/ads). The "if you're not paying, you're the product..." cliché is getting tired anyway. But its premise simply doesn't apply to the New York Times.

[0]: [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/data-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/data- misuse-bigger-than-facebook/556310/)

<comment><USER3> The mentions your first point, fairly early on.

<comment><USER2> Yes, you are right (and I was wrong). I admit I stopped reading when they suggested the media was being "ironic" (i. e. hypocritical) on the matter.

<comment><USER3> If it makes you feel better, I had stopped reading your comment when I found that point, and posted mine. My original version was that "the article addressed your points".

I subsequently reread your comment and realized you made several other points. Oops. I then edited mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've updated that piece several times to clarify things, so you might check it again.

What it's a call for is hacking our way to publishing norms that don't involve tracking. And that's what we're starting to do at Linux Journal, where I'm editor-in-chief.

For the first time anywhere, we'll be agreeing to readers' terms, rather than the reverse. In legal terms, the reader will be the first party and Linux Journal will be the second party. I explain how we're approaching this in "Help Us Cure Online Publishing of Its Addiction to Personal Data": [http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/help-us-cure-online- publ...](http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/help-us-cure-online-publishing- its-addiction-personal-data)

The barn we're raising is for all of publishing, but we're short-handed. So, if you're interested in helping, let me know (doc at linuxjournal dot com). Or show up on 2 April at the Computer History Museum: [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/vrm- day-2018a-tickets-438706894...](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/vrm- day-2018a-tickets-43870689413) . Thanks!

<comment><USER5> Happens that I just posted an essay on that topic: [http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/03/google-doubleclick- mozi...](http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/03/google-doubleclick-mozilla- essay-second.html)

<comment><USER6> If you're going to mention this post in multiple threads, please do a regular submission instead.

<comment><USER5> Yea, I don't normally do this. I did it because docsearls was there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Compare ad tech that news websites use to what Cambridge Analytica did.

1\. Ad tech:

As I browse, my interests are accumulated into basic interest groups, demographic data, and maybe recently visited websites that use tracking.

The result: when I visit a news website, I might see an ad for tennis racquets (because of interest), or a local bank (because of location), or DigitalOcean hosting, because I recently visited that site.

2\. Facebook's platform, used by Cambridge Analytica:

I install a Facebook psychological quiz app (supposedly from the prestigious Cambridge university), and give it permission to access my data.

Through that, Republican campaigns also access my grandmother's account, with all of her photos, likes, and comments. They use that data to learn her deepest fears.

They hire designers and writers to create fake news websites, and get their propaganda stories to appear in her Facebook news feed, where they appear to be legitimate right next to the news about the local sports team.

The result: when I visit for Christmas, I have to try to calm her down, that Hillary Clinton isn't actually running a late term abortion clinic out of a pizza parlor. And she won't believe me.

<comment><USER8> Can we please keep the reddit style hysterics on reddit? I pretty much left reddit to escape the fake political nonsense. And with all due respect, you are doing exactly what you claim cambridge analytica did. You are pushing extreme fear and agenda. But for what end?

> As I browse, my interests are accumulated into basic interest groups, > demographic data, and maybe recently visited websites that use tracking.

You are forgetting installing cookies and fingerprinting ( amongst others ) to track across platforms. You are forgetting using that data to target customers with tailored fearmongering news articles to better clickbait.

> Through that, Republican campaigns also access my grandmother's account, > with all of her photos, likes, and comments. They use that data to learn her > deepest fears.

I hate to break this to you but everyone does this. Obama did this. The democrats did. Hillary's campaign did this.

I love how you excuse news websites when they cause hysteria and panic over nonsense like campus rape crisis and pay gap in male and female sports. Not to mention the hysteria over cambridge analytica. Seems like the news has done far more harm to you than facebook did to your grandmother, assuming your story is legit and not made up.

I recommend you go watch the 13th on netflix to see how news and media can be dangerous. The problem now is that news has access to tons of data about us ( just like facebook ). The biggest difference is that facebook was pretty much "neutral" whereas the news/media are highly biased. Facebook allowed both trump and hillary political ads.

<comment><USER9> You are right, both sides are to blame, but this don't make any of the them better.

In Brazil we have the same mentality of "sides" and I believe that this is destroying the good sense of some people.

It's not because everyone does it that it should be the norm, or that is not evil.

Our true challenge is how we can stop this type of propaganda without hurting any freedom?

In Brazil All the big publishers are in someway connected to the people in power, so our non-fake-news were never really impartial or independent. Some even say that the media should be controlled by the government (which is to me a 1984 scenario, but not so much different from what it's today).

I believe that the only way to end this fake-news madness will be a truly anonymous p2p communication, but this would generate another kind of problem.

(Sorry for my english, I'm still learning how to write properly and an argument is kind hard to do, I may sound like provocative but that is because of my lack of vocabulary not my intentions)

<comment><USER10> > You are right, both sides are to blame, but this don't make any of the them > better.

( _Both sides_ refer to the broadcast/online media & commercial/political ad campaigns)

Blame can only be placed on either party if there exists the prior assumption that people should believe all things which are presented to them as fact. If this assumption does not exist _and without facilities responsible for fact- checking_ then it's only the individual that is responsible for dividing fact from fiction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am rather skeptical of the effectiveness of online advertising, despite all the tracking and profiling. I see companies like Google and Facebook post bumper profits, yet I see users becoming smarter at avoiding ads. Something doesn't quite add up, and because the validity of clicks is shrouded in mystery, it's not difficult for the platform owners to play dirty. I have had very little success with online ads for my app ([https://usebx.com/app](https://usebx.com/app)), yet what worked really well for acquiring users was releasing a JS library for free ([https://osrec.github.io/currencyFormatter.js/](https://osrec.github.io/currencyFormatter.js/))

<comment><USER12> What doesn't add up is that you and your circle are not typical users. Try talking to advertisers doing direct response on Facebook — they keep a very close eye on ROI. Brand advertising is less trackable, but advertising does and has always worked. If it didn't, businesses that didn't spend on advertising would outcompete those that do.

<comment><USER11> Then why are companies like P&G cutting digital ad spend significantly? And why is this actually having a positive impact on their bottom line?

<comment><USER13> Because advertising for big companies is all about brand awareness and has little to do with sales per se. You can't follow a P&G add and end-up in a page where you can buy the damn product, 9 out of 10 times you'll end-up in an info page.

It's the little guys that get the most out of digital advertising, especially e-commerce sites where they can link ads to products.

<comment><USER11> I would have agreed with you 5 years ago, but currently, I don't see the same in my business, nor in the businesses of my close friends or relatives. It could of course just be that we're in a niche where ads don't work too well!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> purple-again If the backlash lasts long enough to really change the landscape of non explicit permission data gathering then an opportunity for hacker news one million jobs may arise.

How much is my data worth? I'll sign a buncb of revenue sharing agreements with YouTube, Google, Mozilla, Facebook etc if the price is right. I know that HN has a lot of really heavy pro privacy advocates but I hope you can recognize a lot of people don't share those concerns and would happyily welcome a little passive income stream in their lives.

<comment><USER14> > people don't share those concerns and would happyily welcome a little > passive income stream in their lives.

This is what I gathered from moviepass privacy thread on HN. Most people didn't care about sharing location if it gave them cheap movie tickets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ha, redmorph's website doesn't even load without enabling third-party scripts (it loads [http://ip-api.io](http://ip-api.io), I guess to geolocate visitors)

</comment><comment><USER16> I think adtech companies are at greater risk than publishers. Publishers will move to a subscription model and most of them will be okay. A whole lot of adtech companies' entire business model is sleazy at best and outright criminal at worst.

<comment><USER17> Yeah but it's also crazy how many pubs (the word is nice ;)) already had to close or at least merge which others. Google News made it quite obvious how redundant a lot of content is. Often articles are just exact copies of Reuters, AP, ... texts.

If subscription is the only solution, I expect more pubs to disappear. Being from Germany, if I had to subscribe to nytimes.com to read articles from there I'd stop reading them probably. Just pretending I would subscribe, I would also have to subscribe to 5 more US Newspapers, 2-3 UK ones and 10-15 German ones. NYT Basic is 1.75 € a week, Washington post 10 $ a month. That would be more than 140 € a month. No way :-) (Oh, I forgot all the commercial tech pubs I read)

I hope the publishers come up with a better model.

<comment><USER18> > Google News made it quite obvious how redundant a lot of content is. Often > articles are just exact copies of Reuters, AP, ... texts.

Reuters and AP are newswire services which is meant to be used by multiple pubs because local pubs don't have reporters all around the world. The local papers' reporters are busy telling you what your local schoolboard is up to and whatnot.

But I agree more pubs will likely disappear or be merged into larger media conglomerates, and that leads into issues like Sinclair forcing all their pubs to push certain agendas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would like to mention that I find it extremely irritating that despite paying for a subscription, the NYT still collects data on me and serves me ads. That's the worst of both worlds.

<comment><USER20> Yep. I'm not anti-advertising, but I am anti-tracking. Serve me ads, but please don't personalize them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> No, change isn't coming. Sorry.

Trump's victory signaled a social media gold-rush for political campaigns. 2018 is a major election year in American politics. You can bet that campaigns are evaluating and signing onto social media related efforts. To meet this demand, as Cambridge Analytica buckles, others will take it place. The people who benefit by these services are those who make the laws. While legislators benefit by social media targeted services, there won't be a political will sufficient to pass a law that will slay the goose laying golden eggs.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal had an Editorial piece yesterday that Facebook should pay for news and media content to increase its trust. There is a lot of self-interest in much of the the commercial-scale hating on Facebook. This is the article although it may be paywalled (WSJ uses variable restriction based on user prediction ironically enough): [https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-public- reckoning-1521...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-public- reckoning-1521846210)

<comment><USER22> Media is definitely taking the chance to try and kick Facebook to death, and often for selfish reasons. That shouldn't distract us from the very real fact that Facebook is a terrible value proposition for users of their service, untrustworthy, and even dangerous. Facebook deserves to be kicked to death, even if the media wants it for their own reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The original title was "Facebook's Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what's coming for all of online publishing" for those wondering what more specifically this post is about. I shortened it when I posted it to get it under the 80 char limit, but the further mod edits probably lost some information of value :)

</comment><comment><USER23> Craigslist replaced paper's classified ads. Pretty much every website is using online ads. I gotta wonder who is doing the coupons that a fair number of people use the paper to get?

<comment><USER24> Coupons are a fascinating business, with a lot of middlemen taking cuts. From the agency that creates the advertising campaign (and possibly books the media) to the media platforms that display the coupons (whether inserts in physical papers, direct mail flyers, digital coupons via coupons.com/Quotient and retailer sites and emails, etc). Plus the clearinghouses that process the physical coupons for retailers, and the processors that handle the financial aspect of cutting a check from the manufacturer to the clearinghouse and onto the retailer for the redeemed coupons.

There are a few big names in each of those sections; but "doing the coupons" is an entire process that sets off a chain of necessary suppliers, rather than just a single name like Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The title should end with "publishers", not "pubs".

<comment><AUTHOR> There is an 80 character title field limit on the HN input field so the title had to be shortened.

<comment><USER26> The title should be reworded, I had to read the article's title to understand it.

Edit: and as I say this it was just modified.</comment></comment></comment>


Why-Developers-Get-Fired - <AUTHOR> http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/09/20/1557251/Why-Developers-Get-Fired

<comment><USER2> See the link to the original rather than the /. item here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833287>

There's lots of discussion there too.</comment>


iMessage Should Have a Dead Battery Auto-Responder  - <AUTHOR> http://benjamingilbert.net/imessage-should-have-a-dead-battery-auto-responder/

<comment><USER2> The point is moot. iMessage as delivery notifications. If the message is not marked as "Delivered", it means the other phone didn't get it.

But it can be spotty at times with poor data connection.

<comment><USER3> Does 'Delivered' show up when the message is received by another iOS device? e.g. I often leave my iPad at home but still connected to iMessage, and if that receives the messages my iPhone doesn't, wouldn't this give a false impression of delivery to the sender?

<comment><USER4> iMessage's are sent to _all_ of your devices. I have iMessage on my mac, iPhone & iPad. All 3 devices receive messages sent to me. That's true even if one of the device is turned off for some period of time. Apple, did seem to go through some growing pains where this didn't always work as above.

To answer your other question the delivered flag is set if any of your devices receives the message.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> matthew-wegner iMessage gets tricky when you have multiple devices.

For example, I went out of the country, but left my iPad at home (which also receives iMessages to my phone #). Because my phone wasn't data roaming, and my iPad was still on the network at home, iMessages _were being delivered_ to the iPad. It basically meant anyone with an iPhone couldn't text me, because the text message fallback wasn't triggering. I had to find wifi with my iPhone to catch up on texts.

The "dead battery" auto-responder has the same issue. What if my iPhone battery is dead, but I'm on a Mountain Lion MacBook and getting messages there?

</comment><comment><USER5> Let's not get ahead of ourselves. The iMessage client can't keep messages in order or search them, let alone do anything complicated like that.

<comment><USER6> Messages has a search bar at the top of the main tableview.

Message search is also built into the iOS spotlight screen (left of first home screen).

<comment><USER7> It's really unreliable and half assed. The parent commenter is a absolutely right. iMessage is full of bugs they need to really fix them! They have done an amazing thing though.

Sidenote: apple has the ability to mine so many conversations for data. It's more intimate than twitter and I'd imagine more iMessages are sent each day than tweets. If something happens anywhere in the world Apple would theoretically be the first to know. Kinda nuts.

<comment><USER8> End to End encryption :)

<comment><USER9> ...is a feature iMessage does not offer.

<comment><USER8> It's not? Are you 100%

<comment><USER5> I've seen nothing to suggest that it does, just some funky key exchange for authentication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are privacy concerns when you tell people about the state of another persons device. There is also the concept of sending a message saying a devices battery is dead "gosh iPhones always have dead batteries I keep getting this alert from my friends". These are good intention designs but not quite there.

</comment><comment><USER11> iMessages has built in notification to the sender if the message has been delivered to the receiver, hence the status "Delivered" or (if receiver has opted-in) also Read status. I see no point in this feature, since the phone could be dead for various reasons, not just battery

<comment><USER12> It would be nice if the delivered indicator could be relied upon, but it seems to report that a message has been delivered once the Apple servers have received it, not when the destination device has received it.

This is especially noticeable under poor network conditions (I think I first noticed it at a music festival where even regular SMS messages struggled to get through due to network congestion).

<comment><USER13> Nope. It needs to hit a device to say Delivered.

For example, if the recipient is out of 3G data coverage but can fall back to SMS, you won't get Delivered, you'll get a line across your conversation denoting a switch to Text Message and a different color bubble.

(Several people I message are in marginal coverage areas several hours a day, so I get to see this in action daily.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This doesn't make any sense at all. iMessage is now tied to my iPhone, my iPad, an iPod Touch, two iMacs, and a Macbook Air. If my iPhone's battery dies, how will Apple know that I'm not in front of another device capable of getting messages?

"One potential reason that Apple wouldn't implement this feature is that it increases user awareness of dead iPhone batteries" I don't even

</comment><comment><USER15> I usually "know" someone's phone has died when 2 straight messages go through as SMS, but a standard notification would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why not turn it around and have iMessages send a "message received" notification when receiving a message? Have it display like a little checkmark next to any sent message that turns green if the other phone pings back. Just that - no read receipt like there is now, as that isn't always convenient.

<comment><USER5> It already does, they're called read receipts.

<comment><USER17> it also have delivered receipts, they are turned on by default opposed to the read receipts (which need to be turned on manually).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A simple 'read receipt' would be much better, if its not already built in, although I suspect it is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it is built in, but many (including myself) disable it. It's pretty common that I accidentally open a message, but I don't have a response / a chance to respond yet, and I don't want the person to think I'm ignoring them.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, plausible deniability. I know a work place which demands them for email. Evil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like this, but can see some problems with iMessage on multiple devices. Ignoring that, I'd love to get a push notification at ~5% battery asking me if I'd like to put an auto-responder on.

</comment><comment><USER21> It can't make any negative remarks about the battery life of any idevice, but it could be kinda nice if it said whether or not the receivers idevice is turned off.

</comment><comment><USER22> The problem hasn't got anything to do with delivery notifications or auto- responders: if you need an answer right away you must use a synchronous form of communication, e.g. voice call.

iMessage, SMS, email et al are async by design. Until you hear or see an ack that's from the actual recipient (and not something automated by a device), you can't be sure the message has been properly received.

<comment><USER23> iMessage has a "send read receipt" feature (deactivated by default).

<comment><USER22> Yes, but that doesn't mean the recipient actually read it - it means that iMessage is/has been the active application on at least one of the recipient's devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Many XMPP clients support message delivery receipts. Maybe there is also one for iOS.

</comment><comment><USER25> But I use "my was battery dead" excuse when i am too lazy to respond.

<comment><USER26> This is exactly what I was thinking!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> if it did you wouldn't be able to use it as an excuse...</comment>


Phone-based RPG built on Twilio - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/jjinux/teladventure

<comment><USER2> What is the latency like for interactive phone based games on Twilio?</comment>


The World Slime Convention - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/kids-world-slime-convention/ <comment><USER2> Wtf? Closing the 'x free articles remaining' modal triggers the same behaviour as clicking the subscribe button (redirect)

How are we supposed to read an article with most of the screen obscured

<comment><USER3> >How are we supposed to read an article with most of the screen obscured

The easiest way is probably to subscribe...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Slime toys always remind me of video artist NobodyTM's take on the social context of the stuff [https://youtu.be/U2Odw8okDls](https://youtu.be/U2Odw8okDls)

</comment><comment><USER5> From the title, I was hoping this was some sort of SF/fantasy thing:

Keynote speaker: Rimuru Tempest.

Panel Discussion: "Is Dragon Quest still the face of our community?"

Gelatinous Cubes protesting outside because they aren't getting the same respect as other slimes.

The convention breaks down into hostility when the water department has to shut off the conference centre for repairs and all the guests start drying out.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good,... as long as you don't injure yourself using borax.

<comment><USER7> How would you go about injuring yourself with borax? It's poisonous, so a small child might eat it. It's an eye irritant, so keep it out of your eyes. But is it significantly worse than other household detergents? This is a genuine question. It might be more hazardous than I think, but my prior impressions and my quick web search didn't make me worried. But I might easily have missed something...

<comment><USER8> We don't use other household detergents as toys, we use them as cleaning chemicals and keep them in safe places.

<comment><USER9> I feel like bubble solution and bubble bath products fall squarely in the household detergent + toy department

<comment><USER10> Bubble solution is glycerin and not a great cleaner. It is also very safe. You could at most say it is hand soap and a toy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> type-2 This is the first time I am hearing about this. No slime conventions in India as far as I know.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why & how slimes have become something people want?

YouTube and Instagram are two enablers IMHO.

<comment><USER3> I was obsessed with Gak before either of those things existed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article conveniently sidesteps the fetish aspect of slime, I see.

<comment><USER13> Almost anything you can think of has a fetish community somewhere. That doesn't make it relevant to general discussion of the thing.</comment></comment>


The Art of Hidden Faces: Anthropomorphic Landscapes - <AUTHOR> http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/the-art-of-hidden-faces-anthropomorphic-landscapes/ <comment><USER2> This is a great selection of interesting art.

They reminded me of a very contemporary version

[http://i.imgur.com/5FD1KDh.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/5FD1KDh.jpg)

<comment><USER3> I was just about to post something about how The Witness would fit right into this article!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whoever popularized those awful SUBSCRIBE NOW hover boxes needs to be tried for war crimes.</comment>


Peter Thiel: "Hypnotic Mass Phenomena" - <AUTHOR> https://www.weltwoche.ch/ausgaben/2018-29/artikel/en-hypnotische-massenphanomene-die-weltwoche-ausgabe-29-2018.html <comment><USER2> > The mentioning of his name sends shockwaves through Silicon Valley

> And there he is: Rather short for being an internet giant, Mr. Thiel has a > strong, dynamic appearance and an extraordinary quickness in his thought.

This is cringeworthy stuff, as introductions go.

I don't hide that I'm not particularly fond of Peter Thiel, but I'd absolutely love to read an in-depth interview with him. This is... not that.

\- Asks one shallow question about the "diversity myth" then immediately pivots to "so you like Star Wars?".

\- Asks about his New Zealand citizenship... but in the context of him being a fan of Tolkien, not probing any of the widely-asked questions about how he obtained it.

\- He throws out lines like "We live in a world where there is too much welfare and where work is undervalued" and it's entirely unquestioned.

\- "What's your IQ?"

</comment><comment><USER3> _> Because in a democracy, we believe that the average person should be able to make some judgements: Do you like the funny man with the strange hairdo or do you like the mean grandmother for president in the United States? These are some common sense things that people should be able to debate. And if you say that you are not allowed to think about that, then you probably should not be allowed to think about anything._

Who on Earth is this directed at?

This is the kind of rhetoric you expect from 3rd and 4th graders.

I feel secondary embarrassment as an adult just knowing that someone that should be a peer or higher thinks like this.

<comment><USER4> 49something percent of voting Americans are the audience for that kind of rhetoric. And I think we fail ourselves when we fail to accept that a vast quantity of people live and vote with their emotional brain and not their logical brain.

I feel that one of the largest struggles, one of the largest causes of divide, is that to logical actors, the concept of an emotional actor is just so invalid that we believe them to be fundamentally wrong and broken and in need of fixing and education.

I'm not arguing that irrationality and emotion-driven voting is an equal alternative to rationalism. I think my point is that we can't just dismiss it as broken and in need of fixing. It's how our brains can work and it's a valid state of being.

I'm 31 and run upstairs in a panic when I switch the basement light off. Don't shake your head at how much of a fool I am, empathize with how I'm still sometimes driven by 3 million years of evolutionary practice of running away from predators.

Edit: Clarified in a child reply why my train of thought went in this direction as a response to parent.

<comment><USER5> I think his point was rather that people are expected not to think about who they vote for, even abstractly, but vote what they are socially coerced to. This is certainly true for the last US election more than any other I can remember.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. I think I'm trying to make that connection but might be failing with my words. Picking people you like, can have a beer with, look and feel like a winner, etc. is all, I think, driven by emotion, not patient, rational analysis. Being socially coerced is just an extension of that. You want to feel included, feel like a winner, so you'll make the choices that feel right, even if they're analytically wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The ego on those people, it never fails to amaze me, condescendingly judging entire continents with thousands of years of history.

<comment><USER7> I think you're succumbing to a distortion brought about by Thiel's wealth and status. Ordinary people make blanket oversimplified statements all the time but because these people don't have such elevated status those statements are not taken as seriously. As a result they don't sound quite so glib.

As a general rule the higher your perceived status the more criticism you get.

Another example would be Elon's Twitter spat. Some random dude on the Internet gets into it with another random dude on the Internet and calls him some bad names and nobody cares and nobody takes it seriously, but when it's two high- profile people it's an international story.

<comment><USER8> "Noblesse oblige". Or if you prefer the more modern version, "With great power comes great responsibility."

It isn't just a "distortion" or quirk. It's a social obligation that goes a long way back. The new American billionaire would do well to remember that their state of privilege comes with a whole new set of do's and don'ts that if they were smart they would pay a good deal more attention to.

The fact that many of the founding father's abhorred the idea of an aristocratic class developing is beside the point. If these magnates wish not to live under the microscope, them mayhaps they should look into actually doing something about the positive feedback loops they have exploited to get to the point they are at.

I'm sure the labor force would appreciate the wage growth, and an end to under the table non-compete clauses, and forced arbitration clauses.

<comment><USER7> Yes, that's what I mean, but here's the thing. Elon (for example) is _nuevo riche_. People who are brought up in elite families are usually taught noblesse oblige as part of their upbringing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The odd thing is that the main parts of the NATO alliance seem to be in > Europe, not in America.

That was the point. Seen from the US, it is much better to defend NATO in Europe, then doing it in the US. That was also the reason why West Germany was rebuild after the war: better use Germany as a member of NATO and fight the war against the USSR in Germany. For example huge tank battles in Northern Germany... Germany was set up with all kinds of military installations as the battle ground for WWIII in Europe.

Seen from the US, there was nothing odd about it.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, this was kind of upsetting to me that he bought into that. NATO is saving the US money for all of what they're doing in the Middle East and Africa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _> Peter Thiel, six months back, you announced to move your company to Los Angeles, citing doubts about the future of Silicon Valley. And yet, here we are at the headquarters of Thiel Capital in San Francisco!

We are moving in August, keeping just one of the venture funds here in San Francisco. The judgement call that I am making is that in the next decade it will be less centralized where technology happens and that the incredible premium on this location will not be quite as big anymore._

I'm shocked that everyone here is focused on his politics when he's making one of the biggest moves SV has seen.

Sama seems to partially agree: [http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si- muove](http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove)

</comment><comment><USER12> Why was this flagged? I think it was a rather interesting read.

<comment><USER13> Peter Thiel seems to be persona non grata in HN circles because he supported candidate Trump (in 2016) and later joined some sort of inner circle when Trump became president (is what I can make out from half a world away).

This kind of flagging is borderline insanity imo. (I have no stake in US or SF politics / social phenomena)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a very good interview. The click bait title doesn't do it justice.

I find myself agreeing with a huge fraction of what Thiel says, but I also find myself unable to actually _agree_ with him.

The block for me is admittedly his politics. It's not that his political views may be different from mine. That's fine. I have friends who are Marxists, democratic socialists, Christian conservatives, moderate libertarians, and admirers of Ayn Rand. But I have an Overton window just like everyone else and some things just don't fit into it.

I have no friends who are fascists and I've dropped people because they start espousing those ideas. I also have no friends who are totalitarian Soviet- style communists, and there is at least one case where I've backed away from someone for seriously espousing the idea that the USSR had it right all along. Advocacy of totalitarian ideologies with demonstrated histories of massive bloodshed is outside my Overton window. I've also backed away from people for espousing racism, misogyny, and other kinds of intellectualized assholery.

To me these are ideologies that go beyond just disagreement about how best to structure a society, how powerful government should be, or what its priorities should be. I think the thing they have in common is that they explicitly advocate hurting people and more importantly believe that you can actually make the world a better place by hurting certain people. You can make the world a better place by inflicting pain.

So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He _seems_ to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists. I could also say the same thing about Trump. Trump does not necessarily explicitly espouse fascism (though there are some debatable statements), but his most ardent and enthusiastic supporters are fascists.

So here we go. I admire and agree with so much of what Thiel says about business, technology, and the state of the world, but how is it possible that these apparently very clear and good ideas can coexist with explicit advocacy of genocide? Or if he doesn't believe that maybe he should reconsider the company he keeps.

<comment><USER11> _I have no friends who are fascists and I 've dropped people because they start espousing those ideas._

 _To me these are ideologies that go beyond just disagreement about how best to structure a society, how powerful government should be, or what its priorities should be. I think the thing they have in common is that they explicitly advocate hurting people and more importantly believe that you can actually make the world a better place by hurting certain people. You can make the world a better place by inflicting pain._

I think the defeat of Germany in WW2 has proved that's true.

 _So back to Thiel and his politics. Nowhere in his writing have I ever heard him explicitly advocate any of those things, but the company he keeps is another story. He seems to hang around with a fair number of explicit doctrinaire fascists._

 _explicit advocacy of genocide_

Since this article's off the front page, it probably won't hurt to delve into politics for a bit here. So I have to ask: What specifically are you talking about?

<comment><USER7> I'm referring to his association with a certain milieu of people who are important figures in the development and promotion of what is today termed the alt-right.

Association with movements like that (or the others I mentioned) is sort of special. Movements like the alt-right are different from (for example) mainstream Christian conservatism or Randian Objectivism or democratic socialism.

Totalitarian movements whose goals would be considered insane or evil by a large number of people adopt the structure of a manipulative cult. When you encounter the Scientology guy on campus he offers to give you a weird kind of personality test. You have to be pretty deep in before you find out about galactic emperor Xenu.

The outermost surface of the alt-right (termed the alt-light in its own terminology) are people who superficially advocate nationalism, question political correctness, and so on. A layer below that you have a more hard-core layer that introduces racism, explicit anti-democratic strong-man politics, and misogyny. A layer below that you have the hard core of the movement where you find explicit advocacy of absolute totalitarianism, terrorism, and genocide.

Maybe I'm wrong but what I see is an onion that looks like:

Peter Thiel -> Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopolis -> Richard Spencer -> Andrew Auernheimer, 4chan /pol

The people on the right hand side represent the true beliefs and goals of the entire onion. You see it revealed in things like the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where the layers mix.

Compare this to for example Randian objectivism or democratic socialism. Everyone in those movements more or less espouses the same ideas. There's no onion because there's not much to hide.

In general when I see a movement with this kind of structure where the innermost people seem to espouse different ideas than the outermost I see it as a huge red flag. What are they hiding? The other thing about movements like these is that if you associate seriously and persistently with the outer layers of the onion I assume you probably know about and accept the inner layers too.

I was deeply saddened and frustrated when I saw evidence of Thiel's backing of that movement. Zero to One is still by far the best book about business I've ever read, and I found myself agreeing with I'd say about 90% of it. Thiel is also one of the few people who has seen what I've seen for years, namely that core technological development (what I call fundamental innovation) has slowed since the early 1970s. I rationalize it by acknowledging the human capacity for compartmentalization. It's possible for someone to have very rational views in one area and be completely nuts in others.

<comment><USER14> I'm curious about why you accept the idea that the smallest, most extreme versions of certain ideologies are the true beliefs, while the more widespread and moderate versions are just nascent extremists. The extremists definitely advocate this kind of idea, but why accept it?

If you accept this kind of layered idea of right-wing ideas, you could just as easily accept the same construction for the left-wing, saying that democratic socialists are just nascent Stalinists, and that totalitarian socialists represent their true beliefs.

In a way, this has been playing out since at least the French Revolution. There's a very clear connection between the modern left and the left wing at the Estate General. Of course, the name has remained the same, but also the core idea of remaking society as rational and egalitarian has persisted. The idea that we can be wiser than traditional culture with modern insignts also drives the technology industry. But it has undeoubtably led to unimaginable suffering and raised up many totalitarians.

I'd offer that the extremists do not in fact represent the true versions of either left or right-wing ideologis. They are idealogues caught in the mental trap of pursuing the purity of their ideas without the ability to accept that ideas are only abstract expressions. They may even believe that their ideas are beyond abstractions, as you will see with may people who advocate for racial purity. They want to find something real, beyond ideas, although in reality they just found one more idea that won't offer the satisfaction they're looking for.

So don't believe the extremists when they tell you that everyone remotely like them will eventually be just like them. That's just elevating their power. If people like you cut off ties with anyone conservative because you think they might be proto-fascists, the diversity of thought within their social group will shrink until eventually maybe the extremists will win after all.

<comment><USER7> Those are very good points.

I haven't stated my own personal views. I think I'd call myself a kind of disaffected libertarian. I don't use the L-word much anymore because it's been twisted and debased just like every other word in political discourse that used to mean something. I'd say I'm disaffected because I've sat here for a few years with my mouth hanging open watching a large number of libertarians put on Nazi brown shirts without blinking. That's a little weird given that libertarianism is supposed to enshrine ideas like voluntarism and equal rights. It makes me doubt the basic functional integrity of the human brain.

I also kind of consider myself a liberal, but like the other L word I don't use that much anymore either. It's also been debased to the point that it basically doesn't mean anything.

Put those words together and pretend they mean something and you could say I'm a voluntarist who is skeptical of authority, believes in minimal government and decentralization, but also believes our goal should be to improve the condition of the world for conscious beings.

That means I'm willing to entertain the possibility that consistency on libertarianism might at times merit compromise in favor of a higher consistency on topics like basic human dignity and well-being. I think health care might be one such case. Extreme environmental problems might be another.

The inverse is also true from time to time. There are times when we must tolerate awful things (child porn on encrypted networks, money laundering with cryptocurrency, gun violence if we are free to own guns) because the only other practical options on the table involve too great an intrusion into liberty and personal autonomy or tend to lead to a slippery slope where further intrusions are inevitable.

As such I can find plenty to dislike on both the left and the right and there are definitely "onions" on the left.

But the alt-right is something else entirely. I have never in all my years on this planet seen a more repulsive and vile political movement. I consider the movement evil, and I think this is the first time in my life I have ever actually used the E-word to describe anything in the political realm. I have a tough time thinking of any left-wing movement that's quite as bad and that has more than a tiny handful of followers. I guess totalitarian communism might work but when I scan across the Internet I am not met with countless totalitarian communists sporting anime avatars spewing memes adorned with Lenin and Stalin quotes praising gulags.

I really think you just have to disown people like that, especially if you have associations and positions that might label you as a supporter. It's the political ideology equivalent of having a best friend who turns out to be a serial murderer. People are going to ask questions.

<comment><USER14> I'm not an alt-right supporter, but if you look at something as deep as the Richard Spencer level of extremism in your diagram, I'd say it's not so different from the kinds of ideas that would be mainstream in China or Japan. It's close to an American version of European identitarianism, which advocates for the continuation of a specific cultural and racial identity. I honestly struggle to see how this is very different from the ideas of the mainstream Chinese Communist Party except for a demographic shift. Of course, Chinese encompases several ethnic identities, but they're related in the same way as a pan-European identitarianism. I'm not saying that I agree with this or that it's the right way forward for society, just that it's not in any way new or uncommon.

It's also clearly a reaction to the extremism of center-left rationalism and cosmopolitanism. While I actually like those things, I have to admit that any push to change society will invevitably result in a reaction against it from people who prefer traditionalism. I think it's very important for those of us who might like to change society to understand those who prefer traditional ways, and not just in an abstract sense but to have personal relationships with mutual respect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yep. Free healthcare and 2000 euros / year university tuition really suck.

<comment><USER16> US Health care costs are wildly expensive but describing healthcare in Europe as "free" seems terribly misleading.

<comment><USER17> well it is in the UK :) (yes everyone knows tax pays for it, spreading the burdon etc.)

<comment><USER10> That's the exception though. I pay almost 700€ a month in Germany and my employer pays a part, too.

It's actually quite expensive, except if you're poor.

EDIT: Not sure why I got downvoted for stating facts. European health care is not free. And the defense budget is separate. They have nothing to do with each other.

<comment><USER18> Public health insurance premiums in Germany are capped at slightly above 700€, including the part the employer pays (Beitragsbemessungsgrenze is the relevant keyword here).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting how he thinks that science, religion and tech is more important than politics.

<comment><USER20> I don't know how he squares that view with his support for Trump</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you experiment to determine the right model w/o alienating users? - <AUTHOR>

We learn a ton by making tweaks and seeing how our potential customers react (pricing, how products are bundled, how trials work, terms of the subscription, etc). At some point though this experimentation process has diminishing returns in the form of alienating users (they get confused or pissed off and we're perceived as wishywashy).<p>So my question is how do other startups juggle the tradeoff of wanting to rapidly iterate and get to the optimal "configuration of dials" vs. keeping consistency of the offering to earn the trust of users?
TIA sean <comment><USER2> People will always react angrily to pricing increases. About the only way to alleviate it is to weight yourself down with support for users on grandfathered/legacy schemes, and announce changes with enough notice to people to buy up at the current price before things change.

Pricing decreases you're just doomed. People will resent having paid $40 last week instead of $25 this week.

For the other stuff, are you being too noisy? Existing users shouldn't be affected by changes to trials and signup technicalities.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great question, and something I've been thinking about lately. I assume it's pretty much exactly what you're doing combined with hopefully having people around that already know some reliable methods (that were probably learned through trial-and-error), if such things exist.</comment>


Vox Media Acquiring ReCode - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/business/media/vox-media-acquiring-recode.html?smid=tw-share <comment><USER2> Deals like this, the demise of Gigaom (yes, I know - but it won't work), and the general lack of runaway success of tech publications lately often get people lamenting how media is on a downward slide and the business model inherently broken. I'm starting to suspect, however, that _tech media_ as a _mass market_ idea is grossly overrated.

The typical "person on the street" doesn't care about "tech" as an individual topic, nor for publications like Gigaom, TechCrunch, or ReCode. They'll take tech flavored news in their stream as it comes whatever the source (and folks like the BBC, CNN, the NYT, etc, all do a good job of it anyway).

The people who work in and live and breathe "tech" (e.g. us) and who _do_ really care aren't considered to be "enough" for a mass market site. It's ridiculous a newish site with 1.5 million uniques a month is classified as "struggled to draw significant traffic" in an industry that employs around 6.5 million Americans in all. The "genericization" of tech media as mass market media is horrid - look at how insipid the stories TechCrunch covers nowadays, for example.

I think people need to rework their assumptions about what "tech" is, how it relates to the media as a whole, and to get used to the idea that tech- specific media is (and should be) _almost_ (but not quite) as niche as media aimed at medical professionals, lawyers, people in aviation, or similar groups.

<comment><USER3> It's hard to trust the comScore number of 1.5M for Recode's traffic. NYT cite comScore in reporting The Verge is 12M uniques a month, but The Verge themselves confirm it's almost exactly twice that in their own story covering the acquisition:

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/26/8662905/the-verge-and- reco...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/26/8662905/the-verge-and-recode-are- joining-forces)

<comment><USER4> Quantcast has more accurate metrics for Vox sites (comscore is just guessing, but Quantcast actually gets data from the sites directly).

It reports 81M US visitors/month for the entire Vox network ([https://www.quantcast.com/p-d9vfr8QTWnv1E](https://www.quantcast.com/p-d9vfr8QTWnv1E)) and 13M for The Verge ([https://www.quantcast.com/theverge.com](https://www.quantcast.com/theverge.com)).

That actually lines up pretty closely, so it's likely they were talking about US visitors rather than global (which is ~2x for The Verge).

(Disclaimer: I used to work on Quantcast's measurement product).

<comment><USER5> Given that Google is reporting 2.5+ million a month uniques (Chartbeat agrees) for us and Quantcast has us at 380k, I'm a little skeptical.

Honestly I expected higher for The Verge but then again I'm an Ars guy myself.

<comment><USER6> Some publishers chose to put Quantcast's tracking pixel on their websites. These are annotated as as "directly measured". Vox Media is one of those publishers. If you don't chose to share your data with Quantcast, they measure it through toolbars and 3rd party data, so it's only a bad estimation.

<comment><USER7> Around 25-30% block Ads and probably also tracking pixel, in the US and Europe . I suspect the numbers are probably twice that high on tech news sites. So this alone could probably explain the low estimates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _ReCode will become part of Vox's expanding digital empire, which includes > the popular sports site SB Nation, as well as the technology site The Verge. > ReCode also will gain access to Vox's publishing platform, Chorus, which has > been a key in luring marquee journalists including Ezra Klein._

Just goes to show how journalists (either the journalists described, or just the NYT author here) are charmed by the mystique of the CMS. I don't care if Chorus is made in Angular 5.0 [1], the robustness of a CMS is not one that makes much difference to the content producers, particularly writing-focused reporters...And the parts that need to be really nice UI/UX (such as slideshow/gallery/quiz creators) aren't necessarily intrinsic to a CMS. A CMS makes a huge deal in ease of publishing...but for most writers, they don't see much difference other than the rich-text editor. It's certainly at the far bottom of reasons to join an organization as a reporter.

[1] it's Rails 3.x IIRC, but perhaps Chorus also encompasses their suite of static publishing tools such as Middleman:

[http://product.voxmedia.com/2014/5/29/5759244/vox-media- ruby...](http://product.voxmedia.com/2014/5/29/5759244/vox-media-ruby-rails- upgrade-chorus)

[https://source.opennews.org/en-US/learning/evolution-news- ap...](https://source.opennews.org/en-US/learning/evolution-news-apps-teams/)

<comment><USER9> I don't understand the obsession with journalism CMS.

Articles about Vox Media never seem to fail to mention Chorus. As a news consumer, I don't give a crap about how the sausage is made: I want accurate reporting. I find Vox Media, of all the new media groups, to have a most embarrassing level of sloppy and inaccurate reporting. I can't tolerate blatant and lazy errors.

The focus on tools seems misplaced to me. They desperately need a quality system.

<comment><USER10> Saying you don't understand journalism's obsession with CMS is like journalists saying they don't understand HN's obsession with programming languages.

 _" But it's what you do that matters, not how you get it done!"_

Yeah, sure.

<comment><USER9> That's accurate. I think the obsession with programming languages on HN is also misplaced. Choice of programming language is far from the most important aspect of the SDLC, as I see things.

I'm admittedly an atypical HN reader.

<comment><USER11> For me it's worse: all I see are constant overheads between trivial prefix- free equivalents...

But then I also love C and hate everything Python with a passion, so go figure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would have been happy about this a year ago, but the Verge has really been going downhill recently - clickbait, poor articles, less of the awesome long form features they used to do etc. Probably part of the reason Topolsky left if it is due to pressure from Vox. Hopefully ReCode doesn't go the same way.

<comment><USER13> I added Ars Technica to my feed since I've always enjoyed their more in-depth pieces and civil liberties beat. Ended up dropping The Verge after I'd see them both cover the exactly same general tech stories I cared about, and Ars without the Spotify playlist and Marvel Universe posts.

Says something about Ars' business model, that a hoary old site seems to sustain itself with some throwback non-native ads and subscriptions, while the Huffington Posts of tech journalism have to sustain growth beyond their audience and crisp initial point of view, into something mushy and barely palatable.

<comment><USER9> Ars seems to be the least objectionable of the available tech website choices, but I worry that their decline is just happening at a slower rate. For IT, civil liberties, and biomedical/physical sciences (I would argue their original areas of expertise), they're as good as ever. As soon as they start branching out from those areas, quality as I perceive it takes a nosedive. Take their "Cars Technica" automotive venture as an example. It should be a fertile topic area, but the execution at Ars has been a disaster: look at their Porsche Macan article [0] (an especially bad one) or their Audi A8 article [1]. If you're brave enough to read the comments on either, you'll find plenty of dissatisfied readers and a staff deaf to the complaints—if that is representative of the site as a whole, I see a decline across the site as inevitable.

I would like to be very wrong.

[0]: [http://arstechnica.com/cars/2014/07/a-day-in-the-new- porsche...](http://arstechnica.com/cars/2014/07/a-day-in-the-new-porsche- macan-an-suv-that-wants-to-race/)

[1]: [http://arstechnica.com/cars/2014/07/hands-on-with-audis- flag...](http://arstechnica.com/cars/2014/07/hands-on-with-audis-flagships- the-technology-packed-a8-and-s8/)

<comment><USER13> I don't get the car reviews on tech sites. Clearly they're not "all things automotive" \- it seems to be mostly Tesla, tech implications and these sporadic reviews of nice cars that make me wonder if they're really marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Face it, Re/Code's main selling point is its conferences. I bet Vox values them (and the names that run them) more than the Re/Code site.

To me, Re/Code and AllThingsD were not about tech, they were about money. Who has it, who just spent it, who just made it, who just lost it. The "D" in AllThingsD was to me not "digital" but "dollar."

It would be interesting to learn if the Re/Code folks got along with their owners (CNBC?) or if that was a clash, and one party wanted out.

</comment><comment><USER15> Since nobody else is saying it: Congratulations.

Re/Code was a startup. They built it into a thing someone else wanted, and they sold it. That's hard work.

Congratulations and best of luck carrying the torch at Vox.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm interested in what this means for the tech ReCode uses. ReCode staff have deep expertise in WordPress and at least historically employed top WordPress development talent.

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic CEO, wrote about AllThingsD when it first launched, "All Things D is a fantastic new WordPress MU powered site that I think is a really good example of what the platform can do." [http://ma.tt/2007/04/allthingsd-on-wp/](http://ma.tt/2007/04/allthingsd-on- wp/)

<comment> brown9-2 Readers aren't coming to the site because of the technology that powers it.

<comment><USER16> Of course not, but the reader experience is influenced by the CMS. And the promise of related posts is still unfulfilled. Instead most of the news sites compromise themselves with outbrain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if there's any correlation between the tech saviness of their reader base and use of Adblock?

<comment><USER18> >The site receives 1.5 million regular monthly visitors

I have a friend who runs his own blog about movies, pulls about 1.5-1.7M monthly uniques. He has two writers and himself cranking on this thing. For comparison Recode apparently has 44 employees, that's REALLY expensive. I understand they have events and likely a higher opportunity for monetization with their credibility but the math simply doesn't add up no matter how you slice it on that one.

<comment><USER19> Just curious, how do they distribute their content so widely with just three people?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems the tech blog industry is not doing so well. First Gigaom shuts down and ReCode gets acquired by Vox Media. I think Vox are definitely the right buyers of the site though, they seem to have a decent track record and their current properties like TheVerge are doing quite well all things considering. As long as they keep Walt and Kara on with ReCode, the site will continue as normal.

</comment><comment><USER21> It'll be interesting to see whether Kara and Walter get absorbed into TheVerge or continue existing as a separate entity. Personally, I hope it's the latter.

<comment><USER22> By the sounds of announcement on The Verge, Kara and Walt will be remaining at Re/code while also contributing to The Verge.

[http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/26/8662905/the-verge-and- reco...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/26/8662905/the-verge-and-recode-are- joining-forces)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> official recode announcement [http://recode.net/2015/05/26/a-note-to-our- readers/](http://recode.net/2015/05/26/a-note-to-our-readers/)

</comment><comment><USER24> _" But as traditional news organizations and upstarts alike descended on Silicon Valley, ReCode found itself somewhat lost in the crowd. "Everybody is bigger than us,""_

Maturing market. Is the market for _meta technology news_ (ie: the business behind technology) that big? Will it support lots of niche news outlets?

</comment><comment><USER25> Mixed Feelings about this. It would be acceptable as long as ReCode retains its editorial independence from Vox Media.

</comment><comment><USER26> It seemed so easy when they were at the WSJ... A year and a half later they're trading their business for shares in Vox and a paycheck. Interesting times for media news lately. I'm not sure how Vox is going to work out long term, they're spending VC like it's going out of style.

<comment><USER27> They do seem to be a little too confident in themselves, though they seem to have the readership (the question is whether they can monetize them quick enough before the 'empire' is too thin on the ground).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think it goes to show you how important a brand can be. I wonder how much audience they lost moving from the AllThingsD to ReCode brand.

Seems like a good move for Vox to jump on this, too.

<comment><USER29> Crazily, Allthingsd.com has been seeing traffic rise [https://siteanalytics.compete.com/allthingsd.com/#.VWT26mRVh...](https://siteanalytics.compete.com/allthingsd.com/#.VWT26mRVhHx)

<comment><USER30> Compete's data is almost totally useless in my experience. Just look at what they show for my site right now (a similar growth pattern): [https://siteanalytics.compete.com/encosia.com/](https://siteanalytics.compete.com/encosia.com/)

Here's my actual data from Google Analytics over the same period: [http://encosia.com/i/encosia-unique-users/](http://encosia.com/i/encosia- unique-users/)

<comment><USER29> Compete uses an ISP-level packet-inspection appliance, I believe, and this shoulder-surfing is to me more buyable than a panel-based approach. Similar problems with a small sample size, but not subject to as many biases as self- reported data.

<comment><USER30> I understand how Compete works. I'm just showing you one immediate example of how comically wrong their data often is, both in absolute value and in misreporting trends. This has always been my experience with their data on both small and large sites, _unless_ you use their paid product that allows you to self-report. Kind of reminiscent of BBB/DUNs/Yelp type protection rackets actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how successful recode was because they seemed to be competing with the WSJ market along with review tecg market while being so pro apple all the time site</comment>


Mawww's experiment for a better code editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mawww/kakoune <comment><USER2> Wow, this actually looks really neat. I have been playing around with it for a few minutes and it seems _much_ more usable than I was expecting from an "experiment".

It would be nice to see some comments from the author(s) on the current stability/roadmap. Or at least a proper release; am I using alpha-quality software here, or what? I don't always like to be running my workhorse software tools on the bleeding edge of the developer's repository.

<comment><USER3> Hello, glad you enjoyed your first contacts. I have been using Kakoune not only to write itself, but as my only code editor in my day time job (C++ video game coding) as well for the last 3 years. I consider it stable, definitely not alpha, every major features are implemented (with maybe the exception of folding) and while breaking changes happen from time to time (some key binding change mainly), they are very rare, and usually discussed on IRC beforehand.

While I agree a proper release would be neat, at the moment keeping a stable master branch, and opening topic branches for disruptive work does the trick. Most of the time, I do not push any commit before having spent a day at work with that code, making sure I do not hit any problems in my workflow. Still a long way from proper testing.

So yeah, Kakoune is definitely useable for day to day work, with quite strong support for C++ (clang support for completion and diagnostics) as it is the language I mostly use.

Any feedback is appreciated !

<comment><USER4> This is really cool, thanks for making it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very interesting.

My question is, could this be implemented on top of an existing editor, like Sublime or Atom?

I'm guessing that that would lower the barrier of entry for most people, including me. (I for example, found the demo video very interesting, but knowing that I'd then have to give up all the customizations I've built up in my favorite editor, I was a bit discouraged to actually try it.)

<comment><USER6> Emacs has evil-mode which implements vim's bindings so of course this can be done. Give it a spin though, you might find that some of your customization isn't even needed here, the design is very clean and composable, even more than vim's I'd say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Especially awesome here with the faux Clippy!! Or Clippy-NG?

</comment><comment><USER4> I somehow want to see the ideas of acme [http://research.swtch.com/acme](http://research.swtch.com/acme) combined with some more modern idioms (standard shortcuts and modern style).

<comment><USER8> Thank you, that's very much in line with what I think the future of computing will look like. I especially like the idea of using a mouse (or other analog input device, probably touch or motion detection in the near future) in place of normal/insertion mode, and then executing text commands like they are a link in a web browser (based on their format).

Once I got past trying to remember the commands, it was uncanny how the actions the narrator executed were extensions of how I work going back and forth from my (sort of rigid IDE) to a regex tool like TextWrangler. I get away with this inefficiency currently because I do very little typing and let commands do the heavy lifting, but getting rid of that last bit of friction would be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't know if you care, and I'm all for toilet humour, but calling the command "kak" will be a bit weird for Dutch people ... because it's a vulgar word meaning "poop" ...

</comment><comment><USER10> Is Mawww someone I should know about?

This looks awesome.

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks really interesting. I'll give it a go :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Sublime inspired, for your terminal I guess?

</comment><comment><USER13> Honestly, us and our tools obsession (take that how you will).

</comment><comment><USER14> >Kakoune is a code editor heavily inspired by Vim [...]

Well, I stopped right there. I'm old enough to know better.</comment>


6x Space does not show up as pwned password - <AUTHOR> https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords
If you type in spaces (any number, I used 6 here), they are not detected or evaluated as pwned passwords. I thought that was curious.
Seems this could possibly mislead some to think they are being clever by entering just spaces as a password.
Does anyone know the exact reason for this? Is it simply impossible to query this as a record in their DB? Would a password field usually not accept spaces? <comment><USER2> I'm only guessing, but in the blog posts about the password search feature he said there was a lot of cleanup of badly formatted files it's possible that the whitespace got ignored?

</comment><comment><USER3> You could ask the maintainer: [https://www.troyhunt.com/contact/](https://www.troyhunt.com/contact/)</comment>


Ask HN: I need help 'guessing' initial startup cost - <AUTHOR>

I'm only asking for napkin level calculations here, so...
Imagine you're putting together a startup for a new magical product/service. You know you will need experienced 3 engineers (lets say 5 years experience covering web, mobile apps, backend), 1 designer. Add 1 for business dev/marketing/ceo'ish responsibilities. Assume that these people are highly qualified.
Now we need to factor in medical, dental, 401K, office space, admin, laptops/desktops/devices/licenses, server space, business card, legal, expected travel expenses and such... I know there's more I've left out...
Presumably it would need funding for at least 1 year (aim for 3?)? Also assume that the into toon is to launch a service/product within the first 9 to 12 months which marks the beginning of a revenue stream.
Bearing in mind I only need an estimate and I recognize that there are a million things that factor into the true and final cost and I won't hold anyone to this...
How much funding would you need? <comment><USER2> Sounds a bit like a question you'd get out of a time capsule buried in 1998. But I guess you might have such a kick-ass idea that you have investors queueing up to fund it, or you might be rich and willing to fund yourself, and just want to budget.

Figure 200k/person for the first year including equipment, overhead of hiring, etc. You'll need to allocate at least 20% of your company's equity for stock options.

Server space is cheap and competent engineers will set you up with something on a "pay as you need it" basis. That said add $2000/month for kicks and giggles.

Legal is a black box. Are you doing a new kind of game? Around 50k for trademarks, etc. Going after the music companies? One trillion dollars.

Office: where are you? San Francisco? $1500-2k/month. Kansas City? They'll pay you to take the space if you throw in a little dance routine on Friday afternoons.

Travel - Are you sending your sales guy to Europe twice a month? Having board meetings in Aruba? I guess you can do a Kayak search as well as we can.

So if you're going to hire everyone and start building toward the Big Release, which is not recommended by the way, figure 1.5 million for the first year. If you read Steve Blank and Eric Reis' stuff you could probably do it on $200k with higher odds of success, but you'd miss out on hiring a bizdev/marketing guy, shopping for dental plans, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> As others have mentioned below, there are probably at least one or two intermediate steps between where you appear to be now (earliest stages of business planning)and being in a position to raise a significant financing round. You'll need a product and probably some initial traction with users and, hopefully, revenue.

That said, you can calculate a rough monthly burn rate by adding together the estimated monthly salaries of the employees you referenced in your post and increase that number by 130-150%. This roughly accounts for all the operating expenses. If you need guidance on salaries try checking out resources like salary.com.

You'd probably want at least 18 months of cash in the bank. This gives you a year to execute and six months to focus on sustainable profitability and/or additional later stage financing.

So, monthly burn rate x target number of months of cash in the bank is your target financing amount.

Hope this helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is clear and exactly what I needed. Much appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> there's all kinds of factors that could affect that answer.

for example, we have a core team of four with five additional interns at the moment. our cost? zero. we're as bootstrapped as it gets, and nobody has taken any pay to date...but we're based in athens, ga where the cost of living is minor.

i would recommend considering 100% of a pie and how much each member you described would be worth. from there, be flexible & generous with your equity as you're filling out the team. equity is your biggest asset at the stage you're at. hope that helps!

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this a joke?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. This is probably a dumb question to many people here. I'm asking as I have no idea, because all I know is how to code and build things and nothing about startups or business. However others here have deep knowledge on the subject.

So I'm asking for help and not cynicism.

<comment><USER5> I apologize if I offended you. First thing I would do if I were you would be to check out resources like Mixergy, This Week in Startups, and read Rework by 37Signals. I know that isn't a direct answer to your question, but that's because I think you're asking the wrong question. Can you elaborate on what you want to build and why you need a fleshed out company right off the bat?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't offended, I just wanted to be clear to you and anyone else that I wasn't kidding and I realize the naivety it carries in some ways.

I cannot elaborate on the product.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PayPal will charge up to 4% for currency conversion - <AUTHOR> https://www.paypal.com/ca/webapps/mpp/ua/upcoming-policies-full?locale.x=en_US <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what is new. They charged a lot for currency conversion for many years.</comment>


Ask HN: Quitting from a small startup? - <AUTHOR> I've been a key member (first hire) of a small start-up for a couple years but now it's time to move on.
I recently accepted a new position at one of the big tech companies and, to be frank, the company I work for now relies very heavily on me.
I'm the only one with any experience doing front end development and they have a lot of need for that right now.
What are some tips to help soften the blow when I give them my two weeks?
I've got some ideas but I'll let you have at it without influencing the commentary by mentioning my current 'plan'.
Thanks in advance for the tips!
Edit: Just to add, I'm on good terms with everyone. They've been working me to the bone for months now (one of the reasons I chose to leave) but it's been a positive work environment 100% of the time. <comment><USER2> As a general rule every employee is replaceable, there's always a backlog of work when people aren't about to get layed off, and there's never a great time to leave.

My advice, just stick to the facts. The reaction may not be anything you expect. Small companies sometimes fire people when receiving notice. Maybe there's a lame counter offer that puts the departing employee on the spot. Maybe there's already a replacement in the pipeline: in a small shop it's often no secret that someone is looking for a job.

Don't burn bridges.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just say that you got a new great opportunity, give two week notice and offer to help train somebody as much as possible to take over your responsibilities.

What else is there really?

I wouldn't mention the fact that they exploited you. It wouldn't gain you anything, and would just create a risk of burning bridges.

</comment><comment><USER4> \- Help onboard another developer?</comment>


Functional HTTP Client with Infinite Chaining, Async, Delay, Fork and Repeat - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Debdut/url-request <comment><USER2> Nice & Clean Work Man! Will be using it

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks</comment></comment>


Practical Garbage Collection - Part 1: Introduction - <AUTHOR> http://worldmodscode.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/practical-garbage-collection-part-1-introduction/

<comment><USER2> A very good writeup, but one thing always confuses me.

What is meant specifically by the "heap" and "stack"? I know what a stack is, but "heap" gets thrown around in many different contexts and I've yet to find any explanation that made it clear.

If anyone has a good explanation or good links for those two terms in this context, I'd be very grateful. Thanks!

[EDIT: thanks everyone for the answers so far!]

<comment><USER3> This looks pretty well-answered already, but I'll throw in my $0.02.

The _stack_ and _heap_ are the two main regions of memory where data can live in a program. They are (somewhat unhelpfully) named after the data structures originally used to represent them. Pretty much all modern languages have a concept of a stack and a heap, although there are differences both in how explicit they are, and in implementation details.

 _The stack_ is the function call stack, used to store data local to a function call. It behaves like a traditional stack, with _push_ and _pop_ operations. When you call a function, a new _stack frame_ is pushed onto the stack, which contains all of the local variables that are only accessible inside that function call. When that function returns, it pops its stack frame (and sends its return value, somehow). The language scoping rules determine how one function may access the contents of an earlier stack frame that called it, but stack frames are basically deleted and inaccessible after they are popped (a source of errors in C).

 _The heap_ is the region of memory where you put data that lives longer than the function that created it. Heap behavior is far less specified, and more variable, between languages than stack behavior is (and involves the OS more), but if you're passing around pointers or references to an object you're probably using the heap. In languages that have them, the _malloc_ and _new_ operators usually mean "put this on the heap." In languages with a notion of reference types and value types, reference types are usually heap-allocated by default.

The distinction between the two types of storage is more important in some languages that others. It's really important in C, where you have to manually manage all your memory, but some of the more dynamic languages (especially everything-is-an-object ones) use the heap for all user data, and the call stack only for implementation details.

Languages also vary greatly in how much control you have over where things get put. On one extreme, C lets you put any type in any location, with _malloc_ , while on the other I am not aware of any way in JavaScript to control object lifetime. Java and C# both distinguish between value-types (stack-allocated by default) and reference-types (heap-allocated by default), but C# allows user- defined value-types while Java does not. Common Lisp has a standardized way to tell the compiler that it is safe to stack-allocate a value (of any type). And so on.

<comment><USER4> There are several things I've never had a good understanding of regarding the stack. How big is the stack? Is it a fixed size dictated by the architecture of the processor? I know I've written recursions that overflow it. Other than gut feel and catching an exception after the fact, how do programmers know when their program might overflow it?

<comment><USER5> > How big is the stack? Is it a fixed size dictated by the architecture of the > processor?

It's more to do with the OS or language runtime; I think the language runtime has a bigger impact for most programs.

> Other than gut feel and catching an exception after the fact, how do > programmers know when their program might overflow it?

In general, you don't. You might be able to do some system-specific thing on specific systems or just happen to know what it is on some given system, but there's no way to find out in the general case. Worse, there's generally no way to recover from blowing the stack; this has always made programs written using alloca() or, more recently, variable-length arrays potentially unstable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The complexity of generational garbage collection vs. the speed of manual collection, makes me feel like the happy medium of speed and simplicity is reference counting, like that found in objective-c. iPhone apps are fast, but take a bit longer to design, develop, and debug due to memory management issues. Though with experience these can be minimized.

It probably isn't possible without a ton of modification, but I wish the JVM/CLR had an option to garbage collect through reference counting.

<comment><USER7> Unlikely to happen. Reference counting has poor interaction with the CPU memory hierarchy: It makes all objects larger, making the working set correspondingly larger, meaning your data cache is less effective. It makes code larger because of the extra ref counting twiddling code. Larger code means a less effective instruction cache, as well as being slower because of all the extra operations performed. Reference counts must be frequently modified, and they are scattered all over memory (next to each object), so you get poorer locality and more atomic writes which has all sorts of negative implications for cache-coherent SMP architectures.

So while you may not notice the penalty of reference counting since it is spread out over every operation, it's unlikely that it is better than proper GC for most applications. Maybe just for ones which are extremely sensitive to latency, yet don't mind running much slower overall (hard real time? aeronautics and space?).

As usual you'd need to measure it.

<comment><USER8> Gc pauses suck the "magic" out of interactive programs. The great thing about obj-c is that it I trivial to have a c array of vanilla c structs, so your performance sensitive code is still slim and hot. (size and cache locality.)

My iOS audio programming mixes c for audio processing and obj-c for ui and control quite effectively.

<comment><USER7> I didn't say that GC was free ... malloc has overhead too.

For interactive programs, I would recommend two things to avoid (or hide) the pauses. Firstly schedule calls which run the GC when it won't be noticed: between frames in an arcade-style game, or just before accepting user input in a turn-based game. Secondly, size the minor heap large enough so that all computation between the scheduled GC runs can happen without invoking a minor sweep (but not too large that the minor heap is wasting memory -- some experimentation and tuning required).

I've written a couple of interactive games in OCaml that used this strategy and avoided visible GC pauses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are the long term implications of the increasing amount of parallel computing resources available to programmers? Are we getting to a point where there is enough excess CPU available, that the extra instruction on every assignment for reference counting is no big deal? (In certain contexts. In some contexts extra instructions are always a big deal, but these don't span all of computing.) Combine that with incremental algorithms for cycle reclamation, and you'd have great low-latency GC.

<comment><USER10> It's still not trivial even with massive parallelism. Performance is easily killed if you:

1) Completely saturate the memory interconnect between the processors and RAM chips

2) If your parallel collector threads are touching the same memory that your worker threads are, you're going to have some cache contention

3) One of the big challenges with cache lines that have writes in them is if they are shared between processors. For example, create two ref cells and have two parallel threads set them -- if the compiler did not happen to pad them out to cache line size, they'll be fighting for the same 64 bytes (8 64-bit words/pointers) of memory

We (Manticore) have done a lot of work to isolate the per-CPU work, heap pages, etc. (<http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2554> , MSPC 2011 proceedings should be out on acm.org soon-ish). But it's not easy and requires rearchitecting your whole compiler and runtime system. GHC is also in the middle of some similar work, and they have a much harder problem both due to the challenges of implementing laziness and they have a full-featured system and real user base, so they can't just change things willy-nilly.

Further, once you get the parallelism right, you end up in a different situation: Amdahl's Law bites. Even if 90% of your program is amenable to parallel work, if you make that portion go infinitely fast, you still have a sequential portion that takes 10% of the time and therefore limits you to a maximum of 10x speedup.

We are hitting that limitation right now in our research and going back to do more sequential performance work. I've got a small army of undergraduates implementing compiler optimizations and analyses :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I enjoyed this basic introduction to GC; upvoted. What I'd look forward is further discussion of incremental and concurrent GC algorithms.

Until then, does anyone know what makes concurrent GC non-trivial? It seems like it shouldn't be too hard to trace concurrent to program execution. And if you don't compact, collection seems to just involve updating some structure tracking free blocks. I'd imagine it's possible to write a thread-safe version of that structure where every "free" request doesn't need to block every "malloc" request. But I must have missed something.

I'd also be interested to read how compaction works; how are references remapped from the old address to the new one? Is it possible that a reference value is a pointer to a reference "object" which contains the pointer to data, which needs to be updated? Then you only need to update a single pointer when moving data, but every dereferene incurs an extra layer of indirection.

<comment><USER12> Concurrent GC is somewhat non-trival as the mutator (i.e. the program you write) can delete references to objects from an area of the heap that has not been examined by the GC and introduce references to those same objects in an area that has been examined. This means those objects will be reclaimed since the GC never saw them.

To cope with this the mutator is modified at compile/run time to inform the GC of object updates that could lead to this situation.

During compaction of any sort, the first time an object is encountered that is to be moved it is copied somewhere else and the old copy's header is overwritten with it's forwarding address. Every time the GC encounters a reference to the old object, it re-writes the reference to the old object with it's new location (conveniently located in the old copy's header).

> Is it possible that a reference value is a pointer to a reference "object" > which contains the pointer to data, which needs to be updated?

Look up something called 'Brook's style forwarding pointer', it is essentially what you've described.

<comment><USER11> Thanks; upvoted! I think I'm beginning to appreciate that concurrent marking is tougher than I thought; specifically, I can see how it can be hard to prove an object is unreachable. So I imagine the marking side is where the difficulties are.

Your explanation for compaction makes perfect sense. Of course, this won't work trivially concurrently. Only if you stop the world can you complete examination of the entire live heap and know you've updated all references to the moved object and can collect the original space.

<comment><USER12> > I can see how it can be hard to prove an object is unreachable.

The difficulty with concurrent GC is not to prove an object is unreachable but to prove is likely to be reachable. For instance Yusa-type (or snapshot-at- the-beginning) concurrent collectors have a tendency keep dead objects alive. This 'floating garbage' is a small price to pay for a fairly simple correctness proof of never dropping a reachable object.

It's no harm for a GC to keep some dead objects alive but dropping something reachable is completely unacceptable.

> Of course, this won't work trivially concurrently. Only if you stop the > world [..] can collect the original space.

Yes, moving objects concurrently requires some serious thinking to get right. Sun's G1 collector does this by recording the location of pointer updates that point into regions which are to be compacted. This pushes the pause times down to the length of time to move objects and update references to them.

If you're real serious about moving objects concurrently, see "A Study of Concurrent Real-Time Garbage Collectors", Pizlo et al, 2008.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While the article is interesting, it skips important things, which have high influence on practical GC speed - write barriers and finalizers. The following ancient article from Microsoft has better coverage of GC internals <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973837.aspx> (somewhat biased to .NET :) ).

</comment><comment><USER14> > The default choice of garbage collector in Hotspot is the throughput > collector, which is ... entirely optimized for throughput

I just want to confirm this is true? Say you're doing a long running simulation. You don't care about pauses at all. You just want it to finish fast. The default GC with no particular options is the way to go?

<comment><USER15> I'd say, odd are, that if you're just interested in throughput, the standard Hotspot GC without any options isn't going to give you optimal performance. I've found that, like gtani, mentions you'll have to spend time tuning to get the performance you want.

In a similar situation, I found that the Parallel Old was, by far, the fastest (throughput) collector.

<comment><USER16> I'd say low fruit are -server, Xmx, Xms and MaxInlineSize and looking for boxing/unboxing. At the other extreme, is it worth it to your company to spend a few weeks reading the Hunt/John book and benchmarking thoroughly?

<comment><USER15> Interesting. I've definitely looked for & removed boxing/unboxing. I haven't touched MaxInlineSize tho.

What performance improvements/degradations have you seen in altering MaxInlineSize?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Fakevoices.com – Donald Trump text-to-speech converter - <AUTHOR> https://fakevoices.com <comment><AUTHOR> Just sharing what we put together to hear our favourite (!) celebrities say stupid things. We're using [https://github.com/Kyubyong/dc_tts](https://github.com/Kyubyong/dc_tts) behind the scenes, though the main challenge is curating high-quality training sets. The result can be a bit hit-or-miss but it was enough to have a laugh with our friends :)

Trump: [https://fakevoices.com/tts/f41f033e-2129-4dab-a67b-4986642c2...](https://fakevoices.com/tts/f41f033e-2129-4dab-a67b-4986642c298b)

And for the David Attenborough fans out there: [https://fakevoices.com/tts/3685f2d3-9b49-4635-9775-1b83783fa...](https://fakevoices.com/tts/3685f2d3-9b49-4635-9775-1b83783fa655)</comment>


Unified Dropdown Menu: One Menu to Rule All Links - <AUTHOR> http://uxmovement.com/navigation/unified-dropdown-menu-one-menu-to-rule-all-links/

<comment><USER2> I'd rather these complex sites avoid having drop-down menus entirely for their top-nav bar. Instead, have the most common general sections linked in the top- nav, and put links to their sub-sections in a section-specific navigation area inside the newly-loaded general section, separate from the top-nav. Less common pages and sections are linked in the bottom-nav.

Cluttered top-nav is a hassle to use, with the worst offenders making me feel like I'm looking for a needle in a haystack every time I use it. It's much nicer to drill down to the section you need one step at a time without modal navigation windows appearing and disappearing, especially if the defaults are well-chosen.

[It's also worth noting, as mentioned by others here, that the paradigm of stacked windows, and thus pull-down menus, is incompatible with pocket OS designs, so you're going to end up with completely different navigation workflows on different platforms if you go this route.]

</comment><comment><USER3> I like this approach, esp how it is implemented on Lebron's site. Like wolffnc3 said above, I would be curious to see if users like the idea of triggering all of the drop-downs with one hover or if they prefer the classic way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Most of the top bars use single word (or very short) menus. With this unified drop down menu, you are limited to make all the sub-menus at the same size then the top menu, which is not very user friendly. I prefer to have longer sub-menus with comprehensible links like <http://www.jawbone.com> or <http://www.nike.com>

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting idea, i'd love to hear from anyone who's tried this and see if they've gathered any data on it's effectiveness (a/b tests, heat maps etc...)

<comment><USER6> We implemented a "mega box" drop down at the University of Nebraska (<http://www.unl.edu/>) in 2009. We didn't do a production a/b test but we did do in-person a/b testing using a custom web app that tested user's ability to find things in the navigation in the mega box compared to a traditional flag model. Mega box won.

Also note that this nav and template isn't unique to the homepage like most higher Ed institutions but is used site wide by all units. That was an epic battle story for another time.

<comment><USER7> I like the "pinning" the menu feature - interesting.....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great on desktop, but I don't think it scales smoothly down to the available space on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks a bit like Ribbon.

Personally I like any menu system that has search in it. So that first 2-5 times I use search, then I learn the location and can click the right thing directly.

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems quite similar to mega menus (<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mega- dropdown-menus.html>)

</comment><comment><USER11> In times of ever increasing mobile web usage dropdown menus should be abandoned since they rely heavily on the hover state which doesn't exist on touch devices.

<comment><USER12>
        dropdown menus should be abandoned since they
        rely heavily on the hover state

Not all drop-down menus are opened by hovering. Not even close.

Further, a menu with a responsive design, such as the following, negates the need to abandon anything:

<http://jasonweaver.name/lab/flexiblenavigation/>

<comment><USER13> > Further, a menu with a responsive design, such as the following, negates the > need to abandon anything:

> <http://jasonweaver.name/lab/flexiblenavigation/>

I ran some tests on this menu. It fails on android 2.3.x and 4.x. Also does it really need JS to function properly. No it doesn't, CSS already has all the features needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does it work on Mobile? No? Trash.

<comment><USER12> Very thoughtful.

By the way, the unified drop-down menu style could be incorporated into a menu that has responsive design, such as the following:

<http://jasonweaver.name/lab/flexiblenavigation/></comment></comment>


Becoming a contractor programmer in the UK - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tadast/switching-to-contracting-uk

<comment><USER2> There's no reason to use a Formation Company - took me about ten minutes, and ten pounds sterling on Companies House site when I formed mine.

A good accountant on the other had is almost worth their weight in gold

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great tutorial. However, the article should mention that it is almost impossible to open a business bank account if you don't live in the UK.</comment>