Plan to restrict highly skilled foreign workers could be a boon for India - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/trump-and-sessions-plan-to-restrict-highly-skilled-foreign-workers-hyderabad-says-bring-it-on/2017/01/08/8701e0ca-d2c0-11e6-aa0c-f196d8ef0650_story.html <comment><USER2> > The visas bring nearly 100,000 "highly skilled" contract workers, mostly in > tech and mostly from India, to the United States every year.

> The H-1B program provides American companies with cheap, temporary > contractors who often work longer hours than Americans and take on the > monotonous programming jobs Americans scorn.

I don't even know where to start. It's the same paradoxical position that journalists have always taken on the H1-B program: that those granted visas are better, faster, _and_ cheaper than American labor while simultaneously relieving the (implicitly higher-skilled) native workforce of "monotonous" (i.e. low-skill and repetitive) work.

So, they're higher skilled yet are put to work on low-skill tasks? This is a fantastical proposition.

<comment><USER3> > So, they're higher skilled yet are put to work on low-skill tasks? This is a > fantastical proposition.

Correct. And your snarkiness aside, it's true. I have several (Indian) cousins and a couple of uncles / aunties (came as Mainframe / COBOL programmers) who have attested to the same.

Even in the Financial Services companies I interned at ( Goldman) and worked at in the past, I've noticed by way of water cooler discussions and whispers that Indian and Chinese H1B works get significantly lower pay -- I'm talking a 30% to 40% lower pay -- than their (mostly white) American counterpart. Many in the exact same Job Title, Role / Grade and Job Description.

We also used to offload our Unit Testing and documentation work to these H1B and they did it without complaining. Most of them dream of getting their Green Card and freedom when they can charge Market rate and not be bound to their H1B sponsor / employer.

<comment><USER2> Regardless, the H1-B program is sold to the public as a way to bring over highly-skilled individuals into roles that require _those_ higher skills.

Yet, time and again we see that the emperor has no clothes: these programs are used to import labor from overseas because it's cheap.

<comment><USER4> I can't speak to any abuse of these programs, but as a US citizen I value my co-workers on H1-Bs and want them to stay.

<comment><USER5> Without sounding snarky or condescending, you should educate yourself about the H1-B program and about the ways how it is abused. It _is_ as bad as those who have gone though it make it sound.

<comment><USER4> And I haven't met any of them who would prefer it gone entirely...

<comment><USER5> Your distaste isn't remotely as great as it ought to be.

<comment><USER4> I ought to have distaste for them? No.

Sure I'd reform the program, but I am glad that they can come here and so are they. I would be upset if they couldn't anymore and so would they.

Sorry to say, I don't think reforming the program with applicants in mind is on the table in this administration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems like it would be so easy to fix the H1B problem. The problem is that the "body shops" just file a ton of applications and then get the number they need because they don't actually care who they get, they just need warm bodies.

And then there are the companies that actually need skilled engineers who pay really high salaries, but only apply for the people who they actually want.

So make it an auction instead of a lottery.

10,000 visas available this year? Great, the 10,000 highest paid workers get in.

Edit: It was pointed out below that this wouldn't be fair to recent college grads, so perhaps it could be split on age or years of experience or something like that.

Another solution would be to automatically convert student visas to H1B after they graduate from an accredited institution.

You can see how this will help. Check out the data[0]. Wipro, a standard Indian body shop, is paying their H1Bs a median of 69K. Netflix is paying a median of 169K, with about 100 jobs over 200K (and a few above 500K). Google and Microsoft are a little lower than Netflix.

[0] [http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=wipro&job=&city=&year=All+Y...](http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=wipro&job=&city=&year=All+Years)

</comment><comment><USER7> The combined lobbying muscle and money of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter etc etc will now sing from one song sheet with the goal of making damn, damn sure that there isn't a bidding war for engineers the way there is for investment bankers, lawyers and "senior managers" with MBAs.

The Washington Post will support this drive fully, as it always has, the campaign isn't new after all. But now there is a palpable threat the vigour and determination will be increased dramatically. Where are the engineers being paid multi-millions for inventing and building stuff? Never heard of one unless they owned the company. Where are the senior managers, loads of them in every fortune 500 company and beyond.

<comment><USER7> Y-Combinator is obviously also on that list. From top story to second page in an hour. I do hope that move was organic and not manipulated with privilege...

<comment><USER8> Probably got flagged by people as politics. Which it is. This topic comes up regularly, and no one convinces anyone. Some people are convinced that they took uuurrr jawwbs, and others are convinced that even immigrants are human beings who ought to have a shot at life in the US if they are willing to work hard.

<comment><USER7> And most probably have a more nuanced and sophisticated view of the issue beyond such finger painted sketches.

It if really is flagged as "politics" that would be a shame and would certainly reflect badly on y-combniator given the founders broadcast of their views on the matter.

The whole concept of "flagged as politics" is actually absurd in this forum.

I wonder if what you say is true and how one would find out.

<comment><USER9> I think the "flagged as politics", though it does happen (in particular during and around the "Political Detox Week" experiment) is more a misnomer in general. Submissions are sometimes flagged because members think the resulting discussion will likely produce much more heat than light.

Given the number of comments, in this case I think the discussion may have triggered the "overheated discussion detector" algorithm, which will move a submission down.

<comment><USER7> Seems highly unlikely given the the number of posts if such a threshold is fairly applied, don't you think? Obviously this is a policy that has direct ramifications on the business interests of the founders of YCombinator. They probably ought to be careful if they really are interfering in moderating.

<comment><USER9> From what I've observed, there's no conspiracy going on here. The mods are very open about the actions they take, and in the case of YC-related topics, have removed automatically applied weights and user-flagged actions to ensure they are discussed, even while flame wars rage on.

Human psychology being what it is, we pay attention to what happens to topics that interest us, in particular if it's negative. This gives us a biased view. I think if you were to do a study of submissions on HN, it wouldn't likely support a view that the mods or the HN algorithms are doing anything untoward. (I'd personally be interested in seeing such a report regardless of the results.)

I think I may have been unclear when I mentioned the number of comments with respect to triggering the overheated discussion detector: I think its based on comment rate rather than absolute number. (The exact rules of the site aren't open.) Yesterday a post was sitting at number 1, with a comparable number of votes to the one in the number 2 slot. As the number of comments skyrocketed (over a hundred in a couple of hours), it plummeted in rank even as it continued to be upvoted. And the topic had nothing to do with YC or even business, for that matter.

There is one other behavior that may be at play. User flags will affect ranking even prior to the '[flagged]' tag appearing. This could also be the case for either of these submissions.

Also, please be aware that flagging is nearly always a result user flags, not interference by the mods. Likewise, the algorithmic actions are automatic, not reviewed and applied by mods on a case by case basis. I've seen reference to the mods adding weight to a post, but this I believe is few and far between. I haven't seen this mention in months. And from a practical standpoint, the mods are just two guys. They do their best in tending to the forums, but they're not watching the site 24/7\. They're not reviewing every submission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is really funny. 15 years ago there were so many engineers and PhD students and candidates who wanted to get a higher education or a work visa to the US, with the mantra of getting the "best and brightest".

Nowadays the more sober people that I know shy away from the opportunity, preferring European research institutions and Nordic or Germanic engineering companies, or just staying home in Latin America or Asia given that the wage gap has tightened considerably and the cost of living in desirable American locations has gone up astronomically.

It's the sort of thing that panders to the short-term nationalistic tendencies, but the impact will be felt a decade or two from now. Building up and maintaining intellectual prestige takes much more effort than it does to destroy it. Not to mention that there's more eagerness to set up engineering shops outside of the US than ever before.

<comment><USER11> I have not seen this in general - there is for sure an effect on some not wanting to come to the US, but from what I see in developer circles and what I have seen in academia, the US is by far the most popular location to move to. The opportunities are still excellent if you can get through that crappy immigration filter.

Truth be told, immigrating to the US has been tricky for decades, if not longer - historically it is a very popular country to immigrate to, but there are filters currently founded on xenophobia/nationalism/racism/etc. These speculated changes aren't really much different in that vein, except that it closes a loophole that is abused. There are more guaranteed ways to get into the US, such as the L-1 visa. There are also ways to get an H-1B visa without going through the lottery.

<comment><USER12>
      there are filters currently founded on xenophobia/nationalism/racism/etc.

Compare the immigration restrictions of your own country to those of the USA. Aren't they _more_ restrictive than those of the USA? And if so, doesn't that mean your country is more "xenophobic/nationalistic/racist/etc." ?

<comment><USER13> Yes, my country's immigration restrictions are worse than the US'. So what? I dislike it in my own country and I dislike it in the US. Did you honestly expect people to think "oh no, I can't criticize the US because that would mean I'd have to criticize my own country too!"

<comment><USER14> There is a difference between living in your own country that's xenophobic and immigrating to a xenophobic country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The text of the bill presented in the previous session of congress may be found here: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/5801...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/5801/text)

The actual text of the bill _only_ effects employers whose workforce is at least 15% H-1Bs (higher thresholds exist for employers with 50 or less employees).

The Attorney General can prevent an employer from petitioning for _any_ alien (H-1B, L-1, nonimmigrant, immigrant, etc.) for a period of 1, 2 or 3 years (depending on willfulness and similar criteria) if it is found that a non- exempt H-1B displaced an American worker.

The current definition of exempt H-1B is: $60k salary OR a Masters degree.

The new definition of exempt H-1B will be: $100k salary.

The relevant statutes are here: [http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=%28title:8%20section:...](http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=%28title:8%20section:1182%20edition:prelim%29)

The bill modifies (n)(3)(B).

The 15% and other thresholds are in (n)(3)(A).

The sanctions the Attorney General may impose are described in (n)(2)(E). Random inspections by the Secretary of Labor are described in (n)(2)(F).

The 1-3 years are defined in (n)(2)(C)(i)(III), (n)(2)(C)(ii)(II), and (n)(2)(C)(iii)(II) which (n)(2)(E) refers to.

</comment><comment><USER16> The problem with the h1b is that it is a lottery.

If it was instead auctioned to the highest bidder, then we wouldnt get companies undercutting American jobs.

Don't just give the visa to someone randomly. Give it to the company who is willing to pay a 50k tax bill.

If the employee is worth it, then they will have no problem paying the bill.

<comment><USER17> If the money goes to taxes I'm afraid it will lower the employee's salary. How about going by the highest salary offered instead? That would ensure that the pay stays competitive and foreign engineers don't get hired just because they are cheaper.

<comment><USER18> The way to do the auction is, the engineers with the highest salary offers get to come (national security permitting). This way the slots would be used only to bring in people who were truly highly valued in their profession.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love the characterization that most if not all of these people are highly skilled and highly prized talents. My experience working with many over the years is quite the opposite. That is not to say that there are not a few good talents here and there, but to say that most of them are good or above average developers would be innacurate. I recently started working on a codebase that was developed by 200 on shore and off shore Indian contractors over the course of a few years. What a disaster. And no engineering disipline whatsoever to mitigate it.

<comment><USER20> If you had a codebase that was developed over a few years by 200 different remote contractors, thats a recipe for disaster regardless of their nationality.

<comment><USER21> Why should it be any more of a disaster than an open source project?

<comment><USER22> An open source project is primarily composed of people writing some software out of passion with few hard deadlines. A team of 200 developers, some off shore, are developing in order to get paid for a client who likely has strict time and budget constraints. I'm not sure I could come up with many scenarios that I would expect to see a wider gap in code quality, even if the developers were the same level of skill.

<comment><USER14> Also it's easier to nope a bad decision for OSS. Office politics makes it way difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> having tougher restrictions for H1B visa's wouldn't be a bad thing. Last few years about 3x as many applications were filed than visas available, with a lottery deciding who would get the H1b visa. I would argue that foreigners that work at a high tech company like Google or Microsoft or Silicon Valley startups add more value than one working at an outsourcing firm that replace americans

<comment><USER24> My problem with whole US H1B system is that there's no shared "opportunity creation." In other words, someone in India has the opportunity to go to school, get a good degree, and then apply to jobs in the US and India.

Whereas a US citizen really only has jobs in the US to apply to. An American citizen isn't going to look at jobs in India for many reasons.

How is it fair that everyone in the world gets to compete for US jobs, but US citizens only get to compete for US jobs? H1B visas should be limited to the number of reciprocal visas to US citizens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am not representative because I had only 3-4 experiences with developers from India but my two cents include a dev who was not aware how a checkbox works, an app which was written by devs from India and they used a "secret" key for authentication which was part of the application distribution (you could basically use it as-is and bypass authentication), and a PL/SQL backend which contained 3000 liner stored procedures without documentation. Most companies think that programming is like manual labor: you can buy a metric ton of cheap workforce who will get the job done but the reality is much more grim.

</comment><comment><USER26> India has to create 12 million jobs every year. Now, let that sink in first. Offshoring/Outsourcing is basically exporting software services to US and H1-B and L1 play a complementary role at Infosys, TCS, Wipro et al. India not getting US contracts both corporate and government IT would be unmitigated disaster. Yes, the country it self can use some of the Software Engineering talent for creating services both in its government and corporations, but unless there is massive investments in localization of software into indic languages, those services will remain "Colonial" in their character.

The lottery system of H1-B has already ensured the ones getting it are just lottery winners with a degree in their hand, nothing more and nothing less.

If US can actually ensure the best and bright get H1-B instead of sweatshops like Infosys/TCS/Wipro, that is beneficial. The argument that the current regime of Lottery H1-B is actually bringing the best and brightest from India to US is highly debatable.

</comment><comment><USER27> I had a buddy who came up with the perfect solution for h1b visas. Instead of a lottery have the highest paid salaries go first and cap the visas at somewhere around the current average pay for that industry. Fair compromise to both opposing arguments.

<comment><USER28> This would mean no H1B visas for those graduating straight out of college because they would have the least salary.

The prepared restriction of $100,000 will do the same because undergrads aren't going to get $100k straight out of college.

That in turn is going to mean fewer international students in US universities. If they can't get jobs after spending 4 years and racking up college debt then they aren't going to come.

If the best and brightest aren't going to come to the US educational system then the US educational system is going to hurt.

<comment><USER27> Giving that isn't the desired outcome of th h1b program that is fine. It's to bring in labor that isn't being supplied by Americans at a reasonable rate. If we want to rob other countries of their brightest and most talented minds we should create another program just for that.

[edit] My personal example of how students are abused under h1b was an old friend contacted me to do some contract dev work. I quoted him the old Buddy price of $50/hour since it was academic stat work and was intellectually stimulating. He balked and said he had only paid his phd post grad student from Vietnam $25/hour to work on it full time. This is a phd holder in computer science making $15/hour while working on additional coursework. Not slavery but not far from it.

<comment><USER28> So, you support the US education system shutting itself to the best talent from around the world?

Because you can rest assured someone with a 4yr college degree isn't getting a $100k job outside California and they won't be coming to the US in that case.

Unless you have sat in a classroom and learnt in a multi-cultural environment, you won't appreciate why learning with people from different backgrounds is good for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A simple solution is to auction off H1-B visas: sort the applications in decreasing order of salary and take the top 65,000. This'll force companies to view H1-Bs as hard-to-find talent, instead of cheap talent as it is currently.

</comment><comment><USER30> This premise is a fantasy. The same exact article previously popped up about China. I'm getting the impression it's meant more to be propaganda to preemptively discourage bad policy by pushing the notion that America's tech golden egg could be swiped by competitors.

The most likely outcome is the H-1B program is modestly increased when it's revamped, to placate the silicon valley power base that does in fact still have extremely broad, extremely influential reach in DC (the tech industry is now by far the largest lobby group overall, surpassing telecom & defense).

<comment><USER4> I'd like to believe you, but 'the most likely' outcome has not consistently happened recently.

Regardless of lobbying, the incoming administration ran a campaign that was built on anti-immigrant sentiment. Their base wants that. They have to throw their base something. No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them.

This could totally happen, and it bothers me as a citizen because a lot of my co workers are on H1-Bs.

<comment><USER31> > No one in Silicon Valley voted for them or fundraised for them.

20% of Santa Clara County voted for Trump. 20% of funds raised in Santa Clara County went to Trump. That's a small fraction by two-party system standards, but it's not no one.

<comment><USER32>
      20% of funds raised in Santa Clara County went to Trump

Can you provide your source for this? (Not being snarky -- I have trouble finding that level of detail in terms of residence vs. company HQ)

<comment><USER31> From memory. I'm wrong. 20% went to Republicans, not Trump: [https://www.opensecrets.org/states/geog.php?cycle=2016&state...](https://www.opensecrets.org/states/geog.php?cycle=2016&state=CA)

Vote % is from the registrar of voters: [http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/64404...](http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CA/Santa_Clara/64404/184379/Web01/en/summary.html) (from [https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Pages/Registrar-of- Voters.a...](https://www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Pages/Registrar-of-Voters.aspx))

<comment><USER32>
      20% went to Republicans

I think that source has issues. The percentages total up to 135% for Santa Clara County. I'm 112% sure that has an error.

<comment><USER15> For Santa Clara county

Total donations: $59,683,708 Democrat donations: $28,362,650 (47% of Total) Republican donations: $7,613,361 (13% of Total)

It _is_ weird that the percentage column reports 75% and 20% instead of 47% and 13% respectively but that exactly accounts for the extra 35%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> At the end of the day let's think about how highly skilled foreign workers are used.

They are brought to the US, given around 40% less, to work jobs that could easily be worked by Americans. This helps the company's bottom line, and that's about it. But if you go and look at the tech companies, they don't really need help with that, many of those hiring the H1Bs have billions of dollars that they are sitting on. They could easily pay for American workers, they just don't want to. In a country of over 300 million people, you don't need more mediocre talent from India to work at 40% below average wage.

And India needs its talent as well. It's a backwater country that needs a lot of development. If those developers stay at home, maybe they can help develop the country. It badly needs it.

So to sum it up, America does not need more talent, it has plenty of its own in a population of 300 million people. The companies employing these workers are not employing them for their talent, they are employing them for price savings. They could afford to pay more. And Americans need more jobs, as the unemployment rate currently is astronomically high. Indians should stay in India, the country needs it.

If these people are so above average, then the companies should be willing to compensate them 40% more for their work. And so create a separate program for that. Which makes companies pay more for highly sought after talent, as compared to the locals. Let's see how they respond then.

<comment><USER16> OK, fine, how about this.

We get rid of ALL limits on visas, as long as they go to people making 100k+ and the company pays a 25k tax to the government.

Win-win for the US, right?

The problem with the H1B visa is that it is a freaking lottery. We should NOT be assigning these visas randomly.

We should be auctioning them to the highest bidder. That would ensure that Americans don't get undercut, and the US gains a shit ton of tax revenue.

<comment><USER28> This would mean no visas for the international students graduating out of US colleges. Someone with a bachelor degree isn't going to get $100k straight off the bat.

That in turn will drive the best and brightest to stay home and not come to the US educational system.

<comment><USER34> You could easily add a clause that says if you have a useful 4 year degree from the US, the minimum is $75k (or whatever) and 100k for everyone else. Then new grads wouldn't be at an unfair disadvantage for getting jobs.

<comment><USER35> It's not trivial to identify useful degrees. Even if you tied this to professions with low unemployment (jobs in need of workers) you would need some link between major/program and profession.

Keep in mind, also, that few of the ideas on this thread haven't already been implemented by some country (Canada, Australia, etc.). It would behoove politicians to look at the resulting data instead of voting on measures that affect groups they don't care to understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> My brother-in-law (who is from Delhi) had a friend from who went to Brown and had troubles with his H1-B after he graduated.

He went back to India and created a healthcare startup which now has nearly 100 employees.

If the US was operating in its best interest, it would try to keep the people it trains in the country.

No country has a monopoly on intelligence and eventually many countries will catch up to the US. It seems to me that a good way to accelerate the process would be to kick all of the H1-B folks out.

<comment><USER35> Assuming the student did not receive notable government scholarships to study in the US, it wasn't exactly the US training him but his spending his own money to be trained. This is not the case, of course, for funded PhD graduates, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On the optimal number of immigrants: [http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal- number...](http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number-of- immigrants.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm suspicious of anything coming from the WP given that Bezos owns it.

For people who really are the best and brightest, wouldn't they already be eligible for an O-1 or EB-1?

Primary use of H1-B I see here in Central time is for people without leverage who can be pushed around. I've known smart guys and dumb guys working here on that visa, and they both have some asshole dangling that visa over their heads.

If we really need these people, we should be giving them citizenship.

<comment><USER38> > For people who really are the best and brightest, wouldn't they already be > eligible for an O-1 or EB-1?

No, many of the best and brightest programmers won't qualify for EB-1 or O-1 visas. To understand why, please look up the requirements for these visas and judge how many of the best and brightest of American programmers you know "in Central time" would qualify.

> If we really need these people, we should be giving them citizenship.

Or at least a green card.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The US has so many work visa programs, that focusing on the "H1B" variant will be the biggest red herring party pandering possible.

They're all ripe for abuse.

Now there might be a redeeming quality in creating some kind of patch so that applicants from a signal country can't all apply by January 2nd.

<comment><USER40> Yeah just like the "Chinese Exclusion Act". But maybe not with as overtly racist name this time.

<comment><USER38> If all of EU got counted as a single country for Green Card issuance purposes, the per-country backlogs would have disappeared long ago :-/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So what is an "highly skilled worker"? How to define someone who adds a lot of value to the country?

Personnaly I would rather make this a free market visa where whose who qualify have to have the higher bid to enter the US. As most of the time, high value correlates with high salary.

<comment><USER42> Now that is a weird claim of something being a free market if I ever saw one. Want to make it a free market? Remove the need for a visa. It is as simple as that.

Auctioning visas may make it into a market, but don't delude yourself that it would be free.

<comment><USER8> > Auctioning visas may make it into a market, but don't delude yourself that > it would be free.

Exactly, because auctioning visas presumes some kind of artificial limit to the number of them, that some politicians pull out of their asses. See elsewhere for my 'optimal number of immigrants' link, which explains this in further detail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There's no requirement that H1B beneficiaries be "highly skilled."

</comment><comment><USER44> Ive been concerned about Zuckerberg and Theil using Trump to get their FWD.us thing passed and start importing cheap developers here.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the fastest way to learn programming as a 30-year-old? - <AUTHOR> I am 30 years old non technical guy. I have never programmed anything. I want to learn coding to earn living as fast as I can. Please suggest me which langauage you would recommend that I can learn fast and start earning some money. <comment><USER2> My wife's 28. She's still hasn't freaks out with the terminal but when she's free, she picks up on python. For her the "Learn To Automate Boring Things" and Derek Banas videos were helpful.

I'd also recommend joining few communities of fellow learners (ignore any age differences, everyone's cool) and try to do few group projects.

I hear open source projects are always look for help. I bet if you're upfront about your extreme beginner situation but willing to help, someone will take you up and definitely mentor you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Python or Golang

<comment><USER3> But honestly the language is irrelevant at your level. Any language can just about do the same as any other language, some do things better and are a better choice for a specific topic or task because of that.

Python is very newbie friendly yet very powerful, I recommend starting there.

I also would not get your hopes up if you are relying on this for your income. It will take a very long time and lots of reading and practicing.

<comment><USER3> Besides that, you should look into Javascript since its being used everywhere now a days. You might be able to land a frontend developer job somewhere, but also learn html/css and js.</comment></comment></comment>


WhatsApp using GPL3 library to promote free software while being proprietary - <AUTHOR> According to the WhatsApp encryption overview as published on: https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepaper.pdf - WhatsApp is using the GPL version 3 licensed software (https://github.com/signalapp/libsignal-protocol-java) in their application which is proprietary.
It seem to be a violation of GPL 3 license.
The Open Whisper Systems who is author of that software seem to be fine that Facebook's WhatsApp may use in their proprietary software, yet it is contradiction to what free software shall be and how it shall be used.
It is a new opportunity to make the WhatsApp software truly free, at least all those versions which used the GPL 3 licensed software in past. <comment><USER2> There could be a separate license agreement between the parties.</comment>


Amazon is sending me packages I didn't buy - <AUTHOR> https://amazonplzstop.com/2019/11/the-beginning/ <comment><USER2> I had a similar experience quite some time ago. Somehow small AWS charges were appearing on my credit card--on the order of around a dollar. I called Amazon and asked them where the charges were coming from _and they wouldn 't tell me_. I had no personal AWS account nor had I ever used the card with AWS. They refused to provide me any level of assistance. It was very frustrating. This meant every month my wife had to request a chargeback through the credit card company.

<comment><USER3> Did you cancel the card and replace it to prevent further charges?

<comment><USER4> This doesn't always work. I had a similar problem with Chase, and the charges kept appearing on the new card. Chase explained to me that the charges can follow the person, not the specific card number.

<comment><USER5> > _Chase explained to me that the charges can follow the person, not the > specific card number._

Can anyone explain this? It goes against all I thought I knew about online payments and credit cards.

<comment><USER6> It works like this. Chase is trying to be _helpful_ so let's say you set up your utility bill to go through their credit card. Now, you get a new card with Chase because you lost it. Chase can see that the old number and new number are both attached to your account history _and_ the charge from the utility company has the same utility account number so they happily approve it for you so you don't have to change your utility billing. It isn't such an awful feature except in this case where you want it stopped. This is one argument for not using credit cards for recurring online bills and ACH instead. Most people love the rewards though.

We need better online payments options that prevent these scams. It would be nice to have the ability to whitelist and blacklist online vendors.

<comment><USER7> > It would be nice to have the ability to whitelist and blacklist online > vendors.

Isn't that basically a direct debit mandate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I went through something similar when an ex went wild with my credit cards. You can actually call the credit card company and tell them to block all purchases from a specified merchant. So I had to block all Amazon and Uber purchases.

Just reporting the card lost/stolen doesn't work because these services already verified and seem to come across as recurring transactions that still go through even though the old card has been reported lost and there's a new number.

<comment><USER9> Wait. I'm missing something important here.

Are you saying that after Amazon verifies your credit card once, a scammer can keep making purchases on your card after you report it stolen to your credit card company?

This is news to me.

How long can Amazon do that? The end of the day? The end of the month? What eventually stops Amazon from accepting a card which has been reported stolen, and how long does the process take?

But blocking one specific company such as Amazon works faster? Why is that?

I guess at the end of the month, you can dispute the purchases.

<comment><USER10> It's a feature on credit cards. Merchants in good standing can get updates on your new credit card. This should keep failed transactions to a minimum; for example, your electricity bill won't bounce if you got a new credit card and forgot to update your billing info.

What Amazon should be doing is letting you cancel an Amazon account if you know what credit card information it's using, like the author of this blog tried to do. The flaw is if your credit card info is leaked and someone cancels your Amazon account. But I see that as vastly superior to just having a random unauthorized Amazon account somewhere out there with your leaked credit card info in it making unauthorized purchases.

<comment><USER11> > What Amazon should be doing is letting you cancel an Amazon account if you > know what credit card information it's using, like the author of this blog > tried to do.

As you note, this has a flaw:

> The flaw is if your credit card info is leaked and someone cancels your > Amazon account. But I see that as vastly superior to just having a random > unauthorized Amazon account somewhere out there with your leaked credit card > info in it making unauthorized purchases.

I don't see why it needs to be all or nothing. Just remove that credit card from the account, and block it from being added back. That lets you stop someone who has your card on their account, without opening you up to having your Amazon account canceled if someone gets your leaked info and wants to be a jerk.

<comment><USER10> That solution is still better than what Amazon is currently doing, and I do like it. My reasoning is that an account being accused of fraud shouldn't be left open. But I suppose a fraudster isn't inconvenienced by having to create a new Amazon account and continuing their fraud there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a known scam:

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/clark.com/shopping- retail/amazo...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/clark.com/shopping- retail/amazon-scam-brushing-warning-deliveries-you-didnt-order/amp/)

<comment><USER13> This isn't that. In the thread's article the author said someone stole their identity and used their credit card to order these things from an Amazon account they don't control. That isn't what your link describes.

<comment><USER14> They could be shipping stuff to jack up sales numbers in the short term. It could be an incentives program gone rogue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> NB: a web page per paragraph-or-so of text is ... pretty annoying.

Please don't.

<comment><USER16> I stopped reading after three pages. The story was interesting, but I'm not going to keep clicking on links every 30 seconds or whatever.

<comment><USER17> Also, the entire site seems to be dedicated to this single article. Very strange format.

<comment><USER15> As a series of updates over days/weeks, I could understand. Where a single day's events span multiple posts, not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Heavily reminds me of the episode "Autofac" from television series "Electric Dreams," a major plot device of which is megacorp [in the show, obviously a satirical take on Amazon] delivering unwanted packages to the [apparent] last survivors of post-cataclysmic humanity

</comment><comment><USER19> After the Amazon rep said "Amazon: This account has your information in it.", he never just tries to tell Amazon his number to see if that IS what is on the other account. Seems so odd to me. But regardless, as others have mentioned already, why would you not just cancel everything to get it sorted out like any other fraud that would happen?

<comment><USER20> He says he did cancel his card. I guess you're saying he should cancel his Amazon account? That's a bit of a drastic step, so I can understand not jumping to it immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is an interesting story, a cyber disfunctional Griffin and Sabine? Are these affiliate links to the strange products author was sent? Is this short format to drive page views of the "stop Amazon" site? Are we being played by the author?

Edit: The about section of the site gives some insight.

</comment><comment><USER22> This could probably have been on one page for easier reading

<comment><USER23> I also don't really understand the point of the multiple pages layout.

<comment><USER24> At first it was annoying to me as well but then I thought that it is actually quite clever - nowadays people are conditioned to read few sentences and then take a break, tap, scroll,click something. Single article could be too much of cognitive load if this is meant to reach broad audience...

<comment><USER16> Well, multiple pages was too much for me to bother clicking through, so I stopped reading. It's really annoying, and I hope this doesn't become a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cool-RR Aside: I bet the people who use these avantgarde fonts on their blogs feel so classy, but they make the text so hard to read on mobile, even with text size enlarged. I wish there was an instant "turn all fonts to your favorite font" button on mobile browsers.

<comment><USER25> Safari's reader mode works well in this case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The article/blog post simply stops after a certain point? I feel a bit left hanging

<comment><USER27> Last post is from Friday, Nov 15, 2019. Seems like the story isn't over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've had this happen three times now, all with products I would be very unlikely to buy. After confirming that I was not charged for any of the three instances, I took the path of least resistance and donated the items (none of which were expensive) to a thrift store.

(The speculation I've read is that some manufacturers will buy their own products and send them to random addresses, in order to create fake reviews.)

</comment><comment><USER29> Isn't this maybe some sort of affiliate marketing trick?

How's the SEO for this url going?

</comment><comment><USER30> Simple. Do a one-month amazon embargo on yourself, and tell your reception to refuse delivery on any amazon parcel with your name on it. Hopefully Amazons processes will flag the buying account as having a false address.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm currently being told I've received certain packages when I've actually received other packages I ordered. Amazon is really weird.

</comment><comment><USER32> I just never let online merchants store my card number if I don't really have to. I'm totally okay with having to enter it for every purchase if it means I can avoid stuff like this.

</comment><comment><USER33> In my experience, this stopped after I stopped drinking and made sure my wife is the only one who can access our Amazon account.

<comment><USER34> I did the opposite. I started drinking after getting the bills and now don't care when the wife shouts at me for having no access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why not just cancel the card number and have the credit card issue a new one? Then change your passwords everywhere?

This would have solved this problem at step 1 when Amazon said they couldn't cancel the account.

<comment><USER36> "Needless to say I canceled my credit card and got a new one."

"In the past 24-hours I did a deep dive into my Amazon account and changed many passwords."

<comment><USER35> I did not see this line in the report. Thanks. Still wondering what else can be done. If a credit card reissue doesn't solve the problem, I'd take that up with the issuer immediately.</comment></comment></comment>


MDMA and psychedelics to the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mdma-and-psychedelics-to-the-world

<comment><AUTHOR> They are also being published in Nature: [http://www.nature.com/news/no-link- found-between-psychedelic...](http://www.nature.com/news/no-link-found- between-psychedelics-and-psychosis-1.16968)</comment>


Ask HN: What is the business model of tawk.to? - <AUTHOR> The in-site chat service https://www.tawk.to/ is free and claims to remain always free. So who pays for it? What is the business model? <comment><USER2> This may be a hint: [https://www.tawk.to/blurts/why-search-is-broken-and-how- we-i...](https://www.tawk.to/blurts/why-search-is-broken-and-how-we-intend-to- fix-it/)

Give the customer service software away for free. Let users search for shops around you that offer chat service.</comment>


What It's Like for a Deaf Person to Hear Music for the First Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/08/what-its-like-for-a-deaf-person-to-hear-music-for-the-first-time/260890/

<comment><USER3> After hearing a description of a similar sudden change to hearing on This American Life, I expected the answer to be "confusing, because his brain can't interpret the sounds or sort out signal from noise." I was surprised that he was immediately enjoying music.

Any ideas why this might vary so drastically?

====

Edit: maybe it's a technological difference; the TAL story involved cochlear implants. [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/411/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/411/transcript)

<comment><USER4> You are correct. When a cochlear implant is activated for the first time, everything sounds markedly different from how it sounds to normal hearing people. That lasts for at least first week, while the brain rapidly learns how to interpret the input.

The guy in this story is still not hearing music normally. Being profoundly deaf means having a very, very small amount of hearing, which is just enough for a powerful hearing aid to help. But he's almost certainly not hearing the full dynamic range of the music.

I have first-hand experience with all of this stuff, and I find this story be overblown, to say the least.

<comment><USER5> > I have first-hand experience with all of this stuff, and I find this story > be overblown, to say the least.

Only on HN can you find someone willing to be an expert on someone else's newly-found joy.

<comment><USER4> I am an expert on the topic.

I was profoundly deaf. I wore hearing aids and later got a cochlear implant. And I've known several people in a similar position.

Trust me, these stories about people hearing for the first time are sensationalized, to say the least. I'm in no way minimizing how miraculous these devices are -- just be aware that the experience is quite different to that being portrayed in the media.

<comment><USER5> > I am an expert on the topic.

You're an expert on how this fellow felt the first time he listened to music via his new equipment?

I think it is likely that you are an expert on how _you_ feel, but this guy is crying as he listens to Mozart, he said it himself, and I'm not sure how much more we can ask for.

<comment><USER4> Nice straw man you've got there; I didn't say anything about the guy, let alone his feelings. Let's keep this discussion constructive.

I'm just sharing my perspective, based on experience -- these stories are misleading at best. Like all stories, they're far too neat. Reality is messier. Despite what the stories would have you believe, they still doesn't hear normally. They hear better. But not normally.

You know what the reality is? The reality is getting hearing aids and still not being able to use the phone to do phone interviews. And having people insist on it anyway. And then helplessly watching your dream job slip out of your grasp because you can't hear the interviewer's questions. Reality is being in school and failing, because the exam had a verbal component. And having the instructor just smirk. It's sitting as a bystander in conversations because you can't follow it. It's being passed over for promotions because you can't be trusted to hear important things. And nobody can see any of it happening. Except you.

That's the real story. A little piece of it. Yes, there are delightful moments with any improvement in hearing, but there's a larger context that always gets left out of these feel-good pieces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not really a technical comment, but I found a video of this type of experience to be so much more powerful: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsOo3jzkhYA>

Even better, Ellen (US talkshow host) saw the video and paid for both cochlear implants ($30k each):

[http://ellen.warnerbros.com/videos/index.php?mediaKey=1_ccmh...](http://ellen.warnerbros.com/videos/index.php?mediaKey=1_ccmh4z8w)

*edited for clarity

</comment><comment><USER7> This just looks like a rough summary of a Reddit thread. Where's the discussion of why he was deaf, what he could and could not hear before, and what the new hearing aids did differently? I want to know more about the medical cause of his deafness, and the technology behind the hearing aids.

<comment><USER8> You probably weren't looking for an article entitled "What It's Like for a Deaf Person to Hear Music for the First Time", then.

<comment><USER7> The article didn't even really cover that; it basically said "imagine the emotion" and listed a bunch of music.

<comment><USER9> >When Mozart's Lacrimosa came on, I was blown away by the beauty of it. At one point of the song, it sounded like angels singing and I suddenly realized that this was the first time I was able to appreciate music. Tears rolled down my face and I tried to hide it.

Seems to cover it to me

<comment><USER10> It's a fairly simply-described reaction that a non-deaf person could have to that piece just because of its beauty not because they are hearing music for the first time.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, but you seem to be assuming that the experience would be completely alien, a language needing to be learned so to speak. I'm not so sure about that, perhaps music being the most visceral of the arts, does not require interpretation or explanation, so that even the unschooled ear can apprehend beauty.

<comment><USER10> I've no idea if it would be any different for a deaf person to hear music for the first time than for a normal person to hear music, and if it is different I don't know if there is any way to answer "What It's Like for a Deaf Person to Hear Music for the First Time".

My point was that this article really doesn't cover that question, as you said it did.

<comment><USER11> While it doesn't fully convey the depth of his emotion, or likely even allow us to fully imagine it, I think that looking at the article as a whole, we can see that he basically now can experience music in ways very similar to (and likely the same as) the way we do. He cries to it. He has samples several different kinds of music, and has definite feelings about the genres (e.g., classical vs country). He's actively seeking out new music, and is finding ways to describe (very well, IMO) _why_ he likes one or the other better. He's found a song that he has had to listen to over-and-over.

I think that covers "what it's like" from an emotional perspective very well. It was profoundly moving for me to read this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With so much more to listen to, Chapman says that, "ironically enough, I'm turning my hearing aids off more often than before." There are too many annoying sounds.

"Silence is still my favorite sound," he writes. "When I turn my aids off my thoughts become more clear and it's absolutely peaceful."

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

This is remarkable. I wonder what the world would be like if we were able to turn our ears off and on.

<comment><USER13> ... buy some really good ear plugs? It's not perfect, but it's pretty good if you buy good quality ones and stick them in deep enough ...

I bought some noise canceling headphones a while back, and started wearing them in the office even when I didn't have music coming through them. The world became a quieter, gentler place when they were on, and it was good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think one important thing to understand is that beautiful music is not the only kind of music that can be great. Sometimes music is designed to invoke a wide array of emotions which is why good music is crucial in TV and film. Good music can make you feel excited, happy, sad, scared, calm, nervous, anxious, angry, inspired, or any mix of the above.

So while I think it's great that he is moved by beautiful music, he should keep his mind open to allowing music to take his emotions in other directions too.

</comment><comment><USER15>
      sigur ros - <USER2>

yes yes yes yes

</comment><comment><USER16> Either this guy is spending a king's ransom on all these tunes or the RIAA is going to have a field day with him.

<comment><USER17> "The response was tremendous, running more than 14,000 comments and garnering the attention of Spotify, which gave him six months of free membersion and a 13-hour playlist that covers a huge range of music."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I felt unusually moved by this article, my rational side is trying to figure out why.

</comment><comment><USER19> Beethovens symphony nine is the best piece of music, which I ever listened to :)

</comment><comment><USER20> "...garnering the attention of Spotify, which gave him six months of free membersion..."

What is membersion?</comment>


This War on Math Is Bullshit - chris-at http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/05/we-have-always-been-at-war-with-large-prime-numbers <comment><AUTHOR> It mimics attacks on the 2nd Amendment:

"If you outlaw strong encryption, only the criminals will have strong encryption."</comment>


A free weekly newsletter containing articles and tips on web performance - <AUTHOR> http://webperformancenews.com/

<comment><USER2> When you confirm your email address on here, the "return to our website" link goes to [http://managewith.us/](http://managewith.us/) which is full of adverts.</comment>


Our latest quality improvements for Search - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-improvements-search/ <comment><USER2> I fear this will be used more as a form of abuse than as a proper feedback, looking at youtube. The link also seems to be designed to be skipped over. You could have told me it has been there for a year and I would have believed it.

Even with Google's volume you have to take the 0.25% of claimed occurrences, then take the percentage of people who will be offended, then take the small percentage of people who will notice/know they can report it, then take the small percentage of people who actually bother.

And even if there won't be an organized effort to game the system it serves to the lowest common denominator of 'not offensive'. If I type "How to know if I'm t" and it autofills 'ransgender' that is fine by me, but some people will consider that offensive (don't ask me why) and report it. Or take for example unwanted pregancy, you can bet that if one searches for unwanted pregnancy and Google puts up a neutral snippet from Planned Parenthood people will report it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Im not a fan of most of their search improvements. It seems like Google these days is good at telling me what I already know but have forgotten vs researching and discovering about information I don't know anything about.

<comment><USER4> Their blog posts about search are kind of the same. Reading anything google tells us about their search algorithm feels like I'm churning through countless iterations of PR spin, rather than actually learning anything new (contrary to, for example, how backblaze blog posts are packed with info).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google has started to ignore an amazing number of search terms. For example, I googled "Olympus EPL3 launch button broken", and the first result was "League of Legends launch button not working". To add insult to injury, Google tells you which of your keywords it's ignoring for each particular result.

<comment><USER6> First they removed the ability to always require a certain with just one character (+), then they started making search worse and worse requiring you to enclose several words with quotes.

It's one of the reasons I switched to ddg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "There are trillions of searches on Google every year. In fact, 15 percent of searches we see every day are new"

</comment><comment><USER8> Search algorithms can't fight a semantic-level threat, they are just blind term-to-content conversion, like e.g. regex doesn't care if it finds something bad. Google can't use more expensive algorithms that actually can classify and understand the content, so their solution to this is human censors/curators. They get shamed regularly, and with recent youtube crisis(advertisers started to pull out) they probably started to take this issue seriously. [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google- de...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy- truth-internet-search-facebook)

</comment><comment><USER9> I have an issue in their recommendation to use the Southern Poverty Law Center as a source to find out extremists. The SPLC is not a neutral source. For example, it has listed Aayan Hirsi Ali and Masjid Nawaz as anti-Islam extremists. [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/magazine/can-a- former-...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/magazine/can-a-former- islamist-make-it-cool-to-be-moderate.html?_r=0&referer=)

The SPLC is free to list whomever they want, but using their list to rank sites in Google search is very problematic.

<comment><USER10> Just read Maajid's section in SPLC's Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists[0]. This is ridiculous; tweeting out a picture of Muhammad is 'offensive' to many Muslims and is therefore 'extremism'? They must be totally unaware of the rich history of Persian and Ottoman devotional art which depicts Muhammad.

[0] - [https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/journalists-manual- field-...](https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/journalists-manual-field-guide- anti-muslim-extremists#nawaz)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I fear that this will become a tool for SJW and whatever their right leaning counterparts are called.

</comment><comment><USER12> Two days ago, Breitbart News started appearing at the top of news search results. That's not a sign of improvement.</comment>


Death to MS Word - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/04/microsoft_word_is_cumbersome_inefficient_and_obsolete_it_s_time_for_it_to_die_.html?google_editors_picks=true <comment><USER3> Word is not a program for editing text. If you want to edit text and only text, there are a hundred different tools that allow you to do that much more efficiently. Then you have Markdown et al. for formatting your text.

What word actually is, for most people who don't need its advanced features, is an amateur desktop publishing tool. Word is for making fliers that you stick to the light pole. Word is for printing out notices that you stick to the coffee maker. Word is for writing pretty invitations for your 7 year old's birthday party. The same is true of virtually every "word processor" out there, including LibreOffice Writer. The switch from text editor to desktop publishing tool took place right around the time they started displaying page outlines in wonderful WYSIWYG. You don't need WYSIWYG if all you care about is the content, right?

But everyone has an inner artist, even though only a few are actually any good. It's amazing how much people (including myself) care about how their text appears on a piece of paper or a WYSIWYG editor. Sometimes, this distracts from the content. But as long as the content isn't being completely neglected, I think we should forgive people for wanting to control the font in which their writings appear, or for wanting their quotes to look "smart", or for spending 20 minutes tweaking the line spacing of their resume. It's human nature to mix a sense of aesthetics with everything. Word caters to that desire. In this respect, a PDF file is only marginally better from the point of view of the unfortunate recipient, and sometimes even worse.

So the problem isn't Word, it's people who abuse Word while performing tasks to which it is not best suited. For example, when you're sending a story to an editor, it's obvious that the editor only cares about the ASCII content and not your choice of fonts and margins.

<comment><USER4> Tools like PageMaker, InDesign or MS Publisher are tools for fliers, notices, and invitations. Word is for documents. Essays, contracts, NDAs, memos. Documents with lots of text but still meant to be formatted for printing.

I think the author's best point isn't so much that it's wrong tool for the job bur rather the job that Word is for is much less relevant now. Just like typewriters were obsolete when word processors arrived; word processors are themselves obsolete in a world where the result isn't printed.

<comment><USER5> _word processors are themselves obsolete in a world where the result isn't printed._

I don't see that.

When contracting I am always being sent Word docs for this and that. There's rarely a need for anyone to print them; the value seems to be in the ability to control layout and highlighting, embed nicely formatted tables, and include images or diagrams, all as viewed on a computer.

Even if we assumed no one was ever going to print these documents, only pass them around to a limited audience, what would be a better tool for the average person helping out on a project? If not Word then almost certainly something very much like it.

<comment> buff-a

      * A wiki.
      * Google Docs.
      * Assembla.

Passing around a word document via email (or shared folder) makes about as much sense as passing around a C++ file, or the text of a facebook status.

<comment><USER5> Google Docs I can see, though it's basically "Word, but in your browser." (Hence "If not Word then almost certainly something very much like it.")

I've had some mild push-back from a few people when trying to get them to switch from Word, but it has the upside of you always knowing what the current version is, a problem the Wordists I've dealt with run into often.

A wiki, though, is a lost cause for many. I do not want to be the one having to teach people how to correctly format tables or embed images with the correct size and captions.

"Why do I have to learn all this stuff when we already know how to use Word?" is a common lament.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author clearly has not spent much time using Word lately, and reading this I was constantly struck by the blatant inaccuracies throughout this piece. Some of his biggest complaints just don't align with modern versions of the software he is criticizing:

1) He start's with a rant about Clippy, which hasn't shipped for multiple releases.

2) He complains about the XML markup when you want to publish something to the Web through copy-paste. Has the author ever saved a Word document prior to publishing before? There are a variety of choices when saving a file, including the options to save as Plain Text (which removes all formatting), or even as _a web page._ No idea if the save as web page feature works well for complex documents, but to overlook this when complaining about publishing a Word doc as a web page demonstrates woeful ignorance of the product being criticized. This is especially ridiculous considering he highlights 3rd party programs that convert .docx into .txt. Why not mention that Word does this out of the box?

3) "The fundamental unit of Word is the single, proprietary file, anchored to one computer. Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it switched its default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and new Word customers out of each other's files." As far as I can tell, the author pulled this one out of his ass. The 2nd Google search result for ".docx" returns a link to a compatibility pack released by MSFT allowing earlier versions of Word to open .docx files. The 3rd result is the Wikipedia page for "Office Open XML," which is the standards-based format that all Office documents are saved in. (The 1st result is a free online 3rd party .docx to .doc conversion service.)

And these were just the things that immediately jumped out at me....

There are plenty of valid criticisms of Word and ways in which the software can be improved (apparently feature discovery...), but by not understanding how to use even the most basic features such as "Save to Plain Text," I have difficulty putting much stock in this individuals personal gripes.

(Disclaimer: I work for MSFT, but not within the Office division. The above is my own personal opinion, etc., etc.)

<comment><USER7> The one thing that he got completely right though, is that Word is for putting text to paper. Most people's writing never sees paper anymore, and I think that's why the tool isn't working for them.

As far as saving to plain text and copying plain text, those are two different things. Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another application just to paste the text is just plain terrible. I've never had that happen to me though, so maybe he's doing something wrong.

I find Word very frustrating to use. I don't feel like I'm using it, I feel like I'm tricking it and at any moment my text will simply change fonts or tab depth or something weird.

<comment><USER8> > Forcing someone to save a file and open it in another > application just to > paste the text is just plain terrible.

That's a general problem with copy/paste, not specific to Word. A great workaround is PureText, which configures WINDOWS+V to paste as text. <http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/>

<comment><USER9> Just as much a feature. Right click ->paste-as-plain-text is available in chrome, notepad++, Word (don't know if it is available during a right click though) and many many others.

<comment><USER10> word 2010 (actually, all of office 2010) is better than right-click: you paste normally, tap ctrl and then t.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This whole article is basically about using the wrong tool for the job which the author mentions directly:

> Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing.

Well yea. I dont think anyone will argue with that.

> Then I copy-pasted that text into a website that revealed the hidden code my > document was carrying. Here's a snippet:

The author is complaining about the HTML that comes out of Word. Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted?

>Word's idea of effective collaboration is its Track Changes feature, which makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor.

First of all, this is incorrect. In the latest version of Word, if you have files stored at a shared location you can collaborate by both editing the file directly like in Google Docs. Second, the Track Changes feature is awesome. It does exactly what it's meant to do. Any changes you make while tracking is the displayed. I dont understand what "world most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor" has anything to do with the tool, rather than the editor himself.

> When I was writing a book, which required lots of alone time with a giant > file—and lots of word-counting, which Microsoft is good at—I stuck with > Word.

Good for you.

<comment><USER12> "Is it really a huge surprise that something as complicated as Word formatting doesn't come out clean when converted?"

No, but it's a huge surprise to users that copying and pasting from Word into a completely different program (say, a rich text editor in a web browser) brings all that crap along. Unless it's pasting into another Word window, it should paste the plain text. There is absolutely no situation where pasting Word's pseudo-HTML into a non-Microsoft program is the right thing to do. As you mention, Word's formatting is hideously complex, so why even bother? It isn't going to work. Just paste the text.

<comment><USER13> OLE, or whatever it's called these days, is magic - the other day, i set up a label printer and all the bundled programs it came with. I right-clicked to copy a jpeg in Chrome, hit paste in the label editor, without knowing if it would work - and _it did_. This is an image, going between a cross-platform Skia program and contracted fixed-function bundleware i'll never use twice, made by two completely different companies, and it... blew my mind a little. I have a resolved respect for the native platform capabilities. I mean, sure, it's just a tag in the clipboard code somewhere, but... fascinating.

Anyways, the point of that was, coercing the data type down to the simplest format isn't always the right thing to do. Word should be able to paste formatted text into anything else that handles formatted text (you can paste word formatted text into TinyMCE, that's also pretty impressive)

<comment><USER12> What's actually impressive is the amount of work the TinyMCE folks have gone to in order to clean up the mess. Check out the source tree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wait, you mean your document layout program isn't good at generating web pages?!

I don't understand how people can write articles like this. I remember reading something similar a few years back where someone criticized Wordpress because, "it is designed as a blogging platform from the ground up, it doesn't lend itself to people who want to build a website without a blog."

When I wrote an article on it at the time, I compared this line of thinking to "because this car was build to drive on the road, it doesn't lend itself well to serving as a boat".

Yes, you could use a boat as a car, and yes there are better boats than a car, but that doesn't mean it's a valid point against cars.

<comment><USER15> The thing is, for a lot of non-technical people, it IS easier, just because they know how to use it. My friend was asked to make a website with CMS capabilities for his church. They were putting up Drupal or Joomla or something like that, demoing all the features, saying "isn't this so cool and great?"

The church committee stared at them blankly and asked, "Can we have something simple like write something up in MS Word?" Even with WYSIWYG features, they didn't get it at all, but they did get MS Word. My friend tried to protest saying, "But actually, you don't want MS Word. This is so much better for technical reasons, and you can format text exactly the same, blahblahblah."

The fear that non-technical people have to try to use a brand new system they've never seen before is not something with which I'd ever be able to empathize. But I am able to sympathize, especially after the day I tried to teach my dad how to use gmail to attach photos (using gmail's drag and drop feature no less!). It was so frustrating to see he didn't get drag and drop, but he finally did manage to click some buttons, after a LOT of hesitation.

Non-technical users don't care that Word adds on all that garbage. They don't even notice. They do care that their experience is that Word just works. And they're afraid of changing.

I know that none of this really matters. More and more people seem to be getting more technically savvy every day. New technologies will leave old technologies behind, whether late adopters like it or not. Heck, even my dad can use gmail now. But part of me feels mean and guilty for making these non- technical people suffer through the transition. Not that I have any solution for that issue.

<comment><USER14> I don't think people who use Word were ever going to produce nice-looking web pages anyway, and I'm _sure_ they won't care about how ridiculous the code is. If they're satisfied with it, fine; if they're not, shouldn't they just be looking for a tool which is actually meant for the job?

Because I like analogies: I'm really bad with woodworking. Everything I do ends out being really hacky because (I'm usually told this after) I don't use the right tools. Even if I _can_ use a saw for something other than its intended purpose, is it really the saw's fault if it performs worse than the right tool for the job?

<comment><USER15> I gotta say, you have a knack for good analogies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would miss a world without Word. Word is how I know whether to apply for a job or not.

If you only accept resumes in Word format, you're not the dinosaur I want to work for.

<comment><USER17> "Sorry I can't read PDF, do you have MS-Word"

True story.

Today I sent a link to my CV online, in HTML.

<comment><USER18> When I arrived in London I sent my CV as a PDf to a number of recruiters. Each one requested that I send a word copy, something that was difficult as I had written it in Latex.

I found out later that they want it in word so they can edit it, incorporate the cover letter, their own notes etc. Not a system that instilled me with confidence.

<comment><USER19> A fair number of recruiters have, or had, resume uptake systems that are/were based on VBA macros and required Word docs. I'm not sure if some remnant of these systems remain, but essentially, yes, they want an editable version of your resume.

Hrm. I may need to knock the "Word" format output option off my resume generator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Word "Track Changes" is still the industry standard for legal documents.

<comment><USER21> So there's one industry that's keeping it. Any others actually NEED Word's advanced functionality?

Not being facetious, let's name em.

<comment><USER22> My girlfriend is an academic and uses the track changes feature all the time when writing or editing papers and articles. When you add Endnote integration and the fact that most journals outside of the hard math heavy sciences want Word documents, Word is clearly the best choice.

Does she NEED Word? Technically not I suppose, but Word is the tool that makes her job the easiest. That being said she still curses Word and Endnote all the time, so there is no doubt room for improvement.

<comment><USER23> I am so hanging out to ditch word for academic writing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Honestly, I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about Word as a program. I just wish .odf would replace the open-in-name-only .docx/.xlsx/etc formats in public use.

If that were the case, then what do I care if people are using a different program to open them?

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been happily doing my postgrad in compsci, using the excellent LaTeX for all my papers and thesis. I got a job in medical research... holy shit... all the publishers require Word documents. Moving from LaTeX to Word is like moving from Python to Fortran on punch cards.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you, LaTeX is awesome for what it is commonly used for. No question there. However the learning curve is much higher than that of Word. So I think complexity and readability wise to an average worker, LaTeX to Word is more like Fortran to English.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was about to retweet this news while honestly adding, "Who still uses Word?" ... then I remembered that less than one year ago, while still working at Xerox Research, Word was the standard and I was the only weirdo forwarding documents in PDF (because I had not authored them in Word).

... so, besides being aware that your microcosm is not representative ... I don't see how can word die (as it should). There are too many people that cannot drop it due to all the required learning to move away (e.g., most people do not even know there are alternatives to Word).

</comment><comment><USER27> tldr-quotes-edition:

> <img id="obligatory-clippy-joke" />

> "[MS Word] has become an overbearing boss, one who specializes in make-work. > Part of this is Microsoft's more-is-more approach to adding capabilities, > and leaving all of them in the "on" position."

> "Publishing a two-word sentence as a Web Page, then pasting the source code > back into MS Word yields an eight-page document. Egads!"

> "Track Changes ... makes an uneventful edit read like a color-coded > transcript of an argument between the world's most narcissistic writer and > the world's most pedantic and passive-aggressive copy editor."

> "A tool that's lost its purpose makes a great toy."

</comment><comment><USER28> I've been using MS word for at least 15 years - but 99% of the time when crafting documents, I do not use MS-Word. Much of the time I simply use my web browser (as I am now.) A lot of the time I use mail.app.

For the 3-5 pages of notes, I switch to textedit - which I love, and is awesome but does have a bad habit of steadily increasing the number of open documents I have (Quitting doesn't close them - next time you restart they all come back - I understand why, but it doesn't change the fact that I have to, about once a week, manually do some garbage-collection to keep the number of open docs down to a reasonable number)

But - when I'm putting together a 50-100 page technical specification, in which I'm embedding PDFs, figures, captions, cleaver headers/footers, carefully watermarked "DRAFT", Auto-updating table of contents, section breaks for multi-column sections, nicely crafted tables, and, most important of all for me - the ability to send this 75 page document to six reviewers, and get their comments nicely organized in electronic accept/reject mode - I am happy that MS Word is available during that 1% of my workflow.

I agree with the author for the other 99% though. Text, or one of its markdown variants is a helluva lot more 2012 friendly.

<comment><USER29> > next time you restart they all come back

I assume you're talking about how Lion apps reopen the last open docs by default - you can disable this (for all OS X apps) in System Preferences > General > Restore windows when quitting/reopening apps

<comment><USER30> Some apps annoyingly don't seem to respect that setting. For example TextEdit and Xcode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The raw contents of an empty Microsoft Word document, pasted into an empty Microsoft word document.

63.6 KB / 124 pages

<http://document1.docx.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/>

</comment><comment><USER32> "Microsoft showed users how it feels about sharing work when it switched its default format from .doc to .docx in Office 2007, locking old and new Word customers out of each other's files."

Wait, what?

In any event, he's clearly not the right customer for the product. Neither am I; my pathological hatred of Word has dimmed over the years and settled into a mild perpetual annoyance. An itch, if you will, that you dare not scratch too long or it will likely draw blood. And I got to that point even before I got hired at Microsoft four years ago.

But I've also seen times when some of Word's abilities (like the "Track Changes" feature being dissed in the article) are not only useful but essential. Example: a language spec being worked on by several people and actively reviewed by several dozen more.

Ultimately, I suspect the "right" customer for the product is a medium-to- large business who's using it to churn out various types of paperwork -- not for the person who's just trying to write some text.

<comment><USER32> Also, no thread about Word would be complete without that mix of grimace and dismissive smirk we reserve for people who paste screen shots into a Word document, then attach it onto an email in order to send them to us.

<comment><USER27> We should also include Microsoft's obnoxious tendancy to release read-only documentation as mutable docx files instead of portable PDFs or even in its own not-invented-here PDF format, XPS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I consider Word to be one of the greatest programs on Windows. It has always did well what it was meant to do - a noob friendly professional publishing tool.

Heck, I use it on my Mac as well. A major flaw mentioned in this article (to edit web documents in word) is like editing vector graphics in Photoshop - <USER2> wasn't built for that.

</comment><comment><USER34> If you think the ungodly hidden XML embedded in text copied from Word is its most hideous crime, try working with living, breathing 500-page "documents" (specifications, test plans, policies, manuals, procedures, what-have-you) which are simultaneously edited by multiple people all the time. Oh, and the document needs to be conformed to some "company standard formatting" which are meant to look good on paper but nobody really prints the whole thing out in real life.

THAT is probably a use case which happens more often in corporate America than the author's more specialized world of online publishing.

I don't think Word is the ideal tool for this case neither (I hear cursing directed at Word all the time), but it is the de facto standard.

As much as I want believe LaTeX is better suited for this task, nobody will use it. (Disclaimer: I last used LaTeX 12 years ago.)

</comment><comment><USER35> This article is silly.

If you want to write only text, use a text editor.

If you want a publishing tool, use Word or Pages or whatever.

<comment><USER12> You are confusing what users _should_ do with what they _actually_ do.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this is the year that LibreOffice actually takes off as a widespread replacement. No offense to any devs that might be reading, but the last few times I used it (or Open Office), it was awful in a vague, this is just sucky, slow, ugly way. 3.4.6, however, is great; I know my office could move over with barely a hiccup (we are technical bureaucrats -- lots of SAS and Excel and GIS).

I think it is only if you have some complex workflow dependent on VBA and links and all that crap that you would have a problem, and I think most people tried that garbage in the late nineties and never did it again. Mail merge is the only stupid automated thing that sort of works, and Libre has that.

<comment><USER36> I'm not sure how a clone that is nearly as complex (minus VBA) will take off as a "widespread replacement".

The clutter in Word permeates many Windows apps (not just those from MSFT -- take a look at WinZip, for example). Most everyday windows users have become used to this and are unlikely to change. This doesn't even count businesses that base their enterprise around MSFT products...

With Microsoft's push towards Windows 8, maybe clean and simple UI will return to the Office suite. Until then, people will continue to use what they know.

<comment><USER37> "maybe clean and simple UI will return to the Office suite"

Laws never disappear from the books, swords are never beaten into plowshares, and Word never, ever loses a feature, although some of them do get hidden.

<comment><USER36> Ok, maybe I am dreaming...but...if and when Office shows up for tablets (iOS/etc), maybe that will transition over to Win8/Metro. It is a dream, maybe an impossible dream.

I remember Excel 5 being fast and not sucking. Word 2.x wasn't bad either. However, you have a point, Word has been additive over the years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The tools within Word that help with the task of document/story creation are underapreciated. Outline view, spell checking, comments, and synonym/dictionary are very useful for my kids and myself. Even the autocorrect feature that the author decries can be quite useful if you customize it.

My special needs son uses a program with Word called WordQ. The combination of the features above plus WordQ have made an enormous difference in his abiity to express himself through writing. Sure, he won't be writing a Web site with Word but he _is_ writing his own stories.

</comment><comment><USER39> Am I the only one who finds it ironic that Bill Gates funded Slate and now it comes back to bite him?

Sure it's all true what he says about Word, but the delicious irony is that his very own creation is slinging the arrows.

<comment><USER40> Bill Gates left Microsoft prior to move on to bigger and better things. If it was his influence that created the design that everyone despised in 2007, which I'll argue that it wasn't, they'd have changed by now.

Slate would be an example of something that Bill Gates helped create because of the value it'd bring to the world - not because of anything from an economic standpoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't hate Microsoft Word, but that's probably because I stopped thinking of it as an application for composing or editing text more than ten years ago. Instead I wrote in something like Notepad, and after having converted to the UNIX-like world, I now write pretty much everything in Vim.

Word and its imitations, therefore, simply became a go-to typesetter and printer driver for simple tasks that didn't require LaTeX's precision, and a read-only viewer for documents people emailed to me.

</comment><comment><USER42> Can someone explain to me how this works? [http://www.smh.com.au/digital- life/hometech/death-to-microso...](http://www.smh.com.au/digital- life/hometech/death-to-microsoft-word-20120412-1wta8.html)

It's the same article. So are both SMH and Slate syndicating from the same source or is Tom Socca employed by both?

<comment><USER43> The _SMH_ syndicated from Slate. Scroll down to the bottom of the article and you'll see the attribution.

<comment><USER42> Ha! Pretty easy to miss that one word attribution.

Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> i'm switching as many clients as possible away from Word to google docs where it is possible and makes sense. just yesterday i had a client ask me for some software to write and submit docs on a Mac notebook for her online classes. it took 3 minutes to set her up with gmail and google docs and show her how to share.

the interface is clean, no ribbon shit, nothing extra. it's cloud wordpad++. it's inherently cross-platform and free.

there is a place for word, but that place is small in today's world, and even smaller for the asking price.

the versioned editing is useful. but i'm fairly confident there is an automatically git-backed revision/collab cloud editor out there...the name escapes me.

</comment><comment><USER45> I tried ditching word format for my resume briefly, however I immediately started receiving replies to please forward a word copy of my resume, so I gave up. I'm afraid non tech people (recruiters) are still living in the past

<comment><USER19> From resume Makefile:

        resume.doc : resume.html
                gnuhtml2latex -s resume.html > resume.tex
                latex2rtf resume.tex
                mv resume.rtf resume.doc

Also, FWIW:

        resume.ps : resume.html resume.tidy
                html2ps -Tn resume.html > resume.ps.tmp
                mv resume.ps.tmp resume.ps

        resume.pdf : resume.ps
                ps2pdf resume.ps resume.pdf.tmp
                mv resume.pdf.tmp resume.pdf

<comment><USER45> what it comes down to though is a lot won't accept anything but word, everyone seems to accept word format, so until people start refusing my resume in word format I don't see a reason to put any effort into a different format. Its probably just me being lazy though

<comment><USER19> What you may be missing here: I've got a build system for my resume. It outputs not only various formats (HTML, text, PDF, Word), but multiple versions (short abstract, stripped of detail and street address for Web, full- detailed general resume, specifically tailored for a given job prospect if I'm interested). Revision controlled. Automatically updated. Changes to global sections reflected in all versions and output formats.

<comment><USER45> Its a cool concept, but do you actually send the resume in all these formats when you apply? I find that some of the non-tech people seem to get confused if you send them more than 1 format so I just keep it simple, I've also found they will but absolutely 0 effort into retrieving a resume, so even if I send them a url where I have it downloadable in a bunch of formats they won't go to the url and instead will just demand that I send it to them via email

<comment><USER19> My preference is to send PDF (I know what it is, it's not readily editable). I have HTML posted online. Many recruiters request Word, and I can accomodate them. For online boards (Monster, Dice, etc.) a textfile I can dump is a better fit.

I've got all of these at my fingertips.

And yes, I've told plenty of recruiters to grab my resume from my homepage URL, or sent them the link rather than the document itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Ctl-A, Ctl-C, open notepad, Ctl-V, Ctl-A, Ctl-C

How you have all your text sans any Word formatting. Horribly difficult, I know. This article's author is just annoyingly ignorant.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think Word is fine. However, we really need to get to that open document standard so you can use whatever app you happen to prefer.

<comment><USER48> The problem with trying to make an 'open document standard' is that everyone thinks they have an 'open document standard', so you end up with 30 'open document standards' that confuse the less technically inclined users and infuriate the more inclined.

Personally, until a better (read: equally universal) format comes out, I've got my document library saved as both .txt (unformatted + UTF-8 encoded) and .doc (formatted). Everyone uses both, at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've never worked anywhere that they didn't use Word.

I've never worked anywhere that they didn't despise Word.

Why won't it die? Why?

Why?

<comment><USER49> Because it's vastly better than the alternatives.

<comment><USER19> No.

Because no one single alternative is vastly superior to it.

Microsoft won the Office wars in the mid 1990s by bundling all the major applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, later Outlook and possibly Visio, I don't recall) in a single package that cost less than buying the alternatives (WordPerfect, AmiWord, Lotus123, Quattro, etc.) individually. WordPerfect (the most popular word processing program at the time) got caught flat-footed with the shift from DOS to Windows 3.1, in part due to illegal monopoly actions as alleged in a still ongoing suit by Novell ([http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/52577046-79/novell- micros...](http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/52577046-79/novell-microsoft- wordperfect-trial.html.csp)).

Effectively, Microsoft poisoned the well: individual competitors couldn't outflank it, were starved for cash, and couldn't collaborate on a single alternative. Sucks to play in a proprietary world when the racetrack owner's got a horse in the race.

My own history: I'd previously used a few word processing / text editing tools, including MacWrite, WordPerfect, WordStar, vi, DOS EDIT, EDT, EVE, and AmiPro. I always found Word to be fussy, and during this period started using Linux. I recognized the value in learning a single tool that couldn't be crushed by competition or abandoned by a single vendor, and so returned to vi (as vim) for virtually all my editing, with some fill-ins from Emacs, Lyx, and the odd usage of Abiword (quick letters for postal mail) or OpenOffice/LibreOffice (if I actually have to deal with Microsoft formats). Occasionally Google Docs. And a lot of web forms (most of which go to a spawned vi editor via Vimperator, such as this one). Office97 was the first and last time I really used Microsoft's suite (though I've certainly been exposed to it since), and the less I have to be exposed to it, the better.

What I've mostly found is that text editing suits my needs far better than word processing / DTP. And there are very few compatibility issues.

<comment><USER37> And I've found that text mostly meets my needs too. But that's partly because I'm technical and willing/able to deal with formatting codes for things that should be rendered as more than text: html, restructured text, markdown, etc. In a sense it's a step backwards to WordPerfect and their split screen.

There's a lot to be said for wysiwyg. Most people are unwilling or unable to learn or use formatting code in plain text and no immediate rendering of the result.

But fundamentally there's no reason why anyone should _have to_ deal with plain text source that produces nicely rendered output (unless we want to). Computers are really, really good at displaying things nicely, and hiding details.

The problem is that Word (and the creeping Sharepoint ecosystem) are much too powerful for almost everyone's needs. My work is typical: all our documents are a single font, and they have tables. The docs are kept in Sharepoint, and we do nothing with Sharepoint but keep documents.

That over-engineered solution would be better replaced with a very simple word processor like WordPad or some similar rtf tool, and the file system.

I don't need to use the truck that takes space shuttles from the vehicle assembly building to the launch pad just to get to work.

<comment><USER19> The key problem with WYSIWYG is that it doesn't exist any more. The key point as I read of the original article was that Word is a WYSIWYG tool aimed at print.

The Slate article could have been a lot better if the author noted the distinction between WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM. Followed immediately by the standard observation that WYSIWYM is a tougher nut. Most of the solutions I'm familiar with rely on either markup (HTML, LaTeX, Wiki parkup, markdown, etc.) or structural conventions (my text docs strongly resemble 1970s typewritten documents in line-length, paragraph style, etc. formats).

The great thing about LaTeX is that your document is _entirely_ semantic, and the style is applied by the stylesheet. With tools such as Lyx, this is reasonably intuitive, though stylesheet production itself is a nontrivial task. Similar concepts exist for Web, obviously, with HTML and CSS.

The problem is that for the typical user, print remains a simple conceptual model to understand, regardless of how brittle it is in a world with mulitple output formats. There's been a lot of thought put into this area over decades, and for a good tool to emerge and become prominant is yet another tough nut.

I agree (from a limited and somewhat old exposure) with your assessment of Sharepoint. I've mostly seen it used as "Christmas Tree" in which individual document blobs (or other objects) are hung, rather than a Wiki in which documents are interlinked, readily refactorable, and dynamic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> easy way to clean up word html (ckeditor) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3831069>

</comment><comment><USER51> Ctrl + Shift + C Paste as text (in chrome at least)

</comment><comment><USER52> "Death to Allegra Geller!"

</comment><comment><USER53> Great to read how someone who needs Wordpad instead of Word (try it on Windows: open Start, type "write" without "", press enter) actually tries to bash Word on being too good. I agree that features might have an easier way to get turned off, but aside for that I think Word isn't that bad.

He also complains about the file format. I agree as well that this could be done better, but they aren't doing a real bad job. In any case, _he_ certainly has no idea _why_ it's done the way it's done and is in no position to criticise it.

</comment><comment><USER54> I would agree with this article especially after it used the word "till". Till isn't the word you want to be using moron. Till is what a farm uses. Til, as in the shortening of 'until', is what you want to use. How the fuck does shit get published where 'til' is the accepted shortcut for a word that doesn't have an extra til.

Till exists in such popularity simply because spellcheckers won't correct it. Til brings up the red underline thingy, and people want to assume it knows what it means. Sadly, most people listen to it.

Till isn't what you mean. Til is. Fuck spellcheck, if that thing actually was smart you wouldn't have any headaches.

That's the sad thing about technological achievement. Most of the time it occurs because enough people start following the default behavior.

Don't get me start on how 'referer' became the default spelling for the HTTP referrer.</comment>