Wikileaks says it is under attack - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11858637

<comment><USER2> So strange. You grow up all your life being told how great democracy is, how we live under the rule and process of the law, how we are a tolerant and free society which values free thinking, which values the right to speech, however offending or off that speech may be.

As you grow up however, you kind of start realising that much of the above is sort of true in theory, but not true in practice, especially if the freedom of speech concerns a criticism of those who have more power than you. It is because power corrupts that many people had to die to ensure that we today live in relative freedom. It is because those in power have the means to subvert criticism and silence such criticism that it has been necessary for many to be shunned, called lunatics, heretics, traitors, or to die, so that truth can be spoken to power, so that truth can be spoken to power in order to preserve our liberty.

The right to free speech does not apply only to the dissemination of pictures of cats. A society and its adherence to its principles are tested and shown when power is seriously criticised, when power is or has the potential to be seriously undermined, not, when someone writes about lolcats because people even in North Korea can write about lolcats.

I am very amazed that people even consider an attack on wikileaks to be 'good', or that a real attack on the wikileaks founder would have been even better, because, they consider the leak to be a potential attack on their own percieved or real self interests, such as the image of their nation around the world, or that the world may find out that real life is so much more interesting that any fantasy book that can be written or any idealistic principle that can be formulated.

I consider it amazing that anyone may even think of supporting an attack by what may be a state actor, not because of any breach of law, but because it is embarrassing to such state actor.

We are not children any more, and if our principles are to die with the passing of our childhood, then we might need to consider the principles in the first place, their truth, their applicability, whether our generation of grown up adults wants to stand by them and continue supporting them. If we as the people wish to turn a blind eye to government censorship, to dirty tactics by governments through reputation damage by means of charges unsupported by evidence, if we are going to eat up the effective propaganda (PR I read somewhere began as an industry after the second world war and was based on the effectiveness of Hitler's tactics) and blindly state that such an attack is a good thing whether by anyone, let alone the government, simply because our perceived interest may potentially be damaged or undermined, not because of any reason of principle, not because we consider it to be an illegal activity not even based on reasonable moral arguments, but simply and only because it is a criticism which embarrasses, then something has gone badly wrong since the time I was born and now that I have grown up.

Truth is Power. Suppression of truth allows power to corrupt. That is why we have such principles of freedom of speech and such principles are not quantifiable simply by our embarrassment when criticised, or even more woringly, by the embarrassment of politicians.

<comment><USER3> There's a difference between truth and security of truth. One reveals to all, while the other protects by doing the opposite.

Managing information like this is not easy, and though it's easy to fault a government for hiding and/or obscuring the truth, there are some things that are better left unknown.

<comment><USER4> From what I understand, Wikileaks is willing to work with the government in order to hide the things that are truly dangerous...and not just secret because someone did something illegal/unethical

<comment><USER5> @nhangen: The government. They offered to collaborate in order to make sure nothing bad would be released.

The government ignored them, however. What does that say?

<comment><USER3> Well their stance is that his actions are unlawful and that he's dealing with stolen information.

It's more complicated than you're presenting.

<comment><USER6> And they'll just keep being disadvantaged by unilaterally-leaked information until they adopt a different "stance" (or until they shoot him.)

<comment><USER3> Something tells me he's going to have an "accident."

<comment><USER7> And if he doesn't?

<comment><USER3> Then his insurance rates go down?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't like Assange. However my belief is that the kind of stuff he is leaking is similar to the kind of stuff that governments manage to figure out about each other through spying anyways. Therefore the risk of injury is not as big as the government would have you believe, but the risk of public embarrassment is huge.

And incidentally, if you really believe in the first amendment, his actions should be entirely legal. At this point he is part of the press, and the government has no right to limit his free speech, or the freedom of the press. OK, so I don't like him. But there is a well-known principal of constitutional law that the important precedents are set by people who are hard to like. Because if they were nice people, they wouldn't have been in court in the first place. But by defending the rights of least likable people, we defend everyone's rights.

If you want to compare it to something, compare to the publication of plans for making a hydrogen bomb. The government tried to sue to stop publication, and failed. Now you can find discussion of the subject on wikipedia at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller-Ulam_design>. Which matters more? The Constitution, or the release of information that could kill tens of millions of people? The actual ruling of the court was that the Constitution mattered more!

<comment><USER3> It's not as black and white as a first amendment issue. This isn't press, this is sensitive and classified information.

He could play a much greater role in change were he to use this information in a more strategic fashion than to recklessly publish 100% of it.

<comment><USER8> _This isn't press, this is sensitive and classified information._

In what way, at this point, is Assange not part of the press?

Remember, a large part of the Constitution is meant to provide checks and balances to prevent government from being able to abuse its power. The proper Constitutional role of the press SHOULD be to inform the public on the actions of the government so that the public can get properly outraged about things they do not agree with.

<comment><USER3> I suppose you're right that he could be considered part of the press, and there are no laws prohibiting the sharing of government secrets. But I'm hesitant to proclaim anyone with a blog or government secret as a true member of the media.

<comment><USER8> There actually are laws prohibiting the sharing of government secrets. Lots of them. Bradley Manning, the suspected informant, is likely to go to jail for this incident.

But once published, they are published.

As for whether random bloggers are members of the media, I agree that it isn't a simple cut and dried situation. However at this point wikileaks is so prominent, and is so frequently part of the information infrastructure that more traditional media provides, that I believe it clearly is media.

<comment><USER3> Well, there's a difference between sharing and publishing though right? In this case, Bradley "leaked" them = illegal. Assange "published" them = freedom of press?

<comment><USER8> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Any of the state actors unhappy with this release have undoubtedly looked at the issue somewhat closely.

They'd know:

* a DDOS wouldn't change anything

* wikileaks has decent contingency plans, and are prepared for a lot beyond a simple denial of service

* It'd just get wikileaks in the news more in the run up to the release

Conclusion: Misguided amateur patriots or complete fabrication

<comment><USER10> On the Wikileaks Twitter feed:

"Now is a good time to download some "history insurance" <https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5723136/WikiLeaks_insurance> 1:04 AM Nov 26th via web"

Yes, you're right, even if the servers are down, they can leak the key via twitter etc. to this file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think Assange underestimates the power that this information wields, and as a result is being reckless and potentially dangerous to those he's trying to "protect" under the guise of freedom.

This is a dangerous game to play, especially for someone with little experience doing so.

I don't know how I feel about the concept of Wikileaks itself, but I do feel uncomfortable that this man seems to enjoy playing God.

Replace one tyrant with another and you end up in the same place.

<comment><USER11> _> I do feel uncomfortable that this man seems to enjoy playing God._

You can't help but wonder if he is playing out some international hacker of intrigue fantasy, but I think that even if he is, that mindset does more good for his cause than it does harm.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to hear why you think the latter portion of your statement is true.

The first part I can agree with, but I'm not sure how it helps...I think he's in over his head.

<comment><USER11> Self-image can be a powerful feedback loop that reinforces other qualities. I think that the types of things he would value if his self image was of a "persecuted international man of intrigue" would be things like vigilance, perseverance, cunning, suspicion, and those would be helpful to his role @ Wikileaks due to the nature of his work.

My $0.02.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Before disparaging wikileaks and/or the person of Julian Assange for whatever shortcomings they've got it would be good to contrast this with the opposite, say a leak from inside the North Korean or Iranian regime.

Such a leak would be applauded and the perpetrator would be declared a hero by those exact same governments that would like wikileaks to go away.

Don't shoot the messenger.

And realize that whatever your government does it does so in _your_ name too. If it can't stand the light of day because it is illegal or embarrassing then maybe it should not be done.

<comment><USER13> I suppose that's true if you consider the interests of Iran or North Korea to be just as valid as the interests of the western world. If the U.S. and Iran/North Korea were two equally evil governments fighting only for their own self-interest, that would be the case. However, as much as I am disappointed with the state of the U.S. right now, I think that what's good for America is much better for the Hacker News crowd than what's good for North Korea or Iran. While I don't support the way the U.S. government has been acting over the past decade or so, it still supports free speech, free markets, and democracy far more than its enemies.

Revealing private diplomatic information is not free expression, it is an attack on the country. It gives an information advantage to that country's adversaries and sours its relations with its allies. If wikileaks did the same to North Korea, the U.S. would celebrate it not because it represents free speech, but because it would weaken their government. There are some legitimate government secrets, and diplomatic cables are one of them.

<comment><USER12> The interests of Iran or North Korea are from the perspective of their leaders just as valid as our interests are to our leaders. All of them would condemn wikileaks for publishing their information, regardless of which country you'd be looking at. The same would go for China, Russia and pretty much every other nation in the world.

Which ones you would think are 'valid' and which are 'invalid' apparently depends on your own interests in the world, and not so much on the 'badness' of that particular government. I would welcome total openness from _my_ government about stuff like this, I would hope for the citizens of those other countries to do the same.

This is not an attack on any country, and to sketch it as such is not an honest depiction of the facts, it is an attack at those that perpetrate illegal acts in the name of all of us.

That 'if you've got nothing to fear, you've got nothing to hide' thing works both ways.

Either we, the citizens of all those states have a right to privacy, or the government does not have a right to privacy either. A society without privacy will have zero privacy for everybody, and I think part of the anger and the backlash against all this is that the governments are slowly waking up to this and they don't like it much.

If your perspective changes depending on which nation you are from that's a fair indication that you are probably wrong, if only because no nation is 'absolutely better in all respects' than any other.

Many North Koreans would agree with that statement about the US (of course, they've all been brainwashed, right?).

<comment><USER14> I think you're taking moral relativism too far when you compare the US with a country like North Korea. I would actually say the US is "absolutely better in all respects" than North Korea; care to name a respect in which North Korea is better than the US?

<comment><USER12> They are probably not living under the illusion that theirs is the greatest country in the world.

<comment><USER14> Yes, I do suppose you're rather grateful you don't have to deal with obnoxious North Korean tourists, or with jingoistic North Koreans posting on web forums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone knows what's the point of stalling those "leakage"? It's becoming quite annoying for me: all those newses about what it is going to be about or newses about DOS attack. Why can't they just publish it already? Or maybe they should setup wikileaksleaks.org for leaks about wiki leaks...

<comment><USER16> They don't publish them immediately because they want a worldwide simultaneous release with the New York Times, Der Speigel, and the Guardian.

<comment><USER17> Also called 'Embargo'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It won't matter - the guy at the Guardian has already posted to twitter that they will publish the papers even if wikileaks go down.

<comment><USER19> Whoever is behind the attack should just DDOS all of the media sites that have the leaked information.

In seriousness though, the attack probably will moderate the damage slightly, as I imagine Wikileaks was going to publish all the raw documents on its site, whereas the other sites will probably just give summaries of the important points. Sure, Wikileaks will eventually come back up and have all the raw data available, but the peak viewing time was going to be today. If I were trying to minimize number of eyeballs viewing the raw documents, I'd take this approach.

<comment><USER20> I think the newspapers will link to full copies for perusal, but include highlights/excerpts in their articles.

The biggest problem the DDoS creates, in my eyes, is that anyone reading about the leaks will go to Wikileaks.org and find a dead page and then forget about it, thus minimising their exposure to the other doings of Wikileaks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Assange is such an attention whore that I wouldn't put it past him to turn off all his servers and send out a press release saying "Look at me, I'm under attack!"

<comment><USER22> Let's wait and see. Besides, whore or not, the world is a better place due to wikileaks.

<comment><USER23> How so? What changes have _actually_ happened because of the leaks that happened? We'd all forgotten within a week.

<comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Notable_leaks>

some of those had a little bit of impact

<comment><USER21> The one with most direct consequences I can see was that a police officer got sacked because he was a member of the British National Party.

How the hell can that be legal? Are police officers banned from joining all political parties or just the BNP?

<comment><USER24> Membership of BNP is incompatible with being a police officer because it's incompatible with the police force's equal opportunities policy. Police officers are contractually obliged to follow the policy. Rightly or wrongly (rightly imo) that's the justification for sacking him.

Membership of, say, the Green Party, does not conflict with the officer's obligations.

<comment><USER25> How does someone's party affiliation keep the police force from following its equal opportunities policy?

<comment><USER26> The BNP is an overtly racist party. If you join them, it is assumed you follow their policies and general belief structure. Those policies and beliefs are incompatible with what the police are ordered to do as part of their jobs.

It's better than a policy of ignoring the beliefs of your officers, isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can't say I have a lot of pity for Wikileaks.

I feel -- and you guys are welcome to trash me on this and I'm sure you will -- that taxpayers have paid billions of dollars to our government to perform diplomacy. And diplomacy always involves the keeping of secrets. It did 500 years ago, and it will 500 years from now.

So no matter how much arm-waving you want to do about freedom and truth, nations still have to have secrets. And while I oppose the secrecy state that we've created, it's the taxpayers that have created it, not wikileaks. It's our monster to tame. Assange neither represents us nor has our best interests in mind.

Assange is no representative of freedom or honor in my book. In my book he's a low-life self-promoting pimp of anarchy, and I imagine what goes around will certainly come around to him.

If you want to leak a few documents about the Iraq war as part of informing the public that it's not going well, then fine, more power to you. Hell I'll contribute to your defense fund. The truth has to be free. But if you're going to dump all the state department cables from countries all over the planet on the internet, then you have attacked my country. And while I'm all with you and fully support getting to an open society, that doesn't even begin to forgive an act of war like this.

This discussion has gotten to absolutes -- people are arguing that _everything_ needs to be open. Other people are arguing that _everything_ must be secret. The truth is that neither position is going to work, and I have to say I'm pretty pissed at Assange at taking such a serious issue like openness and crapping all over it. He's done more harm to his own cause with this than his opponents could ever help to accomplish. For the next ten years we'll have story after story trickle out about what harm this has caused. It will make a nice backdrop to even further draconian security measures.

There is a space between anarchy and the security state. Let's find that spot and live there.

<comment><USER4> I feel like they are allowed to keep their secrets provided they don't make something secret just because it might make them look bad or because it's illegal.

Remember, everything they do...they do in our name.

<comment><USER28> By law, information may not be classified merely because it would be embarrassing or to cover illegal activity. Information may only be classified to protect national-security objectives/interests.

I imagine this release is more contentious since it undoubtedly contains sources, methods, and likely personal opinions of the diplomatic corps and the clandestine services operating under the guise of the diplomatic corp.

<comment><USER27> My guess is that to the average person nothing much of import will be revealed -- but I could be wrong. In either case, I don't think the short-term fallout is important.

What's completely insane (in my view) is that the diplomacy corps of the United States may have just been damaged beyond repair. It could take a generation or more to recover from this, and it could hurt a hell of a lot of people. Even if you hate the United States, that's a lot of collateral damage on the path to openness. There are a lot of very serious things going on in the world, and people have spent their entire lives getting into position to help nations come to agreement over various things. These do sneaky things, sure, but they also prevent wars. Getting rid of them by exposing all of their reports and identities is whacked, not to mention the damage to foreign governments when it comes out who has been secretly helping whom.

The far-reaching impact could truly be mind-boggling in scale. And it wouldn't surprise me at all to see it all being greeted with silence from around the world -- there's really no point in anybody making a spectacle of reacting.

I can't help but feel that this is going to be very destabilizing to a lot of nations. And U.S. secrecy is not going to be affected at all. If anything it will just increase to more insane levels beyond where it already is.

<comment><USER29> I think there's a lot of value in all our cards being on the table, for everyone. We are playing at just about every table, and this is not a zero-sum game.

I think one of the most important things to recognize here is that we're not the only ones whose cards have been revealed. It sounds like there's verification the Chinese government was behind the attacks against Google, Yahoo and the rest. That's a big deal, and it could hurt China.

I also think that in general, having a clear understanding of US goals makes it easier to come up with creative solutions that benefit all. It does also potentially make it easier to screw the US over - but frankly that's difficult to do, and I'd say given the power the US wields, any direct action against US interests comes with strong likelihood that it's a net negative for both the opposing power and the US. Win-win situations, when you can come up with them, carry far less risk. But you can't come up with win-win situations when people are holding their cards close to their chest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Looks like the Guardian have gone live with this already...

<http://grab.by/grabs/1f0906251076b904622300ccf4496b71.png>

</comment><comment><USER31> "The US state department has said the release will put many lives at risk."

Yes, because the US government clearly has great concern for unnecessary loss of life :-/

<comment><USER25> It does. Especially under McChrystal there were numerous deaths of American soldiers due to the very restrictive ROEs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Off topic, but I had to ask this: Am I the only one here that thinks that this upcoming leak will pose a threat to the national security and should be stopped?

<comment><USER33> The national security of what country? I suspect it could improve the security and life of some affected countries. If there was no exploitation and shady operations that seriously harm others, there would not be such excitement in the US government.

<comment><USER32> The national security of all countries involved. Sensitive diplomatic information is often better handled by diplomats. Unleashed to the masses, it may cause unnecessary aggression, maybe even riots somewhere. Not to mention that it puts a lot of people's lives at risk.

<comment><USER34> Best handled by diplomats? Because us unwashed masses can't handle the truth, public debate just second-guesses those who are in charge, and we should really leave the important things to the ruling class?

<comment><USER32> Just take a walk in the mall today and tell me if you think _those_ people are ready to handle the truth.

<comment><USER33> This discussion could circle for ages.

Maybe _those people_ are like they are because they are living in a glittery facade world based on ignorance for too long?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> national security has a direct-line relationship to the bottom line of u.s. startups... we get to witness the dividing of those who will make an atom bomb, and those who will not.

(i.e. if your business depends on imperialism, you are an imperialist. now consider oil and hegemony)</comment>


Web fonts, boy, I don't know - <AUTHOR> http://meowni.ca/posts/web-fonts/ <comment><USER3> I have had the exact experience in the last month. Being on a slow connection, I've come to loath web fonts. There is nothing wrong with them in general but it's just that they've come to symbolise over-indulgence and a myopia towards the users actual task-focused needs as opposed to aesthetics.

Part of the issue is dealing with progressive enhancement as far as slow internet connections go. How do you solve that problem? There is no native browser API to my knowledge that does not depend on using JS which isn't ideal imo.

Would love an attribute on script and link tags that could be conditional based on connection speeds.

P.S Would also encourage those who have the choice to use system fonts ([https://medium.design/system- shock-6b1dc6d6596f](https://medium.design/system-shock-6b1dc6d6596f)) instead of web fonts. Seems more in-line with the spirit of the web and these fonts are very well tested in general.

<comment><USER4> As much as I believe font matters, I really think people should just use system fonts in general. No content is definitely more annoying than ugly content, but I have a seething hatred for webpages who jump around as content loads. "Let's click on this link... ah, not that link, let's go back. Yes, this link... NO! STOP MOVING!"

Besides, I'm used to my fonts. I know your fonts are a deliberate design choice, but I'm here for content. Maybe I'm just a neophyte, because I think a smaller cleaner website is better than a reactive design that has to constantly change to cram everything in. I don't care though, it's stupid when I have to wait 10 seconds for a page to load on my home connection because you've got so much crap going on, and all the while the content is jumping around like a frog with it's butt on fire.

If your site sucks, I'm not going to whine about it on twitter, I'm just going to stop visiting.

<comment><USER5> _" Let's click on this link... ah, not that link, let's go back. Yes, this link... NO! STOP MOVING!"_

This is my #1 complaint about reddit. Not due to fonts; but rather when I load reddit on my phone, a "get the reddit app" banner appears... timed perfectly so that my attempt to view my messages sends me off to the app store.

<comment><USER6> Heck, this is my #1 complaint of almost anything on a mobile browser. It's easily the worst offender when it comes to mobile in general; I wish browser vendors put a bigger focus on fixing this, somehow.

<comment><USER7> Google is fixing it, but it's punishing them in search, not Chrome.

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/google-to-punish- sit...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/google-to-punish-sites-that- use-intrusive-pop-over-ads/)

<comment><USER8> Which will lead to the same hack as paywalled news sites, the ads won't load when referred from google meanwhile the rest will suffer.

<comment><USER9> So users reaching a site through google have a better experience than users accessing it through some other method? This seems like a pretty good thing from Google's perspective...

<comment><USER10> Sounds like a good reason to build a plugin to always sets the http referrer header to google.com on certain news sites.

<comment><USER11> Is there any good reason for having the "Referer:" tag at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My feeling on web fonts is that that they can sometimes look nice but aren't worth the page weight. My approach is to pick two fonts I expect MacOS and Windows to have, then fall back to generic. Other times, I'm more lazy and just use the generic.

To put it more bluntly: [https://bestmotherfucking.website/#remote- fonts](https://bestmotherfucking.website/#remote-fonts)

<comment><USER13> >that link

Nice. I was only familiar with the original one; I wasn't aware that there were more. It appears to be the most recent one? I was hoping to find a comprehensive list of this kind of site somewhere but didn't. I did find these by following some breadcrumbs:

      1. http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ [original]
      2. http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
      3. http://evenbettermotherfucking.website/
      4. https://bestmotherfucking.website/ [yours]
      5. https://thebestmotherfuckingwebsite.co/ [with extra satire]

I don't think #3 is a particularly strong example, though. I don't think it looks _bad_ \- In fact I think it looks good; my personal site uses monospace fonts - but I think it adds too much to make its point effectively.

#4's criticism of #3 is spot on, and its mention of Let's Encrypt, gzip and caching make it my new favorite. Thanks!

<comment><USER14> And one more: [https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pres/KpMqqB](https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pres/KpMqqB)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yes, web fonts often suck on slow connections. Meanwhile, on fast-ish connections, I find the FOUC effect to be greatly annoying. That 1-2 seconds of seeing Times and Helvetica and then seeing Freight Text Pro and Proxima Nova drives me bonkers. I think there must be some kind of happy medium between FOUC for faster connections and rage-inducing FOIC for slow connections. Unfortunately, most devs (and sadly I claim to be one) don't test their sites frequently on a range of connection speeds so it's common to have badly-tuned font dynamics on sites.

Bottom line: as someone who cares about design and visual experiences, I _don 't_ think the answer is just accept and live with FOUC everywhere. Browsers and dev tooling both need to improve in order to find that happy medium.

<comment><USER16> I think the Chrome behaviour (display invisible content for a while, then after a timeout render using fallback fonts) would be a happy compromise were the timeout not three whole seconds.

font-display: optional and font-display: fallback (as linked in the article) look like promising solutions to the problem (both recommend a FOIC aka 'block period' of 100ms), but it'd be even nicer to set the exact duration of the block and swap periods in CSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The HN crowd frequently compliments Stripe on their good looking, functional, well designed web pages. The Stripe home page is 75% web fonts (432k).

<comment><USER18> To be fair, 500k, at least compared to some webpages, is actually a fairly small size. This isn't really a case where a percent of the total is useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm regularly annoyed by the flash when loading the Docker documentation, e.g. [http://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/](http://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/)

It's annoying enough to warrant using Stylish to override the web font.

<comment><USER20> Is this because of the web fonts or because of markdown rendering?

<comment><USER19> It is the web fonts, if I override 'body' and 'body p' then it loads quickly (the content does anyway, sidebars still flicker).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been slowly adding the contents of Google Fonts into my system fonts storage as I see them used on sites that I visit often. Things like Open Sans and Roboto for instance are quite common.

I think there would probably be a good case for an extension to automate that in some fashion for fonts with known open licenses (essentially anything from Google Fonts, for example) to go ahead and just install them into the system.

There was at least one HN commenter I've seen that has claimed to just go ahead and install _all_ of Google Fonts locally, which might be a bit extreme, but even automating that isn't necessarily a bad idea.

<comment><USER22> If someone uses the Google CDN to load the font does the browser/website even look to see if the font is loaded on your local computer?

<comment><USER23> Assuming they're using pure CSS for the font loading (which is standard for Google's CDN), yes, the browser will use a local copy in preference. (There's a way to disable that in CSS's font spec, although it's hard to think of a good use for that.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For anyone missing the WW reference: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvr1T1sFvEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvr1T1sFvEg)

<comment><USER25> After instinctively reading the headline in a Rob Ritchie voice I am realizing I may have watched the West Wing too many times.

<comment><USER26> Currently on my fourth viewing of the series :)

It's the only show I can watch over-and-over again.

<comment><USER27> I'm pretty sure I've seen it at least 10 times now. I may have a problem.

That said, it helped me get through a (terrible) US Government class back in college. There's a surprising amount of useful information in that series.

<comment><USER28> There should be a 10x club (support group?). I think I've seen it about that many times, too. My favorite thing is how often Sorkin reuses the exact same lines throughout all of his works. I'm assuming this is 100% intentional, but haven't ruled out the possibility he was simply too high to remember what he wrote previously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> For God's sake man, don't leave a huge, fast gif infinitely looping where I can see it while trying to read your blog post. Make it activate after I scroll down to a certain point, or on hover, or _anything_ that doesn't make me feel like I'm trying to read through a strobe light.

<comment><USER30> Honestly, gifs in blog posts instantly add 50 years to my age.

Before you give me the No Fun Allowed badge, let me explain:

I'm probably reading your post because I'm searching for something, in a hurry ( _software: it breaks apart!_ ). When I see a gif or beat-up meme in a software-related post, it does the opposite of lightening the mood.

<comment><USER31> It also does the opposite of lightening the page load. The amount of bandwidth I've wasted due to silly animated gifs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Badly engineered, multi-purpose WordPress themes are my favorite on that matter. Not only they make you download the entire set of assets ( Think of ~2 icon fonts, half a megabyte stylesheets, megabytes of JS and on top of that 5$ DO box serving all the PHP `magic` ), but also include some entrance animations, which take additional time, before you focus on the content.

Actually this reminds me of the IoT DDoS attack. The low-tech users, making a blog by clicking around and installing 25$ theme are actually unaware that their website drains mobile-bandwidth.

So if you are developing one of these portfolio-with-landing-page-with-blog- section-woo-commerce-supported mega theme, please consider optimizing assets as your next priority.

<comment><USER33> Most of these are premade themes from themeforest or other similar marketplaces. The devs have no incentive to optimize their themes as they are usually bought by non-tech people and they don't know how adding five different fonts in their website makes it really hard to load and render.

<comment><USER34> This is true, they don't understand how 5+ fonts make it hard to load and render. But they do care about bandied about stats like 83% of people will leave a site if it doesn't load in -0.3 milliseconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Are there actually font blockers like ad blockers? That would solve the problem pretty easily for everybody who's annoyed. Although they probably won't be available for mobile browsers, where it's the most painful.

<comment><USER36> about:config

search for webfonts.enabled. change to false.

alternatively, install noscript extension to have a UI with whitelist.

if you are not using Firefox, then i have no sympaty. wait until google cares about you.

<comment><USER37> Also, in preferences, you can uncheck the box that allows sites to choose fonts. After I saw your comment I fired up Chrome to check and was surprised that there seems to be no option for this.

<comment><USER36> Reason there is no option on chrome: google serves 99.9% of the fonts online for "free".

That means every site with a custom font from google now leaks the page and time you are accessing to them.

Same reason they forbid disabling 3rd party referrer on chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Are web fonts smart enough to download only the symbols that you're using? With Unicode growing all the time, and fonts supporting significant parts of that total set, it would be insane to have to download hundreds of thousands of symbols when you're just trying to write a 3-word headline.

Another problem is aggressive filtering, oddly. I once visited China and found my entire web site wouldn't load; it turned out to be triggered by a font from a Google domain. How silly for _content_ to be thrown out because an optional _style_ element is unavailable. I have since stripped out all my Google dependencies.

<comment><USER39> Nope, I don't think so. It would be hard to pull off as you might be using the font on an <input> and the user could type any character. Or you could be pulling text in through an XHR and won't know in advance what characters will be returned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> For web fonts in emails, look no further than my latest package `custom-fonts- in-emails` for Node.js.

[https://github.com/crocodilejs/custom-fonts-in- emails#custom...](https://github.com/crocodilejs/custom-fonts-in- emails#custom-fonts-in-emails)

<comment><USER41> pretty cool. love the fast-levenshtein addition - can't tell you how many times user error has killed me (used the wrong extension or missed a letter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I feel like all developers should be forced to load their site over Amtrak wifi....

<comment><USER43> Chrome Dev Tools have an option to simulate loading over slower connections (2G, 3G, etc). Not one for Amtrak wifi though ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Fonts ought to have Subresource Integrity checksums, and clients should cache them effectively, even cross-site. It's not like they change much.

<comment><USER45> This has been tried and failed many times in the past with other things. The biggest problems are with what a "canonical" version actually is, and security.

Browser cache sizes are already too small to effectively cache things for one origin for any significant amount of time, and when you try to introduce cross-site caching you quickly run into a few issues.

The big one for fonts is that you very rarely include a WHOLE font in your site, you generally include a subset of codes that you care about (if you are targeting english speaking users, no need to include russian characters...). But in addition to this, unless everyone everywhere agrees to load a specific version, file encoding, file format, compression format, compression settings, and more, the checksums will be so spread out as to be basically be useless. While it's less of an issue with fonts vs something like .js files, it can still be a problem.

And someone else already touched on the security issue, but to go into more detail. At the very least, caching ANYTHING cross-origin lets any page you load probe for things in your cache. To use a bit of an absurdist example, A government website could try to load fonts used on a popular "terrorist" website, and if it gets a cache hit, they can immediately be pretty sure you have been on the site recently. The size of most caches, and the propensity for people to clear their cache (or use private browsing) means that this only gets more and more accurate.

It's one of those things that sounds like a great idea on the surface, but in the end it would end up causing more issues than it solves. That being said, I believe there is a proposal somewhere for a standard along these lines, but I can't seem to find it any more.

<comment><USER44> _Browser cache sizes are already too small to effectively cache things for one origin for any significant amount of time, and when you try to introduce cross-site caching you quickly run into a few issues._

Oh? We have browsers eating a gigabyte of RAM now.

<comment><USER45> Which has nothing to do with cache sizes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I find web fonts so annoying, along with images that don't load until you scroll to them. I usually read in Reader mode, and it takes the loaded page and re-renders it without web fonts in a normal style. But when the site doesn't load all the images, I end up missing half the article because I can't see what they're talking about. So annoying.

</comment><comment><USER47> Why are GIFs in articles a thing? Can anyone focus on the words while they are looping in the corner of your eye? I always open the inspector and delete the elements, but it is annoying to do that every time.

<comment><USER48> The GIFs are fine - although I get the impression that they weren't put through an optimizer.

Converting GIFs to autoplay=false videos is still a miserable experience with kinda awful results. Not to mention that it takes forever.

<comment><USER31> Surely any screen recording software can output as a video format? Converting from video > gif > video would produce a janky output.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I blame the browsers. There's no deep reason you have to introduce a piece of javascript to hide stuff from the browser so that it can load the page normally, and then add back the fonts. If browsers cared about making the web usable for everybody more than they cared about making web page look like slick native apps, they'd do it for you.

The way browser internals work is already designed for that. if the network is slow and you get only half the html, half the css, miss some images, or whatever, the browser will render as best as it can with what it got so far, and re-render when it gets the rest. The fact that it doesn't do that with fonts sucks.

</comment><comment><USER50> In truth, if web design took seriously the constraint of bad network connections, the result would be much different to what we have today. This is but one example.

(And to be totally honest, if the author took that constraint seriously this page would be different as well.)

But in that world, things would be less pretty and less flashy, and that stuff means more to people than they would care to admit.

<comment><USER30> If there was a way to progressively enhance based on available resources (connection speed, usage metering, device performance, battery charge) we wouldn't have to compromise.

As it is, you either design something really bare for the worst connection (which works for some content, but not all, and keeps us from effectively using the power we have in our devices) and serve it for all devices/connections, or design something for a mid-tier device/connection, which amounts to a bad experience on weak devices/connections and an _unimaginative_ experience on better devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I despise icon fonts with a raging passion. It feels like we're back in 8 bit time where we're using sprites for things that Man Wasn't Meant To Do with them.

Web fonts as real world fonts are kinda-sorta okay. Although it's yet another area where "All the world's a VAX" can proliferate, when designers think everyone's got the Windows font engine or their MacBook/iPhone's Hippidippi display.

</comment><comment><USER52> All web developers should be forced to spend a full week using their site on each of LTE, 3g, and 2g. If your website takes more than 10 seconds to load on an ad-block free LTE device you're fired.

Relevant: Page Weight Matters (2012) [http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page- weight-matters](http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters)

<comment><USER53> There is absolutely nothing forcing people to use the internet through their phones, so I see no reason to force developers to optimize for it.

Some people eat their food through a tube, but you wouldn't force every cook to prepare all of their food to be eaten through a straw. And there you at least have a moral argument.

<comment><USER52> Yes. Why would developers optimize for the platform that the majority of users use? Truly a question for the ages.

<comment><USER53> _ALL_ web developers. All. That word means something.

Just because something is popular doesn't mean everyone needs to cater to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I think the easiest solution would be just not to use web fonts at all. Do you need fancy fonts on a website with technical documentation? I think you don't but sadly PHP developers added a whole megabyte of fonts to PHP manual. As a result one has to wait until the fonts are loaded to see the text.

And web fonts are often poorly rendered on Windows.

I want an option in Chromium that would allow disabling web fonts by default and enabling them on a per-site basis (like it has an option for disabling JS). And what surprises me most is that mobile browsers (which are often used on slow and metered connections) do not have such options at all.

I remember old Opera browser that is now long gone had a lot of options to make user experience better on poor connections (and a builtin domain block list). Well, at those times internet users had higher average IQ and now typical Internet user would not even understand what is the meaning of "disable JS".

<comment><USER55> > I think the easiest solution would be just not to use web fonts at all.

Here's another option: plain text.

That's right. You can have webpages that are plain text without any HTML formatting, and they will render.

Here is an example file:

      This is text.

This is the absolute best way of presenting web content. No one will complain.

<comment><USER56> > This is the absolute best way of presenting web content. No one will > complain.

Not sure if this is a joke or not, most people would complain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I absolutely do not understand the need for 'web fonts'. Just specify a normal font that most users already have installed in CSS, with some fallbacks.

'Progressive styling' is way more annoying (in my humble opinion) than waiting some time. Pages like the verge can take minutes anyway, when the wifi is not optimal. When you do things progressively, the page just keeps on changing, and the page can't really be used. So if you have a long page with text, and the user is somewhere halfway, the font loads and... BOOM! You are reading text that is located 8 paragraphs from where you were reading one instant ago.

This is far more annoying with images which dont specify their size, but I would still consider it bad practice to use an uncommon font for non-artistic pages.

<comment><USER58> The shifting page layout is a symptom of a broader problem, in that it's impossible to accurately predict or specify the rendered dimensions of text. Even measuring a container after the fact is unreliable because of the arbitrary amount of whitespace in different fonts. You'd have to generate a bitmap image and detect a bounding box around the pixels, which definitely won't help with loading times. This can't be done at development time because different browsers and system configurations all render the same fonts slightly differently. So, even sticking with system fonts to avoid this one symptom, we have this giant elephant in the room making it difficult to ensure anything but the most primitive layouts will be legible across devices.

<comment><USER59> Seems like it could at least be mitigated on the browser's side though: "This text was at the top of the viewport before the restyling, so let's scroll the document to the point where that text still appears at the top."

<comment><USER60> The text in column 1, 2, or 3? Or perhaps you were reading the text in the footer at the time that the page decided to slap on its makeup?

<comment><USER59> Yeah, so it clearly can't solve everything, hence "mitigate" instead of e.g. "completely solve". In any case, I'd argue that 90% of the time it's better than doing nothing at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I had a very strong impression that the quality of Web typography took a colossal nosedive when web fonts became a thing. My suspicion at the time was that this was largely a result of designers pushing pet fonts that looked fine on their Mac but like crap on other OSes (due to different rendering/hinting algos); can't prove that, though.

I did try disabling web fonts in Firefox, but then that semi-broke sites like GitHub who seemed to think that using them to display UI button images was a good idea. This is why we can't have nice things. And why designers are sometimes held in less esteem than they might like.

</comment><comment><USER62> I had the exact same problem in China last month, only worse because I was also going through a crowded VPN. The only page I could reliably load before losing patience was Hacker News.

The best workaround I found was to load Opera Mini and crank up the compression proxy. It's annoying though, if Opera Mini can automatically compress the page's imaging and formatting, why can't the web server do the same?

We can nag designers/developers all day long about web fonts and whatnot, but at the end of the day, only an automated solution is going to actually get put into regular use.

</comment><comment><USER63> it's easy enough to edit web fonts to include only necessary characters, but most EULAs won't allow for this. any font licensed under the SIL open font license is fine, though you may have to change the font's name if it has a reserved font name (check the license file). this makes a _huge_ difference (fonts under 10k), but no one ever bothers to do it. not sure if inlining them as base64 in your CSS and serving with gzip would help much more.

a lot of the stuff that we do in font editors is going to start happening in- browser. variable fonts that use two masters (the thinnest and heaviest font weights) to interpolate all the other weights in-browser are an emerging standard that will get font sizes down[0]. you're essentially being sent two fonts over the wire that can generate quite a few more. font files are bloated in a number of ways. eventually we'll have a standard where diacritics like ¨´ etc can automatically be added to letters without the need for an entirely separate glyph. (å,a,á,ä, are currently separate, which is very expensive).

google, adobe, and other big players are hard at work on this stuff, and it won't be long. there are pain points now, for sure, but to me this isn't an argument in favor of system fonts. most of web design is typography design, and anyone who says otherwise probably hasn't been designing for the web very long.

0\. [http://blog.typekit.com/2016/09/14/variable-fonts-a-new- kind...](http://blog.typekit.com/2016/09/14/variable-fonts-a-new-kind-of-font- for-flexible-design/)

</comment><comment><USER64> Web page should just disable web fonts, if they are not loaded after 1 second and reenable them, when they are loaded. It's not hard to do and it's greatly improves usability. Actually it would be nice, if browsers would do it automatically, show system font, if web font is not cached and it's not going to be ready in the next few milliseconds. Anything better than white page.

<comment><USER17> Chrome does something like this already. I think it's something the browser should take care of, rather than having every site use some half-baked JS solution which ends up just adding to the bloat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> What fonts are available in recent versions of all major operating systems? So what are the "web safe" fonts of 2016?

<comment><USER66> There are no more guarantees about which font is installed, although you will probably get a decent match if you use one of the old Microsoft core fonts (Verdana, Times New Roman, etc.). Just don't expect the exact font; often you will get a font that matches the metrics for the one you've chosen as a fall- back for those (once) popular fonts.

In any case, you can always safely specify one of these font groups: sans- serif, serif, monospace. These will give you the user's default font for that broad category of typefaces. No guarantees about which font you will get though.

If you do want to leverage installed fonts, you can craft a decent so-called font-stack that will cover a lot of fonts typically installed on various OSes. For instance, you might specify:

        /* Just an example, these do not necessarily match. */
        "DejaVu Sans", "Bitstream Vera Sans", "Droid Sans", Verdana, sans-serif;

Again, no guarantees, that is why we have web-fonts.

Also, I am probably missing something, but don't you just get the fall-back font (e.g., whatever matches sans-serif) with a web-font as long as you specify one? Isn't that common CSS knowledge among developers?

<comment> angry-hacker You do get fallback but might experience FOIT and other nasty things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> As she's in Taiwan, she might have mentioned that webfonts, despite any pros and cons they have for western language sites, will never (never say "never"...) be useful for Chinese or Japanese sites. A bit off the topic of the article but maybe adds some perspective. Or not.

</comment><comment><USER68> The gripes are valid and some of the links about fixing it are good content.

I'm starting to sound old, but "back in my day" people would use the 'media' parameter in link tags to load mobile-specific stylesheets. Has this practice died out? If so, why?

<comment> angry-hacker You can do it but designers want consistency on every device pixel perfect bla bla. All major OS providers should included in all the Google fonts by default and we can move on with our lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I wish that system fonts could be told the size of the characters of a web font upfront, before the web font was loaded. The system font's glyphs should smoothly fade/morph into the target webfont once it is loaded.

To solve the problem generally would be difficult or equivalent to the effort/data required to download the web font in the first place, but there may be a quick and dirty solution that covers 99% of text in the wild. The easiest case is monos paced fonts. Is there really an excuse why the system font can't be told via Css what spacing/height to use to match the target webfont?

<comment><USER69> To be more explicit, it is insane that we find it acceptable for text to reflow/ break over lines at different points once the web font is loaded. There is something that bugs me -- On the one hand we are being considerate and trying to make the reading experience pleasant. On the other hand we are being careless creators of jank. Maybe jank is something that primarily irritates nerds and I am overreacting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I'm mystified by how many major sites have terrible usability issues on mobile devices that are used widely. (older iDevices cheap-mid level Android phones).

Are the proprietors of these sites, which live and die on their traffic, actually unaware of how bad the experience is?

Or are the proprietors oblivious because they always have the latest iPhone or Galaxy? Are the developers oblivious too, or are they keeping their bosses in the dark?

Or are the business requirements for the sight so absolutely needed, and it is simply hard to make it work?

Anyone able to venture a perspective on this?

<comment><USER71> >Are the proprietors oblivious because they always have the latest iPhone or Galaxy?

Probably. They can say "I've checked it on mobile".

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> This is one of the reasons I browse with all web fonts disabled.

<comment><USER73> My primary reason is that I don't view a page on the same display and machine as the author, so more often than not the presentation is sub-optimal or entirely unreadable locally. Custom fonts are similarly abused like low- contrast text (grey on white).

Also loading via JavaScript and changing the fonts of an already rendered page disrupts my reading. If you want remote fonts, load them from the beginning, or if this isn't possible, just don't, please.

Another justification for disabling remote fonts is that it's one security critical interpreter of complex data which, when disabled, doesn't adversely affect the presentation, whereas on most pages disabling images does and cannot reasonably be disabled. The latter justification may go away with Mozilla's Oxidation efforts with time, leaving just loading time and readability as arguments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Problem is that lazy loading will introduce a flicker on fast connections or if the font is already in browser's cache since re-rendering of the page takes some amount of time (more content, slower it will be). And if you have multiple pages, this means this will affect even people on slow connections on every page except the first one. So it's not a win-win solution, one side will have more or less degraded experience.

</comment><comment><USER75> That invisible ink at the top is a good subtle touch.

</comment><comment><USER76> One thing this completely missed are non-Latin script. For example, the default Thai font on Windows is just plain ugly.

</comment><comment><USER77> Off topic, but the first paragraph mentioned using 2G mobile internet in Taiwan... why!? 4G is cheap and plentiful there.

[https://guidetotaipei.com/article/cell-phones-and-sim- cards](https://guidetotaipei.com/article/cell-phones-and-sim-cards)

($100 TW = $3.18 US)

<comment><USER78> I was roaming! T-mobile gives me free 2G when roaming, and I don't like temporary SIM cards because nobody knows how to call me if there's an emergency :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I just gave up on web fonts and go with Georgia, Arial and a sensible set of fallbacks (although I try Menlo instead of Courier first, because it's ugly in retina)

</comment><comment><USER80> Ehhh. Slowness has its benefits. But you need to know the fallout that will result.

</comment><comment><USER81> I got a message from my provider to say they are closing down their 2G network next year since hardly anyone uses it and they want to reuse the bandwidth for something else. Maybe this protocol will die out soon.

</comment><comment><USER82> When you hover on the links they flash like a 90's era webpage horror, why? is this what the cool kids do now?

</comment><comment><USER83> Really love the title, nice article.

</comment><comment><USER84> Custom fonts and web fonts are fine... if they are stored on the same web server, so they load with the document.

Images are fine... if you specify the width and height so the page doesn't jump around while the page loads.

Menus and top bars that change when you scroll down are never acceptable. It's distracting and unnecessary.

Goofy background and image effects in general are very annoying if they are synced with page scrolling. It reminds me of a child's pop-up book.

</comment><comment><USER85> A 1.2 MB blog post complaining about bloat.

<comment><USER86> You do realize sometimes it's _okay_ to have a page larger than, say, 50kb. Right? The gifs were a great way to show the exact issues she was discussing and they take up the bulk of that space. So why is that a bad thing in any way?

Yes web pages should, _ideally_ , be small but that doesn't mean the media they show to the user has to be small as well.

<comment><USER85> >You do realize sometimes it's okay to have a page larger than, say, 50kb. Right?

50KB isn't anywhere near 1.2MB. Did you mean 500KB?

The blog post specifically mentioned an experience on a 2g connection, and the bloat associated with webfonts.

Webfonts seem to typically be in the 50KB - 150KB range.

I just find it ironic to complain about bloat from one type of artifact, in a blog post that uses even larger artifacts to make that point.

<comment><USER87> The article's point is that all text not rendering cripples a page. Not seeing a specific image for a while, especially one that's relatively optional, is fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> > awesome free roaming 2G

So instead of fixing the real problem - which is obviously connectivity - <USER2> need to break the web and add another layer of Javascript complexity to something that works perfectly fine without.

It's 2016. 2G is 25 years old (started in 1991!). Stop being cheap. Stop working with 2G.

<comment><USER89> I think you're used to the developed world. Here in India, most of the places (except big cities) only get 2G. 3G towers are being laid and will probably be operational in 2-3 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> If she cares so much about the experience, why does she use an iphone after all?!?

</comment><comment><USER91> Tl;dr: if you are travelling in a foreign country and you think about whatever fonts... girl, you are doing it totally wrong. Buy a city guide, printed on good old fashioned paper, even if it is so 1990, and get a fuck off-line! Or just talk to the natives! In person!

<comment><USER92> I think you are a bit off with your comment. Having a web connection makes traveling much nicer. The authors mistake was not pre purchasing a data sim with a fast connection. Amateur traveler complaining about nonsense

<comment><USER91> The next time I pick up a chick I chatted up on a trip and I can't find back to my b'n'b because we both are so wasted and I don't have internet connection to use google maps I hope you will be there. At first to be able to use your 4G phone and at second to prove you how wrong you are.

<comment><USER92> Did you read my comment? Get a data plan before you travel and you'll be slow internet proof.

<comment><USER91> Did you read my comment? I do not want to be [paste an "indispensable" first world service] proof if I am in a foreign country because it kills the advanture and makes me thinking about fonts and cats.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"A child born today will conservatively live 200 years" - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/609684/how-to-be-a-futurist/ <comment><USER2> A child born today, unless they're upper class, would be lucky to have a job in 2050.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's pretty scary (can't say why) when thinking of my kids (3/5 yo).

<comment><USER4> Don't worry; the prediction is wrong.

Now: Do you find my comment _less_ scary? Or _more?_</comment></comment>


Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords & 17 Others Shot in Tucson - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/us/politics/09giffords.html?_r=1&hp <comment><USER2> Also a Federal Judge from Arizona was shot dead.

"Ms. Giffords, who represents Arizona's Eighth District in the southeastern corner of the state, has been an outspoken critic of Arizona's tough immigration law, which is focused on identifying, prosecuting and deporting illegal immigrants, and she had come under criticism for her vote in favor of the Democrats' health care law.

Friends said she had received threats over the years. Judge Roll had been involved in immigration cases and had previously received death threats. "</comment>


[video] Introduction to Functional Programming - <AUTHOR> http://ontwik.com/erlang/introduction-to-functional-programming/

<comment><USER2> Apparently there is 'no mobile version of this video'. Which might be nice to know, had it not been for the fact that I am on a regular old desktop with a cable connection.</comment>


Maker Studios Says Disney Acquisition Is Approved by Shareholders - <AUTHOR> http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/relativity-offers-up-to-900-million-for-maker-studios-in-bid-to-outflank-disney-1201156736/

<comment><USER2> "The Journal cited a "person close to the Disney-Maker deal" as saying the companies have a binding agreement and that the "Relativity bid would have no effect on it.""

And...

" Disney also said it has signed employment agreements with Maker's senior management team."

I have a feeling this deal isn't going to go through.

</comment><comment><USER3> Who are the owners of Maker Studios?

<comment><USER4> [http://www.makerstudios.com/about](http://www.makerstudios.com/about)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-04-14/disney-wins- back...](http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-04-14/disney-wins-backing-of- maker-studios-investors-over-relativity)

Has some more details.

 _Danny Zappin, a former CEO of Maker Studios, and three co-founders unsuccessfully sought in court to block a vote on the Disney takeover, saying the notice to shareholders was misleading._

> So, that's now out of the way apparently.</comment>


The Economics of Writing a Book - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/can-authors-make-money-selling-books/ <comment><USER2> Minor nit here:

 _Generally, publishers don't just accept submissions from any aspiring author. They go through agents. So you must first convince an agent that you will be a lucrative investment. As a rule, agents take 15% of everything you make from a book._

Speaking as an author, I love my agent. My agent is _on commission_ , on my side. A good accountant is supposed to save you more money than they cost you; a good agent will actually _make you more money_. The agent's job is to match your book with the right editor, or if there's more than one who's likely to buy it they run an auction: once they've got you a publisher they then squeeze as much money out of the publisher as possible -- publishers _always_ low-ball the advance and terms they offer an unrepresented author -- and then vet the contract small-print for landmines. A survey an author of my acquaintance conducted about five years ago came up with statistics for agented vs. un- agented books in the SF/F field (which is what I write), polling professional authors on a mailing list; in general, the book advances of authors who go through agents are between 150% and 200% of those received by unagented authors.

The benefits of an agent are likely to be lower for a non-fic author who writes technical/business books on an irregular basis -- but still reasonable. But for a fiction author who eats or starves on the basis of pushing out at least one book a year, the agent's ability to market the author and push their career track is essential.

They are, after all, on commission. And the more they can earn for the author, the more they get to take home too.

<comment><USER3> That stands to reason, however, do I decide to read a given book because it is a 'find' of a given agent or published by a given publisher? Or do I read something because it is heavily promoted? More importantly, do women - as in those people that actually read a lot of books and keep the publishing industry afloat - do they care about those behind the scenes that have marketed a given book?

If a book comes from a word-of-mouth recommendation or if it is by a favourite author then that will be sufficient to make the purchasing decision. Reviews on Amazon are sufficient to make the purchasing decision. To a large extent a book sells on merit and someone taking the self-publishing route with something that people really do want to read and tell the world about can make a success of it. They were not able to do so before the e-book revolution came along, they were beholden to agents and publishers. Yes, people in the publishing trade secretly fear 'they don't need us...!'

Here is something:

[http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially- rej...](http://www.literaryrejections.com/best-sellers-initially-rejected/)

A good reading list (Da Vinci Code and a few others excepted).

<comment><USER4> _" do I decide to read a given book because it is a 'find' of a given agent or published by a given publisher? Or do I read something because it is heavily promoted?"_

The former makes the latter more likely. A good agent will:

* get a better advance for the author, which makes it more likely the book will actually get finished

* be on the author's case to get the book finished and out (otherwise less money for them).

* negotiate better promotion with the publishers

* be on the publishers case to make sure that what was agreed actually happens

* etc. etc.

All of which make it more likely that the book gets published, gets promoted, and so seen, and so read, and for that word-of-mouth to kick off ;-)

As for the number of successful authors who were rejected. That's to be expected. Publishers are the VCs of the book industry. They say "no" a lot, and most of the people they say "yes" to aren't hugely successful. Every VC has said no to a successful company. Every publisher has said no to a successful author. They doesn't mean either group are necessarily failing as a whole.

To push the analogy - not everybody needs a VC. Some people can bootstrap. Some people are happy taking on the extra load of marketing, financing, producing, distributing, advertising, editing, admin, etc. etc. They find it fun and interesting and are happy to take the time to do it. Some market segments make that work considerably less than others do.

Other authors want to use that time to write.

<comment><USER5> I find the analogy to VCs interesting. In term of investing your own money (as in investing in a fund), I have seen graphs showing that VCs have a pretty bad ROI, if not the worst This is partly attributed to highly subjective decisions from a small number of like-minded individuals, which often end up in poor and mostly misapplied metrics. (I don't want this to be the debate, this is just something I have seen reported many times, and at least once on HN not too long ago, and most people seemed to agree with that, so lets assume that VCs are not a very sound way to invest your retirement money).

Is the same true for Publishers? Could make a comparison using data about this $15B revenue vs how much was spent?

Moreover, the best ROI for VC funded anything, seems to be an exit IPO. What would be the equivalent of an "IPO" for authors? A movie?

<comment><USER4> _" Is the same true for Publishers? Could make a comparison using data about this $15B revenue vs how much was spent?"_

Good question. I have no idea ;-)

I guess it might not even matter. If what you're interested in is the best way to get more good books into the world rather than make the most money. From my experiences the folk in the publishing industry I've met are more interested in the former than the latter.

The issue I was trying to highlight though is that many people seem to ignore the "invest" part of what publishers do and see them as just people who print books. The publishers advance + the publisher/agent network are an investment. And with new authors an especially risky investment.

 _" Moreover, the best ROI for VC funded anything, seems to be an exit IPO. What would be the equivalent of an "IPO" for authors? A movie?"_

I'm guessing getting a Terry Pratchett or a J. K. Rowling. That combination of talent and public zeitgeist that produces wads of cash.

<comment><USER2> Alas, you can't gamble your company on getting a Terry Pratchett or J. J. Rowling -- or a Dan Brown. Those folks come along once a decade in the worldwide English language market. The overwhelming majority of works of English language fiction sell less than 100,000 copies (hardcover, ebook, and paperback, across the North American, and UK/Commonwealth markets, and in translation); indeed, many sell fewer than 10,000 copies.

Most folks have _no_ idea how micro-targeted a niche business publishing is. The goal of a large publisher is to find a lot of these small fry and hope one or two of them will break through and make the big time; just one such author can float the rest of the midlist at a publisher for many years, raising the chance of another huge bestseller coming along.

<comment><USER4> Actually, looking at the size of investment with individual authors, I guess folk accelerator/seed folk like YC would be a better analogy than the average VC firm.... but I'm really pushing the analogy too far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After 30 years of writing both professionally and privately while I learned to code and then train teams, I finally came to the conclusion about what I am: a writer. I'm not a celebrity writer, a best-selling writer, or a major-league writer. Just a writer.

So I wrote a book. Because I have a passion for technology teams, my book was about how to create, prioritize, and manage those to-do lists of work we all have: backlogs. Because I'm a science fiction junkie, it had robots. And because I'm a Douglas Adams fan, they were robotic chickens. Plug: [http://www.amazon.com/Backlogs-1-Daniel-Markham- ebook/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/Backlogs-1-Daniel-Markham- ebook/dp/B00JESGC6U)

I'm also a startup and business junkie, so even though I was writing the book no matter what the business model, I spent some considerable time learning the economics of book publishing. There are a hell of a lot of blog articles out there titled something like "How I made Seven-Hundred Thousand Dollars publishing an E-book. And you can too!"

Meh. Not so much.

I think it's clear that self-publishing is the future. Except for the big- league authors, publishers have too much overhead to be very useful to us small fry. However the author's conclusion is correct: _" Without question, we can say that authors have extraordinary opportunities in the 21st century publishing world. It's just that making a living from book sales is rarely one of them."_ There just isn't that much money for most authors no matter what the publishing route.

The good news is that ebooks can be part of a larger conversation a writer has with his audience. In this case, the process isn't to create a "business book proposal" and then execute it; it's more like creating a community of people with similar interests, then having a conversation with them. Ebooks can be a useful part of that conversation.

Self-publishing rocks, but it's not just the old way of publishing where you do it all yourself online. Wish it were that simple.

<comment> grey-area I do agree with the other poster - a revised cover and proofreading (m ore) would make a big difference to the perceived authority of your book. As a designer I can't resist giving you some unsolicited advice here (apologies in advance, feel free to ignore):

The central image is perfect - a good photo, and says everything you need it to say. You should cut the other images (and in particular the awkward 80s perspective grid layout), and just use that one image big on the front, with the titling superimposed or on blocks of colour above and below. The result would be an instant increase in credibility.

Now perhaps the WTF chicken reflects the folksy style of the writing inside, so there is an argument for keeping that poking in from an edge (I see why you have included this), but the rest of the images and their styling absolutely do not and fight against your premise, and the green grid communicates 1980s business title.

You may also want to consider a strapline that tells people what is in the book, and why a rubber chicken features on the cover of a management book, perhaps pair the chicken with that.

<comment><USER6> Thanks guys for the great advice.

Many times HN is full of people just picking apart things because they can. This was good stuff. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking at the percentage of authors making more than $500 a year is misleading. It's never been easier to publish a book, so the pool of marginal books will grow. This doesn't necessarily reflect the prospects for serious authors.

I'm a self published author. I make around $10,000 a year from print sales. My books started as experiments. I already had e-books. I decided to turn two manuscripts into print books.

I spent about $500 and two weeks on formatting and design. I didn't copy-edit beyond what I had done myself. And I waited to see if it sold.

It did, so I turned more e-books into print books, and made new books aimed at print.

But if the books hadn't sold, I would be classed as one of the poor authors making less than $500 a year. But that would be a misleading data point, because my initial foray was rather tentative.

<comment><USER8> Could you say more about your approach to print? I'm reasonably far along with a manuscript, and now I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. LeanPub seemed nice and easy, but they don't do print.

<comment><USER7> Aaron Shepard's books give a pretty good overview of how to publish on amazon.

Createspace is pretty easy to use. If you already have a pdf you sell online, you just have to format it for print, and put a cover on it. I found a designer on elance to help me with both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's one very important service the publisher provided, which the author missed: assessing whether the book was likely to be a successes. Telling people who _won 't_ be successful not to bother (or at least, not to bother with an expensive campaign) is costly, and an important service.

Ironically, the people who pay for this service (i.e. the people who are successful) are the ones who don't really benefit from it.

<comment><USER10> LoL you have it backwards. Publishers do not have magical pre-cognition of the success of a book. We have myriad examples of them shoveling money at authors for books which bombed and we also have them turning up their noses at manuscripts which went on to earn billions. Case in point, Harry Potter.

<comment><USER9> Survivorship bias. I bet they've knocked back a lot of books which wouldn't have made a lot of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _Self-publishing [...] is historically unprecedented, providing the means > for millions of people around the world to bypass the elitism of the > publishing establishment [...]. In terms of access to a worldwide > marketplace, it is fantastically democratic. In terms of access to financial > success, it is far from it._

Just give me democratic and let's let product do the rest.

____________

Speaking of financials, another reference point to consider is selling via lulu where profit would be $6/copy (15.99sale-8print-2lulucut=6), which is not stellar but still beats amazon's predatory $4.18.

Print-on-demand and epub are nothing short of revolutionary. Suddenly the incentives are right for people to earn a living from their intellectual labour---distilling knowledge and sharing their research with others for profit. I wouldn't buy a access to a website with lots of info on a subject, but I would buy a book.

UPDATE: More thoughts on the subject: [http://minireference.com/blog/the- economics-of-writing-books...](http://minireference.com/blog/the-economics-of- writing-books-people-want/)

</comment><comment><USER12> The author of the article perhaps should have spent more time discussing the intangible benefits of writing a book.

I started writing using big name publishers and then switched to self publishing. Because of being an author I have met many very interesting people and I have received offers for interesting work. I can't quantify the value, but it is huge.

</comment><comment><USER13> " _Having one's first book published by a top five publisher conveys all kinds of non-financial kudos to the author. That prestige is hard to replace with pure sales dollars. In some cases, that prestige can lead to lucrative opportunities like speaking gigs, increased seminar sales, and better academic prospects._ "

Speaking as someone who has a very good reason for having gotten into collecting bookcases (the last one is a sweet, 7', 6-shelf oak stack with mullioned glass; when I saw it at an auction, I knew it had to come home with me), this is really kind of a strange situation.

I recognize that many people, particularly commercially published authors, see publishers as a source of prestige, which is what gives the publishers prestige, but for me a publisher is more of a liability. If I see Apress, Morgan Kaufmann, Springer, or (heaven forbid) Baen on a cover, I'm much more likely to set it aside for later rather than buy it now. Offhand, I can't think of any publisher that _adds_ something; maybe MITP, but academic books are pretty sketchy anyway.

" _The benefits from the legitimacy of a well-received book go well beyond the sales numbers, and working with an accomplished editor helped make the book a critical success, earning positive reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Review._ "

One wonders whether the editors efforts best come under the heading of "improving the book", or under "getting it on KR or PW's list".

</comment><comment><USER14> Regarding one of the links in the article, I think Dinosaur Porn has got to be up there with Bingo Cards in the department of opening your eyes to the possibilities of a niche market.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting that the main picture links to a Lifehacker article on saving money on Textbooks. Somehow I managed to click the link and load _that_ page without realising - wow did the title and first few comments here confuse me!</comment>


All September's Planned Space Launches - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2014/09/01/space-launch-schedule-for-september-2014/

<comment><AUTHOR> three SpaceX flights this month alone..</comment>


Live: Who's Freezing Hiring from Coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> https://candor.co/hiring-freezes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, this is David — lots of movement in tech hiring in the last few days. Spent some time to put together a list of companies freezing hiring or doing layoffs.

If you have any information on layoffs/freezes, please comment below or email at email@example.com.

<comment><USER2> weirdly zip recruiter is still hiring

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, thanks, adding to the list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi David, Thanks for doing that. As someone that was affected by the layoffs, this is really helpful.

Currently on the final round with Facebook, they mentioned that they hire L5 and above. E3 & E4 is on hold.

</comment><comment><USER4> Apparently Wish is having a hiring freeze until sales volume improves</comment>


NetlifyCMS 1.0, Git-based content management to static sites - <AUTHOR> https://www.netlify.com/blog/2017/12/07/open-source-netlify-cms-hits-1.0-bringing-git-based-content-management-to-static-sites-everywhere <comment><USER2> Is there a simple way to test this? Maybe on a site hosted on Netlify anyway?

<comment><USER3> Yep! Hit the docs website and click "Get started": [https://www.netlifycms.org/](https://www.netlifycms.org/)</comment></comment>


Why not RocksDB for streaming storage? - <AUTHOR> https://materialize.io/blog-rocksdb/ <comment><USER2> I am confused. Last I heard, RocksDB was an offshoot of MongoDB. What is the real story? Being the basis for a bunch of other DBs seems to make it much more plausible.

<comment><USER3> You may be thinking of MongoRocks. MongoDB with a RocksDB storage engine [https://github.com/mongodb-partners/mongo- rocks/wiki](https://github.com/mongodb-partners/mongo-rocks/wiki)</comment></comment>