Have a personal web site - <AUTHOR> https://writing.markchristian.org/2019/04/29/personal-web-sites/?c=1 <comment><USER2> I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.

Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk your ear off about the places I've been and the things I've done, but if I'm objective about it, none of it is particularly praiseworthy, and it's hardly going to make me stand out to a potential employer. Any attempt to dramatize my life or skills is going to reek of pomposity, even the rare bits that are somewhat unique.

I'm not a designer. I'm not a visual person. Any attempt to fashionably describe myself is going to backfire. My resume is a good overview of my skills and experience, but if I try to turn that into an online portfolio, it's not going to be any more impressive. If I don't keep it up to date, and remodel it constantly to keep up with contemporary fashions, it's going to make me look old and out of touch.

I have an exceedingly common first and last name, so I'm hard for employers to find online. I'm happy about this. I don't want employers scrutinizing my social media presence, as benign as it is. I would never give a potential employer any of my online IDs if they asked.

If you've got something to say or show and you want your own home page, go for it. I don't think most people actually have enough interesting content to warrant it, though, and I'm pretty sure that I don't.

<comment><USER3> > I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably > it'll either become a chore or go out of date.

The main goal of my blog was not to be interesting or show off (even though I do include my side projects etc.), but to write about specific issues I managed to solve. As a software developer, I'm googling for problems all the time. 95% of the time I land on StackOverflow or GitHub issues. But it's about those 5% that I find a blog post which really helps me. My goal was to contribute back the same way.

If you don't like to actively maintain a blog, just set up a GitHub repo + GitHub Pages (or even go for plain GitHub Gists). As long as the information can be found via a search engine, it's good enough.

Finally - don't create a blog just because you feel obliged to. It's totally fine as a developer not to have a blog.

<comment><USER4> > The main goal of my blog was not to be interesting or show off

That's what they all say.

Humans are social creatures and the main motivator for anyone to do anything in public is to "show off" or "be interesting". "All is vanity".

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Without a desire to compete, impress, prove our worth and so on we'd be living in huts. But it's something to be aware of and something that should be tempered.

I think the pendulum is swinging away from modesty plus self-reflection and towards "people documenting their lives in public".

<comment><USER5> >.. we'd be living in huts.

As someone who has actually lived in a hut, I would like you to know that living in huts should not be used as a derogatory example. In fact hut living was the best time of my life and I long to replicate the simplicity and freedom it afforded.

<comment><USER6> Care to share more about this? Eg, when, where, why?

<comment><USER5> As a kid in the 80s born and lived in a traditional Yoruba village established within a forest in the South Carolina lowcountry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some of the most interesting things online are people writing about things they are passionate about, for the sake of writing about them. At least in my opinion, so it's fair to say that I agree with the author.

I think it's an equally delightful experience to journal about things though. I do it from time to time, when some subject just needs to get written down, almost as though the journaling is me thinking out loud on something. I could certainly do this in an old fashioned journal, or keep things to myself, but in my experience, I've learned a lot about something by having to write about it in a way that anyone could read. Which includes explaining things that are obvious to me, but not to you.

I know it's not for everyone, and I respect that, but if you do think out loud, then do us all a favour and share the things that are most important to you. I think it'll help keep the internet much more interesting in the age of social media.

If we can find it anyway, with google down-prioritising personal blogs.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I'm a bit jealous of his (Mostly) food truck name ideas, [https://writing.markchristian.org/name- ideas/](https://writing.markchristian.org/name-ideas/).

Once, in the functional programming rabbit-hole, a coworker advocated for a hypothetical Indian food truck named Haskell's Curry.

And when I was studying propositional logic I certainly wouldn't have said no to a side of De Morgan's ColesLaw.

<comment><USER9> The best one we've come up with is a Russian-American fusion truck named "Collusion", serving (alcohol-free) cocktails named after all the major players / plot points in the "Russia investigation".

It's an endless source of entertaining ideas. "Moscow Mueller", "Manafort on the Rocks", "Cohen Kvass". Or you can go for drinks that are flavored after their namesakes: dry, sweet, bitter, sour.

Park it in front of Trump Tower on central park, and Instagram fame would be instantaneous! Feel free to steal my idea.

<comment><USER10> Or "Otto's Collusion Repair"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I started running a vanity domain name around 2000, for email and Web, and have a few thoughts based on that...

Hosting chronology something like: home Linux box on ADSL, 2 different shared hosters, 1U in a colo facility, back to earlier shared hoster.

For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`. (The longer story behind this is that, early in dotcoms, I very quickly got tired of being at social parties of grad students, with MBA students always wanting to talk to me for startup reasons. Also, CS departments and culture were changing due to the gold rush. Going "non-profit" was an idealistic youth reaction.)

The reasons I keep the vanity domain and hosting include:

(1) I'm not signing over rights to some snooping companies to snoop on my email, nor will I implicitly endorse that practice. (IMHO, the current practice of corporate snooping on everyone's private communications is a bad for society. All this time, we techies have been shirking our responsibility to advise people about what they're signing away, and why that's an undesirable direction. I haven't done my part, but I'll try not to make it worse.)

(2) The vanity domain name gives me flexibility for where&how I host, and doesn't lock me into anyone. (Though I'll remain loyal to a hoster who's worked well, even if that means my site is not a showcase for a currently popular service. I've done novel things on AWS professionally, and I shouldn't have to prove anything with my quaint little personal site.)

(3) I've run the canonical Web pages for various niche open source projects, and there's never been an obviously good third-party permanent home for them. (I did almost move those projects to a `git`-centric third-party service, fairly recently, but then my first choice service was acquired by a very different corporate culture, and this also raised the question of how my second choice is going to change (due to competition, or presumably being courted for acquisition). Moving is a lot of trouble to go to, for a situation that might make me want to move again soon after that, so I stick with my ancient site design and hoster.)

I have mixed feelings about the Web site's dated visual design, and I think this is a consideration for anyone who makes a Web presence that will last for years... Mine has looked almost identical for ages, and now feels personally "genuine" to me, compared to better but generic modern looks. While the look stayed the same, the implementation has moved from `table`, to CSS that mimiced the `table` look, to CSS that's responsive while still respecting user's preferred font size. In parallel, there was also a move from HTML4-ish, to XHTML, to HTML5. Along the way, I dropped some unnecessary features that were flashy when I did them, like code syntax coloring (for which I rigged up Emacs into site generation).

I suppose a dated-looking site filters out job opportunities from people who insist that one's personal Web site showcase their best frontend practices. It could stand another look, at tweaks or makeover or complete rethinking, but I'd rather invest unpaid time in contributing to an open source project or techie community, than futzing around with the vanity domain.

You might keep updating your own site, but at some point you might have better things to do, so try to leave it in a style you won't mind being frozen at for years.

<comment><USER12> > _I started running a vanity domain name around 2000, for email and Web, and > have a few thoughts based on that..._ > > _Hosting chronology something > like: home Linux box on ADSL, 2 different shared hosters, 1U in a colo > facility, back to earlier shared hoster._

Much the same sort-of chronology and hosting story for me…

> _For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn 't want > to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`._

I'm curious to pick your brains on that. I've gone the other way: I ended up standardising on a .net but I kinda wish I had the .org instead, my rationale is, .org is a closer match to what my site is: if I squint I can consider it to be an "organisation" of one, but I can't convince myself that it or I'm a network. I originally picked the .net because I thought it scanned better with my choice of domain.

<comment><USER11> I don't think I have any strong feelings on TLDs today. Especially when there's so many new TLDs, appropriations of the county code TLDs, and so many non-techies. I'm guessing many techies no longer know what the original TLDs meant, back before rules/conventions were relaxed, pre-ICANN. Either .net or .org original meanings, "of one", could work.

As an aside, I'm still slightly uncomfortable with the real-name domain name. I did it because I had some idea that this was a facet/presence of my real identity, which already had a name, and there's the idea of standing behind one's name. The discomfort is because my upbringing tried to teach me a flavor of traditional values, like not being boastful, not advertising your deeds, etc., yet the real-name domain name means I'm plastering my name all over, like some politician. Maybe why I went with it despite discomfort is that I'd gotten used to discomfort -- trying to reconcile upbringing (humble is good), with personality (still learning), with conventions in industry&academia (promoting name is accepted/required). I don't worry about it, and I do need some kind of identifier in this space, but I don't know whether I'll ever fully like the domain name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The saddest part about personal websites now is that if someone googles your name, your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project or company you worked for, or any news outlet article where your name is mentioned will rank first and ahead of any personal website.

I understand if one's full name combination is too common to show every personal website, but I feel like if a unique name is googled, or there's one or two decidedly well known person(s) of that name, and that person has authored a personal site, search engines should prioritize that on the first page, if not the very first result(s).

Try googling for John Carmack, Barack Obama, or (op) Mark Christian. What's the SEO required to get your personal page to be the first result on a search engine?

<comment><USER14> I can provide a counter example to this. Searching for my full name (and for many years my first name) has always resulted in my personal website being the top link.

It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.

<comment><USER15> I have a ten year old personal website that does not appear to be indexed by google at all anymore. There was an article about this that made the front page, that some old websites are being dropped from the index. If you search my name from duck duck go its the first hit.

<comment><USER16> Your website is indexed by Google. You can see whether it's indexed by running a site specific search. Put "site:" before the domain name. But that site has three pages, one of which is a blog listing with no content. It's not ranked because there's nothing worth ranking.

<comment><USER15> If you are searching for information about _me_ , it is the best source online. Ideally the best sources are listed first. DDG does that, and Google doesn't list it even in the first half-dozen pages. Is it really a worse website than all the spam white-page sites?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In Finland it is illegal to google for applicant's online presence, because of the possibility of judging the candidate because of misidentification. You have to have applicant's permission to that. And I am glad, because one of my name doubles isn't very representative person according to their online presence.

<comment><USER18> I have the opposite problem, I share the name with someone else working in the tech field who is academically and professionally my senior.

I frequently get emails and phone calls from recruiters offering positions with a salary up to 200k more than I'm expecting at my level because they think I teach at Stanford

<comment><USER19> Did you ever try to bullshit your way into one of these positions? Obviously it's a bad idea, but I'm only half joking since it might be an interesting experiment to see how people rate and value you if their mind may have already been made up.

<comment><USER20> Why is that a bad idea? If you can pass the interview stages and the only difference is perception then I say go for it.

<comment><USER21> Stealing someone identity is, by definition, a bad idea.

<comment><USER22> > is, by definition, a bad idea.

So what is the definition?

This is certainly legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would consider being an online ghost as a great compliment with how everything has been lately. There is way too much public information being pumped out for no reason at all.

<comment><USER24> This was my sentiment while reading the article. Two years ago I went through a process of completely stripping away my online presence. I'm now unsearchable by name, name and company, name and home town.

The author's reasons for having an online presence don't appeal to me personally. I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.

<comment><USER25> I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines. I have several name-doppelgängers out there that do ample SEO for themselves. Plus we have the rapper now. I have close to zero presence on social media. You would be hard pressed to find a single photo of me by doing basic name and location searches. Really didn't have to do any scrubbing or "reputation management." I consider it a real, rare blessing in this world where online privacy is disappearing.

I have no doubt a highly motivated and technical individual (or nation state adversary) could find and dox me, but the average curious HR person or run-of- the-mill stalker will likely not have much luck.

<comment><USER26> >I feel super fortunate that I have a relatively common first and last name, and you pretty much cannot find me through search engines.

Same here. My ultra-common first and last name means I'm also essentially unsearchable. On occasion as an experiment I'll try to find myself using combinations of my name (including an also-super-common middle name) and birth city, cities I'm lived in, jobs I've had, companies I've worked for, hobbies, and other things would normally narrow down a person in a search engine. I've never found myself. I've gone a hundred page deep in google, bing, duckduckgo, and others (both regular and image searches) and I've never once found me. It's like having an invisibility superpower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A lot of commentary around recent development on the web kind of falls into a common theme of "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do WWW like it was 1997 again?"

The thing that makes a personal webpage now different from a personal webpage in 1997 is this: Back then you could expect to immediately rank #1 on your own name, and you would even have a decent chance of ranking for some keywords related to content that you put up. Nowadays, if you're unlucky and you have a name that's somewhat common, or even just a single other person exists with a strong online footprint that has the same name as you, then you won't even rank for your own name any more. If you want any of your actual content to rank, then the chances of making that happen are even slimmer.

More eyeballs on the internet means greater incentives to put content online that will get noticed, which means that commercial interests will throw money and resources at making that happen which a personal side project can't compete with. More content online means search engines get to be pickier about what they show to users. The cost/benefit calculation has changed dramatically, especially around how much content you have to put up and how frequently you have to put up content, because search engines heavily penalize content for being old or stale even when content ages well when it's good and even when you actually write on stuff that you are a real authority on and even when the web is desperately in need of less of the "sponsored" kind of content and more of the "independent & authoritative" kind of content.

So in order to truly solve the problem of making it worthwhile again for people to have personal websites, one first needs to solve the discovery problem.

I think somebody should invent a search engine to do that.

I think that when people put up personal webpages now, they should adopt a "fediverse" technology stack to turn their personal webpages into a social- media-like experience that allows for an alternative vector of discovery next to keyword search.

I think that policymakers should reverse the current trend wherein they put liabilities on website owners & operators that a private person doing a personal webpage can't possibly shoulder.

So, in conclusion: Bring back some of the goodness of the WWW of 1997 again. I'm all for it. But the technology community has a loooong way to go, before that can become a reality.

<comment><USER28> Maybe someone should build a seach engine that only indexes pages without ads. That would mainly be private blogs and wikipedia, I guess.

<comment><USER27> ...that's a pretty good idea, actually. I'd bet that in some way, shape, or form, search engines probably already have the ability to detect presence of advertising. The question is how they work it into the relevancy formula given that the big two search engines are at the same time the big two ad networks.

<comment><USER29> I wonder if you can just make an extension to filter these out of the google results. Adblocker extensions certainly don't have a hard time detecting ads in webpages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Couldn't agree more.

A place on the internet that you own and can write your thoughts down is very valuable. Yes, there are other services that you can leverage (medium, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, stack overflow, to name a few, depending on your content and desired reach) but your content there will alwybe subject to the whims of others. Big companies aren't always going to have your best interest at heart.

It's a bit of a pain to set up, but as the article states, you get your own space. Writing is one of the ways I learn best, and any writing I do is highly leveragable and can be used by folks far into the future. With your own site, you also have, again as the article states, a place to do low risk but still meaningful technical exploration.

I have had my own site for almost 20 years and look forward to having it for 20 more.

Also, see this post from Dion Almaer about bringing content back to his site vs a third party service:

[https://blog.almaer.com/almaer-com-reopens-for- business/](https://blog.almaer.com/almaer-com-reopens-for-business/)

<comment><USER31> This is the comment I came here for. It's always a good idea to have your own spot on the Internet that you have control over, and can write about whatever you like.

My website is my username DOT org, for anyone who is curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Completely agree with the article. I think it's very unfortunate that so many think a LinkedIn or StackOverflow profile is a viable replacement for a custom-made website that can portray you in any light you so choose.

I've been told several times that I was Googled prior to interviews/meetings and have heard great things about my website, my online presence, my books (I have an "author" card when people Google me), etc. Whatever you do to make you stand out is a boon.

<comment><USER33> > _I think it 's very unfortunate that so many think a LinkedIn or > StackOverflow profile is a viable replacement for a custom-made website that > can portray you in any light you so choose._

A logical consequence is that you compete with other vain people online who might choose to stretch the truth a bit more than you do. At which point does telling convincing lies about yourself become a useful skill to have?

<comment><USER34> > _At which point does telling convincing lies about yourself become a useful > skill to have?_

Since… forever?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't think everyone _must_ have a website, but I do think many more people would if they realised that the cost and difficulty of setting one up are much lower than they used to be.

A personal site can be about pretty much whatever you want, and look how you want it to look. It doesn't need to be a sales pitch, or on topic all the time. It doesn't need to come top in google when you search for your name. You get to decide why you're building it and who your target readers are (if any).

</comment><comment><USER36> I've had a personal website online since around 1996. I make sure its offensive and hilarious. This is not a new issue lol.

<comment><USER36> [http://www.minions.com/](http://www.minions.com/)

<comment><USER37> Has Illumination Entertainment contacted you at any point to ask for that domain?

<comment><USER36> I don't think so, if they have its never been serious contact. I get tons of shady offers all the time, I usually delete them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Like almost everyone I've done the blogging thing on blogging platforms, on hosted traditional sites, on github with jekyll, etc. At some point I always get tired of dealing with it, question why I am even posting something, and what the whole point of it is.

Essentially what I want is a journal, and as my vanity continues be killed, I'm sure I'll eventually go to using an actual paper journal.

Right now I am one step away, I've been using gopher to blog on SDF.org. A huge reduction in audience, and since it is text based, its about as simple as you can get.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't judge a person's technical skill through this metric (or at least I make an attempt not to), but it's rather noticeable when someone has nothing going on online. A blank GitHub, no website, no projects, etc. For an employed person, eh, whatever, maybe they just have a life.

But for a student? I'll admit I get a little suspicious. I'm not saying students should have a huge roster of projects and crazy extracurriculars. But something like a simple GitHub projects site or more than 50 commits in a year goes a long way to making yourself seem like an active, competent developer. I can count the number of people I've met with semi-active GitHubs at my school on one hand. That's not exactly a vote of confidence for my school's CS program.

<comment><USER40> This is an unbelievable attitude.

"Oh so you call yourself a mechanic, huh? Well you aren't blogging about cars and mechanic-related things in your free time, so I'm suspicious".

"Oh, an architect, huh? You don't have an online presence, which is worrying".

I'm baffled as to why people expect programmers to spend most of their time behind a computer, and to make social git commits or blog about it on top of that.

I program professionally. It's true that I sometimes program after work on personal projects and write for my blog, but I also devote my time to studying Korean, and Japanese kanji. I also draw, spend time with friends, or occasionally play videogames. Programming is exhausting and oftentimes the last thing I want to do is look at code or write about it after work.

And of course, people have things like kids or other responsibilities in their life. College students may have extracurricular activities or work. Not every college student has oodles of free time as you so broadly assume.

 _We shouldn 't have to justify NOT blogging or pushing to github_. How dare I have any interests outside of computers and programming. Blegh.

<comment><USER41> Before I go to a mechanic I am checking their review online.

Before I hire an artist that would make some graphics for me I would ask for a portfolio. Nobody in graphic industry is surprised when someone asks to show some of their works.

Same with IT, you would try to do some background checking. See if there was some recommendations from person's past employers or some sort of porfolio.

Should it be everything I would use to evaluate person? Hell no! But if I can see someone's actual achievements it gives me much more insight and confidence about how I am evaluating the candidate.

Would I miss some good candidates? Probably. But the strategy is not about not missing all good candidates, it is about ruling the bad ones. E.g. in Germany if you were hired, everyone though that you were ok, but then they found out that you are shitty, they cannot just fire you. They have to give you head ups that you are underperforming, then they have to make a formal evaluation to make sure that it isn't about them oppressing you and finally they are obligated to propose a recovery plan for you - only after you fuck it up the company is allowed to fire you. So you might end up with a guy not doing enything for 6 months. In such perspective it can be better to miss 2 good candidates than to hire one bad one.

<comment><USER40> You don't quite get what I was saying.

A review is not written by the mechanic _themself_ once they get home from work, is it? My point was that people don't expect mechanics to go home and start blogging about new tools that they use or the latest in car news. It's an absurd concept, yet it's seen as normal for criticizing and penalizing prospective software developers. Artists are in a totally different boat, where they actually do need a good portfolio to demonstrate their personal style and past work, etc. For programmers they do it through known concepts called "resumes" and "interviews".

> But if I can see someone's actual achievements it gives me much more insight > and confidence about how I am evaluating the candidate

If I have an accomplishment but I don't blog about it or post on github, did it actually happen?

Not only is this quite preposterous, I literally cannot share code if it was developed under an NDA. I only can discuss vaguely / without specifics in interviews.

> Would I miss some good candidates? Probably. But the strategy is not about > not missing all good candidates, it is about ruling the bad ones.

Again, you are arbitrarily penalizing people for not being on their computer 14-15 hours a day. You are penalizing people with children. You are penalizing people like me who have interests outside of programming.

Not only is your reasoning absolutely absurd, you are -still- missing out on good candidates. It's lazy, and I would not want to work at a place that hires like this, because it means they do not value personal lives outside of work at all.

People like you are why people feel like they HAVE to blog and HAVE to contribute to open source projects- on their personal time. Fuck that. It's a sickening practice and as I said, it's not expected in other fields. Why is programming the exception here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Some people like to be ghosts online but I really do like to post and write about my experiences whenever I can and it is nice to look back and see what I was doing a couple of months or years ago.

Personally, a website I can just do whatever on is great and I don't have to be worried about a platform's limitations, requirements, or nuances.

Most people prefer simplicity of networks like Twitter, facebook, etc but I really like having my own blog where one blog post is 50 words and another is 1500 words and many other things at the same time. And my individual pages can be anything from experiments to documentation.

</comment><comment><USER43> > You should...

Except for all the reasons you shouldn't. The biggest reasons is that if putting up a website doesn't feel like a good use of time, it's probably better to just not have one.

An alternative way to think about it is this... is it a good business decision to de-prioritize talking to people who don't have a website? I'd be real surprised if the answer was yes.

<comment><USER44> One of the benefits not mentioned in the article: it serves as a good personal record of accomplishments or thoughts (similar to a diary). How often does the new year come around and you think to yourself, "where did the year go?"

<comment><USER45> Why should this be public information, though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is an uncompelling piece. I believe the core argument is that you should have a personal website a) because the author was unsettled by his own lack of an online presence and b) a side benefit is that he has somewhere to use tech that is interesting to him but not something he can do at work. There's also an offhand comment buried in there about writing practice being good, and an audience making it easier to stick to.

There's not even a real attempt to turn this into a persuasive piece - it's like it started as a post "why I like having a personal website" and then got a new title and intro paragraph. I'd like to see an attempt to explain why the two major points apply to "everyone" \- or perhaps the first one wasn't even intended to be an argument, just background?

</comment><comment><USER47> Curated online presence > no online presence > bad online presence imho.

That includes personal website and social media.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've been blogging for 7 years using Wordpress (hosted, with my name as the domain name). It's been a great experience, and I wish I had started earlier. I don't feel any pressure to blog every week or every month, but over the years the content has built up anyway. At an interview recently, I was asked several questions (e.g. What makes a great programmer, What are the most important lessons you have learnt) for which I could point to blog posts I had written.

I've written about my experience blogging here: [https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on- pr...](https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-programming/)

</comment><comment><USER49> >"You were a complete ghost online.", they said

Okay, so what? Is it a blogger or promoter position? Otherwise, why should you have any _visible_ online presence?

The whole thing is about one guy who decided to make a personal website and how he made it, that's fine. But why call it "You should have a personal website" without any reasoning/examples for others? I don't get it.

<comment><USER50> Because others will. It's an arms race.

<comment><USER51> You may want to know: an arms race in what war?

Put another way:

\- Who thinks it's a meritorious thing that someone screws around on Facebook, twitter, or personal blogs all the time? \- Who specially wants to work for/with the people who do?

Not that it's a _bad_ thing. But why is it a good thing? And why should we think the people who do think it is a good thing are significant?

<comment><USER50> The war of getting hired in the tumultuous tech industry. Others will sell their brand online, so you will do it yourself, or you will be outcompeted. I don't think it's inherently good to do it, just necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> What are people's thoughts on an ideal personal domain name?

firstlast.com seems the obvious choice, but it gets pompous when used for things you're the author of but not the subject of, like "andrewredford.com/my-js-library" or "andrewredford.com/notepad".

fml.com (initials), if you can score a good TLD? flast.com? Create an unrelated but brand-able name like vegandev.com?

<comment><USER3> I've started blogging on firstlast.com (using my online alias), but by now I've turned it into my de-facto online portfolio. Most of what I publish goes to firstlast.com/project or project.firstlast.com. I don't think there is anything wrong with this approach: I'm not the _subject_ , but it is _my_ project after all.

The only issue I've had with my domain name was chosing my default email address: I did not like email@example.com, so I went for email@example.com instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> _"I like to look people up before an interview to try to get to know them a bit. You were a complete ghost online."_

Why is this a bad thing?

<comment><USER54> Because hiring people is risky and expensive, so (all other things being equal) companies prefer candidates they know more about.

<comment><USER53> I get that, but the context from the article is that of an _interviewee_ looking up the interviewer and commenting that the interviewer was a "ghost" online. To me, that's somewhat bizarre. What bearing does your interviewer's hobbies have on your perception of whether the company and the role would be a good fit for you?

<comment><USER55> Where I live, it's expected from candidates to show they looked up the company and have prepared a question regarding a project the company is working on or something else about the company itself. So, you actually end up googling the thing.

<comment><USER56> That doesn't address the question at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Something about this comments page plays the Trogdor the Burninator song (in the premii HN app on Android). I've never had that happen before, anyone else experiencing it?

<comment><USER58> It's from a comment with a link to this web site.

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

<comment><USER59> Yeah, seems like the app is prefetching links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Agree with the article, it does not cost too much effort and gives you online presence.

I am using gohugo + netlify, tried gatsby, jekyll as well. If you are interested how to setup a personal web-site - I've an article for you: [https://medium.com/@tarasmatsyk/how-to-kick-off-a-blog- in-2-...](https://medium.com/@tarasmatsyk/how-to-kick-off-a-blog- in-2-hours-4bb142922185)

</comment><comment><USER61> In addition, there should be a search site that only indexes personal web sites.

<comment><USER62> As much as i would like this...taken to a logical conclusion, not sure if it would help. Walk with me a bit, and see if this makes any sense (or not)...

1\. A new search engine appears and focuses on "personal presence" sites - however a personal presence would be defined.

2\. Google, bing, etc. begin crawling this new search engine, and its index of sites.

3\. Users by default simply use google, bing, etc. to search for people...but how would google, bing, and other search engines resolve the conflicts of "which is the correct John Doe site?" between the results they've captured (such as on silos/walled gardens) vs results from this new personal site search engine?

Well, if its google, i suppose they'll use some signal like relevance. And, as i recall google uses link authority (big boys pointing to YOU gives you authority, which leads to "relevance" in the eyes of google)...which would suck because the big boy silos likely have a bit more "authority" by way of quantity of links, no? Unless i'm missing something, having another search engine - focused on personal sites - may not help the layperson find your personal site any more than current environment. Please someone correct me if my logic is flawed here, because my scenario is quite depressing.

(Let me caveat that I'm very much a proud supporter of personal websites, and would love having a new/additional "personal site-focused" search engine...I'm just not hopeful that it helps much.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I started my own online journey as codingbbq which is my alias. I wanted to write articles and have my share of online presence, without connecting to my actual identity. If I wish to look for job or apply to a company, I can always share my website with them. [http://codingbbq.github.io](http://codingbbq.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER64> Wonderful article, RSS needs to make a comeback. Especially among friends and family who love to make large posts about important topics. I try to tell them to build a blog and then just link to articles that they write. Your article and others inspired me to finally just put together a system to make it easier to start blogging. I just mimic a social media platform, but since everything is committed to a repository using the JAMstack it could easily be converted to a full website. Any feedback would be wonderful. [https://your- media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/](https://your- media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/)

I will also mention that [https://www.stackbit.com/](https://www.stackbit.com/) is doing basically the same thing but more from a "Make life easier for Website designers" perspective.

</comment><comment><USER65> I've been writing on my personal site [0] since 2006. Most of it is bad. The early goal was to rank first for my name on google. That worked until an actor with my same name emerged.

A few of my articles have made it to the front page here on HN. The traffic spike and follow on views from peoples newsletters and twitter is fun to see.

But nothing material has ever come from it.

I still enjoy writing on my site. When I'm in a mood where I write twice a week some of it even gets good. Then there will be periods of months where I stop. I tell myself if there was a consistent audience coming back for more I would write more. But that is undeniably the wrong answer to the personal site chicken-egg problem.

I suppose this thread is now pushing our personal sites.

[0][https://www.nicholasjrobinson.com](https://www.nicholasjrobinson.com)

</comment><comment><USER66> I don't think it's fair to judge a candidate based on their online presence. Some people are very private, or for whatever reasons prefer not to have an online presence.

Furthermore, if you judge every candidate by the number of linkedin posts and stackoverflow answers or whatever superficial metric than you will miss out on a lot of talented people.

I'm not the type who has an urge to express my opinion or feelings on anything. I've been on Youtube for years and never posted even one comment. Although I always like videos, if I liked them of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I wasn't looking them up--the candidate told me that they looked _me_ up.

<comment><USER66> Oh I see, that's a fair point. Perhaps in your case it makes sense to have some presence when you know that people may you look you up. Although, I would still argue that should not be reason enough - unless that it is, you actually want to have a personal website and enjoy writing.

In my case, I often feel like my opinions are so asinine and generally not worth sharing that I just don't feel the urge to set them in stone, so to speak.

<comment><USER67> Except that, you just did. :)

<comment><USER66> Exactly, where's that delete comment button...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Mark wrote a great article for my newsletter a couple of months ago and I found his passion really showed through. I think a big part of it is that he's put so much work into his own site.

We need more of this! Especially in 2019.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aw, thanks Ernie! <3

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Terrific thread! Am enjoying reading about personal experiences around "building your brand." In fact, I believe this is so important you should fight your instinct to keep things "pure." And go ahead and contract professional services if you are serious. Hire professional developers, writers, graphics, video, and stylists if necessary ;)

For certain folks just coming up this is de rigeur. If you are a young writer / director trying to break into advertising to gain experience before conquering Hollywood. You need a killer demo reel. Same for a recent MFA grad living in Brooklyn seeking Manhattan gallery representation. An Instagram that tells a visual narrative is way more powerful than a series of unconnected shots.

Furthermore, learning to take a single piece of content. Such as an onstage presentation or demo. And slice and dice it into bite sized content tailored to specific platforms. It is one method for extending your reach 10x. It's the "attention arbitrage" in Gary Vee's Content Model ;)

[https://www.slideshare.net/vaynerchuk/the-garyvee-content- mo...](https://www.slideshare.net/vaynerchuk/the-garyvee-content- model-107343659)

And it's why "free tiers" such as Github Pages, App Engine and 1MB are so important in our community. Not only does it level the playing field. It offsets the risks for experimentation and self-discovery.

"Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like _yourself_ " \--Miles Davis

</comment><comment><USER70> I've been reading the comments for a few hours, and am actually amazed that this is still at the top of HN, so here goes:

I've kept a blog ([https://taoofmac.com](https://taoofmac.com)) for over 15 years, and I've derived satisfaction from it on three main counts: I like to write in general (and keep notes, and the site actually started out as a Wiki of notes covering my migration to the Mac), I like to tweak the code behind it (although new releases are now years apart), and I like the (little) correspondence that comes from people who tackled the same issues (sometimes with different solutions).

As to exposure, it was great fun in the pre-iOS days and when Mac blogs were all the rage. But professionally (and this is the bit where I think some pushback is needed) I get exactly _zero_ benefits from it, because:

\- What I write about technically has (by design) nearly zero import on my work, skills or career aspirations

\- LinkedIn has become the de facto "show off" (cess)pool, and although I write a few opinion pieces now and then and post them there (and on Medium), the novelty value has largely worn off

In fact, my online presence has, if anything, been a nuisance in my career moves--my currently being at Microsoft and keeping a Mac-related blog is often commented upon, for instance, and many recruiters who approach me via that route usually think I'm a developer (I also have [http://carmo.io](http://carmo.io), but that has essentially zero visibility).

<comment><USER71> Just checked out your site and wanted to say I really like the visual design. Not sure if you do all your own CSS but it has a great feel/balance on desktop. Well done

<comment><USER70> Thanks!

On Tao, I decided to go with a Jekyll theme as a base and then proceeded to rip out most of it, starting with the typography, and added lazy loading to make it a better experience on mobile - and the iPad.

The portfolio site is based on a minimalist skeleton CSS. I tend to rely on proven grid/layout bases and tweak the rest to my satisfaction (sometimes obsessively).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Over a decade ago, I had a website. But it seems to me that Facebook killed that urge. As people are now moving off of Facebook, it does make sense for personal websites to return. But people will return with a new perspective.

I've done the same, and made one via github about a year or two ago. But it is very different than my older sites. I feel like I have less room to express personal thoughts or design ideas. Everything is more scripted, sanitized, and is trying to sell me to employers.

</comment><comment><USER73> A personal site is certainly something I've considered a few times. I do like the idea of a space for your own work away from corporate platforms, and having something that comes up when you search for your own name to show potential employers/contacts.

However, I've then always considered against it because:

1\. I'm never happy with anything simple, so any new project like this would inevitably become ten times more complicated than it arguably needs to be. Before too long, it'd end up being a tech demo for the ten new programming languages I was interested in learning that week.

May as well put the effort into things with an audience.

2\. I genuinely like having some semblance of privacy, and think fondly about the old days when people were encouraged not to share so much information about themselves online. It's why I basically have no pictures of myself on any social media platform, have only about two, maybe three voice recordings online ever, etc. Also feels a bit safer, especially given the ease in which mobs/witch hunts seem to developer over 'controversial' comments and political views.

Having a personal sites seem like it'd lose that, and increase the level of risk in general.

</comment><comment><USER74> I'm a similar "ghost", and with new projects in the works have been contemplating a big update to my own site. Thanks for the inspiration!

</comment><comment><USER75> In the same vein, I consider it a dark pattern when companies don't have a a public email for recruitment purposes. Ideally, every opening should have an associated email answered by a real person. It's kind of rich to expect candidates to upload custom cover letters, CVs, samples of work, but only expect them to receive template replies. Some companies even state that replies are not guaranteed.

</comment><comment><USER76> I could see how having a personal website that is basically just your resume could be helpful. If you're a web dev in particular, this kind of thing is essential. However, I don't think having a personal blog is a good idea for everyone. If your posts are all extremely boring and about mundane tasks, then you end up looking very self-involved. Being too funny can come off wrong as well, making you seem crass or like someone who can't be counted on to take things seriously. God forbid you talk about politics or complain about the person who cut you off in traffic.

I'm not saying that having a personal blog is bad, by all means make one and complain about politics, but if you make a website/blog for the sole purpose of helping you get a job, I'd think twice about the kind of content you'd going to put out and how that would reflect to future employers. Having no presence online really doesn't strike me as a bad thing at all.

</comment><comment><USER77> The author mentions learning how to properly format metadata to have links unfurl nicely in Slack and other social media platforms. Are there any debugging tools that let you see what an URL would look like on all platforms at once, without having to post it everywhere and deal with caches when you have to change the content ?

<comment><USER78> Unlikely because these platforms themselves control how the content is displayed, and this will likely change often.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I actually started startablog.com to help people with this. We'll actually set up someone's wordpress site for free. We've done several hundred and we're hoping to help 10,000 people make the move.

People keep moving to privatized networks and there's nothing that beats owning [yourname].com

</comment><comment><USER80> I have no identity online, except for Facebook and Linkedin. Linkedin is the only one that is public. I don't even have a photo.

I've been careful since about 1997 to always ensure that I don't attribute myself to anything I've written. Even accounts like this I'm always careful to write things that won't identify me ever, unless I did it completely on purpose (a blog post for my employer, etc). I learned very early on that the things that get written are forever, and I didn't want something I wrote 20 years ago to come back to haunt me.

I rejected a handful of candidates for things they wrote on Twitter (ex. "old people should give up their right to vote because they don't matter anymore", "SF is a piece of shit and everyone that lives there is a piece of shit").

<comment><USER81> I don't think many people will write something that reflects them negatively when it's long form content.

<comment><USER80> That's why Twitter is such a giant-killer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yoz-y A side note:

Author mentions <sidebar> but as far as I know (and after searching for it too) this element does not actually exist. Modern browsers fallback to <div> rendering for anything they don't know but it's not exactly semantic web either.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually meant to use <nav> — just a silly mistake. I've corrected the article since.

<comment><USER82> Hi Mark

For accessibility your sidebar could be a <header> containing a <nav> with the links in that. This <header> can precede the <main> content. The title for the links should be in the <nav> so it outlines properly and the heading for the <header> or the <nav> doesn't need to be <h1>. <h1> is best kept just for the article, not anything else.

If the <header> containing the <nav> precedes the <main> you can style it to look like a sidebar. Why bother? Well, try it and then see how the page opens with Firefox Reader Mode. You should see the difference, the reader can jump past the header 'landmark' to the article.

If you want to go fully HTML5...

The newsletter signup could be in an <aside> rather than a <div>.

Then with the article, it is nice to see use of <figure>, I have no evidence but I believe Google likes that. You can also try breaking down the article into <section> sized chunks, with the <h2> headings at the top of each <section>. This should compartmentalise each 'section' into a way that search engines might prefer. Amongst the <section>s the <aside> for the newsletter can slot in, outlining nicely. Ideally the newsletter <aside> also has a heading.

Footnotes. If you change 'name' to 'id' then you will get top scores on validation. Nobody will ever notice or care, but you don't want validation errors do you?

Also check out this:

[https://codepen.io/SitePoint/pen/QbMgvY](https://codepen.io/SitePoint/pen/QbMgvY)

Really cool footnotes using CSS counters.

Why bother?

Well, you have taken HTML5 so far and not much is needed to go exemplary. In a world where everyone is up to speed on web technologies few get the actual HTML right. You might not know the latest funky web technology but it is always useful to point out how HTML5 could be done using the full vocabulary instead of just <div> mumblings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> I've had some interesting conversations sparked by my personal website (linked in profile). Friendships, even. I don't blog as much as I like to, I'm embarrassed by some of the content at times, but overall I'm pleased with it.

</comment><comment><USER84> I'm going to have to throw myself in the camp of those who don't have much interest in publishing a page or blog. I suspect that it would either be ignored or result in protestors setting up outside of my house.

If a strong urge to write presented itself, I rather like the idea of self- publishing either a novel or a non-fiction book on something I know a reasonable amount about. It not only would force a certain discipline to writing and study for the author, but would serve as my tiny push towards encourage long-form reading again as opposed to the modern urge to read things that fit on a computer screen (like I'm doing here of course).

</comment><comment><USER85> Somehow related (pretty good in my opinion): [https://www.troyhunt.com/the- ghost-who-codes-how-anonymity-i...](https://www.troyhunt.com/the-ghost-who- codes-how-anonymity-is/)

</comment><comment><USER86> For more reasons why this might be a good idea, see [https://indieweb.org/why](https://indieweb.org/why).

</comment><comment><USER87> Another reason to have a personal web site is that it allows you to define your digital identity. If you don't, other people or worse, corporations, can easily publish documents, texts, tweets or something else that will make you look in a certain way.

You don't have to post amazing pictures or publish Paul Graham essays, publish once a year and having the link in your email footer is enough to establish to others who you are

</comment><comment><USER88> Don't see how you could be a ghost online with a name like Mark Christian. There would be a ton of Mark Christian's all vying for attention.

<comment><AUTHOR> Life is tough when your first name is just a word. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Fascinating how I agree with the headline and disagree with the article completely.

Personal websites are a lot easier to control and chronicle what you want them to. They also help with SEO and also community building if you desire that.

When I didn't desire that, I was very content being a "need to know senior engineer" behind the scenes. I gamed my third-party recruiters to do all the work for me and we all made money.

</comment><comment><USER90> With a name like Zigurd, SEO isn't a problem. Nor was registering the .com. A very simple site that points to Amazon and other places with information in context is useful. Google Sites is free and simple, and it is no longer sucky looking and retro. It took longer to do the "do you own this url" dance with Hover's DNS tab for the url than it did to create the site.

</comment><comment><USER91> I think GitHub profile maintenance as a service would be quite a business model for body leasing type of consultancies (that cater a particular industry sector) ... for individuals, it would not be very sustainable.

Actually, a lot of work maintained by consultancies is half finished non production shovelware, so they probably already do this themselves.

</comment><comment><USER92> I put up a very simple bio page at [https://nojvek.com](https://nojvek.com) a while back and that gets me decent inquiries here and there.

I don't think I can blog regularly with 2000+ word articles.

That's awesome but it makes me feel I should rather be writing 2000 words of code and building something. Just me.

</comment><comment><USER93> Once I remember a coloring app developer, calling for artists to be featured in their app.

Requirement: Portfolio _and_ Instagram profile with a considerable amount of followers. I mean, it's perfectly understandable. Who will want to feature unknown artist in their app — but you know what, _screw it._

</comment><comment><USER94> I agree and I just so happen to have built a Jekyll theme for personal sites that's kinda good for hackers & nerds and is available here: [https://hydejack.com/](https://hydejack.com/) (it's based on the Hyde Jekyll theme)

</comment><comment><USER95> Content aside, this is a great minimalistic blog without the usual trackers/bloat -- it's rare to uBlock blocking 0 assets. Seems to be built with Jekyll [https://jekyllrb.com/](https://jekyllrb.com/)

</comment><comment><USER96> "how to design web sites that respect the notch on iPhone X and friends"

i'm a notch disrespecter

</comment><comment><USER97> This somehow reminded me of John Carmack's .plan files [0].

[0] [https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan- archive](https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive)

</comment><comment><USER98> Out of curiosity: do you draft on paper or do you go straight to the text editor?

</comment><comment><USER99> Now all browsers have removed the RSS feed button, here's his! [https://writing.markchristian.org/feed.xml](https://writing.markchristian.org/feed.xml)

</comment><comment><USER100> Technical blogging isn't all about all about showing off. I write because I want to share what I am up to hence share in the form of articles. That's the other thing that I got leads as well.

</comment><comment><USER101> IMHO, a personal website that is super out of date looks worse than one that doesn't exist. My website is a good example of this (being out of date). So I recently removed it from my resume.

<comment> dan-robertson It seems the opposite is true in academia where most academics have a personal website but the normal style is best described as "mid 1990s".

<comment><USER101> By out of date, I meant lacking any recent content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Always post anonymously on Internet. Nobody wants you to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER103> if there is a native markdown driven, login supported, file-based(no database), online editor supported blog platform that transforms both code and markdown to html5, I will start tech blogging right away.

drupal and wordpress users for years and I keep looking for a simpler solution, no not the static site generators which has no online editor and no login support either.

I plan build one with python/flask, then I will have my personal site.

</comment><comment><USER104> People are going to look for your name so you can influence the results that come up through a personal website.

</comment><comment><USER105> If you wanted to start one, what would be the easiest way of doing so, preferably an all static site. ?

<comment><USER106> As a developer, a very natural choice would be Github Pages and Jekyll [1]. If you're not a fan of having your whole site out in the public like that, you can also use Jekyll locally. I'm sure there's other similar static site generators, but Jekyll is pretty widely used and in my opinion easy to get started with.

[1] [https://jekyllrb.com/docs/github- pages/](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/github-pages/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, Jekyll is what I use, and I quite like it. I'm not hosted on GitHub pages though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> What font does he use on this website? I can't find it in the source, but it looks really nice.

<comment><USER108> For the main paragraph content it's "Helvetica Neue". For the main headings it's "Arial Rounded mt bold".

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> I wouldn't expect a younger person to have a personal website, given that it's almost impossible to come up with a domain name that's not taken. For instance, my real name is also Mark Christian. What am I going to do, register markchristian1.org? theothermarkchristian.org? Might as well not have a website at that point.

<comment><USER110> No it isn't. There were like 100000 new tlds added. Basically any name you can think of is available on one of the tlds. Also most personal websites don't use the authors name as the domain name. Most dev blogs I have seen have some strange name but have their real name in the text of the website so it will show up when searched.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> Have a personal web site and a blog! Great idea, will work on it :)

</comment><comment><USER112> I think you are just lazy, and there is no problem with that. Anyway, laziness is a sin, and some philosophers classify this sin as "the loss of taste for life", which is not good for you.

<comment><USER113> Sins are a social construct. Laziness is a state of being that many people aspire to, but few can realistically achieve without serious detriment.

<comment> grayed-down Oh no! Not all sins are a "social construct". But I do agree with the rest of your post. True laziness with a degree of comfort and lack of anxiety is quite difficult.

<comment><USER114> > Not all sins are a "social construct".

Yes, even those sins where the social construction of them as sins has some social utility are social constructs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Migrate from Heroku to Rackspace? - <AUTHOR>

I am user of Heroku with Amazon RDS plugin for the past 7-8 months and my conclusion is there is nothing to appreciate about Heroku except their architecture. Here is why I think:

   1. Even though it is sold for $200 million+ they were still NOT using the Amazon multiple zones feature of Amazon. Below is the link how SmugMug survived amazon crash by using Amazon's multiple zones feature. http://don.blogs.smugmug.com/2011/04/24/how-smugmug-survived-the-amazonpocalypse/
   2. No phone contact support in the event of issues (not application but Heroku's), lot to learn from Rackspace
   3. The application I am hosting, people will starve if it goes down for few hours on Friday forget about 60 hours downtime.
   4. I see intermittent deployment and connectivity issues. Please visit this link for a confirmation: http://status.heroku.com/
 I know developers love it because they throw a cheap web process called 'dyno' for free.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> My concerns are that Heroku's prices are rather high. I understand paying for what you use, but you get charged for as long as something is on, even if it's not in use. Add to this that there's no built-in shutting down of inactive dynos or workers, and you can't help but feel like you're getting fleeced.

I haven't looked at Rackspace too much. Is deployment as simple as a git push, like Heroku? How's their pricing compared to Heroku? Is rolling your own scalable Rails architecture using AWS directly too complicated?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We need to build the Rails architecture if you go with Rackspace which you may NOT want to do in the beginning. Still investigating but wanted to hear if anybody already using rackspace cloud and their experience.</comment>


Robin Williams: A brief encounter - <AUTHOR> http://davidsimon.com/robin-williams-a-brief-encounter/

<comment><USER2> I did not know d Simon had a site. If you've ever seen an interview with this man, he's a smart guy.</comment>


Firefox tidies up with Office 2007's Ribbon  - <AUTHOR> http://www.programmica.info/2009/09/firefox-tidies-up-with-office-2007s.html

<comment><USER2> Honestly, this is an extremely stupid move. Something like Word requires a ribbon interface. A browser does not. What a browser requires is maximum screen space for displaying the webpages. Right now, my Firefox shows only the navigation toolbar, tabbar and statusbar. A default install also shows the bookmarks toolbar and the menubar. How is that cluttered???

</comment><comment><USER3> Firefox cluttered? My Firefox consists of the title bar, the menu bar on which my address and search boxes also reside, and the tab bar. It takes up about half the space of the ribbon.</comment>


Does Your Gmail Suck Too? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/06/24/does-your-gmail-suck-too/ <comment><USER2> I've been definitely having problems with the system hamging when retrieving messages in the last couple weeks. It could be a browser issue, but seems to span different browsers.

<comment><USER3> Do you mean that your browser "hangs?" Does it hang completely and you have to restart the browser?

I've never had this problem with Firefox or Safari. I do remember Gmail telling me to turn off Firebug, because it would slow things down.

<comment><USER2> The browser was fine - but gmail would show "Loading..." for indefinite lengths of time using the javascript version of gmail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone prefers _Zimbra_ to Gmail? _Zimbra_ , of all things? Well, each to their own, I suppose. In my experience, it would be hard to find a webmail client that is worse than Zimbra.

<comment><USER5> Zimbra's webmail client is definitely worse than the gmail interface, but as Om's IMAP reference should have suggested to you, there are more ways to get to email than through your browser. Those of us who sometimes need to do email work while disconnected or who prefer a richer client interface can use IMAP or even (shudder) Exchange interfaces to get to the Zimbra mailboxes. On this particular facet gmail really, really sucks.

<comment><USER4> I've heard this complaint before, but I personally use Gmail almost exclusively via IMAP, and it works fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't had problems with Gmail losing my mail, but I've found it hard to sift through conversations to find what I need. Search doesn't always help with that.

Maybe I'm old, but I still like Yahoo! Mail's old web 1.0 interface. Maybe that's just because I know all the quirks after years, but I can find what I need quickly and store messages easily.

<comment><USER7> You'd probably enjoy using SquirrelMail. It is a web interface to an IMAP server which implements an interface similar to Yahoo's old interface. You can configure your own instance to access a third-party IMAP server.

Tags: [SquirrelMail] [webmail] [mail] [IMAP] [Yahoo] [webapp]

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> At work we have been using Google Apps for your domain for ~6 months as well and NO PROBLEMS. Everyone loves it, even the interface ;)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've definitely had problems - emails that show up in Gmail but never get downloaded via POPm 6+ hour delays for messages.

</comment><comment><USER10> nope, mine has been golden. thanks for asking though! ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> No, works perfectly via POP3/SMTP and, seldom, web. Although, last week I had some problems with GTalk using Adium, it connected but the contact list didn't refresh.

</comment><comment><USER12> It did, until FF3 came out.

</comment><comment><USER13> Never had any of the problems you are describing.

</comment><comment><USER14> No, it rocks... Google apps working fine here,

</comment><comment><USER15> nope, haven't had any of that.

</comment><comment><USER16> no. No problems with my gmail account. specific information with supporting evidence would also be nice for an article this high in the HN news rankings...</comment>


Apple Should Renew Focus on Mac Users, Pros - <AUTHOR> http://blog.macsales.com/36741-apple-should-renew-focus-on-mac-users-pros <comment><USER2> I have a 2008 Mac Pro with four hard drives. I use it for multi-track audio production. I don't have a good upgrade path. To migrate all this to one of the modern Mac Pro machines I'd have to buy an internal enclosure. Given that drives have gotten bigger, it wouldn't be a big deal to go from a 4-drive setup to an SSD system volume + 2 data drive setup. A smaller, quieter Pro that was quieter and supported 3 internal drives would be ideal for me. I've considered trying to migrate some of my work to Mac Minis, but they have the same external chassis problem. I've considered NAS but sometimes you'd just really have a hard drive online.

I also read that my 2008 box won't be upgradeable past El Capitan. I'm still running Yosemite. Honestly, for functionality and reliability, I'm not sure why I ever left Snow Leopard behind. Life-long Apple fans like me must have Stockholm Syndrome... I'm still pissed about my huge family history project in Aperture. I can open it now, but who knows.

But it's important that we rebrand everything as _lowercase_ macOS... for some reason...</comment>


Apartment Blockers: Parking Rules Raise Your Rent - <AUTHOR> http://daily.sightline.org/2013/08/22/apartment-blockers/ <comment><USER2> I don't mind most driving, so self-driving cars are kinda "meh" to me.

But then I think about the ability to pull up to a building and tell my car "go park yourself" and it becomes awesome.

All sorts of great efficiencies pop out, too: a lot filled with self-driving cars could pack them tightly, and when a car needs to be removed, all the other cars move out of the way. Offices, closed businesses, schools, etc, with parking spaces could all become ad-hoc lots at night. (I'd make city ordinances requiring this for building approval). Your car can park in a remote area somewhere, and when you want to leave, your car comes and finds you. Imagine taking a post-dinner stroll towards my car, and at some point you meet up.

<comment><USER3> I think the concept owning your car will become mostly a thing of the past. Most of the time, I just need a car to get me from point A to point B. When the car is not performing that function, it's just sitting, taking up space.

Rather than making a car payment, I'd rather pay for a car-on-demand service. Whenever I need a ride, I make a request and a car appears.

Coupling with an electric car makes sense, too. The car will always be charged, or alternatively, only a charged car will pick me up.

<comment><USER4> Relevant to your point and this article's Northwest angle, I note that the Car2Go[1] service has become fairly prominent in the Seattle area. It's quite different to services like ZipCar, in that Car2Go has worked out a few key details:

1\. Smartphone apps that show you the location of the nearest cars and allow various interaction.

2\. The ability to walk up to any car not reserved/in use and take it.

3\. Parking deals with the city -- just park in any public parking spot, no worries about metering.

These attributes raise convenience considerably vs. some competing carshare services and remove ceilings on how many vehicles can be injected into the local system.

For anyone following Horace Dediu's Asymcar[2] podcast, Car2Go fits right into their theme of exploring what will really disrupt personal transportation as we know it today.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car2Go](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car2Go) [2] [http://www.asymcar.com/](http://www.asymcar.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Articles like this annoy because the underlying tone is, "Well, you shouldn't have a car." But I don't know anyone over 30 who doesn't have one. The bus system doesn't go everywhere. How would I get to Mt. Rainier, or get around Bainbridge, or for that matter over to work? I've taken the bus and I've driven from Seattle to Redmond; the bus takes twice as long for me to get from home to where I'm going.

Rent goes up. If you don't like paying high rent, move to Texas.

<comment><USER6> _I don 't know anyone over 30 who doesn't have one_

For people _under_ 30, not owning a car is becoming increasingly the rule. And I know several above-30 types without cars. They may rely on transit-only (a city designed to be unfriendly to cars is much friendlier to transit and walking), hire cars as needed, or use a car-share service (which still greatly reduces car dependence and parking requirements). Self-driving vehicles which can park themselves elsewhere are another obvious solution.

In crowded cities, cars _aren 't_ faster than buses (though they're typically more flexible for multi-stop trips), and parking requirements at your destination greatly increase costs ($20 - $50+/day isn't unusual).

<comment><USER7> I saw quite a few people revisit their decision about not owning a car post hurricane sandy. Zipcar etc are well and good for everyday use but good luck for peak usage scenarios during natural disasters.

<comment><USER6> Often a bike or access to some form of group/mass transit is going to do you much better in an evacuation situation: you can navigate through debris- clogged streets, standing water, and above all else, traffic jams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cars ruin everything about urban life. Look at what happened to SF when the automobile came on the scene in the 30's:

[http://www.oldsf.org](http://www.oldsf.org)

<comment><USER9> I would love a car-less city where the only vehicles are public transport or commercial delivery vehicles, with cycling being the only allowed personal transport.

<comment><USER10> I think this vision is shared by some of the town councils in big european towns.

For example in Paris, the current mayor (who has been in office since 2001) has made it his mission to make the city as unfriendly as possible for cars to discourage people to come to Paris in their cars.

This includes massively removing parking spots, making parking expensive all over the city, removing lanes wherever there are roadworks (to add sidewalks, bike or bus lanes, trees...) and banning cars from some of the most important streets in the city (most notably the embankments).

So far it has stopped the growth in car usage in Paris. I don't think people are ready for an outright ban on cars yet, but this surely seems like an effective strategy to prepare them for it. Maybe when the Supermetro is done and suburbans can more effectively use public transportation the city will move in this direction.

However : do you consider taxis as public transport ? What about Autolibs (shared electric cars you can pick up all around the city) ?

Edit with some stats : Parisians overwhelmingly use public transport (63%) and not their cars (13%) to go to work. More people walk than take their cars (14%). So that would be an indication of success, however a brief walk outside at 6PM will help you see that suburbans still massively come to Paris in their cars :)

<comment><USER9> _do you consider taxis as public transport ?_

I would like to say no, but I do see the need for personal transport on occasion. I would need to think this through more, but I notice that in my local city, the place is awash in taxis - I think the numbers would have to be regulated better and people encouraged to use buses/trams/trains/bikes instead. Ideally, the public transport would be (somehow.. I admit) set up so that the need for individual point to point transport would only rarely be required...

Of course, this is easier said than done!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In my city, the daily commute traffic breaks down like this:

* Car 40%

* Bicycle 36%

* Bus 16%

* Walking 8%

I'm nearing 30 and none of my friends who live in the city own a car. Many subscribe to zipcar-type services for when they need to make trips. They're also all childless - all my friends with kids moved out of the city.

IMO, cars and cities are a bad mix. They make cities far more unfriendly, they increase sprawl, and cause a spiral of adding more cars, increasing sprawl further, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> The primary reason they dig those holes is because tall buildings need solid foundations. It's not as if they can just build the building at ground level if only it weren't for those darn cars.

Foundation depths vary based on too many factors, but a ballpark number for a midsize apartment building is probably in the 15-30% range. So if you have 16 floors, you could reasonably expect to have 2-4 stories below grade. What else would you put there?

Even if you only needed 2 stories of foundation depth, digging an additional 2 for parking is relatively cheap compared to the first two, since the equipment is already out there.

<comment><USER13> You don't need a full basement for foundations, large pilings are far cheaper. They can easily support 30 story buildings without a basement in an earthquake just fine. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_foundation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_foundation)

<comment><USER12> True, but most apartment buildings will want at least one basement layer for mechanical and storage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe First Hill is special, but parking in Seattle proper and Capitol Hill (both near First Hill) is extremely crowded and finding a spot can be hard. The mythical building plot described in the article sounds wonderful relative to my experience:

"Overnight, when your tenants' cars will most likely be at home, the office buildings' garages are usually empty. And, of course, there are hundreds of curb spaces within six blocks of your building, though neighbors' vehement territoriality about "their" spaces would make it impolitic to mention those in an appeal to the city for a parking waiver. Odds are that your tenants could secure whatever parking they wanted for much less than $250 a month per spot."

The cheapest parking I could get on Cap Hill was $150/mo, and it was in one of these subterranean garages.

Speaking of garages, any reason you can't build the garage on levels 1-2 and put apartments on 3-5?

<comment><USER15> > The cheapest parking I could get on Cap Hill was $150/mo, and it was in one > of these subterranean garages.

I always guffaw when I see American prices, which are so much lower than the rest of the world. The cheapest spot I could get near my apartment in Beijing is around $400/month, and its not available. Switzerland was even worse. But when I was at UW, it was only $50/month (back in the late 90s). Why is the USA so cheap?

<comment><USER14> Easy answer? Low population density, lots of space, relative to Europe (totally unfamiliar with Beijing). UW (U district) is a bit cheaper than capital hill (when I lived in U district, 1 parking spot came w/ rent, an additional spot was $50/mo).

<comment><USER15> When I was living there, I never heard of free parking in the U district. You always paid for your slot in the garage even if you only had one car. Many apartment buildings lacked any parking at all.

It is true that the US has lots of space, but the cost of driving (and parking) is still ridiculously low compared to other countries with similar characteristics (Canada/Australia)...and people still complain about it being too expensive (god, $4/gallon gas, outrage!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not sure why they don't investigate automated parking systems. Their parking density is much higher than lots or decks.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOR25PjV0wI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOR25PjV0wI)

<comment><USER17> There is at least one residential building in Vancouver, BC that has implemented an automated system, but according to this article, the cost per space is almost double that of a conventional space:

[http://www.vancourier.com/news/vancouver-robo-garage- lowers-...](http://www.vancourier.com/news/vancouver-robo-garage-lowers- security-fears-1.385058)

Also, having spoken to someone who lives in that building, it seems to be disliked by a lot of residents, due to the long waiting times at peak periods. That's not particularly surprising given there are only two transfer stations.

I guess these systems may work better in retail locations where there is a steady flow of traffic coming and going through the day, rather than at residential or office locations where there are very high peaks in demand. To build enough transfer stations to satisfy the peaks would presumably both be very expensive, and reduce the space savings that were made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would think that contractors need to dig a deep hole to ensure the foundations of the building are secure - get into the bedrock, especially in earthquake zones. Whether the car parks are below or above ground is moot.

That said - The High Cost of Free Parking (1) and The Walkable City (2) are both excellent reads on the matter of parking and car parks. The second is the more readable.

(1) [http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated- Edition/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated- Edition/dp/193236496X) (2) [http://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save- America/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Walkable-City-Downtown-Save- America/dp/0374285810)

<comment><USER19> _I would think that contractors need to dig a deep hole to ensure the foundations of the building are secure - get into the bedrock, especially in earthquake zones_

Not necessarily, spread footings or piles can work if designed properly and the soil can support it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I live in a condo building with maybe 35-40 1br and 2br units on 3 floors, plus first floor 35 or so units of parking. It doesn't seem unworkable, and a parking spot in the building is worth at least 100-200/mo to me. I am not sure how the economics work here but not in the example.

</comment><comment><USER21> I feel like I missed something. Why is it that off-street parking must be subterranean? Is it more expensive to make the building a floor of two taller and use the first floors for parking? Is this illegal somehow?

<comment><USER22> I was wondering the same thing. The office building I work in has the first four floors devoted to a parking garage, with floors 5 to 10 as office space. Why couldn't the same be done for housing?

<comment><USER23> Because it's hideous? People walking around don't want to walk past the blank walls or ventilation grates of parking garages. An attractive urban pedestrian environment needs to have something _different_ and _interesting_ every few dozen feet. That's why streets with many narrow storefronts are the most crowded with pedestrians.

<comment><USER22> Here's the building I work in: [https://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=26.200547,-80.149577&spn...](https://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=26.200547,-80.149577&spn=0.009241,0.012252&t=m&z=17&vpsrc=6&layer=c&cbll=26.200361,-80.149577&panoid=5HmWm0fNWGVR0KLEjGk0kQ&cbp=12,276.97,,0,1.5)

You can see the garage entrance to the left, and the garage wraps around behind the main entrance (a five story open air atrium) to the right hand side. It doesn't have to be hideous.

<comment><USER23> I take it you've never been to an actual city.

Nobody cares what this building looks like because nobody would walk to or past it because it's in the middle of nowhere and there are literally no sidewalks.

This article is about a real city where people walk to things. Here is a picture of it. [https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=ballard+seattle&data=...](https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=ballard+seattle&data=!1m8!1m3!1d3!2d-122.384484!3d47.668657!2m2!1f299.14!2f78.3!4f75!2m4!1e1!2m2!1slkWUjACB9rUeHPvMV- OhRw!2e0!4m11!1m10!4m8!1m3!1d201878!2d-122.235328!3d37.7584754!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!17b1&fid=5)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is it so hugely expensive to dig holes? You would think this'd be the kind of work that would be easy to automate.

<comment><USER25> I'm guessing there is an element of 'you don't know what you're going to find until you start digging' aspect to it.

<comment><USER26> In Germany and other WW2 theatres, you will commonly find unexploded ordnance. All work will come to a halt as it has to be removed by experts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Install a couple of lifts on the side of the building and put all the parking on the roof.

<comment><USER28> That certainly sounds cheap!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is an awful lot of conjecture, yet remarkably little substance. The core claim of this purported injustice is that "Digging these holes is astronomically expensive", with absolutely nothing to qualify it (beyond a link to an Onion article). The single proof was that LA allowed builders to re-purpose existing buildings (e.g. turning that old sugar factory into condos) without satisfying current parking requirements, which has absolutely nothing to do with the cost on a new build.

Large buildings need a substructure proportional with their height, _especially_ in an earthquake zone like SF area. Even where non-parking substructure is built, it usually still requires a complete excavation to ensure that the materials are appropriate for keeping a skyscraper from falling over. However more expensive parking is than without, unless an accounting construction expert wanders in, I draw very little value from someone looking out of their window and drawing perhaps unsupported conclusions.

And then even if you assume that parking is more expensive, _most buildings charge for parking_. Does this cover the extra costs, if any? I don't know, and neither does the author. Just a perceived injustice and yet another claim of subsidizing car drivers.</comment>


You Can't Use the Live UK Train Data Without Accepting a Gagging Clause - <AUTHOR> https://mocko.org.uk/b/2013/02/22/you-cant-use-the-live-uk-train-data-without-accepting-a-gagging-clause/

<comment><USER3> people forget that ATOC exists to protect and further the interests of their members: the privately owned Train Operating Companies -- they don't owe random developers anything.

Network Rail on the other had are (basically) state owned, and their extremely comprehensive feeds are now completely open: <http://www.networkrail.co.uk/data-feeds/>

these feeds even include the raw signalling data (you even get events when trains activate level crossings) -- there's nothing stopping you building your own NRE API.

I've been slowly building up a database of signal locations/berths to lat/longs by matching up my physical position (while riding on the train) to the NR feed events, with the idea of being able to produce a much better map of where the trains are in realtime.

<comment><USER4> > they don't owe random developers anything

IMHO ATOC, like everyone else, owe random developers one thing: to deal with them fairly; and not say one thing but do another. To not say that they're open when they're just giving it lip service.

<comment><USER5> There's no legal obligation to do that, so why should they? Because of morals? Are your morals demonstrably more correct than theirs? Why should your morals have anything to do with their morals? If you want a company to do something, you either need to go through your representative in our democratic process to suggest a change to the law, withdraw your custom, or shut up. Hoping that they follow your arbitrary morals is bizarre.

<comment><USER4> So if I understand your argument, it is basically "how can you possibly say that the arbitrary morals of 'fair dealing' is more correct than 'screwing everyone over'? Bizarre. Shut up."

Is that right? Or is there more to it than a simple derailing tactic?

<comment><USER6> > Or is there more to it than a simple derailing tactic?

I see what you did here.

<comment><USER4> Derailing the derailer? Maybe so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess I'm not revolutionary enough, but I can't see the problem with this. It makes sense for a private company to protect their reputation, and it makes sense not to provide data to people who run them down in public. They have an agreement to that effect that is _provided in advance_ , and you can opt out be deciding not to participate.

I know I'm supposed to feel rage whenever there are conditions placed on the use of data, but I just can't muster it up in this case. Sorry.

<comment><USER8> A private company which is funded by companies which are contracted by the government to provide rail service. As a taxpayer subsidised body, they should have a greater degree of accountability.

<comment><USER7> By that logic, every contractor hired mainly by government would have to behave like a public organization. I don't think that leads to sensible conclusions, and it's redolent of after-the-fact justification.

<comment><USER4> > By that logic, every contractor hired mainly by government would have to > behave like a public organization.

You say that like it's a bad thing. In fact, on major criticism of outsourcing and privatisation is that it becomes way to shelter dubious activities from Freedom-Of-Information requests that would apply if the work was done by a public organization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember a while ago I wanted to get the location of things like bus-stops. (after the whole "showusabetterway" waste-of-time site the UK gov created. )

Found the information on a site some and found that I could ONLY use it if I was under contract from a UK local council.

Most of the info sources listed on that site were bound up in huge amounts of red tape / brick walls

Frankly I am not surprised that the trains are in the same situation.

<comment><USER10> Some things do get better, at least. The database that includes the locations of bus stops (NaPTAN) is now open data: <http://data.gov.uk/dataset/naptan>

<comment><USER9> Ahhh, NaPTAN, that was what it was called.

Thank you, I gave up a long time ago with the project that was going to use this data.

Glad that things are getting better at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Annoyingly this wasn't always the case. Since privatization this has been the case. Prior to that you could get a TOPS terminal/feed for a nominal fee and do what you want with it.

Now, it's covering arses and nothing more.

<comment><USER4> It's not just CYA. It's also profit, corporate reputation management and empire-building.

<comment><USER12> Ironically, this is precisely the attitude that prevents companies from improving their product. Such a shame.

<comment><USER13> That's not ironic; the goal of a company is not to improve their product; its to SELL it. "Profit, corporate reputation management and empire-building" support selling; product improvement may or may not, depending on the market and the improvement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone who had to shutter an app due to legal threats from ATOC, this doesn't surprise me one iota.

</comment><comment><USER15> This happens with Bus data as well in the UK. Although possibly for different reasons.

I work with live bus time data and before getting access I had to sign an NDA because bus companies are fined by the council for poor performance. With access to that data I can see the percentage of buses that are late and could compromise the business of the companies.

</comment><comment><USER16> _NRE have a stranglehold on the only comprehensive source of real-time passenger train data in the UK. They developed it to power their own website but have recognised in it a way to exert power over anyone who wants to use real time train data and to stifle criticism._

What is referred to by "their website"? Why not just scrape the data?

<comment><USER8> Presumably National Rail Enquiries. How can you base a commercial application on scraping a website? That is not a sensible business model.

<comment><USER17> Google do

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm torn.

While I certainly don't like a 'gagging clause', I can only look with envy at the data you UK guys can get your hand at.

So, maybe it's not perfect, maybe not good enough, but being able to get at that much data in the first place _is_ already quite remarkable imo. I'd love to see a German equivalent, gagging clause or not.

<comment><USER19> What's the transit data availability situation in Germany?

In the US, various public transit agencies do varyingly good jobs of this. Boston's MBTA has lots of data available, both geo, schedule and real-time, and hasn't made any complaints or tried to stop a site which is at least somewhat critical (<http://howfuckedisthet.com>), and have been stupendously helpful to me as a developer. New York's MTA built their own system using an open transit API for bus real-time data (<http://bustime.mta.info/wiki/Developers/Index>). Certain of my interactions with them have been less than efficient, let's say.

<comment><USER19> I just noticed this page on Transport for London's API docs [1], the summary of which is "Use our data, but don't pretend to be us". +1 for straightforward guidelines like this. For instance, "Please don't... Use our brands - <USER2> roundel, unless it's part of a map interface" , but "Please do... Use the words 'London Underground', 'Tube' and 'London bus'".

[1] [http://www.tfl.gov.uk/businessandpartners/syndication/17102....](http://www.tfl.gov.uk/businessandpartners/syndication/17102.aspx)</comment></comment></comment>


Falling values of WeWork, Uber and others prompts reevaluation among investors - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-adjusts-to-new-reality-as-100-billion-evaporates-11574764205?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> It's adorable how every generation, predictably, without fail or exception, falls victim to their day's Tulip Mania.

<comment><USER3> What's less adorable is how people repeat fictitious narratives because they bolster their worldview and make them feel superior.

You know why that story sounds ridiculous? Because it's well documented that most of it never happened.

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was- real-...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip- fever-180964915/)

<comment><USER2> > That's not to say that everything about the story is wrong; merchants really > did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices > for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn't pay the > high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a > small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations.

That's... exactly what I was getting on about.

The article you posted exactly and precisely directly asserts what I'm asserting.

A few knuckleheads pouring money into a shortsighted endeavor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clearly, the falling values reveal re-evaluations. By definition.

</comment><comment><USER5> It was obvious both these companies were ridiculously overvalued years ago. But there was no way to bet against them.

The entire premise of the value of capitalism is that smart money can take from stupid money. But capitalism is failing because we have no way to bet against these awful allocations of resources for the majority of their existence. In the case of WeWork, you still can't.

Late capitalism is that everyone at the top swings up and down with their peers and no real risk but the economy suffers real damage.

In my opinion Index funds and crony capitalism are a top down economy problem just as insidious as the one that took down the Soviet Union.

<comment><USER6> Isn't choosing to not put resources (working hours, investment money) a bet against something?</comment></comment>


Scientific study on code readability – Looking for participants - <AUTHOR>

The Department of Psychology of Heidelberg University, Germany, is conducting an experiment on the psychology of programming.
We are researching how programmers read source code. At the moment we're running a pretest for the main study for which we need the support of programmers who are fluent in C#.
If you're a C# programmer and would like to help science, please follow the link below. Your task will be to find a bug in a piece of C# source code. The pretest will take approximately 20 Minutes.
We are very interested in your comments, so that we can further improve the design and the software used to collect data. Your input would be much appreciated, so that the final experiment can be further improved.
It is the first step of a larger project on the psychology of programming that will include experimental studies, eye-tracking, and electro-encephalography (EEG) studies. If you are interested in finding out more about this project, please contact me. You'll find my contact details on the provided website.
To participate, please visit the following url:
http://code.psychologie.uni-heidelberg.de
Regards,
Johannes Hofmeister <comment><USER2> Well, that was fun. It took a lot less than 20 minutes though

</comment><comment><USER3> not sure I got that second thing right :D

<comment><USER4> I found two errors, so I did the one which was a more obvious flub, rather than the first one I found. But it made me worry about the rest of the code.

The spec is also underspecified for what to do on duplicates. The behavior of last-wins is quite common, but I would prefer a comment that highlights the implementation-defined resolution of that ambiguity.

With experience, I've learned to be very distrustful about what goes in query strings. Users put in unexpected values, and there can be security holes when, say, the input verification code resolves ambiguities one way and the actual code resolves it another way.</comment></comment>