Ask HN: What are we doing here, guys? We're just going to submit anything anti-NSA, no matter how shit it is?
>Do you think that, as a society, the United States has become a basket case?
You ... do not live here, nor do any of your readers, nor is it reasonable to diagnose entire societies, though I'm sure it makes you feel smart. How do you work for the media and not understand how the media works? Everything you know about the United States, somebody wanted you to know. Which is what makes your list of grievances so disturbing... it reads like the UK media's primary objective is to boost the national ego.
I'm an American and agree with the basket case diagnosis.
In general, I don't take seriously any comment that quotes the first line of an article and then rages against that one line. It makes me suspect that you haven't read the article and have no business dismissing the entire thing since you found the first line inappropriate.
>If it had not been for the acquiescence of engineers who took part in the creation of PRISM, XKeyscore, etc. we... well, we would not have PRISM, XKeyscore, etc.
Oh, come on, man. If you think this is true in the fullest sense, you are not a thinking individual. Mere technological feasibility is 99% of the battle; implementation is the last, most inevitable step.
>the famous Edmund Burke quote: "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing".
Googler. The quote may be famous, but Burke is not. Like most men with noble fighting words, he had more noble words in him than he did noble fighting.
The argument is presumably that if you won't do it, they'll find someone else who will.
That's a pretty shit argument for being the one who folds. If everyone does refuse then it doesn't get built. If you refuse and they find someone else, that person may not be as good as you and may create a less effective surveillance apparatus which is easier for white hats to neutralize or dismantle.
Engineering has practical consequences. If you build something that gets democracy activists killed, you're the one who has to live with that. There are plenty of cool problems to solve that don't involve the construction of a surveillance state.
>I'm a little surprised there is no mention of their definition [for 'ethical'].
No you're not. ;)
If they define it, people can/will disagree with it. If they don't, they can't/won't.
Or, think of it this way: how many studies with similar outsets but which included a real attempt at a definition for 'ethical' do you think go viral enough to a) make it to HN, and b) get 46 upvotes in 60-119 minutes?
That's a problem qualitative social scientists often have with this kind of work. In their view, the right way to analyze something like this would require at least several months of classic ethnographic fieldwork: interview and observe people in a community, read its newspapers, try to understand how to it functions, what socioeconomic class categories people see themselves and others as a part of, what problems frequently come up around that, etc. Only after a phase of open-ended investigation to try to understand what's going on would you then try to abstract any general conclusions about how social class in Berkeley impacts something as broad as "ethics".
By contrast, the quantitative psych-influenced approach is to pick a proxy variable and measure it, either in the lab or in the field. Much less work, and many people will actually think that style of work is more scientific (it has numbers and p-values). It also makes for better definitive soundbites, because it states a bold conclusion that it doesn't qualify with the dozens of caveats you'd find in a year of real investigation. But it's also considerably more superficial and at risk of measuring based on problematic choices of categories and proxies.
2. Love the design. B+/A- from an unreasonable grader who hates every website he sees. The blue-green-blue content flow is especially smart. There are a few small things I really think you should change, but they're perception-small, not code-small; and since you're early on, we'll pass on them.
* Nice font choice - readability could be better though. Backburner. But good job on the sizing and justification.
* Perfectly done job of setting the "class picture" of apps on devices just so, so that the eye expects more content underneath and wants to scroll down.
* Green is the best section. Hits on all cylinders content-wise and really sells your product well and sells it quick. The value-add is made very obvious.
* Great understanding of "content funnel" on a single page - blue1: BAM, this product is real and here and ready; green: non-technical value-adds decision-makers will appreciate; blue2: decision-makers see as extra nonsense, they "already know everything they need to know"; whereas techies see that and say, "Yes, yes, yes, this will be an improvement, Mr. Manager who asked my opinion via email, on our existing, Centralia-esque catalog system. You were right to observe the opportunity, sir. You are a philosopher-king of management."
3. Fixes.
a) Top bar:
* "Find out how easy it integrates"
* Logo: Black clashes with playfulness of leaf colors. I'd pick a light, light gray.
* Less-than-quick fix: rethink your white bar content. "How to" AND "FAQ" tells me users have a lot of questions. "Order" should be "pricing" or "plans" or "service tiers", etc. Lose the "login" button - implies (right or wrong, you tell me) that the librarians/whoever will need to run their system infrastructure from a web app -- this sounds great to me but does not scream reliability to decision-makers, and reliability is the one thing other than the obvious value-add you need to persuade them on. Lose "Free Trial" and replace it with a button/something elsewhere on main page. See patio11/Patrick McKenzie's vid on free-trial funneling (or maybe A/B testing).
* CHANGE YOUR "ABOUT" TO SOMETHING ELSE. Yours was the first "about" page I've clicked on in like 5 years. They usually have shit for content. Yours has great content! Nobody's ever going to see it!
b) Blue 1:
* Quick fixes: The publications. a) Either make the names clickable links to their corresp. reviews of your product, or (my preference), put an "as seen in" somewhere on the right-ish. b) Do something about the logo non-coherence. IMO, make all of them white. Actually, IMO, throw out Irish Times and RTE alltogether. If 2 of your 4 exes were runway model 10s and 2 were unphotogenic 5s, you would not, if you wanted to convince me you were a 10, show me pictures of all four. Why would you? Because four gf's is better than two gf's? I could've thought you were a 10; now I think you're a 7 who got lucky. c) Definitely, definitely move the App Store button beneath the publications. d) Replace the Android phone with an iPhone, and replace that screen with something that looks more fun/interesting to use. If you want to emphasize cross-platform availability, the place to do it, given your market, is with the choice of laptop. "Oh, all our computers are old PC's." -- decision maker who thinks you don't want his business. It will happen. Maybe already has.
c) Green: Make Coverswish photo bigger - I had to squint to tell what was going on. Change "fancy music album art" to iTunes. The attempt at distance made me think you were hiding from the association rather than embracing it, perhaps because you would prefer I think that you came up with it yourself. I don't care if you came up with it yourself. I care if it works just like iTunes. I know iTunes. I trust iTunes. Any friend/copycat of iTunes is a friend of mine.
* Get rid of "using a smartphone's camera". "So, do I use the camera app, or...what." This confusion is the reason QR codes never blew up.
* Less conceptual-style language, more concrete-object language. "Libramatic then retrieves the book's catalog information for automatic viewing - title, author, and even content abstracts."
* MUCH better than the current graphic would be just a zoom of a screenshot of Libramatic displaying a really impressive abstract. Define as you will. But be sure to partial-zoom, focusing on the abstract and cutting off the other info, because you're not trying to sell them on that, because Libramatic is too awesome to think of mere book titles and author names as an impressive feature, and because your customers expect better. Whether or not any of that is true, I have no idea, but that's the impression you should give.
d) Blue2: You already know what, you lazy person. All the icons and paras are offset and different sizes and different styles even. Stop dat. Also, I disagree with some icon choices, especially the globe and the paintbrush (kidding). But I gotta go now, late for lunch. Shit. Anyway, good luck out there, Shane.
It's not nice of me to say, but it's true. People only ever come around after the fact. Sitting around advocating positions in hopes of furthering corresponding causes is perhaps the most/least efficient way never to accomplish anything.
Are you or aren't you describing the whole of non-medical, non-moon landing human technological progress? (Yes, 'progress' is a loaded word, but depending on your perspective, that may be the point.)
Neolithic Rev. onward, it's been specialize, optimize, specialize, optimize. What's Excel do that you can't do with an abacus?
I wouldn't call reinventing the early 20th century progress, at least not positive progress. The service industry is largely the antithesis of a technological utopia.
The worst of it was that most of the fitting wasn't necessary. There is no need for there to be a link between Up and Toy Story - both stories can exist in the same universe, as there is nothing contradictory.
In fact, the author of the page doesn't seem to want all the films to be in the same universe. S/he could more accurately be described as trying to reduce the number of "magical" artifacts necessary to explain all of the things in the films that don't exist in real life. So we have the discovery of magic in Brave, and the creation of unlimited energy / strong AI in The Incredibles, and everything else flows from that. Of course trying to tie everything to just these two root causes ironically makes them all less believable than the suspension of disbelief for each individual act of "magic".
Exactly, exactly. If you see this-- I'm replying late-- lend me an ear:
This analysis itself and the curious overwhelmingly positive response by HN and especially Reddit, as measured by vote tally and the mere inclination of the author to go to the trouble of creating a website solely dedicated to the idea, are, I believe, symptoms of how American schools teach literature.
Before describing my personal experiences, I want to note first that you should forget everything you've heard Americans prop up as excuses for our education system, if not entirely, then at least for this particular discussion. Science and history teachers may need to "teach to the (easiest) test (in the world)", but English teachers can and do assign whatever books they want - the graduation test is basic essay writing.
Anyway, American English teachers are extremely fond, for whatever reason, of "themed" curricula. For example, in my 9th grade English class, we read "Native Son" by Richard Wright (black American), "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe (black Nigerian), "Cry, the Beloved Country" by Alan Paton (black South African), "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad (the only white person on this list, and, inarguably, the only High Literature as well), and something or other by Maya Angelou (black American).
So, if you can't guess, the message that year was black people got it rough. If, in your literary analysis for any section of any of these books (even Conrad's, which isn't even about black people), you concluded that the message the author meant to convey with any even remotely logical elements X, Y, and Z, was that, indeed, black people have it rough, then guess what? You're right. X, Y, and Z mean black people got it rough. A+.
Yes, I mean it. Pick three random paragraphs out of 1984. "Orwell's opinion is that totalitarianism is bad, since, here, the authorities are torturing Winston." A+, you literary genius. Get something wrong for once! Please, just for the sake of variety! "In Fahrenheit 451, the firefighters' helmets are red because communism, which is also red." Oh my God, I never thought of it that way! Somebody get this 16-year-old a Nobel.
(The sole exception to this is Shakespeare, whose meaning behind any one play even the most idiotic English teachers are unwilling to reduce to a single sentence. And, wouldn't you know it, 80% of the students in class will inevitably complain about his insistence on using Victorian English, the big jerk. Literally, I shit you not, the majority of the time American students read Shakespeare, they're reading it in a book wherein the Shakespearean version is printed on left pages and the "modern translation" is printed on the right.)
Ha. In one higher-level class (juniors and seniors), an older prof asked the class whether most students these days were religious. Response: "If we were when we started this major, we sure aren't now." Anxious laughter followed by contemplative nodding, all around.
Well yes. We had a situation reminding me of your story. ;-)
And no, we are not dour nor depressing. Me (having been highly influenced by formalism and structuralism) just wanted to know, what made stories work the way they do? What are/were the pieces, that allowed so many different people to read so many different things into these stories.
I wanted to understand the ground, the basis of all this. And I believe, that this yielded some quite interesting and counter-intuitive insights into some texts.
>Do you think that, as a society, the United States has become a basket case?
You ... do not live here, nor do any of your readers, nor is it reasonable to diagnose entire societies, though I'm sure it makes you feel smart. How do you work for the media and not understand how the media works? Everything you know about the United States, somebody wanted you to know. Which is what makes your list of grievances so disturbing... it reads like the UK media's primary objective is to boost the national ego.