Ask HN: I am 21 and lost - <AUTHOR> Hello I am 21 and seem lost. I can't seem to figure out what is it that I want to do with my life. The friendships that I have seem false, why is that. Has someone past through this same experience? <comment><USER2> There is no "general advice" for "finding yourself", although that might not be what you asked. It's most likely also true for finding out what you want to do in life[0]. Figuring these things out is very personal and dependent on your personal history, and there are few general princples. If you feel you really need help, it might be beneficial to talk to a counselor who can provide more personalized help. There are few formulae that apply to all person's situations.

As an illustrating example, I don't know what you mean by "friendships are false." What do you mean by that? Do you have many acquaintances and no close friends or were you recently betrayed by someone whom you consider a close friend? This is something you need to sit down with someone else and talk about.

[0] With respect to this, many people say they don't know what they want to do until they do it, but then again, some people know from when they are 6 they want to be a doctor/scientist/professor and, lo and behold, that guides their life and they do it. It _really_ depends on your personality and goals and that can only be weened out of a 1-on-1 conversation, IMO, again, very few general principles here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your advice. "friendships are false" by that I mean; that my "friends" only need and ask for my help wen in deep trouble, and I don't feel they are asking the way as a favor. For some reason my "friends" seem fake.

<comment><USER2> I perhaps might not be the best person to get advice from on this because I am an introvert (recently retook Myers-Briggs and it placed me as an moderate introvert, although in the past I've been at extreme). I have spent days at a time happily alone, not talking to anyone, so I care less about what others think compared to most people I know. I've learned to just say no when favors would drag on my resources and the situation isn't dire enough. I would suggest having similar boundaries.

It may be different for you though, you may want these people to like you or be your friend, so perhaps you can't do that?

Again, I suggest talking to a counselor who would probably have better experience dealing with different types of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You haven't included enough details for anyone to provide meaningful help. But I'll try.

I think many of the folks who don't feel lost (or feel less so) operate on some measure of momentum, following a well-trodden path of finish secondary/high school, get degree, get job, [get family] (last step is optional). Those tend to consume enough cycles that there's none left over to feel lost.

People who take a step back and ask "what am I even doing here? Why would I want this job over that one?" would probably find more frustration than those who don't.

Friendships are a real challenge. It requires significant investment to find friends to begin with. If somehow they turn out to not be good friends, you must keep searching for new ones. Keep in mind that friendships require you to work for your part in the friendship as well. If you're lucky enough to have friends at your workplace, that's a huge win.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know my question seemed vague, and lacked information. I never thought about it that way. I will try my best to focus on what is ahead and work out a definite plan to follow.

Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi.

Yes, that sounds pretty normal for someone your age. My advice would be stay fit and healthy (eat, sleep, exercise properly) and think about smaller goals that you can realistically achieve rather than dwelling on the big picture too much. For what it's worth I think a lot of people find their teens and twenties a pretty hard time (I certainly did) so don't think you are alone in that. You don't have to know all the answers right now.

About the false friendships thing -- perhaps they are and perhaps not, I suspect it's a combination of not having met people you really click with, over thinking things, and a general effect of your particular age that you're still finding where you fit in.

If you can, keep open communication with your parents/grandparent/siblings and close friends about what you around going through, or a counselor or other trusted adult if you need (there's no shame in getting some good advice about life and help to sift through your thoughts)

Maybe don't frame it as "figuring out what to do with my life" as a whole but rather many smaller experiences which will eventually add up to the whole thing.

Most people can't estimate and plan a 3 month IT project particularly accurately, let alone entire lifetime!

:)

<comment><AUTHOR> That may be it. Maybe I need to find friends who I really click with,aside from the current ones that I have.

Focusing on small things/projects is what I will start doing. The last thing you wrote reminded me of something I had already long forgotten. Sincerely thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let me start by asserting that there is no figuring it out.

You may discover satisfaction, peace and fulfillment. However, these are the result of living an engaged life, not really objectives on their own.

Find a purpose. I recommend a selfless one that allows you to be of value to other people. Commit to it fully, exhaust it or fail at it. Then move on to the next purpose.

Using this approach you will learn about yourself and develop relationships that are based on more than vicinity, common interest or some superficial social norm.

The silver-lining is that you are asking these questions. I'd argue that someone who thinks they have figured it out risks becoming blind to their full potential.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your advice.</comment></comment>


Stop asking "how can we hire more women?" - <AUTHOR> http://alicebartlett.co.uk/blog/stop-asking-how-can-we-hire

<comment><USER2> And reframing the question that way shows you don't give a flying fuck about the concerns of the people asking it.

If you're going to display that level of empathy, why should they behave differently?</comment>


A Primer on Bezier Curves: finding y, given x - <AUTHOR> https://pomax.github.io/bezierinfo/#yforx <comment><AUTHOR> A small but important update to the Primer: after seven years there is now finally a section that explains how you can find a y coordinate, given an x coordinate, for functions that "look like they should just be normal functions".

As parametric curves, Bezier curves are notorious for being loopy (heck, it's _the_ reasons we use them in all manner of graphic design) but there's plenty of cases where they're not: CSS transitions, audio EQ, image leveling, etc. can all use Bezier curves as their control function, but that frickin control variable means you can't just get y, if you know x.

This new section explains exactly how to get around that. I should have written it years ago =)</comment>


The Perfect Crime (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=691642 <comment><USER2> Summary:

The 6th amendment requires a jury pool to be selected from the state/district where a crime is committed. The part of Yellowstone National Park which is in the state of Idaho has no residents, and therefore no potential jury candidates. This creates a loophole which could possibly allow someone to commit a serious crime that could not be prosecuted.

There are potential strategies to close the loophole: residents moving into the area after a crime is committed, interpreting the clause broadly enough to allow residents from neighboring "similar areas" to qualify, prosecuting lesser crimes that don't require jury trials, prosecuting related crimes (such as "conspiracy to X") that took place outside of the area, or even vigilante justice.

See also [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicinage_Clause#The_perfect_cri...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicinage_Clause#The_perfect_crime.3F)

<comment><USER3> I have heard of trials being moved to a nearby jurisdiction, usually when there is some conflict of interest in the original district (like if the defendant is a public official in the district). I would guess that moving a trial doesn't require a jury, so perhaps the prosecutor could just move the trial to the nearest district with residents.

<comment> Tuna-Fish Pulling a jury from a district where the crime wasn't committed can only happen with consent of the accused. Quite a lot of legal work has been done to expand the definition of where the crime was committed to allow for venue shopping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This "loophole" was even a plot device in a recent book, "Free Fire" by CJ Box. [http://www.cjbox.net/books/free-fire](http://www.cjbox.net/books/free- fire)

</comment><comment><USER5> Given this is Hacker News it is interesting to consider 'softer crimes' than murder which even the threat of might be able to drive legislative change. It would seem that, if permits could be granted, it would make a great place for a "no rules" security camp-con. Look at DEFCON as an example. They have a wireless CTF; however, certain hacking techniques are off limits if one is concerned about being charged with a felony. As an example, signal jamming to downgrade connections to weaker ones which have implemented broken protocols or jamming and redirecting GPS signals:

Title 18, Section 1362 - prohibits willful or malicious interference to US government communications; subjects the operator to possible fines, imprisonment, or both (18 U.S.C. § 1362)

Title 18, Section 1367(a) - prohibits intentional or malicious interference to satellite communications; subjects the operator to possible fines, imprisonment, or both (18 U.S.C. § 1367(a))

While there would likely be very low interest from law enforcement for local signal jamming against competitors in a wireless CTF, things could get interesting if someone attempted to hijack or jam satellite uplinks from that location. Surely such antics, even without an arrest would spur more immediacy in closing the loophole?

</comment><comment><USER6> Is not it technically possible to do such perfect crime in any district, if you just kill everybody who lives in it?

</comment><comment><USER7> The actual paper:

[http://passthebarexam.com/articles/SSRN- id691642.pdf](http://passthebarexam.com/articles/SSRN-id691642.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is one of those wonderful "theory meets practice" issues. US history is full of people arguing on similar technicalities and courts universally reject them as such.

There is zero chance you could commit a semi-major or major crime there and get away with it, anymore than you can quash a warrant and exclude evidence because they mis-spelled your name on the warrant application.

Even if, by some miracle, you managed to "get away with it", after years in solitary confinement, a $1000000+ legal bill, and a completely ruined life... congrats, you're the one and only person to ever manage it because your case would immediately spur political efforts to close the loophole.

The bottom line: this just isn't an issue in reality.

</comment><comment><USER9> Alternate source of explanation- [http://loststates.blogspot.com/2011/08/loophole-landwhere- cr...](http://loststates.blogspot.com/2011/08/loophole-landwhere-crimes-cant- be.html?m=1)

Key point is that it's a district with zero population, so there's no jury pool.

<comment><USER10> The district itself has a non-zero population. The problem is that it is split between three states, and the portion of the district that is in the state of Idaho has zero population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article is pretty old. Has anyone tried to exploit this loophole since then?

<comment><USER12> Actually, yes. Here's a recent article overviewing the subject: [http://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5738756/you-can-kill-someone- in...](http://www.vox.com/2014/5/22/5738756/you-can-kill-someone-in-a-section- of-yellowstone-and-get-away-scot)

Scroll down to "an actual case". Mind you, AFAICT, they didn't travel to the 'zone of death' intentionally to commit a crime; but, having committed a crime there, they did attempt to use this defense.</comment></comment>


The "Don't Be a Dick" Code of Conduct - <AUTHOR> https://ilostmypage.com/the-dont-be-a-dick-code/ <comment><USER2> "What the group considers to be dickish WILL change. Even if a group agrees now, all groups change over time (even if the members stay the same their environment definitely doesn't)."

It's interesting how we adapt our sense of normal based on consensus even within the smallest of groups. If you have a team of 5, and 2 are replaced, the dynamic for the remaining 3 changes based not only on how they individually interact with the new people but also with how the incumbents as a whole interact with the new people.

If A,B,C interact with D,E. Then A's relationship with D also depends on the interactions between BD, BE, CD, and CE

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed.

Whilst it's less obviously impactful, I think it's important to note that it doesn't have to be a whole person-swap though. Group dynamics can change over time as the people in it have different life-events, hit different points in their career-path etc. That change can then go and have exactly the same kind of effect that you outline, without any people-swaps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A CoC that encourages bullying and marginalisation. Probably should include "don't cry" as well to get the full gamut of emotional abuse covered.</comment>


The web is about to change forever (again) - <AUTHOR> https://www.pagecloud.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> the web cloning feature while quiet impressive (at face value) also opens a huge copyright issue and not to mention a nasty design echo chamber.</comment>


Famo.us open to everyone - <AUTHOR> http://famo.us/?new <comment><USER3> I got a look at this during the "Secret Beta". All in all, cool idea with using the 3d matrix transform, felt very unfinished though. I also felt that the coding style was very verbose with plenty of needless inheritance tricks, etc.

They have a huge physics library and a bunch of other stuff that is not necessary for 99% of apps. There was one demo for a basic app, and like 100 demos of various bouncing balls and springs.

I think that if they had focused on a minimal implementation of the basics necessary for apps, like menu dragging and maybe some light transforms, and really polished that, it could have been an awesome tool. Some stuff was indeed very smooth on my ancient Android phone.

Too bad they disappeared down a huge rabbithole. The messianic proclamations from the CEO were pretty goofy too.

EDIT: In their defense, many (but not all!) of these demos are much better on a phone. Don't judge it based on the desktop experience.

<comment><USER4> As an employee I have mixed feelings here. For a long time (I've been with the company for 2 years), I was the main person at the company arguing for the basics necessary for all apps like you suggest we should have done. However, looking at this from the inside my view has changed to where the approach we're taking probably makes the most sense long term even though it may not be immediately obvious.

First, the goal posts have moved. With iOS7 and Jelly Bean, the expectations of people building apps have become an impossibly high bar for the traditional web. If we had built a simple app framework, then we'd be competing with native apps circa 2009. I think that hyperlinks alone would have helped us win the battle against native apps, but there would always be lots of use cases we wouldn't be able to touch.

Second, focusing on trying to do everything you can do with iOS and Android provided us with much more challenging performance constraints. This extremely high bar has resulted in a design where performance is considered in everything we do. If we didn't squeeze out as much performance as possible, it would leave a much smaller margin for the developers using Famo.us. Looking at everyone who has built stuff with Famo.us, many people have been able to make demos and apps that compete easily with any mobile app built by very senior developers.

Furthermore, there is one major yet unrealized optimization that all the browser makers are aware of that once implemented will completely eliminate 90% of the overhead. Basically, HTML, being XML, inherits XML's poor type system of only strings and children. When interfaces to the DOM were designed they adopted XML's weak type system for the getters and setters. This means that when Famo.us sets a CSS 3D Matrix transform, it needs to take an array of floats, stringify it and then set the style property on a DOM element. Once set, the browser then needs to take this string and parse it back into an array of floats. This marshaling of an array of floats to a string and back again is horrible for performance. This is why Famo.us is currently limited to moving 200-400 surfaces simultaneously on a desktop browser. When this bottleneck is eliminated, everything changes. Famo.us which is relatively fast compared to all techniques out there will become several orders of magnitude faster.

What I don't get is all the hate out there. Yes, we've misstepped in places. Is what we've built thus far perfect? No, not yet. We're competing with operating systems that have years of head start on the web. If we want something that can compete with native, then we need to start building something that is as ambitious in scope with what already exists in native. What other option out there even comes close to giving us a path to combining an experience that is comparable to native (for the average web user, not us neckbeards), supports semantic web content (at the Surface level), has a faster development workflow for iterating on designs and supports the most important feature of the web: hyperlinks?

Lastly, I think the importance of native scrolling and other native-like features are actually overblown. I've been on the web long enough to remember when people used to say that webmail would never compete with desktop mail and that Excel would never compete with something like Google Spreadsheets. Even ExtJS was born out of the need to have a javascript framework that aped the Microsoft Windows look and feel.

What is so special about native scrolling that puts it on a pedestal where it cannot be disrupted? If we define "quality" as "fitness for use", does our scroller yet meet the definition of a quality scroller for the desktop? No, we've got a ways to go. However for mobile devices, I would argue that Famo.us is definitely already there. I encourage everyone to take the demos we have, boot them up on a local server on your machine and view them on your phone or tablet. Those are definitely fit for use now and give you access to a market that is already larger than any native platform and can be opened via a link (many greenfield opportunities not available in native land).

There will come a time where native scroller is going to be shown to be the false god that it is. All you really need is to reach parity with respect to fitness for use and you're at a tipping point where that's no longer a hard and fast requirement. From there, things eventually shift far enough that it's no longer a consideration.

<comment><USER5> > No, we've got a ways to go. However for mobile devices, I would argue that > Famo.us is definitely already there.

Looking at it on Chrome in Galaxy Note 3 with KitKat, no, you aren't "already there". Scrolling is painfully erratic.

And if you really want to be "mobile first", which makes sense, it would probably be a good idea to have content which (a) scaled to the width of the device, or (b) failing to scale to device width, at least provided horizontal scrolling. As it is, _even in landscape_ your "Famo.us University" content extends beyond _both_ sides of the viewport.

> There will come a time where native scroller is going to be shown to be the > false god that it is.

Sure, someone may one day build something that makes not using the native scroller sensible. But Famo.us _hasn 't_, as yet, done that.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, KitKat isn't on the list of versions we support. We target Ice Cream Sandwich and above. Also, are you using the stock Android browser or did you install Chrome?

The problem isn't with that device isn't Famo.us, and IIRC it's not the hardware either, it's the implementation of the APIs we rely on in the browser.

Many people replace their mobile phones every 1-3 years. Now that smartphones are becoming feature phones and all these phones have the most recent versions of Android, it's only a matter of time.

<comment><USER5> > FWIW, KitKat isn't on the list of versions we support. We target Ice Cream > Sandwich and above.

Since when is KitKat (4.4) not "above" Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0)?

> Also, are you using the stock Android browser or did you install Chrome?

Well, I said Chrome, but the problems (at least, the ones listed in my previous post) are identical in the stock browser.

> Many people replace their mobile phones every 1-3 years.

Well, yeah, I just replaced my long-in-the-tooth iPhone 4 with a still-top-of- the-line Galaxy Note 3 (though the GNote 4 will be out fairly soon.) That's the phone we're talking about here.

> Now that smartphones are becoming feature phones and all these phones have > the most recent versions of Android, it's only a matter of time.

But KitKat _is_ the most recent version of Android, and you just said you don't support it.

<comment><USER4> Oops .. total brain fart on my part. Did the alphabet wrong in my head. I always felt more comfortable using numbers for versioning. Letters always require a little bit of mental gymnastics since it's uncommon to think of them as having ordinality in every day life.

Yes, we support KitKat. We'll investigate the experience on your device.

<comment><USER6> This link might be useful to your team: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history)

Looks like KitKat has been out for 6 months. Just a heads up, the best Android devices are running KitKat, like the S4 & S5. I can confirm, the Famo.us scrolling & animations have issues on the S4.

That being said, your framework is amazing on iOS, and feels like a native app. I'm sure your team will have no problem with KitKat, if time is dedicated to it.

<comment><USER4> Oh we're familiar with it and we spend time trying to get Android working well. It's been a more challenging platform because the performance of the underlying APIs on Chrome has been more erratic.

FWIW, I made this versioning mistake because I'm one of the two people in the company who is the least familiar with Android versioning because I work on backend systems and tooling that we'll be releasing later this year. 90% of my time is spent in the terminal.

Anyways, homepage clearly needs some a lot of love. In the meantime, do you mind trying the following instructions in this comment, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7771330](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7771330) , on your Android device to see how the demos perform?

<comment><USER6> Hey Andrew, thanks for the clarification. I only had time to check out Albumatic, Rise, and PHQ4, on the Samsung S4. Albumatic was a bit laggy, Rise & PHQ4 were pretty great. Will have more feedback after the Hackathon.

<comment><USER6> Post Hackathon: Great framework. Really interested to see where it goes.

<comment><USER4> Awesome. Thanks for the feedback. We're working hard on pushing things forward and will fix the initial problems we've had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Scroll doesn't work (can't even hit spacebar or use the arrow keys), demos don't seem to work (I can't scroll to get to more than the first 2 anyway), and there is an unclickable scroll bar just taunting me. Maybe it is just linux+chrome that doesn't work well? Any one else get the same issues?

Also I like how they eliminated the scrollbar everywhere (for aesthetic purposes?) and yet there is a big greyed out scroll bar in the university page (in the area where you type your code).

<comment><USER8> I usually scroll using the smooth scroll by pressing the middle mouse button. Doesn't work either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised that so little consideration seems to have been given to the marketing of this framework. Your landing page should be optimized for the audience you are expecting to sell to. Running a general release aimed at developers on a Monday afternoon, they should have expected that most of their target audience would access their page from a desktop environment because they are likely programming. Having a page that seems to be optimized for mobile, albeit poorly considering the scrollbar didn't work on my iPhone any better than it did on my laptop, was a pretty egregious oversight, especially considering they constantly remind their audience that choosing reliable tools is important for their career.

</comment><comment><USER10> Scroll from the top to the bottom (or vice versa) really hard.

Watch the "3d layout engine" flip out thoroughly (tested only on chrome stable on darwin)

<comment> squeaky-clean Try grabbing the scroll bar with your mouse and pulling it down the page. Nope, apparently scrollbars aren't for that.

This doesn't seem to be designed with regular desktop usage in mind.

<comment><USER11> I don't know why but it seems to be perfectly acceptable to break the scrollbar these days.

<comment><USER12> I don't think it is. Famous is the first I've seen to complement reimplement (and fuck up) something as fundamental as scrolling.

<comment><USER11> What about the countless sites that have infinite scrolling (Facebook for example)? It's not as bad as Famous but still breaks it in my opinion.

<comment><USER12> Infinite scrolling doesnt break scrolling, it breaks backwards/forwards navigation.

<comment><USER11> It does both (infinite scrolling is a horrible idea). If you try dragging the scrollbar it will jump around every time more content is loaded and you lose your position on the page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I found it interesting that most of the demos provided work very poorly for "desktop web".

I think frameworks like this exist in a no-mans land - A modern web framework is great because it allows you to easily deploy one responsive app to a variety of devices/screen sizes/user inputs. This comes at the expense of performance compared to a native mobile app.

So if you are building a web framework that is built entirely with mobile in mind, then why choose the framework over native development? You are sacrificing platform agnosticism AND performance at the same time.

<comment><USER14> How are you sacrificing platform agnosticism by using a web framework?

<comment><USER15> Because using a web framework that only works on mobile is not truly platform agnostic. It may be platform agnostic in that it works on multiple different mobile platforms, but a mobile first web framework is not truly platform agnostic as it doesn't work for the desktop web.

<comment><USER14> So it's more agnostic for mobile development than the native mobile development you're clamoring for?

Also it's really not a big step for them to polish the desktop experience. They just released 0.2.0, give it time and I really do think that it's going to be a great platform for both mobile and desktop.

<comment><USER13> It's more agnostic than true native development but less agnostic than a lot of other frameworks out there.

And I agree that it is an early release and that they have room to improve on the desktop experience. I was just commentating on the current state of things.

All other things aside I think it looks like a cool framework with lots of potential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is anyone else encountering large lagtime problems with scrolling? Also, the scroll-bar is non-functional. [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41231461/455436902/fff.w...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41231461/455436902/fff.webm)

<comment><USER17> I know, the irony is rather hilarious. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4iyU2a0ivI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4iyU2a0ivI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> 95% of the negativity on this thread revolves around the obviously sub-par scrolling behavior. I think that if you look past the ScrollView problems there is a lot of great innovation in this framework. I'm looking forward to their continued work.

I've been particularly impressed with the new support for Angular: [http://famo.us/angular](http://famo.us/angular)

As a side note, that page is a good example of famous being used with NORMAL scrolling.

<comment><USER19> I'm trying to keep an open mind, and I feel really bad for the developers to get so much bad or even downright hostile feedback.

But to me the terrible scrollbar, and the janky behavior on my Nexus 4 doesn't just frustrate me; it makes me seriously doubt the value of the whole project.

If a group of people spend a very long time working on something, yet somehow can't figure out that releasing it with such basic, huge flaws is a bad idea, it signals to me that something is fundamentally wrong with the whole project. I think they should sit down and rethink what they're doing.

That said, after my initial frustrations I decided to give the thing another look, and there's definitely some good stuff there. Maybe this could be really great some day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Down arrow? Nope. Click and drag? Nope. PgDn? Nope.

Nope. I tried, but while there's obviously more stuff to read below the viewport, I can't get to it.

Oddly, this _may_ increase the likelihood I will conclude I'm not missing anything.

</comment><comment><USER21> On the demos page [0]:

> The PHQ4 example shows off a great parallax effect.

This isn't a parallax effect - there is no illusion of depth.

Parallax is when "background images move by the camera slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth" [1]

[0] [http://famo.us/demos](http://famo.us/demos) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scrolling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scrolling)

</comment><comment><USER22> Are these pages meant for desktop? I cannot even scroll [http://famo.us/university/famous-101/slideshow/33/](http://famo.us/university/famous-101/slideshow/33/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Crazy to finally poke around the Famo.us University and then to read all these scalling comments. The scrolling did not work that well for me either, however having seen so many APIs for graphics in Java back in the RIA days until now, I think that Famo.us is doing something fantastic for HTML5.

By the sound of the comments and also feeling the same pressure I'd say everyone is between a rock and a hard place, when it comes to getting their hands on a decent mobile framework (more than that Angular CRUD thing anyways).

Yes, it is absurd that something like what Famo.us is doing at long last has not already been done. Now that they are doing it lets give them a chance to do it (if that leader of theirs could actually code instead of act like a kingshit it would also help). I'm also sure most of you could crawl back up your stack and shut up for a bit longer.

I've had to wait a long time myself, to the point where I've just had to use a lot of engineering and progressively move toward an agnostic codebase that has become elegant as a matter of course. I would welcome Famo.us as an option for me, sure beats the incredible waste of going native. We need to support Famo.us with useful feedback not bitching.

</comment><comment><USER24> Famo.us is another over-hyped framework that would have been cool five years ago. I've met Steve several times at their absurdly pompous meetups in SF where he claims to be changing the world. Each time, I couldn't shake his dirty used-car salesman vibe. If you want to make a great product, try focusing on the problem you want to solve. You guys are honestly embarrassing yourselves - and your leadership isn't helping.

</comment><comment><USER25> Just scrolling the website is jerky on my iPad Air. That doesn't seem like good design.

<comment><USER26> it's jerky on my (haswell) desktop too. It seems that one of the things they've done to make it feel faster is to mess with the scroll wheel - <USER2> scrolls slightly more than the default which makes using the site feel sort of "fake".

<comment><USER27> It seems like they heavily turned on scroll acceleration. If I scroll 1 "click" of my mousewheel the scroll bar only move a tiny almost imperceptible amount.

If I scroll a lot the bar will fly off the top / bottom of the scrollable area and slowly come back.

Feels like it needs a little work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm always disappointed with Famo.us's updates - so much hype, so much opportunity, always feels wasted. Building out a developer network is hard, and they were so good at getting buzz/interest- would love to see them translate it to something meaningful in a timely manner (like apps actually using and succeeding with the fwk), vs. sending more and more marketing updates.

</comment><comment><USER29> All these overbearing JavaScript frameworks solve problems nobody has. Web design is trivial, all you're doing is bloating it and making it less accessible by replacing native GUI elements (like scrollbars) with our own confusing, low-performance solutions. I see more and more bad habits from 15 years ago come back to hunt the web, how did it come to this?

</comment><comment><USER30> Nothing seems to work right in touch IE11 on Windows 8.1, not even scrolling on the front page. Not a great showing for what's supposed to be a cross- platform mobile web framework.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, preserve-3D is not yet supported in IE11, even after the Windows 8.1 update. AFAIK there is no clear ETA on when preserve-3d support will land in Internet Explorer. My best guess would be in IE12.

That being said, Famo.us currently works best on mobile devices, which nets you all of the iOS ecosystem and large portions of the Android ecosystem. Is it everyone? No. Is it a big market? Yes. Will it get bigger? Yes.

(disclaimer: I work at famo.us)

<comment><USER31> It might work "best" on mobile devices, but I'm afraid that "best" is still pretty awful. In Chrome on a Moto G the frontpage gets maybe 5fps when scrolling. And not even consistently, but with seemingly random intervals between refreshes. The effect is physically nauseating, a bit like bad VR. On the same phone with Firefox it's even worse. The touch response is just so badly off that I can't even come up with a mental model of what's happening.

I'm sure you guys are proud of launching, and receiving criticism is never fun. But honestly there's no way this thing is usable _at all_ on a midrange Android phone. If you as a company think otherwise, there must be some kind of collective self-delusion going on that you need to work out.

(If instead you had to launch now for some reason, even if you knew that the system isn't really production quality yet on most platforms... Well, too bad. But maybe you could benefit from stating up front on the page the environments where you expect it to work well, before all the launch goodwill is squandered by people not viewing the page on exactly the right platform.)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback. Out of curiosity, what version of Android are you running on the Moto G?

<comment><USER31> 4.4.2 (the normal Motorola version, which is very close to stock Android). Chrome 34.

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, how did the demos perform on that device?

We'll work on making the demos available at standalone URLs (instead of iframed on our site). In the meantime, if you haven't tried them and want to, you can:

1) download the starter pack

2) go to the demos folder

3) open a webserver in each folder that serves the app.html as the index (just occurred to me that we should switch app.html with the iframed index.html for this very reason).

4) then open each demo on your phone over the local network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The Famo.us session (along with a couple others) at last year's HTML5 conference in SF is what made me decide to make the shift to full time iOS development. Every benchmark was presented in terms relative to native app development: "transitions are 95% as smooth as native apps;" "rendering times take only 3% longer than native apps."

Of course mobile web development is important, but I don't really see where Famo.us's market is. Full feature desktop web?

</comment><comment><USER33> There's an absolutely massive custom scrollbar (why?!), but clicking in it doesn't do anything?

</comment><comment><USER34> I like this as a concept, but I wouldn't recommend to build websites with it. I wonder how user-accessible websites built with famo.us are — for example I can't just use my arrow keys to navigate up/down and tab'ing through elements does not move the scroll-bar accordingly, this could be an issue for some, older internet users.

<comment><USER14> You can build that functionality if it's really a problem. Also surfaces within Famo.us afaik are just like normal sections on a webpage where your normal tabbing and arrow keys will work.

But if you're building more traditional looking web apps in famo.us, I don't think you'll run into the issues you're talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Choosing a development platform is more than just a technical decision—it's > a career decision.

That's not a great argument to convince me to adopt a brand new platform

</comment><comment><USER36> There are lots of negative comments. So I may as well complete the list:

\- Fundamentally you have to code UI within JS. It's like doing document.write('<div></div>'); without .html file

\- Physic lib is totally useless on mobile. It's slower than pure JS

\- Flex grid doesn't work well when you make browser size larger and then smaller. You can see the UI not being refreshed.

</comment><comment><USER4> First famo.us employee here, want to give people some food for thought to consider as you gripe about things like zoom and and the scrollbar (rightfully so). Some of the more controversial points, especially those regarding accessibility and progressive enhancement, made below are my own.

I think I'm the only person at the company that browses the web with JavaScript disabled, so I know how broken the original world wide web from when I first went online in 1994 is. I also remember using text-only browsers like lynx, and demonstrate it to co-workers on occasion. Lastly, I've been doing the web app development schtick for several years now and seen the good and the bad.

With all that in mind, the push towards progressive enhancement starting in 2003 when AJAX was just starting to become popular has proven to be a false prophet. IMHO, no idea has done more to make the web less accessible while also holding it back in terms of interactivity. You simply cannot use the same abstraction for both documents and applications and expect decent results for either.

What we should have done instead is allowed the two to diverge long ago and especially after 2007 when mobile computing took off and that change in screen size afforded us the opportunity to return to screens not all that dissimilar from those I remember using in '94\. The first iPhone had a effective resolution of 320×480. You can effectively show as much on an iPhone as a 1994 computer monitor and have it be readable on both. In fact that's basis of the "Mobile First" design paradigm that frameworks like Zurb Foundation have pushed for. Designing content for a single-wide column that scrolls up and down, that you can jump backward and forward on via anchor hypertext references was a really smart abstraction for lots of content. The site [http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://www.motherfuckingwebsite.com/) illustrates this poignantly.

The technology direction we should have taken should have made sure that search engines, the blind (or otherwise disabled or dexterally challenged) actually remained the first class citizens on the web instead of taking the back seat to print designers and interaction designers. It's easy to take the content designed for those constitutents and make it available via APIs that can then be consumed by people making rich web apps.

We even had something like that, it's called RSS and it is glorious. RSS may have actually survived if it had not been for progressive enhancement which was crap but just good enough that people could get away with killing RSS off. Every technologist should make themselves familiar with the concept of path dependency (this Slate articles on the persistence of rockets as our primary way of putting objects in space is illustrative: [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/02/space_stasis.html) ). Had progressive enhancement not become the road taken, no one would have ever argued to kill off RSS in favor of a hack jobbed DOM implemented where maybe 1 in 100 developers actually understood how to actually implement accessibility. RSS and other means of programmatic content consumption would have become the prime way of being indexable by search engines. Everyone would have maintained content that way because it would have been in their self interest to do so. Not only that, progressive enhancement is just usable enough to not get sued under the ADA. Without progressive enhancement, businesses (read: at least every fortune 500 company and then some) would have poured gobs money to into making sure they have the digital equivalent of wheelchair ramps. Progressive enhancement gave everyone the opportunity to do the least amount of effort and still maintain a defensible position if challenged legally.

The screen reading experience has been shit for like for ever and it's only gotten worse as designs have become more complex. Skipping over the level of abstraction that made content usable programmatically not only impoverished those that need it, but those who don't as well because we're deprived of richer, more flexible APIs.

Having worked with webapps for a while, I think one of the most amazing improvements in the last 5 years has been the move towards displaying content on many more screens than just the desktop. This has forced us to go back to API solutions (usually REST, but sometimes RPC over websockets) that often ape what we originally tried to accomplish with RSS. This is the only sane way to provide content that needs to be displayed in different ways, from a Mobile First single long scroll page rendered by the server to a Famous/Ember/Angular/Backbone/React app that takes that server-rendered page and replaces it entirely with a rich interactive experience in the browser.

We (at famo.us) don't yet have a solution for this future that treats everyone as a first class citizen, but we eventually plan to address this if the community doesn't tackle it first. We've been inspired by a few attempts at figuring out how to achieve this. Spike Brehm and crew over at AirBnB have been exploring this with Rendr, that works with Backbone.js, [https://github.com/rendrjs/rendr](https://github.com/rendrjs/rendr) , and August Lilleaas has worked on a solution for React, [http://augustl.com/blog/2014/jdk8_react_rendering_on_server/](http://augustl.com/blog/2014/jdk8_react_rendering_on_server/) . We feel like there is potential for a generalized solution that doesn't need to be necessarily tied to how one framework works.

If you look deep at Famo.us, we don't throw out the DOM wholesale, instead we use the DOM where it matters. In Famo.us, there is a concept of a Surface (which is similar to Layers in CoreAnimation). The Surface is basically a container for HTML Document Fragments, usually fragments that are very strongly structured semantically. The entire scene graph above each Surface node basically helps you programmatically abstract away all the bullshit that many today handle awkwardly with levels and levels of DIV hell controlled by JavaScript. This is not only the abstraction that makes building things in Famo.us easy and fast, but also provides a boundary where content gets lumped into semantic chunks that oftentimes should be consumable for use in a long- scroll, semantically rich, Mobile First design where navigation is hyperlinked anchor based instead of spatial navigation.

When browsers were first designed, they made a decision to have a 1 to 1 relationship between the window object and the document object. While reasonable at the time (remember: small screens, low bandwidth, high latency), this proved unscalable to larger screens, greater bandwidth and lower latency. Take Twitter for example. Twitter.com is basically an application for displaying a tiny document called a Tweet. There hundreds of tweet documents shown at a time. The code for tweets is semantically rich. The code for the twitter app? That's DIV hell. This is what Famo.us helps with. Like Flash and Silverlight before it, it helps apps be apps, but unlike its predecessors, it allows documents to be documents. Keeping these two separate keeps abstractions from leaking into each other in the code you write.

So while some things may be broken, and the way its broken may inspire ire, it's important to understand that it's not where the puck is that matters, but where it is going. The scrollview we've made is still inferior to the native scroller in a few ways, such as missing keyboard bindings, but are temporary shortcomings that we and the community are going to address in time. Eventually the feature and quality gap will narrow and the Famo.us scrollview(s) will reach parity with native scrollers.

Furthermore, some of the abstractions in the Famo.us scroller are remarkable for their programmatic flexibility. When most people think of a scroller, they only think of three scenarios: vertical scrolling, horizontal scrolling and a pannable tiled area (like Google Maps or Open Street Maps). This is actually a pretty limited view of what's possible to explore if you abstract a scroller to its essence. A scroller at is essential is a mathematical set with a curser and that all scrolling does (whether by mouse or keyboard) is move the cursor position in that set. When you think about it that way, many more things you've seen are scrollers. For example, the Apple Time machine view is a scroller in the Z-direction. CoverFlow is another scroller that is horizontal, but where the affine matrix transform applied to a surface is based on the distance of a surface from the cursor and inverts on each side of the cursor. One team of beta testers used the scroll view to display a DNA double helix. It was basically two position linked vertical-scrollers, where the positioner function didn't just set the position on the Y-axis, but also manipulated the affine matrix to create the helix shape.

While probably not the best approach, even Google's new interactive Rubik's cube doodle could probably be implemented as a series of Famo.us scrollers. Each scroller would contain 12 surfaces (doubly linked in a ring), with pagination occurring at every three surfaces. The pagination function instead of translating the surfaces along only one axis instead rotates all the surfaces 90 degrees around an axis. All surfaces would belong to two scrollers "perpendicular" to one another at any given time, being lifted from one to the other and back depending on which one was in motion.

And since all this is based on the same scroller, which will eventually reach parity with native scrollers, it means that they get all the same features. Home goes to the top of a vertical scroller, the left of a western horizontal scroller, the beginning of the double helix or the begging of time in z-axis time machine like scroller. End does the opposite.

These examples just begin to scratch the surface of what's possible when you expose primitives that map to mathematical concepts like a set and current index to developers.

Last, but not least, we're going to look at all the feedback on the scrollview and try to address all the issues you all have encountered.

<comment><USER37> I find myself agreeing with most of what you wrote, and yet, it doesn't matter. You keep sabotaging yourselves.

Does no-one do QA? Do you not have a Steve Jobs-esque character who has taste and an eye for detail and who can look at this stuff the way your users will? Because such a person would've looked at this and Noped the fuck out of there, cancelled whatever PR you had planned, and put everyone around a table saying "we're not there and can we fix it?".

Your first hyped launch thing was a sign-up form with blurry fonts leading no where. Now you've implemented a giant janky scrollbar with easing equations calibrated for "instant turn off". The parallels to Flash really are quite similar.

You should not imitate native behaviour unless you have someone going over it with a fine toothed comb, and you shouldn't be making grand claims about the future when you cock up the present.

If you believe your own claims, then why does your page work terribly on my brand new laptop, never mind the 4 year old one it just replaced?

<comment><USER4> What's the lesser of two evils?

1) Launch an imperfect product that works well for some use cases; or 2) Perfect everything and be ridiculed as vaporware

I wish we were Apple and had $159 billion in cash reserves. We're not though and have to operate within different constraints that don't afford us the same luxuries. You can't really compare Apples to Famo.uses

<comment><USER38> >1) Launch an imperfect product that works well for some use cases; or

I absolutely loathe this attitude that has taken over entrepreneurship. This is not OK. I don't give a shit what the Lean Theory zealots say.

<comment><USER39> > _I absolutely loathe this attitude that has taken over entrepreneurship. > This is not OK. I don 't give a shit what the Lean Theory zealots say._

They've worked insane hours for over a year to create a tool. It's an imperfect tool, but one capable of doing amazing things. And they've given it away for free. How are you not OK with this?

<comment><USER37> If you work insane hours for over a year, your company is broken. That is a problem of time allocation and unrealistic expectations, and has no bearing on the quality or usefulness of the work being done.

As for "capable of doing amazing things", this is stuff that Flash was able to do better 10 years ago. If people hadn't forgotten where we came from, and browser makers hadn't ridden the CSS train to performance hell, Famous wouldn't even be necessary.

So far, all I've seen is a) huge, hyped up promises and b) janky demos that feel like some interaction design student's wild experiments. You don't need to be Apple to do this right, you just have to be able to be honest about the output of your own work.

<comment><USER4> I expect negative comments on occasion from everyone, but you've been registered on HN for 16 days and every single comment you've made since you've joined has been vitrolic haterade that adds nothing constructive to the threads you participate or the community. Do you ever have anything positive to say about anything? If you're so embittered, why participate here at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I find it interesting how much they seem to be focusing on the "career" aspect. I wonder if they are pivoting to an open source model with premium training.

Even so, I'm not exactly inclined to throw my career behind what boils down to a JS animation library.

</comment><comment><USER41> That scrolloff bounce is absolutely horrible on Mac.

</comment><comment><USER42> oh man, what a failed launch.. so much hype and then those uber-simple single- click demos.. wow..

I'm back to using the browser like it should be (with a bit of angular on top)

</comment><comment><USER43> [http://famo.us/demos](http://famo.us/demos) are quite good

</comment><comment><USER44> Hey, where is the Facebook Paper demo? These news demos pale (to say the least) when comparing to the ones that made us interested on your company in the first place! What's going on here?

<comment><USER45> I am working on reproducing the stories scrollview from the paper demo. Lookout for github.com/jperl/famous-cards later this week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> noob question - I saw this on HN sometime last week [https://www.webkit.org/blog/3362/introducing-the-webkit- ftl-...](https://www.webkit.org/blog/3362/introducing-the-webkit-ftl-jit/)

"This will allow JavaScript programs to leverage sophisticated optimizations that were previously only available to native applications written in languages like C++ or Objective-C."

Would famo.us have any utility once Apple moves to that version of WebKit?

<comment><USER4> Definitely. JavaScript performance really isn't the problem. DOM with getters and setters that only accept strings and children are the problem.

That being said, once the browsers fix the getters and setters so you can set them without marshaling types into strings, Famo.us will be even faster and all performance issues will drop to almost nothing.

When that does happen, assuming no new yet unannounced HTML5/ES6 features, there isn't anything in the browsers that will magically give you the capabilities Famo.us does. The browsers would have to create an alternate parallel scene graph based interface for content. It's possible that may eventually happen. But like almost all features of the web, it takes a few bold individuals and teams implementing those features first to show what's possible and how they may be accomplished. We're hoping we can influence where the web is going enough that some of the ideas eventually become standardized.

It would be nice if in the future, we find a way to get the benefit of Tim Berners-Lee's vision for the web and also what Alan Kay thinks the web had the potential to have become [0] had we gone down different paths.

[0] [http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview- wit...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan- kay/240003442)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The site is unviewable on a 4k monitor, giant red bar goes across the screen, scrolls to white, and nothing. Took a while to figure that out...

</comment><comment><USER48> People, please, for the love of everything good and holy, stop developing tall websites. At first it was cool, but it get annoying really fast. I however have not read any of to comments, but I'm guessing there is probably some negative feedback on the horrid scrolling also. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Scrolling was solved decades ago.

</comment><comment><USER49> All your type is hideous on a retina screen.

</comment><comment><USER50> it was indeed hyped too much.

</comment><comment><USER51> Would there be any documentation of how to integrate this to Phonegap / Cordova?

<comment><USER4> Stock phonegap works fine for iOS, but there are limitations on Android. We've got an internal project that we'll be releasing in 1-2 months that allows you to package Famo.us apps for Android.

<comment><USER52> Could you please elaborate on these limitations? I've already tried packaging a simple app using cordova for android and it worked fine. Planing to use it for a real world app, so it would be helpful if you enlighten us about any pitfalls in this approach

Btw, when would the forums will be open to public? We are in dire need of one.

<comment><USER4> I'm not the right person to answer this question, but I'm not> What you can do is swing by #famous on irc.freenode.net or possibly even visit our offices to talk about this. Work email in profile.

<comment><USER4> Sorry for the dangling sentence fragment. I got distracted yesterday and posted the comment in the middle of editing and forgot to proofread and edit that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Seems to crash on Firefox 24.1.0 ESR, also on IE 10 I can't click on anything.

</comment><comment><USER54> I have the famous song from the Beastie boys : 'Sabotage' playing in a loop in my mind as I watch this on my Desktop ...

</comment><comment><USER55> The scrollbar doesn't even let me drag it.

</comment><comment><USER56> What other programming languages do you plan to support?

<comment><USER4> Tell us more about what you have in mind.

<comment><USER56> Don't want to use JS or transpilers.

<comment><USER4> I'm a bit confused.

If you don't want to use either JavaScript or a transpiler (ClojureScript, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, etc.) that compiles to JS, how do you get what you've built into a form executable in the browser, our current runtime target?

Are you talking about using LLVM in someway?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Is the logo related in any way to the game(s) Marathon?

</comment><comment><USER58> Is there an ETA on official clojurescript support?

<comment><USER4> I'm a huge fan of the work being done by the clojurescript community and I'd love to see people from that community to adopt Famo.us, and we'd love to work with them. I personally find Swannodette's work with Om and Mori to be inspirational.

If you're interested in working with Famo.us and Clojurescript or know someone who does, you can contact me directly. Work email in profile.</comment></comment>


#techlead get's banned from Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJcEDzgPRrc&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> Hmmm.... I wonder why? [0]

> Exposing #BlackLivesMatter: It's just reverse-racism.

> Why Black Lives Matter is a scam #BlackLivesMatter.

> Growing up Asian American... racism, discrimination, and why I deserve more.

Of course. Banned on suspicion of wrongthink. No Redemption.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_us_hH43AJtU_A- iXCLmqw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_us_hH43AJtU_A-iXCLmqw)</comment>


"This is extremely dangerous to our Democracy" [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksb3KD6DfSI <comment><USER2> [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22this+is+extremely+dangerous+to+...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22this+is+extremely+dangerous+to+our+democracy%22&t=fpas&ia=web)

As I suspected, these are Sinclair-owned stations. Sinclair is well known for requiring verbatim reading of received editorials, often to the dismay of staff who remember the "before times," pre-Sinclair.

 _That_ is extremely dangerous to our democracy.</comment>


Unfiltered.news – Explore news outside the bubble of your language and location - <AUTHOR> http://unfiltered.news <comment><AUTHOR> Just released this data viz to public beta. The goal is to make it easier to explore topics and perspectives that might not be covered in your language or location. More info on blog here: goo.gl/70V2rZ. We (@jigsawteam) would love any thoughts, feedback, or ideas.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I think an option to exclude sports would make sense. US basketball results are less reported in Germany, and German soccer results are less reported in the US. This isn't surprising or bad, it's how it's supposed to be.

Also, not sure about how accurate this is. E.g. for Norway, "Russia" is on top of the "less reported" list. This makes no sense, there is a fairly big story today about a Russian government official making controversial comments about the case where a Norwegian reporter was injured in an attack on journalists on the Chechnyan border last week.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point re filtering categories, that would be great. For the data example, it could be that that the entity "Russia" didn't make the top 100 entities mentioned by Norwegian publishers this day or that the news happened after todays date cut-off. Thanks for the feedback!</comment></comment></comment>


Band names that are really hard to search for - <AUTHOR> http://qntm.org/?bandnames <comment><USER2> For many cases of hard to find things, Google should have the advanced search option of excluding certain words more prominently highlighted.</comment>


Behold the raw, elemental beauty of the world's first monolithic Integrated Circuit - <AUTHOR> http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/augarten/i6.htm

<comment><USER2> I count two transistors. Does that really count as an integrated circuit? I've always viewed the definition of an IC as a manufactured object, this is clearly hand-built.

<comment><AUTHOR> Noyce (of Intel fame) thought the same thing.

See [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/06/22/MNGJ7DC98L1.DTL) for more details.

The relevant paragraph: "Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of chip giant Intel Corp., is credited with developing the manufacturing process that made economical the wide-scale production of integrated circuits. Kilby and Noyce bickered for years over the other's claim to have invented the integrated circuit. Ultimately, the two agreed to share credit. In 1995, Kilby was awarded the Robert N. Noyce Award, the Semiconductor Industry Association's highest honor. When Kilby won the Nobel Prize, he invited Intel's other founder, Gordon Moore, to the ceremony as a gesture to the contribution of Noyce, who died in 1990. Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously."

But, technically, Kilby's chip counts because it _was_ a circuit on a semiconductor substrate. It just looks odd because that image is blown up considerably, the real size is 0.040 x 0.062 inches. A modern IC would look substantially similar under a high enough magnification.

<comment><USER2> Actually, modern ICs are surprisingly regular and clean looking. My wife is a semiconductor process engineer and I occasionally get to peek at the electron microscopy images over her shoulder. She isn't allowed to tell me what they are, but I can read the distance scale, and these are transistor-sized features. And they have square corners and straight lines. It's pretty amazing stuff.

But yeah, if this thing wasn't produced by photolithography, it's sort of a evolutionary dead end. Whatever the semantics of what qualifies for an IC, this really isn't a meaningful predecessor of a modern chip.</comment></comment></comment>


How kiteboarding was invented - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-hackers-won-the-water <comment><USER2> Chris Moore was one of my kiteboarding trainers in Providenciales, TK. While hanging out he shared quite a few stories. A few years ago, after I learned how to stay upwind in TK I flew to Maui. I flew Cabrinha and Naish kites only to realize that both were born in Maui. That prompted me to dig more into the Kiteboarding history, how things started, what everyone was doing around the world and how they intersected to merge into what is now kiteboarding. It was fascinating, I wish I had documented it ..

I'm glad this article came out, although I think it would be worth a deeper look and more details about how the hacking took place - the story of how a modern sport gets born. It's amazing how things that were happening across the world crossed paths and merged into the modern kiteboarding just before the Internet became a thing.

I think kiteboarding was very much a hacking exercise. Couldn't see the article mentioning this but here's a bit of youtube history [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxtZzMMYO_I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxtZzMMYO_I)

</comment><comment><USER3> The connection between kiteboarding and hackers might be a bit far fetched, but somehow there are many entrepreneurs who are into the sport. There is a Founders Kite Club, exclusively for entrepreneurs who kitesurf. In the Netherlands we have an Kiteangels community, who do regular kitesurfing "downwinders" along our coast, kitesurfing trips and network for our businesses.

Kitesurfing is now more or less mature, the hacking is now happening in foils: surf foiling, wing foiling, sup foiling, e-foiling, many people are tinkering and hacking to invent new sports.

[https://www.founderskiteclub.com/](https://www.founderskiteclub.com/)

<comment><USER4> I don't think the article is claiming kite boarders = computer hackers, but instead is saying that the innovators in the kite boarding community hacked together better kites and rigs using a variety of tools and methods

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article if fairly accurate. Kiteboarding is unusual in that everyone basically agrees it was "invented" by a bunch of people and not an individual. The contributions of the Legaignoux's, Roeseler's, Don Montague, and not mentioned Lou Wainman all helped popularized it.

A lot of this is captured in "UPWIND - Launch of a Sport"[1].

In terms of prior art, there's an amusing anecdote of Benjamin Franklin(!) pulling himself across a pond with a very large home built kite in the 1710's[2].

As a sport, kiteboarding is wonderful. It's mentally demanding in the same way piloting aircraft is while physically demanding in the way, say, snowboarding is. There is immense satisfaction in throwing around a huge 12 square meter sail with the flick of wrist while an intimacy and sense of flow that comes with riding out on the water in solitude exposed to the elements and not boxed in by a vehicle or craft.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLKMSJTtypU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLKMSJTtypU)

[2] [http://mentalfloss.com/article/71431/time-ben-franklin- casua...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/71431/time-ben-franklin-casually- invented-form-kitesurfing)

</comment><comment><USER6> They added the kite because they couldn't invent a proper hoverboard ...

</comment><comment><USER7> " . . . he sold everything he owned, laid off more than sixty employees at the business he'd built, and moved east from Missouri to rebuild his life on the ocean."

Only an entrepreneur thinks that's OK.

<comment><USER8> What do you mean by "OK" in that context?

Based on what it says in the article, it's reasonable to assume that he tried to sell the business as a going concern and didn't find any takers. If I own a business and want to move on (or retire) and I'm unable to sell it, I'd be sorry for the people affected but ultimately have no obligation to keep going no matter what.

If you mean taking that kind of risk is unusual, sure.

<comment><USER9> You'd think based on his desire to live by the sea, he'd have been prepared to "go down with the ship". It's a maritime tradition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even though the headline contains the word "Hackers", nothing in the article mentions anything about hackers or hacking.

I suspect this is another knee-jerk submission from someone with a Google News alert set up.

<comment><USER11> Alright, we'll dehackerfy the title above. Please don't cast aspersions on your fellow users, though. hhs is a fine submitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't "inventor" just a meatspace word for "hacker"?</comment>


The Dream of Buying a Coffee with Bitcoin Is Dying, If It's Not Already Dead - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-dream-of-buying-a-coffee-with-bitcoin-is-dying-if-its-not-already-dead-block-size-fees <comment><USER2> Bitcoin was a great project that got a lot of things right, but it has not worked well in at least two major areas:

> "The transaction fee market is a free market of users bidding for a limited > amount of transaction capacity. It is subject to the natural laws of supply > and demand for that limited economic resource."

This is ridiculous. When bitcoin was developed, there was plenty of distributed transaction processing capacity and we have many more and much more powerful computers and better networks now. Our growth in supply of the ability to process transactions in a distributed fashion has dramatically outpaced the demand.

But bitcoin's built-in scaling mechanism led to a CPU->GPU->FPGA->ASIC->Dedicated hardware arms race. So most of the world's capacity can't really take part. The supply is wasted. And as a result, everything ended up monopolized and centralized in the hands of a few people in one place. Of course they're going to want to keep the supply limited to protect their monopoly, and of course they're going to want to charge fees to capitalize on it. But it's all artificial. We have tons of spare compute capacity. It's unlikely that will become a scarce resource at any time in the forseeable future. Not scarce enough to induce delays or justify fees.

The other failure was simply the fact that it was so difficult (and lengthy, scary, potentially expensive) to get money into or out of the system. It's hard to build adoption rate when you require people to link their bank accounts to shady exchanges and go through complex transactions that take multiple days (and/or download a massive blockchain that may also take days).

Hopefully a future cryptocurrency can address the issues discovered with Bitcoin and succeed. It should seek to remain decentralized; everyone should be able to participate, and to do so relatively quickly, easily, and safely.

</comment><comment><USER3> On the one hand, when you use your card instead of cash to buy that coffee, there's absolutely a fee and it's absolutely bigger than the USD.04 I saw posted in another bitcoin thread today as now being typical for confirmed transactions.

On the other hand, for bitcoin to keep working we have to keep burning fossil fuels, and total transaction fees plus total mining rewards have to pay for that. At USD400/BTC, rewards are worth USD1.44 million per day. As rewards drop to zero over time, the transaction fees must rise to keep miners interested. Based on 600,000 transactions per day in 1MB-bitcoin, that's a $2.40 rise per transaction by time block rewards drop to zero in order to keep miners interested. Ouch.

<comment><USER4> Can you expand on the fossil fuels comment?

<comment><USER3> What I mean is that most electricity is presently generated from fossil fuels. E.g., 2008 figures on wikipedia show 2/3 of electricity from coal+oil+natural gas [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Product...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#Production)</comment></comment></comment>


Ididhis renamed to Closest.in - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iddhis.com/re-branding-iddhiscom-to-closestin

<comment><USER2> Site is down.</comment>


Digg founder says Apple iTV launch in September will 'change everything' - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/08/22/digg_founder_says_apple_itv_launch_in_september_will_change_everything.html <comment><USER2> Isn't this the same guy who said he'd seen the iPhone and it had two batteries and a slide out keyboard?

Edit: Yup: [http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/03/kevin-rose-confirms- iphon...](http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/03/kevin-rose-confirms-iphone/)

<comment><USER3> Your comment is a marvelous antidote to hype and rumor. Thank you, sir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As far as I'm concerned, the only way that the new iTV is going to "change everything" is if it somehow gives you the ability to watch any episode of any show at any time, streaming, ad and hassle free. THAT I would pay for.

But giving the networks the ability to require an app as a gateway to their programming? Sorry, but that just an invitation for abuse, and begging for new ways to shove ads down our throats. Think javascript popover ads are annoying when browsing the web? The networks already abuse the screen real estate when you are just trying to enjoy a program. Imagine if they could do this in an app instead...

<comment><USER5> After reading Kevin Rose's post, I started to think about this and realized that another thing where the app model would not be great is that in the end, nobody cares what network a program is on. The only thing that matters is the list of programs you like and want to watch.

A user would want to see an aggregate of all the programs s/he likes, not go to one app to see what's new on ABC, and another for NBC… that's where the Google TV model is interesting I suppose.

I'd think that something more like Google Reader (conceptually, not in terms of UI obviously) might be more fitting: a bunch of feeds for shows you like. You can "star" the ones you'll always want to keep around, let others disappear if too old…

To be YC-centric, it seems that the recently-launched Teevox got that right by merging listings between Netflix and Hulu.

<comment><USER6> Boxee does a good job with that. They've got apps with _mostly_ map back to a particular website they're getting their streaming video from, but for TV shows and TV show like content, all the titles show up in a list of all TV shows. You can search and sort the list, or you can mark a particular series to be part of your "queue". Then new episodes of that series will always automatically appear in your "queue".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The original blog post: [http://kevinrose.com/blogg/2010/8/21/why-apples-itv- will-cha...](http://kevinrose.com/blogg/2010/8/21/why-apples-itv-will-change- everything.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe Kevin Rose should work on trying to keep digg's user-base professional and on-point, site design clean and fast, and less an aggregate of sponsored links before trying to be another tech messiah/mouth piece.

</comment><comment><USER9> So, it will get rid of war and famine?

<comment><USER10> No, it will just make them better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Those are pretty timid explanations for how iTV will 'change everything'. Per network applications, instead of just say, one feature set for all networks? iAds to monetize content, meaning something like ads on Hulu, or, the internet? $99, like Roku? Granted the iPhone as a remote is an excellent convenience and obvious evolution in home entertainment.

</comment><comment><USER12> Would this be able to rival the picture quality of HD satellite tv etc?

I'd also be concerned that (in the UK at least) far too many people haven't got a decent enough broadband connection to support this kind of streaming. If the uptake is big then it'll hammer the networks, surely. Try downloading something at 6pm on a weekday using one of the big ISPs. Imagine half the country streaming HD video at once.

<comment><USER13> No. It can't do 1080 _anything_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If Apple do intend to launch a product called iTV then I imagine there will be trademark issues to resolve:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITV>

</comment><comment><USER15> A 99$ TV box, and a 500$ remote control for it? So really a 99$ "make your TV an iPad peripheral" box.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can't Google TV do all of those things as well when it is released?</comment>


Al Jazeera Investigates – Broken Dreams: The Boeing 787 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvkEpstd9os

<comment><AUTHOR> This is some pretty shocking stuff. Even some people close to the project openly saying that they would not fly the B787.

Boeing's full responses to AJ's inquiries about the 787 "Dreamliner" [http://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/boeing787/2014/09/br...](http://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/boeing787/2014/09/broken- dreams-boeing-responds-20149181020694622.html)

<comment><USER2> It's pretty sensationalized. Forbes covered it well: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/airchive/2014/09/10/review-al- ja...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/airchive/2014/09/10/review-al- jazeeras-787-report-misses-the-mark/)

The shop worker problems sound no worse than any other large factory. If those things bother you, you should probably never set foot in any motorized vehicle again. The 787 rollout (which I attended) being "scandalous" is nonsense as well; everyone knew it was not a flyable ship being shown. They've drummed up a lot of melodrama out of nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't believe for a second that the claims were portrayed in a sensationalized fashion. Those are serious allegations that were just brushed off by Boeing's PR folks. Just as the legal, albeit morally questionable, cosy relation between FAA regulators and Boeing lobbing co.

If the aircraft wasn't safe it wouldn't be flying today. But questions regarding QA must be addressed before it's too late (i.e. UA811).</comment></comment></comment>


Thank you Twitter for locking my account - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I have just created a Twitter account. I have attempted to change some profile account settings and while attempting doing so, it asked me 3 times for my phone.

I didn't give it and locked my account for "unusual behavior".

I mean...seriously Twitter?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle bugs in production? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> File a ticket in our issue tracker. Fix the bug. Commit to source control. Deploy it to our staging environment. Verify the fix. Merge branch to stable. Deploy to production.

Isn't that how everyone halfway sane does it?

</comment><comment><USER3> Well .... something like this ? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75wa8Lx4yc4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75wa8Lx4yc4)

// troll mode off

<comment><AUTHOR> lol that is good.</comment></comment>


Gmail for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://www.kiwiforgmail.com/

<comment><USER2> Just installed it, pludged for the paid version.

Seems like a solid contender for Mailplane, but I miss the possibility of having dedicated tabs for the calendar views of my different GMail accounts.

This is a deal breaker for me at this time.</comment>


Is Crime Genetic? Scientists Don't Know Because They're Afraid to Ask - <AUTHOR> http://quillette.com/2017/02/18/is-crime-genetic-scientists-dont-know-because-theyre-afraid-to-ask/ <comment><USER2> Not surprising. For right or wrong, any scientific experiment that could possibly be taken as support for 'eugenics' or similar philosophies is basically banned by informal taboo. Likely as a way to deprive extremists of ammunition for their beliefs.

Which is perhaps unfortunate for scientific understanding in some ways.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the propensity to write rubbish articles masquerading as science while avoiding all of the important features that make science science and also just happens to support racism heritable?

Maybe we're all to scared to consider phrenology as the answer? There's plenty more 19th century bulls##t we can embarrass ourselves with if we choose too!

</comment><comment> tuna-piano Interestingly, I think it's pretty clear that there is a huge level of correlation between crime and gender (which is of course genetic). The stats are just overwhelming. In a world where the purported income gap between men and women attracts a lot of attention, no one ever talks about the crime gap. To what extent can we blame genetics for the male/female crime gap?

Also, can you imagine the outcry if a study came out showing not just a genetic correlation with crime, but also a racial one? Not everyone is so rational - and racist and sexist facts don't seem to be tolerated, even in science.</comment>


Home ownership is a lousy investment compared with stocks or bonds - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2018/02/18/why-your-home-lousy-investment-when-you-think-its-great/340516002/ <comment><USER2> This is a horribly incomplete analysis. It doesn't account for the cost of rent, and it assumes that everyone would be crazy enough to keep a 7.5% interest mortgage for 20 years! You'd have to try really hard to _not_ find this intentionally disingenuous.

<comment><USER3> They probably want us to get into the stock market casino. Just lost half of your money? Remember you are in it ___long term_ __. It 'll go back up and you just need to diversify more (give the broker more money) so you won't lose ___as much_ __during the next down-turn.

I'm sorry if this sounds cynical, but that's my honest assessment of the stock market. Some very wealthy salesman is always trying to get me to put more money into it and continually tells me to just be patient. It feels like a big scam.

<comment><USER4> I just took a new job and one of the benefits they offer is this health care savings account, where you get a high deductible plan and then also contribute to this other account tax free for medical spending. One of the "features" of this account (actually touted by the custodian's literature) is that you can stick that money--you guessed it--right into the stock market casino! So, now you want me to take money I'm already setting aside for something as important as my health and put it on the Wall Street roulette wheel? The mind boggles.

<comment><USER5> That's why there is a minimum contribution to the HSA before you're allowed to invest it. It's for healthy people who have saved up a big chunk and don't expect to need the money for 10 or more years, so they can park it somewhere to earn a decent return. The stock market is only a casino if you're in it for the short term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a terrible analysis from someone who offers professional investment advice (the author).

Nobody would have held a 7.5% mortgage w/o refinancing. You can always ratchet down if rates go down.

Mortgage interest is (was?) largely deductible, greatly reducing the after-tax interest rate, especially in the market example cited (San Mateo).

Property taxes are deductible as well (less so before the recent tax changes).

You have to live somewhere and that's a quantifiable benefit (in rental equivalent terms). If you put all of your money in stocks, and none in a house, you're going to have to pay rent somewhere.

A portion of the capital gains on the sale of your primary residence is tax- free, further increasing your after-tax returns.

Housing market examples, like stocks, can always be cherry-picked for one argument or the other.

Home ownership is not always a _great_ investment, but it's usually not lousy.

</comment><comment><USER7> I didn't buy my place for the investment although I'm confident it's going to work out just fine from a financial stand point. I did it for the personal utility that comes with improved quality of life and satisfaction from having a place that I can customize and not have a landlord that I have to stress about kicking me out and / or raising rent. The after-tax all-in cost is about the same as what it would cost to rent out the place that I bought so I don't see how it is such a "lousy investment".

</comment><comment><USER8> To me, this is like pointing out that car ownership is a lousy investment: it may be true, but it seems beside the point. If I want to have a car that I'm planning to hang onto for a long time, and which I can do whatever I want with, I want to buy a car instead of leasing it. Sure, I won't make money that way, and I might even come out ahead financially if I were to lease, but then it isn't my car, it belongs to someone else, and there are going to be a bunch of rules associated with that. To me, owning a house is the same thing, but with the added bonus that there is actually a chance of making some money. But that's purely a bonus; comparing it with buying stocks or bonds seems ...odd to me.

<comment><USER9> It's still important for home buyers. If you go in knowing you probably won't make money on the car or house, you won't buy more than you need (unless you really want to). And maybe invest the rest?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article doesn't consider at all the cost of rental. I have no idea in US but in London renting an house is quite more expensive than mortgaging one. And you have to consider the non-insignificant problem of rental going up 5-10%/year while mortgage interest are going quite quickly to zero if you pay the mortgage at the same rate of the rent. If I listened to this "genius" instead of being almost the sole owner of an house doubled in price in 7 years I would have spent much more than 100k on rental in the same period without having nothing at all at the end. I can't really understand what this "journalists" gain in deceiving people in this way..

<comment><USER11> And so you respond with purely anecdotal evidence, based on your special case of buying a home at precisely the right time, in the most overheated real estate market on earth (London). Look for instance at a random home in Phoenix, AZ [0]. If you had bought at the very bottom of the housing crash in '09, and sold today, that's about 50% returns before any of the associated costs with home ownership and mortgages. Compare that to ~300% return over the same period from just dumping your money in the S&P 500 [1]

[0] [https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Phoenix- AZ/pmf,pf_pt/7...](https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Phoenix- AZ/pmf,pf_pt/71601764_zpid/40326_rid/globalrelevanceex_sort/33.994042,-111.632767,33.216286,-112.616044_rect/9_zm/)

[1] [https://www.morningstar.com/etfs/arcx/vti/quote.html](https://www.morningstar.com/etfs/arcx/vti/quote.html)

<comment><USER10> Your 300% return sadly doesn't include the cost of renting. If buying SPX would give me free housing I would be the first buyer, believe me. But unless you are born very, very, privileged you need to buy an house or to pay a rental, unless you want to live with your parents, and your wife is happy to do so. For me, as I repeat, it was a no-brainer. If you want to live for the foreseeable future with your parents then obviously better to put money on some index rather than buying an house. If you have a family I'm really not sure that it would be better even in Phoenix or in Castrovillari or wherever in the world you want.

<comment><USER5> The article does make the unstated assumption that you're able to 1) rent for cheaper than the cost of a mortgage + extras, and more importantly 2) invest the difference. If your individual circumstances don't allow that and you're able to afford the necessary downpayment, the calculation is pretty easy to make, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The attraction of buying a house has always been (to me) the leveraging of the money. I can buy a $500K house for $100K down and the X% appreciation applies to the full $500K.

Better yet, I can put 5% down and buy the same property. Then the X% appreciation of a property turns into X% times 20 return.

<comment><USER13> You can do the same by buying stocks on margin.

It does not mean this is a good idea, however.

<comment><USER14> In practice,it's hard to get much beyond 3x leverage in the equities market. It's _typical_ to find 5x, fairly common to get 20x, and possible to get to 33x in the real estate market.

<comment><USER15> You can get massive leverage on CFDs (Contracts for Difference), you can run on as little as 5% margin (i.e. 20x).

Maybe it's different in the USA, but in New Zealand the lowest I've seen is 5%, which is uncommon, 10% for lower value houses, and only 20% margin is common.

<comment><USER14> GGP was "stocks on margin" and my response of (unqualified) equities I meant stocks as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I bought a place several years ago in Seattle, where the market has been going up like crazy. So has the stock market. Between fees, interest, and opportunity cost of my down payment in the stock market, I'm not sure I've financially come out ahead if I were to sell today. However, non-financially it's been great. I've had stability, a place I can make my own, and haven't had to deal with a landlord. Buying a primary residence as an investment is far from a sure thing. But it might be the right call for other reasons.

<comment><USER17> Seattle _might_ be due for a correction in the near future, but if you bought several years ago, it would be hard to _not_ make money in real estate right now in Seattle. Did you see where average prices on Capitol Hill are now > $1MM? Ballard / Phinney Ridge everything is > $800K. Unless there are extenuating circumstances, you should be more than fine should you choose to sell.

To me the interesting question is, does one believe this growth will continue for several more years? IE: should one buy a (overpriced?) property today in one of these popular residential neighborhoods? Or, is one better off looking farther afield assuming that less desirable neighborhoods are going to eventually become desirable as most of us are priced out of places like Fremont or Ballard? In other words, are we at the top of market already?

<comment><USER16> I wasn't suggesting that I won't be ok, just that it might not beat out the gains I would have had if I had the rent difference and downpayment invested. And that is in a very hot market.

I'm not sure if the growth will continue. If I was buying today with an eye for appreciation, I'd aim for one of the less desirable neighborhoods towards the south end.

<comment><USER17> I'd agree with that; there are some good values to the south.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Real estate is just another type of investment, and one that can bring diversification to a portfolio. Of course if your net worth is all invested in your home, your risk/reward profile is probably suboptimal (YMMV!)

<comment><USER19> You could invest in a real estate investment trust (REIT) to diversify over several houses rather than just one.

<comment><USER18> Absolutely. But I guess that when you look a the diversification together with the opportunity to be the owner of your own house, it's a sensible investment. Basically I was just disputing that buying a house is never a reasonable investment choice. But hey, I'm not number 200 in the list of richest Americans ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is lousy calculation by armchair pundit. The main thing missing is all the rents you would have paid if you didn't owned the house. So if you have two scenarios, one where you just rented an apartment with ever increasing rents and other where you had a fixed mortgage for 30-year - you would most likely win by wide margin in 2nd scenario.

</comment><comment><USER21> This article is an example of the bad math common in rent vs but discussions. Sadly it contributes to the difficulty of developing wealth or the perception that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

It's not always best to buy instead of rent, it takes many factors like stability, career, family, etc. So any blanket advice like "always buy" is not very useful.

That being said, buying a house over renting is likely the top means for the middle class to develop wealth (maybe under save for retirement and exercise). This article is really about investing in real estate vs. stocks. And stupid real estate investing where there's no income from the house.

A proper analysis needs to account for cost of purchase and ownership vs. cost of rent. This author is either really stupid or expects his readers to be stupid. If the former then you don't want to buy his investment advice, if the latter then readers shouldn't buy anyone investment advice.

</comment><comment><USER22> I bought my house as a place to live. (My only "mistake" was that it's a bit larger than I need.) It was a cheaper option than renting, as apartments 50%-60% smaller were significantly more than my mortgage payment. Buying a house to live in, with the idea it's an investment just doesn't seem to be guaranteed to me. That's especially true if it comes to making any modifications -- I want to do them to suit me, not trying to consider if a future buyer wants them.

If it appreciates? Great. If the value stays the same? Fine. If I move and can only make what's outstanding on the mortgage? That's good, too. If it's worth less? Then I will look into renting it out.

</comment><comment><USER23> There are a few inconsistencies here for sure, as in if you don't buy the house you still have to pay for rent. But I think the largest takeaway is that really financing the house eats away the most amount of profit. The benefit to financing is of course if you can't buy the house outright you can still own it, hopefully pay around what you would for renting, and then still end up with a profit, which is more than can be said for renting.

I think the biggest factors to consider are is this your primary residence, what are the carrying costs for the property if you bought it outright, and how much of your net worth is tied up in this asset, or said another way, how much of your burn rate.

</comment><comment><USER24> ... says the article written by a guy who sells stocks and bonds for a living.

I wonder if he lives in a rental.

<comment><USER25> Such articles make me nervous- is there a stock or bond bubble?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have a 3% mortgage for 30 years (though I am paying toward the principle so I should pay it off in 20 years). My mortgage + insurance/taxes for a 4 bedroom house on a quarter acre is far less (about $500-1000 less a month) than what people in my area are paying for tiny 1-2 bedroom apartments.

Plus if I were to sell my house right now I could sell it for more than double what I bought it for. The market might tank, but I'm planning on living here for another 20 years at least so it could go through the boom-bust cycle a few times before I get around to selling.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't care much for real estate investing. You pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance on it. You only have a vague notion of what it is worth, and that all depends on just happening on the right buyer at the right time. It can take a month to a year to sell. You pay 6% commission on selling it.

With stocks, you know second by second what it is worth. There are no taxes, maintenance, insurance, or liabilities that come with it. You can buy/sell it at any moment. With a discount broker, the sales commissions are minimal.

<comment><USER28> If you're talking about the US, you're wrong in that there are capital gains taxes at 20% long term, and up to 38% short term on the sale of stock. For a real estate investment that you live in, couples do not have to pay capital gains tax on up to $500k worth of gains.

Just to play devil's advocate - when you buy a stock, you are buying nothing more than a piece of paper, and you don't even get a piece of paper nowadays. It's really easy to manipulate the price of a piece of paper.

<comment><USER27> It's more complicated than that. The $500k is for married couples - it's $250k for singles. You also have to stay in the house for at least 2 years. There are a bunch of other rules, too.

> It's really easy to manipulate the price of a piece of paper.

The real estate crash of 2007 shows there is no such thing as sure thing in real estate, either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've done better with my home investment than I have with my managed investment funds. I bought my flat in 1994 for $107,000 and it's now worth $715,000 after Melbourne had the same rise in house prices as San Francisco.

Two problems, though. (1) The money is locked up. I can't take a couple of bricks down to the travel agent and exchange them for tickets. (2) I am locked up. Google wants me to work for them but are quite insistent that I move to California. I guess remote work can only go so far.

<comment><USER30> Some people do better in the lottery than their managed investments too.

<comment><USER31> And that's less than the return of the s&p in the same period (~880k).

<comment><USER30> Well, I assume you are calculating as if you paid all cash for the house. With a mortgage, you leverage quite a bit. Most would never be able to leverage that much to invest in the stock market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Like, sure, but it's beside the point when one considers that you have to live _somewhere_.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Globe and Mail also has a great comparison of rent vs buy using numbers from Toronto (includes closing costs, taxes, maintenance, inflation, etc): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZR_vMTLfIk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZR_vMTLfIk)

(buying comes out slightly ahead assuming you don't move for 25 years, and the renter averages 7.5%/year returns on their investments, and, and, and etc.)

TL;DR buying is probably better if you don't move very often, but there are so many variables that you can't know beforehand -- that you need to be able calculate whether renting vs buying is more profitable -- that it's probably not worth worrying about.

EDIT: The NYT also has a nice visual calculator for this: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent- cal...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent- calculator.html) You need to know about 21 variables (that can change over time during the lifetime of your mortgage).

<comment><USER33> That NYT calculator is awesome, and helped convince me to buy my place. Particularly helpful for seeing how changing interest rate vs down payment affects the overall cost of a mortgage and moves the break even point vs renting.

Hopefully at some point they update their site to take the new tax laws into account (which will make buying less competitive for people in areas with higher cost of living)

<comment><USER34> I agree its a great calculator. The funny thing is that I used it and it convinced me its far better to rent in my market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> My home is not an investment but since I'm now renting it out it is turning a very tidy profit.</comment>


Klingon for English speakers in Duolingo - <AUTHOR> https://en.duolingo.com/course/tlh/en/Learn-Klingon-Online

<comment><USER2> As a Star Trek fan, I think it would be funny if they were able to pull this off. However, as a Duolingo user, the resources could definitely be better used elsewhere, particularly on a Japanese for English or Mandarin for English course.

<comment><USER3> It's user made, so it's not really more of a waste of duo lingo resources than an Klingon article is a waste of Wikipedia ressources.</comment></comment>