Nginx Unit - <AUTHOR> https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx-unit/ <comment><USER3> I hate sites like this. Im probably stupid but I have no idea what precisely it is after reading that page. I just know that marketing team wants me to believe it's going to be my saviour.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I had a hard time finding out what this site did.

<comment><USER5> Lol, yep:

> NGINX Unit is a new, lightweight, open source application server built to > meet the demands of today's dynamic and distributed applications.

That means everything and nothing. They wasted their intro sentence on it. They probably don't have a very good idea of what it is either.

<comment><USER6> While it is a fluffy marketing sentence, it seems clear to me. It's an application server.

Then the next section explains that you can run different kinds of applications and even different versions of the base software like different versions of PHP or python all in the same server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looks pretty cool, and makes me sad that Mongrel2 never became popular. In short: Mongrel2 solves the same problem, but does it by letting your application handle requests and websocket connections over ZeroMQ instead of eg FastCGI.

I guess it lost momentum when ZeroMQ did. Anyone know why? Sounds like a dream solution in the current microservice hype.

[http://mongrel2.org/](http://mongrel2.org/)

<comment><USER8> Wait, zeromq lost momentum ? When did that happen ?

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, the founder of ZeroMQ, Pieter Hintjens passed away (due to cancer) [1]. He was a regular on HN [2].

ZeroMQ still works great and the open source community is still maintaining it on GitHub [3]. I just think people are also looking at other technologies. A lot of interest popped up in things like Apache Kafka and Samsa. I still think ZeroMQ holds a unique place due to its lightweight and simple nature.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11547212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11547212)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PieterH](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=PieterH)

[3] [https://github.com/zeromq](https://github.com/zeromq)

<comment><USER10> I have been curious how the community would hold up after Pieter's death. This project is a unique case because of how much work went into building community and welcoming contributions. That said, the world is a different place than in zeromq's heyday. Other commenters refer to Martin leaving the project, C++ regret, and a poor fit with node.js. Maybe in the face of all those changes zeromq's mature community is primarily why it lives as a project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Confusing description. After seeing the Github README ([https://github.com/nginx/unit#integration-with- nginx](https://github.com/nginx/unit#integration-with-nginx)), it looks to be Nginx's alternative to low-level, language-specific, app servers, e.g. PHP-FPM or Rack, with the benefit that a single Unit process can support multiple languages via its dynamic module architecture, similar to Nginx web server's dynamic modules.

It's still intended to run behind Nginx web server (or some other web server), much like you'd run something like PHP-FPM behind a web server.

<comment><USER12> It's a polyglot app server with microservice orchestration. It's definitely needed.

Some things to look for, such as registration/discovery of services, intra- cluster load balancing (where it started, no doubt), identity propagation & authn/z

The biggest issue to my mind though is distributed transactions and logging/debug/development. My biggest stumbling blocks with this sort of thing.. stepping through code over microservices is such a PITA.

<comment><USER13> You seem to be very experienced in this area. Can you explain a bit about why you think an "app server with microservice orchestration" is needed?

<comment><USER14> because you can work with individual microservices across clusters without a ton of overhead (or use a monolithic app server), aiding in deployment, rollback, debugging, development.

<comment><USER13> How exactly does having an app server reduce overhead, compared to running each service directly without app server? And how does having an app server compare to putting each microservice in its own Docker container and orchestrating them in Kubernetes, which is what more and more companies seem to be doing?

<comment><USER15> At a glance, I think this is an alternative to docker/kubernetes. The general idea seems to be to cut the middleman/topman out and let the bottom man (app server) be the "unit" of configuration. Like a sort of integrated docker/<YourLang>-runtime.

<comment><USER16> No, this thing is more like inetd, while kubernetes is more like an OS for containers and docker is a package manager.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _> It is not recommended to expose unsecure Unit API_

why do people always use "not recommended" when they actually mean "do not ever do this or you'll end up the laughing stock in the tech press"

Exposing this otherwise awesome API to the public will amount to a free RCE for everybody. So not ever expose this to the public, not even behind some authentication.

It's very cool that by design it's only listening on a domain socket. Don't add a proxy in front of this.

<comment><USER18> Technically, you can expose the Unit API within an internal network.

<comment><USER19> Why that still might not be a good idea: [https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43231.html](https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43231.html)

<comment><USER18> Thanks for linking that. Typically, if you know what you are doing, a setup of this nature would be segmented out from the rest of internal network.

I did compliance work for a lot of start-ups and never came across a company that understood this concept. The majority thinks that their wireless router is already doing this via the Guest account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am biased, but call me underwhelmed. It seems that with every "new" feature, nginx is copying Apache httpd, even now claiming to be the "swiss army knife" of web-servers. Embedded languages. Dynamic modules. Support of uWSGI. gracefull restarts. Thread pools... and yet people eat it up. Just goes to show what having corporate-backed marketing and PR can do.

<comment><USER21> When I started with apache, I thought it was great, but after moving to nginx, the speed and simplicity made me never look back. While these new features to nginx aren't new to the world, they are a nice welcome addition to a system that IMO is far superior to apache.

<comment><USER22> I never found Nginx especially simple to setup, the config files were always messy. Caddy seems to have knocked this out of the park for me, especially considering automated https, and redirection.

<comment><USER21> I use Caddy on all my small projects right now. I haven't used it long enough to install enough faith for production sized systems yet, but hopefully I will get there because it is much easier to setup. Still, nginx is a breeze compared to apache IMO

<comment><USER22> Been pretty rock solid for everything I've put on it! Side projects + corporate.

<comment><USER21> I will keep that in mind. You mind me asking what's your most complex setup and your scale?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Could anyone explain to me why I would want to use this? What exactly is the use case and benefits of it when I am for example running a go web application?

<comment><USER24> NGINX allows you to proxy a back-end applications giving you the ability to load balance, handle upstream failures with custom maintenance pages, employ server blocks (virtual hosts), and much more. However, you always need to do the leg work to get your specific application language up and running. This new unit system makes that job easier as you would no longer need to employ separate middleware, like PHP-FPM for PHP applications, or use a separate init system like systemd to run Go or Node applications. Now NGINX would assume those responsibilities and provide you with a consistent interface.

Here you can see the configuration of workers and user/group permissions for a Go application:

[http://unit.nginx.org/docs-configuration.html#go- application](http://unit.nginx.org/docs-configuration.html#go-application)

<comment><USER25> I'm sorry but I'm not sure I get it.

Is it like the apache mod_php for php for example ?

Thanks in advance for your answer

<comment><USER24> Yes, you can generally think of it as a replacement for mod_php as Unit would parse requests from NGINX, pass them along to the PHP parser, then return the responses back to NGINX. That's the same job mod_php does for Apache and what PHP-FPM (essentially) does for servers like NGINX.

You can see the PHP configuration here:

[http://unit.nginx.org/docs-configuration.html#php- applicatio...](http://unit.nginx.org/docs-configuration.html#php-application)

And here's the configuration needed to integrate Unit with NGINX:

[http://unit.nginx.org/docs-integration-with- nginx.html](http://unit.nginx.org/docs-integration-with-nginx.html)

<comment><USER24> Update:

Upon first reading I thought that Unit needed to be behind NGINX to function. When actually it listens for requests as a separate server, entirely. It only provides an API for configuration purposes.

However, If you want to use the other features of NGINX, like providing static files, you will need to put it in front of Unit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's worth noting that it's rarely necessary or desirable to put an app server like nginx in front of Go HTTP server applications. The Go standard library http and TLS stack are production quality and rock solid. Putting something in front is mostly cargo culting from people more used to the worlds of PHP/Python/Ruby/etc.

<comment><USER27> Pushing back on this a bit...for example, securely exposing a JSON endpoint to the public internet requires extra machinery that applications like nginx bring for free. If you simply set the router to your handler, then you accept arbitrarily large request sizes, wide open for DoS attacks. You have to either manually add limits or pull in some library. nginx caps these by default. Want throttling or load balancing? Again, things that haproxy and nginx do well, but require more cruft in your application.

<comment><USER26> I would argue that all is part of security-aware software engineering. If you aren't thinking of these things you have no business writing publicly-exposed HTTP applications.

<comment><USER28> Or... you spend your time building something useful, leveraging skills you do have, and let nginx leverage its own strengths.

What you say, sounds like NIH syndrome to me.

<comment><USER26> Secure software isn't useful? Insecure software isn't eventually value- destroying?

Really what this sub-thread is arguing is that security Isn't My Job(TM) as application developer. I disagree. Furthermore telling app devs not to worry about it because nginx takes care of everything is a false security blanket that will bite you eventually.

Not accepting unbound input and sane rate-limiting are kind of basic stuff, no? I'm not saying every app developer needs to be a Defcon wizard, just that they should have some fundamental awareness of secure coding standards for web apps if that's what they're building.

<comment><USER29> > Secure software isn't useful?

Nowhere in the sub-thread is this claimed.

> Insecure software isn't eventually value-destroying?

Nowhere in this sub-thread is anyone suggesting otherwise.

> Furthermore telling app devs not to worry about it because nginx takes care > of everything is a false security blanket that will bite you eventually.

Nobody said this. But while we're on the topic the more likely false security blanket comes from telling app devs "just use 'net/http' and 'crypto/tls' and everything will be fine without a reverse proxy."

In any case the straw men you've raised are distracting and not driving the conversation forward.

<comment><USER30> > > Furthermore telling app devs not to worry about it because nginx takes > care of everything is a false security blanket that will bite you > eventually.

> Nobody said this.

That seems dishonest to say... From the grandparent:

> Or... you spend your time building something useful, leveraging skills you > do have, and let nginx leverage its own strengths.

Really sounds like at least one person in this thread is advocating for app devs not to worry about things that nginx takes care of.

Agree that making straw men doesn't help. There's advice on either side regarding which one to use and realistically both are equally 'false security blankets'. The correct answer is to educate yourself on the benefit and drawbacks of each and make a conscious decision about where to implement your security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sounds like uWSGI based on the description. I wonder how it'll play along with certain environments like Kubernetes.

<comment><USER32> Same. I really want to like (and use) uWSGI, for many reasons, but I find it's lacking severely in the department of documentation (searching "uwsgi" on Amazon gives zero hits!).

A properly edited book would be awesome. I would pay for it of course.

<comment><USER33> _> I really want to like (and use) uWSGI, for many reasons, but I find it's lacking severely in the department of documentation (searching "uwsgi" on Amazon gives zero hits!)._

uWSGI definitely needs more concise tutorials on how to accomplish some tasks (e.g. creating Hello World with python and uWSGI, or how the uWSGI emperor works).

However I disagree with _" lacking severely in the department of documentation"_

Sure, it's not as easy as some other projects to dive into (e.g. Django) but IMHO the documentation is not lacking, it's just not forthcoming.

If you sit down and read through the uWSGI documentation, you'll discover a lot of very useful functionality and a reasonable description of how to utilise it.

What's lacking is the tl;dr way to bash something out quick and dirty.

<comment><USER34> [https://uwsgi- docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/WSGIquickstart.h...](https://uwsgi- docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/WSGIquickstart.html) it seems very quick and straight to the point (yet complete, it even starts with apt-get)

[https://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Emperor.html](https://uwsgi- docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Emperor.html) \- has config snippets too

Or maybe you mean detailed step by step instructions, a'la howtoforge?

<comment><USER33> _> Or maybe you mean detailed step by step instructions, a'la howtoforge?_

Yes, this is what I meant when I said

 _> IMHO the documentation is not lacking, it's just not forthcoming._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I initially thought it would allow to dynamically handle upstreams list (and other configuration) like hipache is doing [1], which would be awesome for dokku or other container management systems which rely on system nginx. But after seeing languages mentioned, I'm confused.

Is it supposed to replace language specific servers, like unicorn and puma for rails (but then, I'm confused about what such kind of support would be for Go, since the server is directly embedded in the program)? Does it embeds interpreter for interpreted languages, like mod_* did for apache?

[1] [https://github.com/hipache/hipache](https://github.com/hipache/hipache)

<comment><USER12> it's like swarm - [https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/#feature- highlights](https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/#feature-highlights) but much more lightweight.

<comment><USER36> and nothing to do with docker containers

in fact nothing like it really AFAICT

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm having a hard time seeing what niche this fills. It seems to be both a process manager and TCP proxy. What am I missing here? What makes this better than, for example, using docker-compose?

I think a "how it works" or "design doc" would be really helpful.

That said, the source files do make for pleasant reading. The nginx team has always set a strong example for what good C programming looks like.

EDIT: Their blog post [0] makes this more clear... nginx unit is one of four parts in their new "nginx application platform" [1]

[0] [https://www.nginx.com/blog/introducing-nginx-application- pla...](https://www.nginx.com/blog/introducing-nginx-application-platform/)

[1] [https://www.nginx.com/products/](https://www.nginx.com/products/)

<comment><USER38> > _What makes this better than, for example, using docker-compose?_

Not having to use docker would be a huge plus for me.

<comment><USER12> yes, infinitely more lightweight. but docker compose and friends are cool

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> More useful: [http://unit.nginx.org/docs-nginx- unit.html](http://unit.nginx.org/docs-nginx-unit.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> What is this? I've tried to read blog post, product site, these comments and still having really hard time figuring out what is Unit and why?

<comment><USER41> Seems to be a standardized replacement for language specific app servers like fpm for php. I guess that makes it a little easier to deploy stuff, although recently with docker containers, that hasn't been such a big deal anymore. You can just take an off the shelf fpm container and deploy that.

<comment><USER42> Seems like a simple C app would take much less resources than a docker container and have a lot lower latency, though. How much computing power would you need for each, given the same number of users?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Interesting. I like the restartless configs idea. This is becoming more common these days with short lived microservices. This week I just switched my load balancer setup from HAProxy to Traefik - very nice API based setup. [https://traefik.io/](https://traefik.io/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Also note github repo at [https://github.com/nginx/unit](https://github.com/nginx/unit)

<comment><USER45> If you're unfamiliar, look at this instead.

The homepage on Nginx.com is basically

> Join this webinar to learn

> \- What NGINX Unit does that has not been available before

<comment><USER46> There's also a blog post introducing the project: [https://www.nginx.com/blog/introducing-nginx-application- pla...](https://www.nginx.com/blog/introducing-nginx-application-platform/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm happy to see this. nginx itself is excellent software, I'll be happy to use similar tech for the application server as well (instead of uwsgi).

There are a couple of options I'd like to see added to the Python configuration though before I could try it:

\- Ability to point it at a virtualenv.

\- Ability to set environment variables for the application.

<comment><USER12> lol.. nginx en-masse configuration is a nightmare. i can point to a fortune 50 company that it's destroying for relying on it. I won't name names :)

<comment><USER48> So they deployed a bad config file to all nodes and restarted the service, which then failed to start.

How is this specific to Nginx? This same mistake is possible with any other software ever written.

<comment><USER49> nginx is faster at stop/starting?

<comment><USER49> downvoters: I'm deadly serious. I've seen plenty of deployment systems which were unbearably slow because it gave more time for a human to spot a bad deploy and cancel it, and who were afraid to replace it with something faster because it would lack this safety net.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The logo makes it as if it's read "N Unit", which is probably confusing as a popular unit testing with such name exists: [http://nunit.org/](http://nunit.org/)

</comment><comment><USER51> So in my Flask app this would replace gunicorn?

<comment><USER39> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> So it looks like they basically rewrote uwsgi and slapped a rest api on top of it.. (as a big fan of uwsgi, that seems like a reasonable thing to do...)

<comment><USER53> badly need settings like restart works every X requests or harakiri after # seconds timeout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I'm still not sure I understand "Unit".

I can't speak for the other languages (PHP, Go, Python) but I have some reservations about it helping Java (as well as Erlang and other (J)VM languages) as FastCGI like stuff has been attempted for Java in the past with not very good success with the exception of Resin.

I guess it would be interesting though if they did a native Servlet 3.0+ implementation like Resin but I doubt that is is what will happen. Regardless Netty, Undertow and even Jetty have caught up speed wise to Resin (well at least according to techempower).

<comment><USER55> CGI for PHP/Python.

AJP/mod_jk for Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Looks to be a good candidate to replace omnipresent nginx based API routers

<comment><USER57> I have a small flask application which basically is a rest get post API server. I'm struggling to make deployment easy. With PHP, i just push to the application server and rsync that folder into var www html for Apache httpd but what would I do for flask python 3?

<comment><USER58> Use a webserver that proxies requests to a wsgi server. We tend to put Caddy in front of Gunicorn which works really well. Also, look into running Gunicorn under supervisord.

<comment><USER58> Oh, and also use Fabric - [http://docs.fabfile.org/en/latest/](http://docs.fabfile.org/en/latest/)

<comment><USER57> Thank you. I'll look this things up. Haven't had to do deployment stuff in my previous life

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> For Go, does anyone have opinions on how is this is advantageous than using the in-built HTTP server (net.Listen() from net/http) that can fronted by a regular nginx/proxy_pass?

</comment><comment><USER60> This would take the place of something like tomcat or uwsgi, right?

<comment><USER61> Java is a notable omission on the diagram on their landing page...

<comment><USER62> Under Features / Multi-language support:

> Full support for Go, PHP, and Python; Java and Node.JS support coming soon

<comment><USER63> No Ruby support :<

<comment><USER64> Also "coming soon" according to their github page

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> It is in beta, but I hope this won't become a commerical-only product.

<comment> unkown-unknowns [https://github.com/nginx/unit](https://github.com/nginx/unit)

It's open source at the moment at least and I think it's reasonable to expect at least that the parts that are open source today will remain so in the future. Certainly they could have a commercial version with extra features like they do with Nginx, but as long as they have a useful version of this Nginx Unit available open source I will be happy to use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I am surprised noone mentioned Kong [1] yet. It seems to implement most of stuff promised by Unit and it was around for a few years.

[1] [https://getkong.org/](https://getkong.org/)

<comment><USER67> Not sure how it is related. Unit is an app server, it runs app processes and manages them, handles graceful restarts and etc.

Kong is just an API gateway: you run your own infrastructure as usually and put a gateway on top of it.

<comment><USER66> >Build the foundation of your service mesh.

Not directly related as Unit seems to be advertised as app server primarily, but you can see quoted text on main page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Any use for that on small scale (of 1 instance)? If you'd need to run nginx in front of it anyway, does it provide any use in case where you'd normally use php-fpm and some proxy_pass?

<comment><USER69> Interesting for me since I run not just php. Depending on what you do, maybe the API is useful for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> The concept of XUnit is so ingrained in my head that I assumed it was a unit testing framework for NGINX.

The rest of the headline cleared it up of course, but I was curious for a minute how that would look.

EDIT: When discussing a new product, I would think the name is a fair point of discussion.

Furthermore after this thread's title changed, it now requires a clickthrough to dispel similar misunderstandings.

<comment><USER71> Yeah, given the title, I thought it was about a unit testing framework for Nginx. Kinda like ServerSpec, but more specific: [http://serverspec.org/](http://serverspec.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Is this similar to openresty ? Instead of Lua - python, go and php? Or something different?

<comment><USER39> No, this is a replacement for things like php-fpm, gunicorn, etc.

The REST API part of it is for updating its configuration over HTTP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> So, Nginx follows exactly the way of Apache HTTP: remember mod_php, mod_perl etc?

<comment><USER46> This is not Nginx, it's a separate project developed by the same company. You could put any frontend proxy in front of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> I didn't see this mentioned but is there any way to upgrade the versions of the modules such as Go and PHP indepedendently of the core Unit package?

</comment><comment><USER75> So is still standalone or do you still need to run this behind the regular Nginx, like you would a language-specific application server?

</comment><comment><USER76> Oh, they wrote their own uwsgi, based on what presumably started as nginx2. That's cool.

I hope they would avoid the Second System syndrome..

</comment><comment><USER77> [honest question, not being negative] what real use-case is not already being addressed by existing technologies?

<comment><USER78> For almost every new product you see, the answer is: none.

It's not about making something impossible possible. It's about improving possible things in some dimension - like speed, safety, flexibility, or - <USER2> this case - standardization and integration with already used tool.

<comment><USER79> Great answer! I wondered about this myself for a moment :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Run multiple applications written in different languages on the same server

Amazing progress! Someone introduce them to CGI.

</comment><comment><USER80> How is it different from Envoy?

<comment><USER81> It seems like it is quite different, you actually change your code to listen with NGINX unit.

[https://unit.nginx.org/docs-installation.html](https://unit.nginx.org/docs- installation.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> Looks fantastic! Will be trying this over the weekend.

</comment><comment><USER83> Is it an alternative to Docker Compose in some sense?

</comment><comment><USER84> Any report of the perf (VS uWSGI for example) ?

</comment><comment><USER85> So does it use fastcgi to rule them all?

</comment><comment><USER86> Nginx Unit > G Unit

</comment><comment><USER87> But can I use Perl 6?

<comment><USER88> that was my question too. seems like no for now, and no plans either.

<comment><USER87> Sad butterfly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> how does it compare to openresty/luajit ?

<comment><USER68> AFAIK nginx unit would still require to have an nginx in front, so they are in different weight category with openresty.

It looks like it's more of a replacement to good old NGINX+Apache set up where there would be mod_php, mod_cgi, mod_perl and .htaccess on backend to serve the app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> Is this like AWS Lambda you could put in your own cloud?

<comment><USER68> This type of question is indication that NGINX Inc. salesmen did fail horribly to conceive of what the product actually is in layman engineering terms. Too much buzzword compliance.

<comment><USER91> Yup.

I came to the comments specifically to try to figure out what the heck this thing does.

The page itself never gets to the point of "Here's what it does".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> So, it's an application server?

</comment><comment><USER93> I recently tried to deploy a python flask application, and it was quite a mess. It relied on some services I had never heard of, and the documentation was a mess (not the documentation of Flask but of how to deploy it properly).

If Nginx Unit could host flask applications, it would be great news.

</comment><comment><USER94> > Full support for Go, PHP, and Python;

Does it do WSGI then? Did they write the equivalent of mod_wsgi?

<comment><USER36> yes, from docs it appears the Python app type in Unit provides a WSGI host</comment></comment>


5 March 1981: The ZX81 home computer launches with 1kb memory - open-source-ux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 <comment> iam-TJ My first computer. Ordered the day it was released after saving up 50% of the £70 and my father added the other 50%.

Finished secondary school whilst waiting for it to be delivered, it arrived the following week - the first week of June 1981.

I spent the intervening months teaching myself BASIC programming from the total of 3 books on programming in the local library.

I remember the day it arrived well; I was busy cleaning house and didn't realise the postman had left the parcel in the kitchen until I stopped for a break a couple of hours later.

Had it unboxed and connected in a flash and I was still to be found lying on the lounge carpet in front of the television programming it (in BASIC) at midnight.

Started my agricultural apprenticeship the following week and continued programming late into the nights, quickly moving to write pure Z80 assembly language code.

Dropped the apprenticeship a year later, went self-employed, and been hacking ever since.

I still miss those days of actually counting the clock cycles of different instruction combinations to find the most efficient code via the look-up tables in the back of Rodnay Zak's "Programming the Z80".

Oh, and we had to manually enter the hex codes of the instructions to write those programs - before there was a decent assembler available.

I recall adding a full-size mechanical keyboard, a 16KB RAM-pack, and a weird multi-port expansion dock that had add-on modules (like a light pen) built into cassette tape cases and connected via a single-in-line pin connection.

I still have that original ZX81 along with a UHF<->VGA signal adapter. Time to fetch it out of its shoe box and fire up the nostalgia.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Zaks book! I remember thinking it was such a weighty tome when I was a child, then being surprised to discover as an adult that it was just a regular sized book.

</comment></comment><comment> david-given The ZX81 was best described as a terrifying bundle of hacks flying in close enough formation that from a distance it looks like a computer... a real masterpiece of hardware design, in a disturbingly twisted sort of way.

Also, the official manuals had some of the best cover art ever seen on a computer book, by science fiction artist John Harris:

[http://www.alisoneldred.com/imageJohnHarris- Prints-2-2508.ht...](http://www.alisoneldred.com/imageJohnHarris- Prints-2-2508.html)

[http://www.alisoneldred.com/imageJohnHarris- Prints-2-2064.ht...](http://www.alisoneldred.com/imageJohnHarris- Prints-2-2064.html)

[http://www.alisoneldred.com/imageJohnHarris- Prints-3-1214.ht...](http://www.alisoneldred.com/imageJohnHarris- Prints-3-1214.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> My first computer.

To give an idea of the state of computing back then, the manual states (I checked now)

> to get '+' you must hold down the key SHIFT and while you are still doing > that, press the key K.

Not something you find in user manuals now.

My English was so bad back them that I couldn't understand the full meaning of the sentence and I couldn't go through the example. I asked my classmates at school the day after. My mother was a touch typist but she didn't realize that the tiny keyboard of the ZX81 could work like the one of a typewriter. Computers were beyond geeky.

<comment><USER3> The reason I learned English was to read manuals and program my Soviet clone of ZX80.

<comment><USER4> There should still be Berlin wall. Love to see genuinely good things spreading.

<comment><USER4> I wrote it wrong, I wanted to say that I vaguely remembered that the whenabouts of 1981 were wall's times, and referred to the computer design spreading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My dad ordered it when it hit the States for, I think, $300. He was an English teacher and suppressed gadget freak (we weren't rich). He returned it because he couldn't see a practical use for it. I wasn't interested in computers. He died two years later. I went on to become a successful programmer and very successful businessdude. I deeply regret not being able to buy him every single PC, Mac, iPhone, and iPad that came out those many years later.

</comment><comment><USER6> My first computer was ZX Spectrum (a successor of ZX81). By coincidence, a few days ago, I've finished reading the book "It's behind you" about development of R-Type, a top-notch arcade which pushed ZX Spectrum to its limits.

Here is a link to official free copy of this book:

[http://bizzley.imbahost.com/](http://bizzley.imbahost.com/)

About game:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-Type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-Type)

Gameplay of R-Type on ZX Spectrum:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6lvAXSGBpI&t=90s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6lvAXSGBpI&t=90s)

I'm _still_ playing ZX Spectrum games once in a while in the urge of nostalgia.

<comment><USER7> > I'm still playing ZX Spectrum games once in a while in the urge of > nostalgia.

Me too. Was playing Horace Goes Skiing earlier this week, but my all time favourite game is "Chaos: The Battle of Wizards":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos:_The_Battle_of_Wizards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos:_The_Battle_of_Wizards)

(This is available to play in your browser, online. Fun!)

Back in the day I used to hack games for infinite lives, and received a bunch of swag from Your Sinclair, and Sinclair User for posting them.

I credit the 48k Spectrum with getting me into programming, first BASIC then Z80 machine code. (Largely because the "bundle" we received had a dead tape- deck, so for the first couple of weeks the only thing we _could_ do with it was read the manual(s) and type in simple programs..)

<comment><USER8> I swear i ran into a clone of that game for either DOS or early Windows at some point. Would love to find it again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really wanted a ZX-81, and my dad ordered one not long after they came out. But typical for Sinclair, the delivery lead time was on the order of months! Not even weeks or days, and my dad gave up and brought home an assembled Acorn ATOM that one of the techs at the university has soldered up from a kit.

Great little machine, and introduced me to programming in ATOM Basic and 6502 assembly, leading to a career in computing that's still going 30+ years later.

Oddly enough, I just ordered parts from Mouser to build David Johnson Davies' Tiny Lisp Computer 2, ... DJD being the author of ATOMIC Theory and Practice and Practical Programs for the BBC Computer and ACORN ATOM.

<comment><USER10> I had a similar story with the Spectrum; they had industrial action and wound up not shipping. My dad cancelled and bought a Commodore 64. I think I dodged a bullet there (although I'm sure the Spectrum would have been interesting).

<comment><USER9> Haha, I remember that. My maths teacher DM had a mate in the factory who eventually got me a speccy out the factory door, but it was a longgg wait. Spectrum was a fun machine. Basic was ok for very simple games. I never did learn z80 assembler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was my first computer, and I remember it fondly.

Sadly, my parents dumped it (and my two ZX Spectrums), but I still have one of the manuals squirreled away.

Edit: JS emulator, for that extra touch of nostalgia

[http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/jtyone.html](http://www.zx81stuff.org.uk/zx81/jtyone.html)

<comment><USER12> The first computer I used at home was either this or the Timex Sinclair 1000. Membrane keyboards are the worst.

I did learn a lot about modern day programming, though. Everything I wrote was really just copy/"pasted" from a book or magazine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if anyone has managed to connect a ZX81 to a modern display? Apparently the design cuts corners, omitting the "back porch" part of the signal, so modern TVs cannot determine the correct black level, and display everything black.

(More here: [https://www.vintage- radio.net/forum/showthread.php?t=73664](https://www.vintage- radio.net/forum/showthread.php?t=73664))

<comment><USER14> Modern TVs are pretty poor at displaying analogue video. All sorts of retro computers and consoles have quirky video output. Most retro enthusiasts use an old CRT TV, typically a late-model Sony Trinitron. They're as cheap as chips these days. If you're really keen, you can't do better than a Sony BVM broadcast monitor.

<comment><USER15> How hard could it be to design a circuit that would reshape the video signal into something reasonable? Or to feed the video signal into an analog input and reprocess it in software?

<comment><USER16> The canonical solution to this problem is the Framemeister XRGB-mini, which can convert pretty much anything into a 1080p HDMI signal.

[https://solarisjapan.com/products/xrgb-mini-framemeister- com...](https://solarisjapan.com/products/xrgb-mini-framemeister-compact-up- scaler-unit)

<comment><USER13> Lovely kit but also £450 in the UK :-(

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I see no reason why such a thing should cost as much as a smart phone. You should be able to do it with a Raspberry Pi Zero plus the right software.

<comment><USER13> Apparently there are alternatives, including an open source one. This video talks about them: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHoOKLWIMKU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHoOKLWIMKU)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also my first computer. Definitely a gateway drug. I was lucky enough to have a 16k RAM pack (held on with blutac). Later we had a series ZX Spectrums, the Acorn Archimedes A440, then an Acorn RISC PC. After that, boring x86 only :/

<comment><USER16> RISC OS today runs natively on the Raspberry Pi, if you want to revisit your history.

[https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry- pi](https://www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi)

<comment><USER8> I do wonder how well it works with one of those Ceed Pi-Top products.

<comment><USER16> You can buy a Pi-Top with a custom version of RISC OS preloaded.

[http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/products/pitop.shtml](http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/micros/products/pitop.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> My first home computer. My other non-home computer being an IBM mainframe. ;) Still sitting in my parents attic somewhere. I gotta get it up and running again.

I really wanted an Atari video game console but my parents thought the ZX81 would be more educational. And I guess they were right.

Endless hours on the floor in front of the TV writing programs in Basic with that spiral bound user's manual for reference. I got the 16KB expansion pack since the 1KB grew old pretty fast.

I remember the user's manual had the pins for the expansion port and a list of all the Z80A assembly instructions. I spent hours looking at those having absolutely no clue what that was. No Internet to look things up back...

I also upgraded to the Spectrum. An then surprisingly enough to an Atari 512ST after the next Sinclair, the "QL", turned up to be a bit of a fail. Really should have gotten an Amiga in retrospects ;)

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone remember the tricks to save a few bytes when you didn't have the 16KB extension pack?

A number (in source code) used a lot of memory, 6 bytes or so, while a command used only 2 bytes, so you would replace numbers by VAL("1") or ORD("A") or something along those lines, saving a full 3 bytes... :-)

</comment><comment><USER20> My first computer as well. As there was no hard drive included, I had to save on audio tape the programs I was inventing or typing from UK 'Your Computer' weekly magazine. Also, graphical definition was 64 by 44 if I remember well, meaning that imagination was welcome when playing 'games'!

<comment><USER21> IIRC, graphics used 2x2 block characters. With 24 lines of 32 characters, that would give you 64x48.

However, video memory ate into your 1k RAM. At 24 lines of 32 characters, a conventional video memory would need 75% of that 1k bytes, so they did things differently; video memory was laid out as you would do in a text editor, with each line ending in a line separator character.

That way, an empty screen took just 24 bytes, a full one (32x24) + 24 = 792 bytes, leaving 232 bytes for a program.

=> few programs for the 1k version could use the full screen.

<comment><USER22> You are correct, but the screen's last two lines of text required some tricks to take advantage of (search for "reserved" in [http://www.tebbo.com/archive/pw810601.htm](http://www.tebbo.com/archive/pw810601.htm) ), so "64x44" is also a correct description from the programmer's point of view.

The particular trick that enabled the program to use the last two lines was easy to come by (I was in the countryside, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest user group, and I only had a few books as source of information). The existence of such tricks, including the pure software "hi-res" more that I read about at the time but didn't get to see until the Internet made it possible 12 years later, is one of my fond memories of that era.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For people interested, there's a small community of Spectrum fans on reddit at /r/zxspectrum and one just for the zx81 /r/zx81

</comment><comment><USER24> Still have mine but dead, for now; infamous for ribbon keyboard decay, and the Ferranti chip may have died, also an infamous component. But both the earlier kit and the assembled computer made us start thinking about what to do, what can be done.

</comment><comment><USER25> Chiming in to say, this model was my dad's first home computer in the 80s in Scotland. As such me and my brother did not fiddle with it much; however later on we upgraded to the Spectrum ZX 16K with 48K removable daughterboard, a much more amenable model to children. I learned BASIC on that machine and played all kinds of amazing graphic and text games - I wrote about my experiences with this machine on my blog [http://nchristiny.com/history/#fnref:fn-2](http://nchristiny.com/history/#fnref:fn-2)

<comment><USER25> Correction: 32K removable daughterboard for a whopping 48K RAM

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My first computer. I had already taken a programming course at school. I was working on a project that required some repetitive calculations (designing a loudspeaker using textbook formulas). The ZX81 went on sale at K-Mart for 40 bucks, and I rode my bike out there and got one.

I couldn't get the cassette storage to work, so for several days, I begged my family to not unplug it. I remember one amusing thing about its architecture, which was that it used the CPU for video generation, and did all of its execution of BASIC programs during the vertical blanking interval.

<comment><USER19> Yes, and it had the "FAST" mode, where the CPU would not do video, screen would go black, and it would race through your program 4x faster :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> And a generation of programmers whose parents couldn't afford an Apple II continued. I am so grateful for Sinclair, Atari, Commodore, and TI for making computers for the rest of us.

<comment><USER28> The idea that an Apple II could have been "the computer you used when you were growing up" was a rather late and surprising discovery to me. Nobody I knew could afford an Apple II, and to this day I don't think I've ever seen one running except under emulation. (Of course the Apple came out a good few years before the Sinclairs as well, but I gather it was still sold throughout the 80s.)

My own first computer was a Spectrum, which I loved, but I didn't have access to a colour TV at the time. I got to know all the fancy colour games in black and white.

<comment><USER27> Schools bought them because that was what schools bought in the late 70's and it did carry over even into the IBM era (1981+). To Apple's credit, they did get how to do educational sales.

I didn't know anyone who owned one personally, but that was probably an income-based observation.

<comment><USER28> Here in the UK, I think schools in the 70s often had the Research Machines 380Z ([https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/13/archaeologic_the_re...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/13/archaeologic_the_research_machines_380z_story/)) which was a marvellously chunky Z80-powered machine running CP/M.

I used those at school and liked them a lot but, I guess like the Apple II, nobody would have bought one for their home because they were expensive and sold mostly through education channels.

In the 80s they generally switched to BBC Micros, which were affordable enough that some better-off families had their own.

So I can see it being a regional thing that I never used an Apple II -- they didn't appear in schools in the UK -- but I wonder about other countries besides the US. Was the Apple all that widespread anywhere else?

<comment><USER27> I think Canada, and something about Japan since their was a special model: Apple II J-Plus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My first one too!

So many things came together back then. On TV I saw a documentary about kids in Japan writing their own games. In our city's airport there was a advertising installation for the IBM PC (forgot which model exactly) in form of a lunar lander game. And my best friend in school had just signed up for a BASIC course taught by students of the local university.

I remember I sat there next to the phone going back and forth, unsure about whether I should do the BASIC course and get one of those strange computers myself, or not. Almost didn't do it.

When I did finally decide it basically set me on the path for my entire career continuing to today.

Of course the first thing I did was figuring out how to do the lunar lander (today I know what I did was the Euler Method).

Edit: I also remember I had a hand-written Z80 op code table of 256 op codes. Using that I would write machine code.

</comment><comment><USER30> My first ever computer, before the Spectrum and Commodore, when my parents decided to let me touch it. Any combination of pure cyan, red and yellow colors still reminds me of the ZX Spectrum's tape loading screen and its dial- up modem-like sounds.

</comment><comment><USER31> Also my first computer (though I also had the 8K? expansion). It was already pretty old when I was given mine but it definitely started something. From there to C64, Amiga and then onto PC/Mac where it all started to get a bit boring.

<comment><USER13> Most likely the 16K "rampack". It was pretty much essential to get anything done with the machine[1]. The rampack infamously suffered from "rampack wobble" where a slight movement of the machine would disconnect lines between the motherboard and the rampack causing a crash. Eventually I got a larger case/keyboard and mounted the rampack internally.

[1] Though there was 1K chess, a mostly complete chess game in 672 bytes [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess)

<comment><USER32> _The rampack infamously suffered from "rampack wobble" where a slight movement of the machine would disconnect lines between the motherboard and the rampack causing a crash._

Oh, that wobble! Definitely on my short list of the most annoying hardware problems in computing history. You'd spend ages typing in the code for a game from your book, and then just as you were ready to go…

<comment><USER19> Did teach you to save frequently though, on cassette tape, which only took a few minutes! :-)

<comment><USER32> Cassette tape? We didn't have such luxuries until we got an Acorn Electron a few years later! So jealous. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 1KiB of RAM (1024 bytes) is 8 times the RAM of the Atari VCS/2600 (1977).

<comment><USER34> Yeah but it's only 1/64 of the Intertec Superbrain, available for only $11.000 at the time.

<comment><USER33> 1/33? [1]

[1] [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/superbrain.html](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/superbrain.html)

<comment><USER34> Don't forget the 2K ROM. I have the 64K model here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A great progress point! Budget phones now have 1GB RAM, a million times more.

The GPUs of budget phones have 10's of GFLOPS... to make a comparison with the ZX81, what's the fastest Z80 routine you could write to multiply 32-bit floating point numbers? Or perhaps, how fast is the routine in the ZX81 ROM BASIC (by Steve Vickers)?

Thw ZX81 had a 4MHz Z80, but in "slow" mode, about 3/4 of that was occupied in rendering the screen, making it effectively 1MHz. In "fast" mode, the screen went black...

</comment><comment><USER36> This was the computer on which I first learned to program. After that it was the Spectrum. Then the MSX series.

Does anyone remember the MSX series of computers from various vendors?

</comment><comment><USER37> My father still has his ZX-81. It was his first computer. I tried getting it hooked up to a modern TV a few years back but had no luck. I didn't have an oscilloscope handy, and there are no LEDs or status lights of any kind on the thing, so I didn't get round to figuring out what was wrong.

It's a pretty cool piece of history though. How many people can say they still have their first computer?

</comment><comment><USER38> My first computer. 1k of ram and the membrane keyboard, but it worked so well. The inspiration for the raspberry PI.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems to have been heavily cloned as well. I think my dad owned one such clone called a Lambda 8300 or some such.

</comment><comment><USER39> JFYI it has been recently revived (actually more ZX80 like, since it uses only discrete components), article on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13314741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13314741)

</comment><comment><USER40> I remember it heating up significantly in "fast mode". Amazing times.

<comment><USER41> and you could use alternate fast and slow modes to make sounds through the TV!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I was late to the home computer party. I sometimes wonder what would have been if I had started with a Z80 instead of a MOS6510.

</comment><comment><USER41> my first computer too. I was 10 and spend all of xmas at my grandparents typing in hex. such a cool looking machine even today

<comment><USER19> Good point, the design has held up surprisingly well!</comment></comment>


Jeff Bezos on why work-life balance is 'a debilitating phrase' - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/hub/ct-bsi-ladders-20180503-story.html <comment><USER2> >On why he thinks "work-life balance" is a "debilitating phrase"

>"This work-life harmony thing is what I try to teach young employees and actually senior executives at Amazon too. But especially the people coming in. I get asked about work-life balance all the time. And my view is, that's a debilitating phrase because it implies there's a strict trade-off. And the reality is, if I am happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy. And if I am happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy.

A lot of folks seem to read this (I think Bezos said something similar last year and there were dismissive reactions to that) and take it cynically, especially given Amazon's workplace culture reputation. But I think there's a lot of truth to this -- that if you are rejuvenated by your job, then that fulfillment spills over to your personal life, and vice versa. But it's an idealized situation that simply isn't really available to everyone, and to insinuate that one _must_ strive for such a harmonious situation is dangerous, because those high standards can in turn be toxic.

On the other hand, I think that the work-life balance strict tradeoff camp shouldn't be dismissed either, because to do so would imply that, if one does not love their job and feel rejuvinated by it, something is wrong with them. But frankly there seems to be a generally inverse relationship between the inherent enjoyability of a job and its material rewards, and so it's an entirely reasonable arrangement to have a "okay, thoroughly neutral job" and a great personal like that is enabled by your 9-5.

The key is that one be happy and satisfied with the arrangement, and that it be the right mix for each person.

>"It actually is a circle; it's not a balance. And I think that is worth everybody paying attention to it. You never want to be that guy — and we all have a coworker who's that person — who as soon as they come into a meeting they drain all the energy out of the room. You can just feel the energy go whoosh! You don't want to be that guy. You want to come into the office and give everyone a kick in their step."

This, I think is unilaterally true but actually independent from his first point.

<comment><USER3> Jeff Bezos doesn't need to work a single day for the rest of his life. So people "take it cynically", because it is very easy to give advice from a position where you don't have to take it.

Some of us have bills to pay and families to raise. Even if I am miserable because I have to spend my 8 hours of sunlight making CEO Von Richenstein wealthier, I can't just walk away and take the risk that my next job will be different. It's just stressful.

So work-life balance means... valuing your time as your own. It's pretty rich for someone who only works because they want to to suggest that the rest of us should do the same without any of the same security.

<comment><USER2> Q - given the need to take a boring, possibly bad/negative/stressful job that is needed to pay the bills and support the family, is it within one's power to choose between feeling that this is (1) a resentful, negative, bad situation, or (2) a nonideal, but necessary siutation, and to take satisfaction and pride in the fact that you're supporting your family? IDK.

<comment><USER3> (2) happens by leaving your work at work and doing what you enjoy at home. "Work-life balance", etc.

I don't need Jeff fucking Besos to tell me that there is something wrong with me if I cannot be happy making other people richer at the expense of my own time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the likes of Bezos work is completely optional and for themselves, they get to choose what work they feel like doing and when. That kind of autonomy has the effect of motivating one to work hard and enjoy it. Which is why Bezos can afford to be happy at work and "come home with tremendous energy"

</comment><comment><USER5> I think he's right, but only if you're doing a job that you enjoy like running your own company. Let's give him a mop and put him on bathroom duty in an Amazon warehouse and see how much "work-life harmony" he finds...

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like he is enthusiastic about other people working for his money.

</comment><comment><USER7> What does that even mean?

How it is debilitating? No explanation.

Work/life balance asserts a distinction between a job and unpaid time, as if labor rights didn't draw that line. It says nothing about emotional state.

There is a strict tradeoff in many cases; you're on the clock or you're not. But many companies prefer those boundaries get ignored.

"It actually is a circle; it's not a balance."

Maybe it's a triangle or polygon.

It sounds like an oblique way of arguing that Amazon workers should work long hours and are to blame if they're not enthusiastic about this.

<comment><USER8> >How it is debilitating?

All these human resources taking it upon themselves to optimize for 'work/life balance' is debilitating to the business owner's extraction of labour for profit.

<comment><USER9> The irony is that it's not likely the overworked and underpaid sweatshop hourlies & temps in the warehouses demanding work-life balance but rather the highly paid "professionals" in the nice glass HQ buildings with all their nap pods, masseuses &c.

<comment><USER10> Nap pods and all that jazz don't help with work-life balance though. I'd say it's rather the opposite. I'll take strict 8-5 schedule over 8-10 with all the in-house entertainment any day. Taking a nap any time you want just means you stays in office longer and do less "life" stuff.

<comment><USER11> Napping in the office means you can party until 2am and still have a productive day instead of clockwatching as a zombie from 8-5.

<comment><USER10> Not partying till 2am before a workday is pretty good if it means I'm free at 5-something every day and can enjoy a nice dinner, go for a walk/ride/run, hit the gym or whatever.

From my partying experience, no amount napping helps after a good party. The next day is lost anyway. Unless you plan to hide from your colleagues in that pod for the whole day...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you were getting 10 billion dollar as your net effective yearly comp then I sure you won't care about work life balance either.

</comment><comment><USER13> Establishing Scope of Work, and sticking to it, is the fundamentals of management. For employment, there is time and responsibilities. Responsibilities should be matched to time, and if one changes so does the other. If there is too much work, either there should be be paid overtime to make costs visible for future planning, or resources should be added. Sticking to 40 hours per week is not only good for employees personal lives. It is a good management practice.

</comment><comment><USER14> The mistake bezos makes is that his work is extremely rewarding, creative, fun.

This is maybe only the case for 0.5% of all employees in general. The other 99.5% need a good balance, because work isn't as rewarding, sometimes strenuous, boring, annoying.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think having attitudes towards certain things (or trying to force them) is harmful. Work doesn't have to be fun, nor does it have to be boring. Work is just, work. Still, its ridiculous for Bezos to enforce that if you don't like doing monotonous work for 8 hours a day without breaks, you're a passionless energy-sucking millenial.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is this the same Jeff Bezos that creates a disincentive for his employees to use the restroom, so they might meet their numbers in the Amazon warehouse? [1] Are they still peeing in bottles?

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849520)

</comment><comment> King-Aaron Forgive me if I find his attitude on the subject to be slightly demeaning.

</comment><comment><USER17> Jeff, this distinction between your property and mine is debilitating. As your customer when I'm happy it makes you happy and I can 100% guarantee there is nothing you can do that would make me happier than to donate your entire wealth to me thereby sharing the decisions you make exercising the power that comes with it.

Every single dollar you keep is a a dollar I don't get. Just as every single goddamn second your employees spend doing work stuff (including commuting) is a second they cannot spend with their families, pursuing hobbies, relaxing and living their lives.

It's a zero sum. F __k you very much for suggesting that spending time at work is comparable in any way to spending time with your children.

Now we're talking about zero sums, the quantity of tears shed by Amazon employees [1] is not a zero sum. You can fix that and it doesn't mean others will be crying.

The question isn't whether Bezos has talent. The question is how many people on the planet of 7 billion with his luck would have come out equivalent. Not all, no sir, not all. But when I think about him that way, he's not a philosopher he's just another arsehole who believes his bankbalance is relative measure of his worth as a human. Cross the road to avoid such people. Don't work for them.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside- amazon-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon- wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> If I'm spending nearly all my waking hours working myself to the bone, I'm not going to be happy at work, and that's going to translate to unhappiness at home. No harmony there. If I'm working so hard that I don't have time outside work for family and friends, even if the work itself makes me happy, I'm not going to be happy outside of work. No harmony there, either.

You cannot have work-life harmony without work-life balance. It feels like Bezos is just splitting hairs and twisting language around so he can seem like he has something deep and insightful to say.

</comment><comment><USER19> Fuck off Jeff. It must be very fulfilling to be the CEO and founder of one of the world's largest companies. I'm sure anyone will be just as fulfilled as you when every second of existence can catapult your already enormous wealth and influence.

You should work at the wearhouse for close to minimum wage with no party to upward mobility, and then preach about fulfillment - not the wearhouse logistics fulfillment, but career and life fulfillment

</comment><comment><USER20> Yup. This is why I don't want to work at Amazon.</comment>


Berlin bans Airbnb from renting apartments to protect affordable housing - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/airbnb-rentals-berlin-germany-tourist-ban-fines-restricting-to-protect-affordable-housing-a7008891.html <comment><USER2> > "I am absolutely determined to return such misappropriated apartments to the > people of Berlin and to newcomers"

Eh? I thought the owners had a right to rent their apartments. I wouldn't want to be in owners' place right now.

<comment><USER3> Yes but they also have to do something about the shortage of affordable housing. Most EU capitals are quickly becoming unaffordable to the lower and middle classes and people will expect their governments to regulate short-term renting of residential buildings more strictly.</comment></comment>


Warren Miller, Ski Bum Turned Filmmaker, Dies at 93 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/obituaries/warren-miller-ski-bum-turned-filmmaker-is-dead-at-93.html <comment><USER3> Warren Miller inspired a lot of skiers. Every time I went to one of the movies while I was growing up, I learned to have a better time on the slopes. In my mind, the thing that made the movies so compelling wasn't pushing the edges of skiing in a badass way, it was pushing the edges of skiing in a fun/silly way.

For example: [https://youtu.be/zD5RhNBmc_U](https://youtu.be/zD5RhNBmc_U)

My brother and I used to have spinning competitions down hills. We also used to do slope breakdancing, which is way less cool than it sounds. Anyways, I'm grateful to Warren Miller for inspiring me to be silly on the slopes. I had a better time because of the films that he made.

<comment><USER4> Was skiing more fun or laid back in the 70-80s? It seems that way from most of the videos I watch. Lots of comments on the Warren films I watched are saying it's gotten far too serious these days and people aren't letting go and having fun on the slopes (besides maybe the 'extreme' guys doing jumps but even they are working hard on a skill)... I'm not much of a skier, but I got that impression myself the few times I went.

Or is this just the usual nostalgic everything-was-better-in-the-past stuff?

<comment><USER5> Definitely not, here's a classic example of the mainstream skier attitude of the time: [https://youtu.be/XPZDEWBzneY](https://youtu.be/XPZDEWBzneY)

I think the people like Warren were more or less revolting against the culture of the time. Nowadays it's just the norm - most people aren't really wound up even if they're mostly focusing on improving their skills. Maybe there are fewer people dialing goof to the max but in my experience most young skiers and boarders drink and smoke on the slopes - that sort of thing. Also there's movies like G.N.A.R. that are recent.

<comment><USER6> Snowboards were definitely controversial when they came out. A lot of it was probably "Get off my lawn" driven by the fact that snowboarders tended to be younger and more aggressive. So people didn't really like them although the same snowboarders running over their skis would have been doing it no matter what they had strapped to their feet. But people sort of justified their attitude with claims that snowboarders scraped the snow off the slopes, couldn't really see where they were going, etc.

In the US there's only one major and one smaller area that don't allow snowboards today. I didn't realize it but there was a lawsuit against one of the areas a couple years back but they won and still don't allow snowboards.

<comment><USER7> There was definitely a "get off my lawn" aspect to it but the thing that really led to acceptance was the dire economics of ski resorts: they _needed_ boarders because the number of skiiers wasn't growing, and they were aging out.

Sad statistic: of people who put on skis for the first time (and remember first timers get free tickets and equipment at most locations in the US): only 25% of them ever put skis on a second time!

<comment><USER6> As snowboarding grew in popularity it just wasn't feasible for the vast majority of ski areas to continue disallowing them even if many skiers would have preferred they did so. The situation was actually worse as just the percentage of snowboarders; a mixed family or group of friends aren't going to go somewhere that one of their folks couldn't board at.

Interestingly the percentage of boarders is down a bit though still significant.

>Sad statistic: of people who put on skis for the first time (and remember first timers get free tickets and equipment at most locations in the US): only 25% of them ever put skis on a second time!

Not really surprising. Equipment is much better than it was when I learned but I nonetheless remember skiing having a fairly painful learning curve for me. I'm sure a lot of people go out, they don't really have the right clothing, and they fall a lot, get cold, get wet, and really just don't have a good time. I'm sure it's true for a lot of other sports as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I still remember one of his older films, I think it was Snowonder that is pretty funny to look back at:

1\. There's an aerial shot of pre-eruption Mount St. Helens with commentary of the effect of "Here's a dormant volcano of the Cascades, at least we hope it's dormant."

2\. In many of his films, there's a sequence with some kind of oddball snow contraption: monoskis, bikes with fat studded tires, etc. In this film, it was this weird thing called a snowboard.

</comment><comment><USER8> I grew up watching Warren Miller movies, but wasn't aware of some of the recent drama the article brings up. It's nice to hear that in that copyright issue he stepped in. I sort of imagined him as the kind of person who would take responsibility like that, and I'm glad that's apparently not too far from reality.

</comment><comment><USER9> I had the opportunity to sit down with Warren Miller and a few others 7 or 8 years ago for dinner. He was an all-around nice guy. Sad to see him go, but at 93 he definitely lived a full life.

</comment><comment><USER10> As a friend of mine said when I told him the news:

"He had a good run."

RIP Warren, you made a positive difference in the universe.

</comment><comment><USER11> _In a 2008 speech, Mr. Miller summed up with uncharacteristic seriousness what had led him - as well as ski bums and heads of state and corporations - <USER2> head for the mountains.

"It's our search for freedom," he said. "It's what it's all about - man's instinctive search for freedom."_

</comment><comment><USER12> bummer... I grew up watching ski movies and listening to my grandfathers stories about hanging out and filming with Warren and other pioneers of skiing way back in the day up at Cannon mtn and elsewhere.

Definitely a legend who adapted right alongside with the sport!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Combined with the loss of Bruce Brown recently ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15911673](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15911673)), it feels like a generation's going.

To be frank, though, I thought both had died years ago.

<comment><USER13> I've been thinking about this alot too lately. It seems as if the entire 20th century has faded away before our eyes over the last couple years. That whole world will soon be nothing but history books.

<comment><USER14> More than just books about us, we leave the world with all we left behind. Warren Miller is with us in his films, and others stay with us too even after their bodies have decayed.

I've realized in recent years that while I don't think there is a physical soul of any kind, the soul of an individual is the collective influence they had. Much of that lives on long after the person's light leaves this world. That lasting influence is now, to me, the soul of the individual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does not seem like this is relevant to hackernews

</comment><comment><USER16> I come to HN to avoid pop culture, including celebrities and their obituaries.

If a person is a notable technologist I think it's of interest, but I would ask the community (who is obviously upvoting these celebrity death posts: I'm in the minority here) whether they really think this is important content for HN.

<comment><USER17> I'd say Warren Miller has spent the last 50 years using technology to create a new media audience. He was the precursor to companies like Matchstick Productions, Teton Gravity Research, and Red Bull Media House.

Watching his movies as a kid was the reason I started putting a video camera on my helmet and video camera in my backpack before GoPro was created.

WME wasn't really pop culture, and I wouldn't categorize Warren Miller as a celebrity. He did use technology to create a life-style business in a category that didn't exist before, which is why I think the post belongs here.</comment></comment>


Improving on Google Scholar - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scholr.ly/post/4581804750/improving-on-google-scholar

<comment><AUTHOR> What else needs to be done to improve GS?</comment>


BlueChili Accelerator: $75k for 30% of Your Startup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bluechilli.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone else have more detail on this? What's the deal? Does 30% for $75k sound crazy or is my judgement just skewed by YC's (and in some part TechStars') fundamentals?

<comment><USER2> My thoughts exactly. That does seem crazy, especially if that $75k is in AUD, which is roughly $57,800 USD...

<comment><AUTHOR> Sometimes you need to check and make sure you're not losing it. $57,800. Wow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> $2.5k / % puts them near the bottom ranking [http://accelerat.io/](http://accelerat.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be interesting to examine the type of startups this attracts</comment></comment>


What's your take on serverless architecture? - <AUTHOR> HN community, we've gone serverless at my startup for the last 2.5 years, and I've seen its advantages on scalability, dev velocity, and cost efficiency. Like any other new technology, it's not a cure-all solution and may not be the right fit for some applications. But I'd argue that in the long-term it will be the de-facto solution for a vast majority of cases.
I've published a write-up on serverless architecture, and plan to write more. I'd love to get HN community's take on serverless.  Do you use serverless components in your organization? In what capacity? Do you have any gotchas or things you'd do differently if starting over?
https://blog.altitudenetworks.com/serverless-architectures-are-good-for-business/ <comment><USER2> Yes here too, and I think it's great and it's the way forward, but as with anything it requires some changes in thinking and approach. Re-composing everything into small functions, queues, and asynchronous events takes some getting used to. And there are some patterns that can help (e.g. using "job queues" can sometimes be the answer, rather than having a different queue for every type of action), when to use FIFO vs unstructured queues, and lots more.

Books like [https://www.manning.com/books/serverless-architectures-on- aw...](https://www.manning.com/books/serverless-architectures-on-aws-second- edition) might help. And of course many consultants, good and bad, will cash in on the new trend, and there will be some high-profile disasters which should never have chosen serverless in the first place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. Anything by Yan Cui is definitely worth a read!

I'd argue the most important value prop that serverless has had for us was to force us think of everything in terms of an event-driven process, with small batches of job being done at every invocation. This is such an underrated benefit of going serverless/event-driven: together with job queues, this has enabled us to maintain control of our jobs from outside the code, without a need for re-deployment. We can fast-forward, pause, stop, rewind our long- running jobs simply by changing the event triggers or sending a new message to the queue.</comment></comment>


The End of My Paid Subscription Content Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/11/the-end-of-my-paid-subscription-content-experiment.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting thoughts about the psychology of the writer - how s/he's affected by the "payment" or "firewall" status of the site. Feld's reactions match what I've sort of expected from myself if in a write-for-fee mode.

Most other discussions have been geared toward the _reader's_ reaction. I think the impact on authors is equally significant (and might need to be addressed differently?).

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you need to come at it more from the mindset that it's a small amount of money that people don't mind losing if it doesn't turn out, then you can be more natural and unfiltered about your thoughts. I think it also helps to think of the small payments people are paying as allowing you a little more freedom in having the experiences and thought which you are writing about.

I like this explanation of using letterly: <http://rosshill.com.au/letterly/>

</comment><comment><USER4> I highlight text as I read and found the highlighter popup very distracting and annoying.

<comment><USER5> I do this too and stay off NYT for that reason.

Also my girlfriend doesn't watch me read for the same reason :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The highlighter would have killed my interest if not for readability. It is incredibly annoying to read any decent portion of consistent text with the highlighter turned on.

</comment><comment><USER7> While I find it admirable that the author wants to charge for quality content it really isn't his decision what is worthy of being paid for. It is his audience who is the final arbitrator of what is worth their $1.99 a month.

There are after all a ton of shitty things being bought and sold for much more.

</comment><comment><USER8> i like the idea of paid content and wish it were more abundant on the web. for example, i would pay Venkatesh Rao to hurry up with more posts in his Gervais Principle series and i am glad to pay $5 per. actually, come to think of it, $5 seems like a lot.. $2 for a bad one and $5 for a good one, all right.

<comment><USER9> I think a lot of people balk because the nominal cost of content online is "free", including content that is supposed to cost money, ala BT.

I don't have a problem with paid content but I'm never sure if it'll be worth it, because I find testimonials honestly less then useless (I mistrust them) and I can't check a physical 'thing' before I buy.

I do like the idea of variable pricing, perhaps a cost to enter then a fixed variable cost for your "enthusiasm" for that content?</comment></comment>


First Look at Uber's Co-Founder's Shopping Concierge "Operator" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/22/the-request-network/#.yvoxvk:ON38 <comment><AUTHOR> I have been waiting on this service to launch since they pre-launched last year. The mobile Ecomerce experience has not had an app that really makes it seamless. I think Operator could be the app that wins as it focuses on use case first and fills exact request instead of having the user search and scroll to find the product that meets their needs.</comment>


Online Color Challenge: How Well Do You See Color? - <AUTHOR> http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?pageid=77&lang=en

<comment><USER2> This test not only measures your color acuity, but also your patience...

<comment><USER3> And the color calibration of your screen...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 7, among the highest for my cohort. Although it's possible the sorting heuristic I used helped, basically a loose binary sort followed by closer inspection and comparison of proximate squares. Increased the zoom level of the page to get a bigger sampling area for my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6417143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6417143)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish it gave more details about the test results. I'd like to know what the average score is in my demo; not just the highest and lowest scores.

</comment><comment><USER7> Response spectra of human cones: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Co...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Cone- fundamentals-with-srgb-spectrum.svg/1000px-Cone-fundamentals-with-srgb- spectrum.svg.png)

The medium ("green") and long ("red") cones are pretty close and similar. It's interesting that the diversity of reds and greens we experience are computed from two mostly-overlapping signals having peak responses at roughly "leafy green" and "sunny yellow".

</comment><comment><USER8> I hate doing bubble-sort manually ;)

BTW, my score is 8. I read the explanation, but I still have no clue what that means? For example, which score would you need to be a graphic designer?

<comment><USER9> +1 for the bubble sort. I dont have the patience for that; I did shell sort :)

Also, I dont understand why it has 0 on the left hand side, yet says for the best score -200; same for the opposite end. I got a 0 btw :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 291 for me.

Colorblindness is frequently a problem: color-coded graphs and maps are usually unusable, and I often have to get help with color in design.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would love to see the score distribution and the particular zones where color discrimination is low for the whole population. In my case it seems blue is slightly problematic. Is there anything like this in the webpage besides individual scores?

<comment><USER12> I found the third row hardest to sort. Is that the same for most people?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Scored 10 (for comparison: male, age 20-29). I think the score might be better on a real monitor (now on notebook) and worse on a phone/tablet, because the high-contrast on some notebooks (my Vaio Z for example) and phones (AMOLED type) might decrease the differences between colors on these charts.

</comment><comment><USER14> Well this is intriguing: [http://crap.q3k.org/8e2fbb1393588d87f953d8c405ab9d101f07fc0d...](http://crap.q3k.org/8e2fbb1393588d87f953d8c405ab9d101f07fc0d6bf3c4eda2bd170a72a10af9.png)

I am really surprised to score 0, especially as I'm not an artist.

</comment><comment><USER15> 38 for me [http://imgur.com/Duhfajt](http://imgur.com/Duhfajt) Fun game, will give it to my wife who sells paint for entertaining her customers :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Being an artist, I'm curious as how PG will score on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> 14

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I got a 241... Good thing I already knew I was colourblind

<comment><USER18> got 4 :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 8

[http://imgur.com/B2SuT1I](http://imgur.com/B2SuT1I)

</comment><comment><USER20> This gets a lot easier if you disable Flux!

Unfortunately I realised this only afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER21> Score 3 on Air 13 inch, max brightness [are you sure you are not scoring your monitor?].

<comment><USER12> Last time I did this I was using a MacBook Pro (very nice monitor), this time I'm using a Thinkpad T61 (lousy monitor).

I scored the same both times.

I'd be interested to see what happens if people use poorly calibrated monitors. I could tweak a screenshot with the Gimp, but I don't know enough about eyes to know if I'm making any meaningful adjustments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I scored zero: "You have perfect color vision!"

<comment><USER23> Same here! [http://imgur.com/cUvRdcd](http://imgur.com/cUvRdcd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I got a 15... but mostly because it was tedious.

</comment><comment><USER25> Scored a 4 on a crappy 10 year old lcd monitor.

</comment><comment><USER26> For the sake of comparability, here's my result (score, 11)

[http://imgur.com/Emd4KDZ](http://imgur.com/Emd4KDZ)</comment>


Disqus Gets VC Funding, Releases v2 and Kicks Competitions' Ass. - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/03/18/disqus-gets-vc-funding-releases-beta-2/ <comment><USER2> Except they don't really kick the competitions' ass. The page view counts are bogus because SezWho does not host a site's comments (which most sites prefer, frankly). SezWho has more customers and activity than Disqus.

</comment><comment><USER3> curious, what are the potential monetization strategies?

they only occupy below the fold or secondary jump pages so they're rarely a destination site. build the business intelligence site that om malik wants?

monetize the landing pages from google traffic? but then publishers will get pissed that they're stealing the googlejuice.

involve more functionality a la identity management?

morph into mini-reddits or mini-blogger for everyone and upsell?

the tradeoff of a commenting system for ads would seem ludicrous as well. the only competitive advantage they have is a network effect. build to flip?

<comment><USER4> I had the same question as well.

A couple of ideas:

1\. No monetization, just eyeballs until an acquisition.

2\. Freemium model: paying customers (bloggers) get access to more useful services (eg: better spam protection, user tracking, demographics on commentators, better threading)

3\. An attempt to make the conversation the destination. Consider a system where the comments become more interesting than the original post (/. was this way once...), and disqus having that niche, since they own/host the comments.

4\. Comment aggregation, a la blog rolls. Again, make the conversation the destination.

5\. Enterprise deals: the Harvard Crimson was mentioned. How about lining up CNN's iReport?

Others?

<comment><USER5> I agree with 1 most; there are a number of possibilities and fantasies suitable for proposal writing, but if I attempted this it would be aimed for acquisition and nothing but, and would only do it with external funding.

Intensedebate started out pretty well, but they never seemed to iterate. No rapid expansion = die, so, poor ID.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disqus is quite interesting, and amazingly simple to use. For that alone it is good to know that they are doing well.

On a unrelated note: since when half a million qualified as a "VC" round of funding?

<comment><USER7> When it comes from a VC. :)

<comment><USER6> Right you are. ;)

It just one more example to show how VC is turning more and more of a seller market.

Now, the bigger question: at what valuation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember reading a discussion on Hacker News where danielha discussed creating such a service a few months before he created it as part of YC. Am I right?

</comment><comment><USER9> What happens if blog tools (Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, etc) include threaded comments in their next release?

<comment><USER10> Profit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's great! USV seems to really like investing in services they use themselves instead of "trends".

</comment><comment><USER12> Awesome news champs - great product and so easy to log in to! ;)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hard to find a use for this, but congrats to the Disqus team.

</comment><comment><USER14> Congrats guys!

</comment><comment><USER15> cool. congrats...</comment>


Want a job in Silicon Valley? - <AUTHOR> http://hiring.customerdevlabs.com/work-in-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> I used to really be attracted to SV. The companies, weather, opportunities; all of it seemed great. Then I realized the living expenses, the government regulations set forth by the state, and the overall smugness of some people and it really turned me off.

Case in point. This websites says "work with the smartest people in the world" as if SV has the highest concentration of intelligent people in the world and as if that's even a measurable statistic.

<comment><USER3> The living expenses are a real burden, and the average rental rates in the core of the San Francisco Bay Area have increased ~20-30% over the last three years.

They're building new apartments all around the bay now and the greedy realty vultures somehow think it's reasonable to charge as much as $3500-4000USD per month for them (one and two bedrooms). That's easily a mortgage payment on a brand new home out here.

The older apartment complexes have seen this and have been raising their rates as well (the monthly market rate on my apartment went from $2150 USD to $2750 USD in the last six months I've lived there even though it's in the south bay area).

The worst part of all of this is the realization that I'll likely never be able to afford a home out here (median house price is currently ~$500K USD): [http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_23249121/bay-area- med...](http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_23249121/bay-area-median-home- price-soars-april)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, shame on the greedy realty vultures for charging what the market will bear. </sarcasm>

<comment><USER5> Funny, you should read Adam Smith's opinion of landlords:

<http://geolib.com/smith.adam/won1-11.html>

or quoting from mises.org(!)

 _Smith was even less kindly to the role of landlords, where he recognized no economic function whatever that they might perform. In pungent passages, he writes that 'As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords like to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce'. And again: 'as soon as the land becomes private property, the landlord demands a share of almost all the produce which the labourer can either raise or collect from it'._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would love a better job, but when it comes to the Bay Area I have a really hard time with:

1\. Housing costs (too expensive)

2\. Transportation time / locality (takes too long to get elsewhere in the Bay Area, probably can't live near the job because of #1)

3\. Climate - San Fran is rather cold nearly all year round.

4\. Because of 1 and 2 likely would not have a garage or space to do projects in.

5\. Sometimes things seem rather legally onerous in CA/Bay Area.

6\. Regional tunnel vision. When I lived in Northern California I got sick of hearing how it was 'the best place on Earth.'

<comment><USER7> re:6

Isn't it?

I kid, I kid. Mostly. But the revealed preferences of where people choose to move and at what price does say a lot about places. Most people, given a choice of buying a nice house in Fargo or Macon for $150k or a nice house in San Francisco or Palo Alto for $150k, probably will go for the latter.

<comment><USER6> Until they realize their $150k in SF or PA bought a 11'x11' one room shed with no bathroom or driveway anyhow.

<comment><USER7> I think you overestimate how far $150k will go in SF ;)

The point is about what people are willing to pay to live in an area, though. The fact that people are willing to pay so much more to live in the Bay Area is revealing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I live in Austin. Same concentration of crazy smart people, only with less attitude. Did I mention that you can actually buy a house here? With a chance of paying it off? And a 25 minute commute?

THIS is why 1 of every 50 cars in Austin has a California license plate.

EDIT: there's less access to VC money here. But that doesn't seem to be stopping people.

<comment><USER9> I think it would be good for you to realize that what gives your life fulfillment (mortgages, shorter average commutes than SF) might not mean anything to other people.

<comment><USER8> I do - an excellent point. Don't get me wrong, I love coming out there to visit. (Especially in June/July/August.) But the cost/benefit seems way out of whack unless you've already done a startup & have an inside straight to more startup $, or already have family in the area.

It's not just me: [http://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/Whats-the-dark-side- of-S...](http://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/Whats-the-dark-side-of-Silicon- Valley)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I mean this in the nicest way possible - not as a troll.

The site needs checkboxes for 'are you young and innocent' and 'are you single and/or do you not care about your family and personal free time'

Those are two huge requirements for most companies out here, but they can't admit this kind of stuff by law.

<comment><USER11> Amen brother. As a wise man once said, it's not what you earn, it's what you keep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I currently work from home and am interested in a new job in SV, however all of the companies I have spoken with will not allow me to telecommute 2-3 days per week.

I don't see any reason why I need to give up 2 hours of my day traveling to / from work on the days when I need to work exclusively on coding.

So I'll stay where I am.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't _terribly_ want to move to SV, but I am a bit curious what this will return.

Sorry if I'm wasting your time customerdevlabs! I mostly signed up out of curiosity.

Obviously, though, if you want to pay me $150k/year, give me 3 months of vacation, let me telecommute 2/5 days, pay my moving expenses, and give me fun problems, I will move tomorrow.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only thing SV doesn't offer is 3 months of vacation - unlimited vacation on the other hand is fairly popular: [http://www.quora.com/Startups/Which- companies-have-an-unlimi...](http://www.quora.com/Startups/Which-companies- have-an-unlimited-vacation-policy)

There's a war on for talent now. Be careful what you wish for.

<comment><USER14> "Unlimited vacation" is also grossly misleading in SV though. I have seen _very, very_ few companies that _actually_ live up to their own hype about encouraging employees to take off as much time as they need.

More often than not, in SV at least, "unlimited vacation" policies is really just code for "don't take any". The small print is also "if you really do take a lot of time off, even if you're great, you don't belong in our Red-Bull- shotgunning startupy experience".

<comment><USER11> It's the present day version of machismo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The housing situation in the Bay Area is a real mess. That's the reason so few experienced engineers are willing to pack up and move there.

It's surprising to me that despite being so innovative and forward thinking, startups and companies in the Bay Area aren't realizing they have to accept this as a constraint and start hiring remotely and find ways to make it work.

Yes, it's sub-optimal to have a remote team in many ways when you're in the early stages. But you have to balance that against fighting for every new hire and then trying to avoid watching them get poached by the newly funded startup across the street. If I were starting a company in SF, this would be a major distraction and something I'd want to avoid at any cost.

<comment><USER11> You hit the nail on the head. It kills me how much technology we have yet working with a remote team isn't even something a lot of top design teams will even consider. We have video conferencing in our pockets, but nope, gotta drive 3 hours (or more) every day in order to produce good design. It's baffling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting proposition. Seems like a no brainer given the dynamic of things today — the biggest problem is connecting the right candidate with the right opportunity, and half the time it's an awareness problem whereby the right candidate isn't aware of the opportunity b/c they don't sit in the bay area to hear about things through traditional channels.

<comment><USER17> I sit in the bay area. I hear about nothing. This site assumes that "I want a job in SV" necessarily entails "I don't already live there". Could I, already having a job there, try to find a different one via this site?

<comment><AUTHOR> absolutely! If you're already here you're in even higher demand. Please send your details via the form or email me at justin at link's domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does this remind anyone one else of the Grapes of Wrath?

</comment><comment><USER19> Want a job in Silicon Valley?

NO.

You should never lead off with an open-ended question. And I seriously do not want a job in Silicon Valley, but that doesn't stop the recruiters from contacting me. If a developer with tons of experience hasn't worked in SV by now, they probably never will.

<comment><USER20> I think you proved the usefulness of the open-ended question: filtering out people like yourself, who clearly aren't interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have been here for the past 13 years. The cost of living has risen so much that I am considering a relocation. Housing prices are insane, pretty much every else is more expensive than anywhere else too. The traffic is now back to .com-boom levels and highways are constantly congested.

If you are young (20-30), single, and are willing to have roommates to group up into some apartment, then SV may be an adventure for you. However, as you grow in life, you will need a pretty high level of income to feel secure in this environment.

Start-ups would be better off setting up shop in underdeveloped parts of the country, however, as the cost of labour here puts a serious overhead over any fledgling company.

</comment><comment><USER22> Forget Silicon Valley, move to the Research Triangle Park area. We have great weather, a burgeoning startup scene, great food, good public schools, great universities, "day trip" access to both the mountains and the beach, reasonable cost of living, a decent (but not spectacular) live music scene, and the largest research park in the world[1].

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle_Park>

<comment><USER21> Any site to get jobs there?

<comment><USER22> Here's one listing of some local startups who are hiring:

[http://www.downtowndurhamstartups.com/content/job+board/1604...](http://www.downtowndurhamstartups.com/content/job+board/16048)

Also, there is a "Tech Jobs Under The Big Top" job fair that is held periodically at the American Underground in Durham, where startups pitch prospects to come work for them. There was just one in April, not sure when the next one is. But check <http://bigtop.it> for more info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why do you want to move people physically there? I could work there, but I can afford to choose and I don't want to move my family out, it's not worth it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Taking a cue from another post currently on the front page; <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5799838>

If you live in the future, want a job in Austin?

<comment><USER25> I love Austin! Vastly prefer it to the Bay Area for a number of reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is actually remarkably similar to the Silicon Valley Internship Programme (<http://www.siliconvalleyinternship.com>) except that SVIP targets itself towards British CS/SE grads specifically.

</comment><comment><USER27> According to some random cost of living calculator I just pulled up on google, I would need 150,000$ to live in SF based on my current salary, and that is a lateral move, are there dev jobs paying 2-300k in SV?

<comment><USER14> Yes. If your'e senior enough and are in a vertical that's in-demand enough, $200-300K is possible.

That being said, don't trust cost of living calculators, they are full of crap. Go on Padmapper and _really_ scope out the cost of housing in your area. If you really are thinking about it, fly there and look at the actual costs of things.

Taking the mean/median of anything when it comes to cost of living just means you have a systemic way of calculating a number that has no relevance to reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The OP is implying that there are an adequate number of qualified 'business people' and they just want hires that will do the dirty work.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are an adequate number of funded startups that want devs/designers to help build their empires.

<https://angel.co/jobs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does the "fly you here" idea apply to candidates on different continents?

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool idea. Make one for NYC!

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting arbitrage...

</comment><comment><USER31> No.

</comment><comment><USER32> Inspired by this, I think I came upon a startup idea that could actually work.

I'm probably not to pursue it (my job search is going really well and I'll probably take something else) but anyone who's interested can reach out. I'm not afraid to share the idea.</comment>