Capitalism and Slavery - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenation.com/blog/206025/capitalism-and-slavery <comment><USER3> > Despite all this scholarly work, each generation—from W.E.B. Du Bois to > Robin Blackburn, from Eric Williams to Walter Johnson—seems condemned to > have to prove the obvious anew: Slavery created the modern world, and the > modern world's divisions (both abstract and concrete) are the product of > slavery. Slavery is both the thing that can't be transcended but also what > can never be remembered. That Catch-22—can't forget, can't remember—is the > motor contradiction of public discourse, from exalted discussions of > American Exceptionalism to the everyday idiocy found on cable, in its > coverage, for example, of Baltimore and Ferguson.

The sins of our fathers... Just because racism and violence still exist today does not mean we're all ignorant of the sins our ancestors committed and should abolish an economic system that _tangentially_ benefitted. And this is not a modern phenomenon, as he seems to imply. This country was one of the first to abolish slavery. What occurred in this country's brief history pales in comparison to the brutality that came before it.

Slavery is institutionalized theft, organized crime. It is the opposite of free trade and capitalism. Sure, self-proclaimed "capitalists" owned slaves, but that shouldn't impugn the whole system. Please tell me, what other economic system has lifted billions out of poverty?

<comment><USER4> Capitalism is still a form of slavery were the capitalists benefit from the workforce disproportionally with regard to their investment. And what lifts people out of poverty is work, not an economic system. Capitalism is of course very effective at organizing the environment in a way to enable highly productive work but suggesting that this is a unique feature of capitalism seems hardly justified, we just didn't explore many alternatives. Finally judging capitalism by the number of people it lifted out of poverty seems also misguided to me, there are a lot of people that were negatively affected by capitalism. And a fair comparison should of course not compare the result achieved by capitalism with the situation before capitalism but with the - unfortunately mostly counterfactual - result achieved by an alternative system that started from the same initial conditions.

Fun fact: I always get my share of down votes for being critical of capitalism but no one attacks my position in a response. Do you have no arguments? (provocative face)

<comment><USER5> Dan, I'll chime in. I don't know your circumstances, but when I read a critique like this my first question is always "where has the person travelled?". It's very difficult to spend time in places devoid of capitalism and not notice the differences. Due to my past work, I travelled all over the globe to both established and emerging markets -- and work simply can't explain the levels of disparity. What repeatedly made a difference was ownership. For example, the poverty in Addis Ababa is overwhelming. Once you get past that, the second thing you'll likely notice is that the government has a tight grip over business there. There are no McDonalds, Starbucks, or any recognizable brands there. This is for the "benefit of the people", but really is just there to protect government interests (the coffee place nearly has the exact same Starbucks logo). In one area where there were nice homes, a single individual owned the entire lot of them. Unlike the US where you might be able to acquire property or make free choices about a new business, your choices are restricted there. There is much talk in the US about the top 1%, but this defines the "99%" by limiting the sample size to only those living within capitalism. On a global scale, the top 1% is anyone making over $34k a year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm confused by the argument made here. An economic system fairly different from the modern world, which was not called capitalism at the time ("capitalism" is mainly an 1880's+ idea), used slaves. Slavery was abolished and later that system evolved into capitalism.

I'm not sure what the conclusion is. The author seems to think someone forgot about slavery, though it's unclear who.

As a counterpoint to the mood affiliation, I'll just remind everyone here that the term "dismal science" was coined by Thomas Carlyle, who favored slavery rather than "find[ing] the secret of this Universe in 'supply and demand,' and reducing the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science)

<comment><USER7> > I'm confused by the argument made here. An economic system fairly different > from the modern world, which was not called capitalism at the time > ("capitalism" is mainly an 1880's+ idea), used slaves. Slavery was abolished > and later that system evolved into capitalism.

Capitalism was a term coined in the late 19th Century to refer to the post- feudal economic system that developed through several centuries and was in full swing by the mid-19th century, and overlapped considerably with the use of chattel slavery.

While its critics hadn't yet _called_ it "capitalism", the system which they did get around to calling "capitalism" did not evolve only after the abolition of slavery as you claim.

<comment><USER6> I don't dispute that old-school market economies involved the use of slavery. I just don't know what the point of the article is, beyond perhaps attempting to affiliate "slavery" and "capitalist" moods in our mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a great deal of evidence that slavery was related to cotton, sugar, and rice plantations (as well as some other crops to a lesser extent). One could also make a very convincing, if not definitive argument that imperialism enabled slavery (at the intercontinental scale), and that mercantilism supported it. Politics, as played by wealthy landowners and slave-traders also perpetuated slavery, as can most easily be seen from the (abominable) actions of the American House of Burgesses.[1]

There is very little evidence for the argument that capitalism or free trade was responsible for slavery. Economics was called "the dismal science" precisely because its critics thought the proponents of free markets were not taking a (racist) vision of 'social justice' seriously.[2] Later on in the American South, the bus and streetcar companies tried to segregate busses on the basis of smoking and non-smoking sections, but politicians and racist groups forced them to segregate based on race. In South Africa during the aparteid, businesses were taken to task for not discriminating strongly enough against the Africans, and many groups such as socialists and unions held racist policies as a tentpole of their platforms. There are innumberable cases of the market acting against slavery, and even Smith described markets as notable for their lack of nationalism or discrimination.[3]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_codes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_codes)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations)

<comment><USER9> >There is very little evidence for the argument that capitalism or free trade was responsible for slavery.

Not only that; they were and are diametrically opposed. The Beckert quote implies a connection between slavery and industrialization when in fact the relationship was an inverse one.

A comparison between the confederacy and the north is illuminating. The concentration of wealth in slaves and land prevented industrialization during the 19th century, and the south fell very far behind economically. I think it's worth nothing that the vast majority of white people in the south were worse off because of slavery, because the system prevented capital from being allocated efficiently. And while the two areas have converged, differences still remain today.

<comment><USER4> What? Having slaves pick cotton is as capitalist as it can get. You own the land, they do the work, you get the profit. That slaves are not as effective as tractors really doesn't matter for that.

Fun fact: I always get my share of down votes for being critical of capitalism but no one attacks my position in a response. Do you have no arguments? (provocative face)

<comment><USER10> I got into a long discussion with eli_gottlieb here but I don't think either of us got the answers we were looking for [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9335125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9335125)

<comment><USER4> I read your discussion there, let me pick one of your early comments.

 _It does this (in general) by giving points to people who satisfy other people 's values and proportional to how much they satisfy them. These points can be used to satisfy their own values after and this creates a feedback loop of value satisfaction. IMO a very good thing._

If I understand you correctly, you think that what Adam Smith explained with the invisible hand, that all individuals pursuing their best interests will usually result in a beneficial situation for society as a whole, is true. If that is the case I have to disagree, otherwise just ignore the rest of the comment.

There is nothing that justifies this assumption, if everyone just tries to maximize its individual gain there is no force that will ensure that gains for society as a whole are simultaneously maximized. Let's just stick with the topic of the article, slavery. If a few people exploit the workforce of a large number of slaves they surly maximize their personal gains but you can hardly argue that it leads to a good overall situation.

By the way, I want to avoid the moral discussion and will just take it for granted that we agree that a world in which the slaves are not slaves but receive a fair compensation for their work is a better world.

<comment><USER10> > that all individuals pursuing their best interests will usually result in a > beneficial situation for society as a whole,

The very next sentence I wrote disagrees.

> Of course there are problems, every system has winners and losers and thats > why we have taxation and welfare, to smooth out some of the issues.

The choice of capitalism depends on moral subjectivity, its a necessary part of the discussion. As I said before, capitalism is a type 2 system. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338441)

At the end of the discussion I asked a question that eli_gottlieb didn't get around to answering. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345477)

This was specific to economic democracy but you can replace that with any other alternative system, the question would still apply and be interesting.

<comment><USER4> I am not sure if I don't understand your reasoning with regard to subjective or objective morality or if I disagree. I don't think it matters. We want an economic system that honours some moral objectives. To come up with such an system we have to first establish our moral values, but I don't see in which way it matters if those values are based on subjective or objective morality. Especially because there is no proof that moral objectivism is true it is at least for the moment also just a subjective position. So how could we even think about choosing an economic system based on that distinction if we don't know which is true? For the records, I am heavily on the subjective side but think that only very few values or assumptions are required to build an entire system of moral values upon them.

Let me pick an example, all humans are equal. This might be an objective truth or a society might just agree on that as a foundational value. But in both cases you can build the exactly same society or economic system that honours this value independent of its origin. But I guess I missed a crucial point of your argument, maybe our understanding of subjective and objective morality differs. Are you talking about the distinction between a society where everybody lives by his own moral values as opposed to a society where all people share more or less the same moral values?

<comment><USER10> I should define my terms better.

For this discussion, I'll initially restrict it to just "value subjectivity", i.e. a person's desires are dependent on their state of mind and that state of mind is personal and varying. For example, ranking your preference for a cool glass of water and a delicious sandwich depends on how thirsty you are.

Scale this up to millions of people and you find that there is no objective ordering of "things" that can satisfy everybody b[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem)

Capitalism, as a system, recognises this and is effectively a distributed consensus mechanism. Allocating "points" to people who provide the most value to the system. BUT like any system, it has winners and losers (not necessarily evil, just benefitting) and without checks and balances would lead to a state of the world that I'm unhappy with. Which is why taxation and welfare.

For any proposed alternative/update, I'm interested in the new winners and losers as well as how this distributed consensus is achieved.

<comment><USER4> I am fine with the market mechanism to establish prices and production volumes, it is a pretty efficient mechanism for this. But I also see no fundamental difference to say a planned economy. Whenever the Soviet Union created their five-year plan they still tried - at least to some extend - <USER2> align demand and production, but this is of course hugely inefficient compared to a market because of the long planning interval and because it is impossible to capture the demand in detail or predict what it will be in five years.

There are also some advantages in a planned economy, you can for example penalize environmentally unfriendly products directly in the plan while controlling a market is only possible indirectly via laws and regulations and their enforcement which might be less efficient. But all in all market and price mechanism with some added planning, i.e. regulations where market forces are not aligned with goals agreed on by the society, seems at the very least a reasonable choice for an economy.

I take issues with capitalism in other places, for example with the ownership of the means of production. Let's again take an example. You found a company, your workers produce goods or services sold for 10 millions per year. You pay 8 millions for consumed raw materials and in salaries and invest 2 millions into the growth of the company, say a new offices, a new production floors or new machines. For the moment this is all good and even necessary for the growth of the company. But when you decide to sell your company you alone get all the money your workers worked for. This is of course unfair and leads to inequality because one or a few owners are able to capture a share of the value created by a lot of workers.

<comment><USER10> > But I also see no fundamental difference to say a planned economy

Unfortunately from Arrow's impossibility theorem (linked above), there is no objectively "best" ranking for allocating resources so all plans will be sub optimal (provided values are subjective). Because of this, any system/allocation will always produce winners and losers, the only difference being who they are.

In a planned economy you can prevent those products from being made entirely or at least kept to a minimum but again, who decides the trade off. Subjective morality is always an issue. Democracy, btw, is based on a principle of subjective morality, if a majority of voters feel that their plastic toy is more important than an endangered fish then isn't that the way it should be? If not, why not? Of course, the real issue is that people have a hard time predicting the consequences of their decisions. (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy) for a possible fix).

\-----

As far as the means of production go, I'd like to set aside the moral argument (for now) and just talk about incentives. A country (with any political structure you choose) has a natural gold source somewhere in an area, they don't know exactly where.

0\. Who predicts a market for gold and how are they incentivised?

1\. Who searches for the mine and how are they incentivised?

2\. Who develops the mine and how are they incentivised?

3\. Who discovers and researches new mining tech and how are they incentivised?

4\. Who organises and hires miners, craftsmen, support and how are they incentivised?

5\. Who pays these employees and other operating costs and how are they incentivised?

6\. Who markets, ships, advertises the finished gold and how are they incentivised?

And the big question, what if the venture fails? does everyone above get paid? If any loans are taken to start this venture and can't be paid back who takes the liability?

It is not that I don't believe there isn't an alternative but capitalism, as a system, has answers to all of these questions and the list isn't exhaustive by any means. Any upgrade/fix/replacement should have answers to questions like this before it can be seriously considered.

edit: formatting

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank god for robots and computers, 'cuz capitalism isn't going anywhere, anytime soon.

<comment><USER4> Well, robots and computers did nothing to prevent capitalism from enslaving its workforce, they might actually have made the situation worse.

Fun fact: I always get my share of down votes for being critical of capitalism but no one attacks my position in a response. Do you have no arguments? (provocative face)</comment></comment>


SpaceX Stats - <AUTHOR> http://spacexstats.com/ <comment><USER2> That javascript slideshow style is really un-user-friendly, especially with largely static content. It's not enhancing anything more than simply assembling the whole thing into a single page with normal scrolling.

<comment><USER3> Even worse than simply changing the way it normally scrolls, it hijacks some gestures on OSX, so instead of being able to do a two finger sweep to get back to HN, I had to try a few times just to discover it was advancing the slides and not due to user error, then go to the back button.

<comment><USER4> My favourite part is how scrolling loops around - scrolling past the bottom takes you back to the top

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At least one stat shown is already out of date; the quickest turnaround so far was 19 days, from launch 15 (DSCOVER) to launch 16 (two comsats). They will improve on this if they get the TurkmenAlem launch off today.

Agreed with others on the funky scrolling, btw: violating user expectations about how common UI actions ought to work is a bug in your site, not a feature.

<comment><USER6> Dev here. Quickest turnaround was actually 14 days last year, but yep, that needs fixing.

Scrolling will be removed in next release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> More stats here for context, also in perhaps a better format: [http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2014.html#rate](http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2014.html#rate)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is cool! It'd be cool to have a .json version of this page as well to see what other people could do with it! Stats are better with context - if you could do the same thing with NASA/ULA/China/India/ESA/etc it'd be even more illustrative.

Also, +1 for getting rid of the scroll-assist. Kind of annoying.

Slightly off topic: does anybody know if they're going to try controlled recovery of today's launch vehicle?

<comment><USER6> Dev here. Will remove scroll assist in next release :). API, allowing you to pull raw data planned.

No landing today, too heavy and going too far.

<comment><USER9> When you report stats you normally also report losses, not just wins, that may be something to add.

<comment><USER6> And what losses have SpaceX had with Falcon 9 exactly?

<comment><USER9> Secondary payload, the orbcomm satellite.

<comment><USER10> [I'm not the dev] That's an incredibly small nit to pick, I don't really think SpaceXStats needs to go so far into the details there. Specifically, and especially because the decision to cut off OG2 was NASA's decision, not SpaceX's. While the initial SpaceX Falcon 9 engine failure led to the decision being made, the F9 could technically have delivered the payload to the desired orbit for Orbcomm.

I think it's more fair to call that a bureaucracy failure than a SpaceX failure.

Edit: Woah, okay, maybe I'm wrong. [Unable to reply below (no button)]

<comment><USER9> I don't agree with that at all. If you're providing statistics you should show both the good and the bad. What the reason for the failure was is ultimately technical, the decision to call it off was a bureaucratic one but spelled out quite explicitly prior to launch. _If_ the rocket had worked flawlessly the loss would have been prevented.

I'm very much a fan of SpaceX but I dislike ignoring failure to paint a more positive picture than reality. The site has sections on 'number of people on Mars'. Stats are stats, both good ones and bad ones. SpaceX has an _incredible_ record to date including that one loss so why be afraid to show it?

Anyway, it appears this is not really a stats site but more of a tribute, the 'countless hours' section shows that pretty clearly so feel free to ignore my comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> @lukealization: I like the site, I didn't even have problems with the scrolling, but your RSS link is broken and my email to firstname.lastname@example.com bounced:

      Final-Recipient: rfc822;email@example.com
      Action: failed
      Status: 5.7.1
      Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 5.7.1 Relaying denied

</comment><comment><USER12> The number of dragon missions of 6 is incorrect, there has so far been 6 CRS flights plus 2 demo flights.

"Vehicles landed" of 0 isn't technically correct. There have been several grasshopper and F9R-dev landings.

The "quickest turnaround" also says -62 days for me...

</comment><comment><USER13> I get to see the Website for a brief second, then, "You need Javascript enabled to view this website. Try again... " even though it displays at first.

Nonsense.

<comment><USER6> Dev here. Good luck creating a countdown site without JS (and no, meta-refresh doesn't count).

<comment><USER14> The non-js version has "As of [page load time]" and static numbers.

The JS version first removes the "As of" and updates the numbers dynamically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> nice idea and looks pretty, but I hate the weird scroll hijacking.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it's rather awkward on non-discrete scrolling systems like trackpads and trackpoints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This site isn't the only scrolljacking offender, even NYTimes has a subtle accelerate/decelerate that is counterproductive and annoying.

Is there a greasemonkey script or the like that can disable scrolljacking? I recognize that means it'll probably break layout for many cases, but at least to avoid some (like NYTimes).

</comment><comment><USER18> This is very cool.

+1 on making it as static as possible, updated manually with a refresh and an optional small JS to update a figure inline.

What I don't quite understand is the number of launches:

When I have it set to "total", the large counter says 22, but the text says "As of August 2014, SpaceX has launched 17 rockets (all from its sole rocket family".

Is the big number more current than the text? These should probably agree, or maybe a text explaining why they are different.

When set to Falcon 9, the large counter is at 17, the text says "To date, it has launched on 11 occasions". So here there's no specific date, and the difference between the numbers is 6, whereas for the total it is 5. Looks odd.

</comment><comment><USER19> Cool stats and description. One issue, in "Merlin 1D Inflight Operating Time" the paragraph text is cut off and I'm unable to scroll to see the rest of it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone tell me what web framework is used to create a website like this? I've seen many websites in this "scrolling" style, and I want to create one myself!

<comment><USER21> Please don't!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nice site and stats. Horrible UX with that scrolling...

</comment><comment><USER23> I think there should be a width limit on text content, it's incredibly hard to read text on a big monitor.

</comment><comment><USER24> Another example of great design married to great content almost totally marred by scroll hijacking.

</comment><comment><USER25> Good luck keeping your domain name.

</comment><comment><USER26> Are there astronauts in training?

<comment><USER9> yes:

[http://www.americaspace.com/?p=16783](http://www.americaspace.com/?p=16783)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Looks pretty, clean design

</comment><comment><USER28> It's easy to count hours worked, so it's not countless. It's also not a positive. Did space shuttle workers work unlimited hours?

<comment><USER6> Dev here. Stop taking such a literal interpretation. Unless you're being purposefully dense, it's obvious that it's meant to be a figurative statistic to represent the hard work that's gone into building SpaceX. Many workers who I know work their asses off there.

<comment><USER29> Right, but I would have preferred an attempt to estimate the stat. Isn't that what this page is all about?

<comment><USER9> Number of employees over time * number of workdays they made * 8 would be a reasonable estimate.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you keep your programming portfolio? - <AUTHOR>

I started and launched quite a few cool projects. Some of them had interesting front-end things to show, but since I'm a programmer the back-end usually had more focus. I started to realized that it would be a shame if these projects go offline and everyone just forgets about it. I think it's a good idea to keep a list of the cool projects that I did, with a description of what makes it interesting.
The problem is that I haven't been able to find a free portfolio website for programmers. I'd love to just create a profile somewhere, add a few projects, write something about them, etc. I could set up my own website, but I don't want to pay for hosting costs and domain name costs for just my portfolio. The existing portfolio sites are aimed towards designers, not programmers.
I could keep track of my projects on LinkedIn, but I don't want to clutter my LinkedIn page with all sorts of projects, plus the LinkedIn projects feature isn't really flexible (for example: I want to show a screenshot, thats not possible with linkedin).
Does anyone know a good place where I can do this? <comment><USER2> If you are willing to share the source code for these projects, I think the canonical answer (at least in 2013) is to use Github as your portfolio page.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that's a good solution. Not all code is open source, and I might want to write 1 post about different projects (for example: I created a WP, Android and iOS for the same thing).

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't that be an interesting business opportunity? While both Github and Bitbucket offer privat repositories both free and paid, non of them can be shared or viewed without additional accounts and management.

If one could host or upload repositories which are private but can be viewed read-only by the means of a password, or a passphrase shared via mail, that would be great.

Although I wonder if a recruiter would even go trough the hassle of entering a password you provided on your resume.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, based on my experience with recruiters they don't even go through the hassle of even reading your resume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think $20/month for hosting is pretty small if it's a business expense that helps you win new clients. But if that is really too much, then you could use Github Pages (free) or a Wordpress blog with a "portfolio" page (free or cheap). But careers last a long time, so I'd buy a domain name and start building a web presence for yourself. You'll have the most flexibility if you pay for a VPS rather than going the WP/GP route. I haven't done anything particularly outstanding to create my own "web presence," but for what it's worth here is my own portfolio page:

[http://illuminatedcomputing.com/portfolio](http://illuminatedcomputing.com/portfolio)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it's not really going to help me get any clients, I'm working on a consumer-based startup right now, and those consumers don't give a damn about the projects that I did in the past. But I do, I want to keep track of the things that I've done :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm drawing a blank on the website name but someone around here has an awesome start up for this with a great UI.

Found it!

[http://hoverboard.io/](http://hoverboard.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks pretty cool :) I don't like the resume thing because I'm already tracking that on LinkedIn and I don't want to duplicate this, but the project part might be interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> i am using github pages: pages.github.com It is free and it is easy to setup</comment>


Ask HN: Facebook alternative, are users willing to try something different? - <AUTHOR>

Same as above. <comment><USER2> A few thoughts... all of this is totally unscientific, unverified, subjective, biased, and may be a combination of wishful thinking, drug-fueled fantasies, fever induced delirium, etc. It's almost certainly contradictory, not self- consistent, and comes with no warranty or guarantee. IANAL, YMMV, HTH, WTFBBQ.

1\. Facebook _can_ be knocked off their perch. Facebook almost certainly _will_ be knocked off their perch, probably sooner than later.

2\. The "net crowd" is very much a trend-following herd... if something catches the attention of the right set of early adopters and the avalanche starts, it'll carry through to its inevitable conclusion.

3\. You won't beat Facebook by building a better Facebook. Nobody cares about something that's just like Facebook but a little better or has a couple of new features. One __killer __new feature, maybe. But what?

4\. Facebook is not _cool_ anymore. Facebook is a utility, like the phone company or the people who provide your electricity.

5\. The way to beat Facebook is to build something that is new and unique, but subsumes (most) of what Facebook does. Think telephones replacing the telegraph. A telephone isn't a telegraph, it's a whole new tool, but it obviates the need for the telegraph.

6\. Remember what Henry Ford said "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse."

7\. Go back and find and read Om's article about how "social networking is just a feature." That vision is partly coming true, but Facebook is fighting to extend their tendrils into every other site, rather than letting other sites implement their own social networking features and (possibly) combining them using open standards to build a federated social network.

8\. Relative to (7) above, see: <http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/> and also research what Appleseed, Diaspora, etc. are doing. There may still be a chance to gain some traction for this federation stuff. That would open up some interesting possibilities down the road and could disintermediate Facebook.

9\. I'm going to guess that whatever replaces Facebook will have a basis in the mobile app world, first and foremost, not the traditional web world. The smartphone carrying, app using early adopters will latch onto something cool that comes along...

10\. Your mom, your grandma, your uncle, your boss, your ex-wife, your ex- girlfriend/boyfriend, etc. are all on Facebook. Your neighbors dorky 8 year old kid is on Facebook. The nerdy guy in Chemistry class who's always undressing you with his eyes, is on Facebook. Facebook is generic and boring... it has utility because of network effects, and because everybody is on it... but it sucks and is lame and isn't _cool_ because, well, _everyone_ is on it.

11\. It's cool to hate on Gladwell, but read _The Tipping Point_ if you haven't already. Then chase down some of the stuff by Watts, Barabasi, etc. on network science. Maybe even read _Diffusion of Innovations_ by Everett Rogers. There's a growing body of science that speaks to how things happen in networks... there may be something interesting that falls out of thinking about "preferential attachment" and power law distributions and scale-free networks.

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

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network>

12\. Also, go read this old Jamie Zawinski piece: <http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html> Keep this bit in mind:

 _That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software)._

IF I had to bet money on any of this being relevant, I'd say (4), (10) and (12) would be the most likely to be so. Facebook just isn't _cool_ anymore. At least not cool for specific niches, like, say, "teenagers" (what teen wants to be on a social-network with his mom and dad, or his geeky little sister, etc?) or college-students ("eeeew, high-school kids!" "eeeeeew, OLD people"), etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for that feed back, its a lot to consider but its helpful.

<comment><USER2> I spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff at one time; when I was sorta- kinda playing with the idea of trying to do something that had some potential as a "facebook killer." But that was never my _real_ aim anyway, and I wound up refocusing a lot of my energy in other directions now. But I still find the idea of thinking about "what will replace Facebook" interesting. If you ever want to bat some ideas around, feel free to shoot me an email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> All of facebooks users are willing to try something different. Just like all of geocities users, all of yahoo searches users, all of myspaces, friendsters and orkuts users were. Simply put internet companies don't have a durable competitive advantage.

They have an advantage for a little while, then someone bests them. But no one has figured out how to build a rolls-royce, goyard or even coca-cola internet service yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sorry, but people won't move away from Facebook for something else until all of their friends do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does that 5 friends rule still stand up? If 5 friends are using a service people will be willing to try.... at least that was an adage of the past.

<comment><USER4> I doubt 5 is enough to switch away from a social network. I think you would need at least 25% of a persons friends before that person would consider following.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been considering moving some interactivity over to Buzz -- a few interesting people I know are fairly active on it, and the (their, at least) conversations seem more interesting and detailed. However, I have no clue at this point whether Buzz is going to "make it", or whether I should Wave it good bye.

(I was pretty pissed with the way Google launched Buzz, but they seem to have at least somewhat learned that lesson, and I don't want to see them disappear from the space altogether.)

I guess I should just fire it up, and save locally any threads I find particularly useful.</comment>


Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia? - <AUTHOR> http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/stuck-in-1950s-suburbia/ <comment><USER3> Many of these buildings are in truly breathtaking locations... but depressingly isolated. The most beautiful I have visited:

The John Deere HQ (featured in the article) is almost worth the trip to Moline, IL [https://www.google.com/search?q=Eero+Saarinen%E2%80%99s+proj...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Eero+Saarinen%E2%80%99s+project+for+the+John+Deere+World+Headquarters&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi6uNKg2-XPAhUMcD4KHUhUAQMQsAQIOg&biw=1440&bih=799)

The IBM research center in Yorktown Heights is a section of a circle [https://www.google.com/search?q=yorktown+heights+ibm&espv=2&...](https://www.google.com/search?q=yorktown+heights+ibm&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=799&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQ2t632-XPAhVCjz4KHRorDVIQ_AUICCgD&dpr=1)

The IBM research center in Almaden is in an amazing CA county park [https://www.google.com/search?q=almaden+research+center&espv...](https://www.google.com/search?q=almaden+research+center&espv=2&biw=1440&bih=799&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjmoPL13OXPAhUEdD4KHW2IAR8Q_AUICCgD)

<comment><USER4> Don't forget the Andrew Lloyd Wright masterpiece that serves as the SC Johnson HQ in scenic Racine Wisconsin: [https://www.google.com/search?q=sc+johnson&client=safari&hl=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=sc+johnson&client=safari&hl=en- us&prmd=nmiv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjW7-Cd4-XPAhVMyVQKHavcBKsQ_AUICSgD&biw=414&bih=628#hl=en- us&tbm=isch&q=sc+johnson+office)

<comment><USER5> Indeed. A landmark of the Arts & Cats movement.

<comment><USER6> I think you mean Arts & Crafts but I like your version

<comment><USER7> He's making an Andrew Lloyd Webber-Frank Lloyd Wright joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've happily relocated to suburbia since starting a family with small children. As others have mentioned, I enjoy the open spaces, lack of crowds, and lines when I want to go out and do something.

I consider cities like NY and SF to be great places to live if single but basically untenable with a family except in certain circumstances.

There are some great cities like Seattle and Tokyo where I might be willing to raise my family but in general I am glad that tech companies aren't in city centers.

<comment><USER3> I moved to NYC with my 4 young kids. NYC is a great place for kids as long as you can afford the rent. We sold our cars, get most of what we need delivered, and walk or bike pretty much everywhere. All the kids activities are at walking distance and my oldest who is 12 is completely independent. I have no idea why people think that cities are bad for kids (apart from the cost of lodging).

<comment><USER9> Fellow New Yorker here.

New York's a great town if you're not racist and only slightly classist.

Let's not forget why suburbs became popular in the first place. _cough_ cough [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight)

<comment><USER10> If you've had the experience of being physically assaulted by random blacks high on drugs, had other random blacks break into your car, and still others accost you at night and ask probing questions designed to test how soft or hard you are as a robbery target (not to mention been pickpocketed by other blacks you tried being nice to), as I have, and you relocate yourself somewhere there are not so many of these people, as my family has, does that make you racist?

Genuinely asking, as I'm unclear how this term's defined these days.

As far as I'm aware, racism used to be defined as "believing one race is superior to another."

However it seems most of its users use it now to mean "protecting oneself from populations with, on average, markedly higher violent crime rates than other populations." You're not supposed to do that - you're supposed to grin and bear it.

For diversity.

Right?

<comment><USER11> According to Merriam-Webster[1], racism is defined as one of the following:

1\. a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

2.a. a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles

2.b. a political or social system founded on racism

3\. racial prejudice or discrimination

As far as your comment you are simply "protecting oneself from populations with, on average, markedly higher violent crime rates than other populations," if that population is defined by race, you are being racist unless there is some newly published study I have yet to hear about that "blacks love crime."

[1] [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism](http://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/racism)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, except that in reality, socioeconimc conditions are often tied closely to race. That doesn't mean that e.g. blacks are inherently more likely to commit crime than Asians, but certainly blacks are a more impoverished race in general. That leads to higher crime rates, so it's certainly not racist to be more fearful of that group of people in general, it's just a learned behavior and a reflection of reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Two words: It's cheaper!

But seriously, it's cheaper and you get to build your own building if you like, maybe bespoke, rather than lease someone else's building. It's not like most US cities will not have a tortuous approval process and a long approval process and unions, etc. to contend with and extra taxes...

What's the next question, why aren't companies building right next to the Capitol? Maybe we should be like Paris and London and Tokyo and have everything important, the important institutions, important buildings and important people all living in one important city. Let's all move to DC and concentrate everything!

On the other hand, we have the Packard building and numerous others in Detroit or Phily.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure if that's it.

Google employees are worth much more per-capita than most bank employees - <USER2> banks stay in the city - due to the networking (and prestige?) nature of the industry.

I think it also has to do with isolation and creating culture.

Urban areas have a lot of distractions, and individuality is encouraged.

There is 'not that much to do' in Palo Alto, at least, compared to the city ... people live in pretty normal homes, doing pretty normal things in the little time they have outside of work.

Also consider: how many truly innovative companies were ever created in the city and grew to be quite large?

I mean - 'cost' would be a factor, but why is it almost never the case?

If you need 10K employees, you need a lot of 'regular folks' \- grinders, who show up every day - and who aren't the fleeting, company-hopping, types.

Obviously it's just a thought.

A lot of great Universities seem to be out in nowhere-land as well. I think there's something to be said for being out of the social centrifuge.

<comment><USER15> >Also consider: how many truly innovative companies were ever created in the city and grew to be quite large?

Amazon is one example.

<comment><USER13> Yet, when they need distribution centers --where do they go for real-estate? Where do AMZN, GOOG, MSFT, etc., go for their DCs? That's right, not in downtown.

<comment><USER15> Of course they don't put them downtown. The logistics would be a nightmare (especially for distribution centers).

<comment><USER13> You're right. My point is a lot of innovation goes into data centers (as well as distribution centers) and necessarily it's not downtown.

<comment><USER16> There was another topic on HN talking about these datacenters.

Less than 50 people work in a typical datacenters. All the R&D to make the datacenter is done outside of it, in R&D centers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Author's theory: the Big Guy moved the company HQ to the suburbs because he's out to get you, especially if you aren't white.

My theory: the Big Guy moved out of downtown because land and taxes are cheaper, many (most?) people enjoy seeing green as opposed to concrete, and the commute is often (not always) better, since most people live in the suburbs anyway. Couple that with an up-and-coming municipality willing to subsidize the building and infrastructure and you've got quite a lot of cash left in the budget. What do you do with it? Build an impressive structure, with the perks and eye-candy to lure the talent you're hoping to hire and retain.

<comment><USER18> Research shows that ~80% of the time that a company moves, it moves closer to where the CEO lives.

Joel Garreau, Edge City

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure these cases are parallel, though. The article is discussing "America's most innovative companies", meaning the behemoths: Apple, Bell, IBM, etc. I haven't read the book, but from poking around on Amazon, it seems to be discussing mostly small and midsize privately-owned businesses. In those situations, I can absolutely see the whims of one person playing a much more central role than in large companies with shareholders to answer to. After all, most small businesses are started by people who (naturally) work near their homes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a weird article. It assumes that this style is bad up front, then mocks all the different ways in which it was defined as good. "People like green spaces, how crazy is that?"

I like cities, but I also really enjoyed the couple of times I've worked at parks like this. There's a lot to be said for a predictable commute and a window full of green things. I've found that harder to come by when I work in cities.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, it's seems like the author has a solution looking for a problem. These companies have plenty of money. If their employees didn't like these suburban campuses they would move to cities.

<comment><USER21> Or perhaps the best catches would never walk in for the interview because they find it a synthetic asphyxiating saccharine fabrication, centered around an automobile and isolation.

The best people out there can make money literally from anywhere, why the heck would they go to some compound of industrialized personalization like that?

<comment><USER22> Or perhaps some of the best people actually like living and working in the suburbs? Maybe their lifestyle and situations are different from yours?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is not about "city = good, suburbs = bad". It is about "walled garden = bad".

The point of the article is that all those campuses are isolated from the local community, and it is not good because it does not help to develop better infrastructure and it isolates people.

At the end of the article the author mentions 2 SV projects which actually do things differently: Box HQ and Facebook HQ. In SV. Not in SF.

To give you a personal example, what surprised me moving from Europe to SV is the bus service: public bus service is terrible in SV, and what is the answer from big corp to help their employees to commute? Having their own shuttles service... What usually happens in Europe is that the people, the corp, the city, the county etc. interact to build a public bus system. It then allows sharing between companies and benefits everyone. But in the case of those gated communities they do not do that.

<comment><USER24> The most basic message is not even that the isolation is bad, it is just that any perceptions of these new campuses being innovative are greatly exaggerated. It's startups turning into the IBMs of the next generation in action, go have fun celebrating that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well, that's a nice article. I have to say, however, that the vast majority of tech companies aren't in 1950's suburbia, they're located in late 20th century office parks: single story "flex space" buildings built on concrete slabs with plentiful parking, a truck dock or two, drop ceilings with good HVAC and fluorescent lighting over a sea of cubicles.

The stuff in the article would be known by realtors as "trophy buildings". Some lucky folks get to work in one of those but most people even in the innovative companies work in flex space in the exburbs. This architecture is so boring that no one wants to even talk about it. Its just a place to show up for work. In your car, of course.

Actual 1950's suburbia, these days, consists of charming inner-ring "streetcar" suburbs. They would be classified by most folks today as "walkable" upscale neighborhoods. Some outer suburban areas are now getting the "new urbanist" treatment to make them more like streetcar suburbs, but sadly these developments are NOT YET getting to the exburban office parks off the highway exits.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?"

Hmm, maybe because some of us actually appreciate not being in some smog- chocked urban hellhole? I mean, if I'm going to commute somewhere, I'd rather commute to some place where there's actually, you know, grass and trees and stuff.

I lived in one of those suburbias for quite a bit of my life. They're perfectly fine places with plenty of room to stretch out and enjoy some air that's actually fresh. Hell, some of them even have actual wildlife; fancy that? But apparently the city-slickers are too good for that, what with their fancy concrete and smoke and noise and light pollution.

I just _love_ the implication that everything that isn't a city center is devoid of luxuries like clean water or smooth-flowing traffic. Yes, us suburban and rural peasants are apparently stupid for believing that there's an actual alternative to being stuck in yet another skyscraper between bouts of fighting for elbow room on buses and trains (both of which exist even in rural areas, let alone suburban, by the way; the article seems reluctant to admit such amenities exist anywhere outside of the Big City™).

Yes, keep pretending that the city life is the only life worthwhile. More room for me out here in the woods.

<comment><USER27> They dislike it because its boring and lacks entertainment.

Also having to drive long distances or having nothing within walking distance sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> In a stark contrast, I think is Google's 111 8th Ave Port authority NYC building, its one of the best workplaces. All advantages of having a huge building (Bigger area than new Apple spaceship campus), while still being in an extremely vibrant and well connected neighborhood.

<comment><USER29> I work in said building and love it. Absolutely a top notch office in a top notch location. Unfortunately the historical circumstances of the building (see video below) make it pretty much one of a kind; there simply aren't any more buildings like this for other tech companies to use. And good luck trying to build a new building of this scale.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVx59XOZtSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVx59XOZtSA)

<comment><USER28> I work on 12th floor in the same building:D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's pretty damn nice run on open space trails before biking to work, have your kids walk themselves to school, have time to coach a soccer practice on a natural lawn pitch, BBQ dinner in the back yard where you grow many of the ingredients, and then go to bed with the windows open.

All of this is possible if you work at the Apple, Google, FB, Intuit, Microsoft, LinkedIn, etc. campuses.

<comment><USER31> I can't see how you can do this in the South Bay unless you already had $2 million to buy the house with the yard. If you do, why did you move here instead of early retiring?

<comment><USER32> You can have all this for <$1m house if you don't care much about the condition of the house. $1.25m will get you something you're happy to call home. Not many parts of the country let you go to bed with the windows open pretty much year 'round.

<comment><USER33> Of course, the flip side of that argument is that in many nice parts of the country, $200k will get you something you're _very_ happy to call home and you can spend a lot less than the leftover $1M blowing heated or cooled air into your open windows for the parts of the year it's not nice out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Eyerolling politicized nonsense. So what if they are out in the suburbs? This weird, near-religious attitude about where people live gives off a really bad odor. Not to mention "isolated from the communities they impact"? What? People in the suburbs of Silicon Valley don't use iPhones? John Deere needs to be located downtown so it can relate to, uh... farmers? It's nuts.

The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake. That entire website should be deleted and "Hunter Oatman-Stanford" (what a name!) should give up writing in shame, retreat to a monastery and think long and hard about where it all went wrong.

<comment><USER13> >The casual accusation of racism ("harder to maintain an all-white workforce!") is really just the icing on the cake

The thing is, the phenomenon is pretty much world-wide, thus easy to prove/disprove. You see it in Mexico, in France, in Germany in Japan. Some of these places don't have the dreaded "Other" to dread, so they cannot have that motivation, unless the author thinks many, more or less homogenous places, are acting preemptively against a possible future Other.

<comment><USER9> Racism is what classism becomes. In America the two are confounded. People hate other people for a lot of reasons. All you're proving is that there is a lot of hate in this world.

<comment><USER13> So we're going in circles?

The author ascribes it to racism not "people hate each other". However, I think racism is a facile explanation to trot out [perhaps even socially expected].

Also, I don't have to hate to not want to live next to you, nor do I have to hate my family if I don't want to live next to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham was designed along these lines. It's very tranquil, but difficult to go anywhere for lunch as the drive just takes too long. Which might have been part of the master plan all along...

<comment><USER36> Part of the reason I refused to relocate to Raleigh is that the office was so isolated.

It wasn't just getting food, though that was certainly a hassle whenever I was visiting that office. It was also the infeasibility of finding a place to live that would leave me with less than an hour total time spent in the car per day. Let alone a location that would let me walk or take a bus to work, which is my _strong_ preference. I'm in a dense city now, and my total commute is admittedly longer than an hour, but half of it is walking and the other half is reading a book or knitting, so it hardly ever feels like a waste of time.

<comment><USER37> I ruled out RTP because of the 4hr round-trip to the ocean. Too bad, the sea shore there is beautiful.

[Edit: clarified round trip.]

<comment><USER38> 4 hour drive to the ocean? Does your car have a 30mph speed limiter? Raleigh to Wrightsville Beach is 2 Hours, 1 min according to Google Maps.

<comment><USER39> So 4h per day drive, unless you sleep under the desk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> As the revitalization of American cities continues at what point do these campuses become white elephants for these tech companies in the Valley?

If urban centres continue to gain in popularity I could imagine suburban companies needing to open urban satellite offices to be able to retain talent that is reluctant to change their urban lifestyle or waste a significant portion of their day in a commute.

Many of my friends have gone to work at such places, but did so grudgingly. If they had had an urban alternative they'd have taken it. Others have chosen not to pursue job opportunities that would have necessitated long commutes.

<comment><USER41> Marriott is headquartered in a DC suburb and they have explicitly said they need to move to a more urban location to attract millennials.

<comment><USER42> As soon those millennials have kids they will be heading back out to where they can live with a house and yard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Maybe most people prefer suburbia? I know I do.

<comment><USER44> Most people prefer a mansion, a giant salary, etc. But doesn't mean they get it.

The problem is that if you want to be at the interesting end of IT you probably need to be somewhere with a decent population (1m+ , maybe closer to 3m+) to have multiple employer options. You might also want to be in a largish place for cultural options (rock concerts, professional sports teams, varied cuisine, minority hobbies, whatever).

Trouble is that big places have various combinations of traffic, high house prices, long commutes etc. So suddenly the nice house in the suburbs you can afford is a 60 minute drive to work and on the weekend you spend all day in your car driving the kids (until aged 16) from place to place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> "The exodus was triggered, in part, by inroads the labor movement was making among blue-collar employees in cities"

There are definitely places that want to give employees less leverage by being the only employer in the area, at least for their given field.

e.g. If you don't like your job at Epic in Wisconsin, you're more likely to be looking at relocation.

Meanwhile, I have contacts 10 minutes down the street by foot.

<comment><USER46> > There are definitely places that want to give employees less leverage by > being the only employer in the area, at least for their given field.

I'd like to see the evidence for this determining a business location.

<comment><USER47> It was a key part of IBM's business model. Mainframes in Poughkeepsie and Binghamton, NY, semiconductors in Fishkill & Burlington, AS/400 in Minnesota, x86 in RTP.

<comment><USER46> Can I ask for some more direct evidence - like an interview with a decision maker, some memos, sworn testimony, a copy of an official IBM strategy paper, a history of IBM by a respected historian?

Sorry for being a bit demanding here, but I hear an awful lot of things about business that are accepted wisdom, but upon digging deeper find there is no basis in fact for them.

<comment><USER48> The evidence up to the point was that, for cost cutting and knowledge sharing, it's better for people to be closer together with consolidation of common stuff. Spooky just pointed out they had teams for each of their markets in different locations. That's unusually isolated and just by what area they compete in. Why would they go out of their way to do that?

I'm also interested in seeing more specific evidence but initial data suggest IBM avoided obvious, cost-effective choice for isolating teams by market segment in expensive ways. That already looks bad somehow.

<comment><USER46> > That already looks bad somehow.

It's a big leap to go from suspecting nefarious motives to "definitely". It could be anything from lower cost of land and living expenses to executives thought it would be a good place to raise kids. Or it could be that IBM thought it would try a "Skunk Works" type operation that was deliberately cut off from the rest of the company - a setup made famous by Kelly Johnson at Lockheed.

<comment><USER48> Anything is possible. So what did your research on IBM's reasoning tell you?

<comment><USER46> Generally, when someone makes a claim of something to be true, it's up to them to be able to defend it with evidence. It's not incumbent on others to research it for them. For example, if I posted here "someone made a car that runs on water!", people would legitimately expect me to provide a cite.

Besides, one can't prove a negative. If you research cars that run on water, and don't find any, that doesn't prove that they don't exist. I could just say you didn't look in the right place, and you should try harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> How many options would Apple have to get 3 million sq ft in a city in the Bay Area? The majority of employees are going to commute anyway so why not just have them go to a suburb?

<comment><USER50> By locating in a suburban area, they are forcing almost all employees to drive (or take commuter shuttles). But if they moved to an urban area, many employees could find housing nearby, and many more could find good transit options.

As it is, they're located is a mostly low density suburban area 5 miles from the nearest commuter rail station.

<comment><USER51> >many employees could find housing nearby

If they were willing to absorb a 50-100% increase in housing costs or downgrade their living spaces (giving up things like "going for walks at night without getting stabbed"), maybe. Living close to an urban office is an extreme luxury good that'll give any mainstream luxury car a run for its money.

>good transit options

The Bay Area has some of the best transit options in the country, and they are to stand with one arm over your head and one arm on your backpack, pressed up against hundreds of strangers, and just try to keep your balance and avoid eye contact while the bus or train lurches around for 30+ minutes. After walking or riding your bike for ~20.

I like driving, so maybe I'm just having trouble empathizing with people who feel forced to do it, but is a ~10 minute drive to a suburban office park _really_ as miserable to you as the ~50 minute BART commute from Berkeley to SF?

If I had a suburban employer with a giant free parking lot (i.e. letting me live _anywhere_ ) moving to a downtown office in a hot real estate market without at _least_ a 2x salary increase, I'd quit in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER52> "The Bay Area has some of the best transit options in the country, "

[citation needed].

It really doesn't. In fact, it notoriously has pretty much the most underdeveloped public transit options of any major city in the US.

(and while folks disagree on #1, i don't think anyone would disagree it's in the top 5 worst)

In DC, i could easily get to work pretty much anywhere in the city in roughly the same time or less i could by driving.

In NY, ditto.

In the bay area, it would probably be 2x the drive time, and a serious pain in the ass (and that's saying a lot, given how bad the drive times are) ]

<comment><USER51> These two.

I agree the Bay Area has some of the loudest advocates for better transit, but it doesn't appear that it actually _gets_ better than this except in Manhattan (and Europe).

[0] [https://smartasset.com/mortgage/best-cities-for-public- trans...](https://smartasset.com/mortgage/best-cities-for-public- transportation)

[1] [https://www.redfin.com/blog/2015/12/transit- score-2016.html](https://www.redfin.com/blog/2015/12/transit-score-2016.html)

<comment><USER52> I'm not sure i agree with either methodology (The one in #1 is just, IMHO, strange), but i'll agree that you have proved somebody believes it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> In a city, there's so much out of your control. You have to fight the government and the city residents and who knows what kind of obstacles you may face.

If the rent is cheap, then great, you have a lot of employees close by. If not, you have just made life for them more difficult and given them a longer commute by fighting their way into the city. All because nobody in the city wants to build more residential.

If it works out and the city actually wants you there, then great. But I am not surprised Apple didn't want to try their luck in SF.

</comment><comment><USER54> > Why Are America's Most Innovative Companies Still Stuck in 1950s Suburbia?

> Stuck

This already implies a negative connotation of "1950s suburbia". Like we ought to move on, just cause.

What about the flip-side of this question: what is it about a 1950s suburbia that helps America's Most Innovative Companies? I'll offer some ideas. Maybe it's a lot more stable socially, so there's most local community trust and engagement, and more mental energy to devote to one's work. Families are stable and know and support each other, e.g. community caregiving responsibilities for children. As well, there's less distracting "events" going on than in a typical city. And so more mental thought and energy can go into work.

As well, it's cheaper to not be in a crammed urban center. This also helps play into a certain level of "mental safety" if you will that enables one to focus more on their work - what else are you gonna focus on?

</comment><comment><USER55> Nike is located 8 miles from downtown Portland in the suburbs of Beaverton. The light rail line runs from downtown to a forest near the campus so those who want to live in a urban environment can do so. One of the benefits to Nike is they can expand their campus more readily in a suburban environment. They recently bought up all the land around their campus and are building a bunch of new buildings. It would have been difficult to do that in an urban environment. But, unlike the suburbs described in the article, the area around the Nike campus is not middle-class white, but tends to be lower-class hispanic. You have to go about 3 miles north or south of campus to get to the middle-class neighborhoods. The farther you go to the east or west of the campus the lower income you get until you hit the agricultural land to the west or get closer to portland to the east.

<comment><USER56> A major Intel's RnD facility is also in the area, further west (It's in the next city over) a bit north of that line. At least at the time I lived in the area the stops that would service them weren't well connected to it. There may have been some buses, but if I'd had to make that commute I'd have taken a bike on to the rail system with me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> GE just moved HQ into the city of Boston, article seems to be cherry picking through history and unfairly picking on Apple, HP was pretty innovative and started in the suburbs. The interstate system and WW2 as a source of innovation seem to be also overlooked in the time period examined.

<comment><USER58> As HP's ability to innovate in technology (as opposed to business operations and cost-cutting) waned, it primarily put engineers in lower cost of living areas like Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. This pattern is consistent with almost all has-been tech employers that steadily transition more into traditional sales-driven cultures. Conversely, just because you start moving your company back towards a major metro area with more talent doesn't necessarily mean that they'll start an upward trend either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> The interesting thing to me, about this article, are the subtle undercurrents which are never really stated, but rather seem to be assumed. And they're part of a narrative that seems to be gaining steam, but which doesn't seem to be objectively true in any general sense.

1\. Suburbs are bad.

2\. Everyone should live and work downtown in/near an urban core.

3\. Cars are evil; no one should drive to work.

4\. Offices _need_ to be in converted warehouses, with exposed ducting and beams and what-not, and have "character".

I personally think all of those things can be true, some of the time, but I don't think any of them are true all of the time. And I think they're all getting undue weight vis-a-vis the prevailing zeitgeist.

</comment><comment><USER60> IBM has many campuses like these, frankly I really like them.

They isolate you from the hustle and bustle of city life, the parks nearby are a nice retreat during the day. Less traffic on the commute uptown.

Also cubicles, love them, can concentrate on the hard stuff.

Its not glorious stuff but highly effective, guess I'm in the wrong century.

</comment><comment><USER61> Here's a close-to-home example: the Stanford Research Park. It meets (in my opinion) the isolation requirement, but here's why I find it interesting: On a map, the area has amazing transit accessibility. But, almost all of that transit is commute-time-only express routes. There is very little integration between the research park and the surrounding communities.

Maybe it's not on such a grand scale as the examples from the article, but things like this are closer than you think.

<comment><USER62> Where is the Stanford Research park? My girlfriend works on Stanford campus and she complains about feeling isolated- she says it's like working on Mars. She works on Galvez and parks at the Stock Farm lot. But no running out on her lunch break to do errands- once you're on campus you're effectively trapped there.

<comment><USER63> > Where is the Stanford Research park?

Check out [http://stanfordresearchpark.com/explore](http://stanfordresearchpark.com/explore)

There are a bunch of companies located here including parc, VMware, nest, SAP, Tesla, HPE, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Amazon isn't: [http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/amazons- south-...](http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/amazons-south-lake- union-turf-do-you-recognize-this-place/)

</comment><comment><USER65> It took decades to construct the images of "success". I know that whenever I am associated with one of these awesome brands in a super sterile corporate location I feel like I have made it.

Even though I hate admitting that.

<comment><USER66> I get it, it gets to me too. It's too bad that the current aesthetic of success is so dumb and infantile though. The aesthetic of success of 14th century Venice was totally badass. Or 16th century Antwerp. Or 19th century Budapest. How is it that a place so enormously wealthy like SV looks so disposable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> For centers of innovation and insight into the future, startups collectively shoot themselves in the foot by centering on some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

It'd be far more logical for VCs to pick a far more livable, affordable area so that their investments could go further, last longer and have a higher chance of success.

VC firms are really just high risk money lenders that have a seat on the boards of the companies they lend to. One could take a dystopian view that VC firms like the super high burn rate that having a startup in the Bay Area entails because the high costs makes companies more dependant on round after round of capital thus giving higher and higher percentages to the VC firms of the companies that do eventually make it. That's a little dark, even for me.

More likely, we've made this hellscape of $4k 1bdrm apartments because VC firms are comfortable in their big, well appreciating homes in choice parts of the Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area and they don't want to drive very far to meet with the companies in their portfolio. This and other factors (NIMBYism) creates the situation to this day.

If VCs were brave and smart, they would try and find a longer term solution to the problem. Find a city nearby that has significantly lower cost of living. I'm actually looking forward to the VC bubble bursting again so that companies would be forced to get scrappy again and start solving this problem themselves.

If I were founding or running a startup today, I would in a location that 1hr or two away from the major startup centers in a place where my workers wouldn't have to spend 50%+ of their salaries making NIMBY owners richer.

</comment><comment><USER68> Reminds me of a quote by Alfred North Whitehead:

"Man's best thinking is done either by persons living in the country or in small communities, or else by those who, having had such environment in early life, enrich their experience by life in cities; for what is wanted is contact with the elemental processes of nature during those years of youth when the mind is being formed." \- Alfred North Whitehead, source 'Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead'

<comment><USER27> UsA cities used to be dirty and over polluted hence the utter dislike some writers had for cities.

Not to mention blacks, jews, and Irish.....

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> It takes time for these shifts to play out, but I'd say the reverse is already happening. For a couple of examples that the article provided (Apple, Google), one can find a lot more examples of opposite -- stalwart companies moving back to the city core:

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-company-moves- subu...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-company-moves-suburbs-to- city-20160615-htmlstory.html)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/economy/why- corpo...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/business/economy/why-corporate- america-is-leaving-the-suburbs-for-the-city.html)

[http://www.downtowndenver.com/homepage/moving-day-why- more-c...](http://www.downtowndenver.com/homepage/moving-day-why-more- companies-are-committing-to-downtown-denver)

[http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-urban-downtown- eco...](http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-urban-downtown-economic- development.html)

</comment><comment><USER70> IBM Watson's HQ is Aster Place, in the East Village of NYC. Many other companies have opened offices more "downtown" than their existing offices. I can cherry-pick data as well as the next person...

<comment><USER71> It's not "cherry picking". Basically all of Silicon Valley is suburban.

<comment><USER70> Yeah, so how do you square that with the fast-growing startup culture in San Francisco? Not to mention Palantir clustering in downtown Palo Alto...

<comment><USER72> Startups are not big companies, which is what the article was largely talking about.

<comment><USER70> ... numerous bigger companies followed the startups into SOMA, and some of the startups have grown big already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Microsoft campus is in the middle of very stereotypical suburbia, and it's lovely, and a non-insubstantial factor my continued employment there. In contrast, I would turn down pretty much any place in Seattle proper, after having some experience working in downtown Vancouver.

At the same time, I know many people that do prefer to work in a middle of a city.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Different strokes for different folks and all that.

Perhaps the author should make fewer assumptions about what other people do and don't like?

</comment><comment><USER74> I'd work in the suburbs for that sweet bowl desk.

</comment><comment><USER75> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House)

Good read, and I'd love an update some day. I think that the only thing that has changed is that we sometimes use pink/red bricks now in these large glass/steel boxes.

</comment><comment><USER76> It reads like it might be mostly a summary of the Louise Mozingo book mentioned at the beginning of the article. I haven't read the book, so I can't be sure about that. Mozingo is cited a number of times. It also seems to take a very pro-density position. I suppose high density will benefit some industries more than others.

</comment><comment><USER77> There are alternatives. Palantir taking multiple buildings in Palo Alto is one. They're getting a lot of heat from the locals for it. City building isn't a great option either. Is the answer mass-telecommuting?

</comment><comment><USER78> Is that site satire or not? I honestly can't even tell any more.

<comment><USER79> No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I have a theory: the people who love open offices are the same people who love living and working in a city. It feels like the same sort of debate, just on a different scale.

</comment><comment><USER81> I bet some of these buildings have some very rare / famous art.

I recall the original one-of-a-kind American flags in the executive offices of the AT&T basking ridge NJ.

</comment><comment><USER82> Is it because that's the way Walt Disney did it?

</comment><comment><USER83> You can tell that a bunch of people only upvoted because of the title and never read the article because the article itself is trash.

<comment><USER56> It took me a good while to read it because it is rather information sparse (lots of puffery and filler content).

It's also setup with more of a story to the situation that shows a biased view of 'how we got here'.

I wonder if that 'storytelling' is something readers expect / prefer in general or if it's a crutch that is commonly used by in depth reporters who should instead be primarily presenting information with a great depth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Adobe, which is doing very well, moved its HQ to downtown San Jose. Google now resides in the suburban industrial park Adobe used to inhabit.</comment>


Show HN: Open source colorizing grayscale images with NN - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pavelgonchar/colornet <comment><USER3> These results: [http://richzhang.github.io/colorization/](http://richzhang.github.io/colorization/) from Berkeley are _much_ better than this model (and the code is open source as well).

Furthermore, those better results have the advantage of a much simpler model. This model has a fairly complicated architecture (a complex residual concatenation setup) and many more parameters (I would guess anywhere between 2x-10x as many, but I'd have to take a closer look), which means it's much slower to run and takes up more memory (disk and RAM).

I'd also say that in general the better model does things that are a lot more common sense: using the CIE Lab color space (perceptually uniform), omitting pooling, using a classification loss instead of regression (regression in generally performs poorly in deep learning), etc.

<comment><USER4> Idle thought: Could colorization be used to (lossy) compress full color images (usefully)?

What I imagine is full color input -> create B/W & color histogram (list of colors used) -> image viewer uses colorization algorithm to reapply colors.

<comment><USER5> I don't really know a ton about image compression, but I exported the same photo to jpg using the same settings twice: once with 3 channels and once desaturated and then with two channels hidden (I couldn't figure out how to make a 1-channel jpg in gimp, no sure if it's possible). The 1-channel export had less than 30% file size reduction.

I don't think a compression technique that would require that much processing power and have that little size reduction would be too useful.

<comment><USER6> A 30% saving is roughly what I would expect.

Commonly JPEG separates the image into 1 channel of luma and 2 channels of chroma. It then downsamples the chroma to half the luma resolution, meaning that you have twice of much raw luma data as you have chroma.

It then goes on to do a whole load of fun discrete cosine transform, quantization and huffman encoding, but to a first approximation, I'd expect them to compress roughly similarly on average.

Since you've got twice as much luma data as chroma data, dropping the chroma will only save you ~30%.

Since the predictions from the neural network are not always accurate, you could then encode the error in the compressed file, and restore it on decompression. This will generally be close to 0, so compression should be pretty good.

At the end of the day, 30% better compression would be great... if the processing overheads aren't too great - I think that's the key factor.

(Most of this is from memory based on some hacking I did to be able to transcode videos to play on a cheap Chinese iPod Nano clone, which used an undocumented variant of MJPEG. The default quantization tables for luma and chroma are different from each other. The iPod Nano clone was using the standard quantization tables but the other way round (so using the luma table for chroma and the chroma table for luma). I can only imagine this was a bug in their code, as it was bound to reduce their compression ratio/image fidelity.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm colorblind and I can't tell the difference between the prediction and the GT. My coworker says that they have slight differences in some colors.

Congrats, you wrote the first colorblind NN ever!

<comment><USER8> I'd say the differences are very well expressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd apply it to an old B&W film to show off. Imagine Ben Hur or Citizen Kane in color!

<comment><USER10> I see a potential problem with moving pictures - the neural network might decide that while red was an appropriate color for the truck in the last frame, blue is more likely in this frame.

<comment><USER11> You can use the previous few frames for fixing this problem for videos

<comment><USER12> There might be a few scenes in between the viewings of the truck.

<comment><USER11> You're right, it would be a fun side effect to see the color change between different scenes :) I guess there's not enough in commercial interest in fixing these problems, but it can be probably done with the current algorithms. Precise 3D reconstruction is much more important than colour reconstruction.

<comment><USER9> Would it be possible to have some sort of semantic naming coupled to it 'the car in this scene is red', that could be fixed by humans, maybe even by talking to the NN? That's when this stuff starts getting fun IMO - <USER2> language together with superhuman domain knowledge.

<comment><USER13> Or even using the previously processed frames as reference the next time the shot appears

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The title says it's open source, but I couldn't actually see what the license is? (Maybe I missed it?)

<comment><USER15> It is open source. You can see the source. The license is no-license, so you can (only) fork it. That way, people can clone from your username instead of the original author, although that doesn't make any difference as they're all hosted on GitHub.

<comment><USER16> You seem to be getting downvotes because you don't understand what the term "open source" means, but nobody has offered to explain so:

Open source does not just mean you can see the source. From Wikipedia[0]:

"Open-source software is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open- source_software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software)

<comment><USER17> Not OP, but---I've been in software and OSS for a long time now, and I never knew this. I thought the term for that was Free Software.

In fact, looking closely at that definition, isn't practically nothing open source?

"Open-source software is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and _for any purpose._ "

I.e. public domain? Any other license lives precisely to limit those rights of distribution, no?

Anyway, just pedantry. I see your point. Learn something new every day.

<comment><USER16> I think you've highlighted an inaccuracy, or at least a lack of clarity, in the Wikipedia article. I guess a Wikipedian could argue it should be interpreted as "for any purpose depending on the chosen licence", but that's definitely not clear.

Re: Open source vs Free software, this is a matter for debate (the tendency being too associate Free software with the more copyleft/viral/gnu-ish side of things), but I would definitely say that both involve explicit licencing, as opposed to potentially implicit " all rights reserved " style regional copyright.

<comment><USER18> I would usually use the term "FLOSS", for Free-Liberte, OSS"

The L part clarified the type of freedom, as the FL clarifies that it's not just OSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can we get some instructions on how to actually use this. I want to test it out on pictures from:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/](https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/)

<comment><USER20> unfortunately I'm not contributor of this project, but I hope author can answer soon )

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be interested to see what kind of hidden biases this might reveal, especially about people, e.g. skin tone, eye color, etc.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. I wonder how good this model is at filling the skin tone of someone. It would be sad if (for example) it turned everybody into white people or something like that.

In biometrics, there's been similar cases of software like face detectors and face recognition working very well on people from China and not very well for other people, because all the researchers who trained those models only had available large public databases from Chinese universities. The model hadn't seen any other ethnicity so its performance on "non-Chinese" folks wasn't surprising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't know if OP will see this but I'd love it if you could use your experience making this to write up a blog post about how it works or port it to being able to adjust color scales for color blind people.

I'd love to combine this technology with this: [http://matplotlib.org/style_changes.html](http://matplotlib.org/style_changes.html)

You would probably have some cool results as you could generate examples of what they would look like to color blind people, and a corrected set so color blind people could see them.

Would be a cool, and I am assuming simpler problem then the one you have already managed to solve.

Good show, great work.

</comment><comment><USER24> I love the last one.

"But you didn't say what colour it was, so I made it a red truck."

<comment><USER25> Also the lighthouse's sky: "That's sky, it's surely blue!"

Generally it's interesting to see nn thinking out missing details. I'd like to see images with an element deleted and a nn filling in black spots to see what level of shape recognition could do.

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure if you asked a group of humans to colorize the lighthouse you would probably get the same result.

There is no way, from the greyscale, to know that the sky should be orange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can I try this out in images myself somehow?

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm looking for a technique that can upscale images nicely (using NNs).

I've found this: [1], but the results seem somewhat disappointing. One of the problems is that the quality measures are (in my case) subjective (the results should look convincing but need not be "perfect", whatever that may mean).

[1] [http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/05/scaling- convnets/](http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/05/scaling-convnets/)

</comment><comment><USER29> I think this was on HackerNews before?

<comment><USER30> Are you thinking of this project instead? [http://richzhang.github.io/colorization/](http://richzhang.github.io/colorization/)

<comment><USER31> Yes - how do those two projects differ in their approach ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Now give it a picture of a bike shed.

<comment><USER33> I think a tool shed is more appropriate.

<comment><USER34> I think it was a reference to this concept:

[http://bikeshed.com/](http://bikeshed.com/)

<comment><USER35> no, it was about this one: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikeshed_color](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikeshed_color)

<comment><USER36> How about we stop arguing about which link to use and just pick one? I propose [http://amzn.com/0345282779](http://amzn.com/0345282779). Of the three links proposed so far, this one is clearly the most authoritative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4ft4hj/colorne...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4ft4hj/colornet_neural_network_to_colorize_grayscale/)

</comment><comment><USER38> It may be interesting to investigate using this for image compression/decompression. ie starting with an image having a greatly reduced color space, could the NN reproduce the original image?

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if this could be used to improve the proposed color prediction in Daala, or if the memory and CPU requirements are too high to put into a video codec.

</comment><comment><USER28> How would this system colorize this image?: [http://imgur.com/RBEht9H](http://imgur.com/RBEht9H)

</comment><comment><USER40> What's the application and/or interest in colorizing images? Does it generalize to other types of problems?

</comment><comment><USER41> The sky is blue, grass is green, trucks are red, and everything else is a shade of brown :-) pretty cool work!

</comment><comment><USER42> This looks pretty cool. Do any photography people or film people can use this?

</comment><comment><USER43> Can this be used to train a model which can un-blur an image?

</comment><comment><USER28> Does it color the sea blue and the grass green?</comment>


Amazon AI Designed To Create Phone Cases Goes Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.iflscience.com/technology/amazon-ai-designed-to-create-phone-cases-goes-hilariously-wrong/ <comment><USER2> The J.G. Ballard groups I'm on are loving these things.

</comment><comment><USER3> We don't know that it 'went wrong' until nobody buys those cases. If one of those cases is sold, then it's working as intended :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I could actually see the 'old woman with asthma inhaler' one being an actual product. The rest..not so much.

<comment><USER5> The Botox injection phone case might have an audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's like watching a toddler trying to use a rattle for a hairbrush, or vice versa.

<comment><USER7> More like vice versa, like watching a rattle trying to use a toddler for a hairbrush.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14736270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14736270)

</comment><comment><USER9> Did the account get killed? I can't see the listings anymore, even through the link in the article.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is just the beginning. AI artists and designers are gradually going to be fairly common.</comment>


DragonFly BSD 2.6: towards a free clustering operating system - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/384200/ <comment><USER2> DragonFly has been a favorite of mine for a while now. It is easily the most ambitious of the BSDs, without being so far ahead of the pack as Plan 9 (i.e. it's still usable).

However, this article is from 2010 and DragonFly recently released v3.0.2. They've also added significantly more features in the direction of a clustering OS. You could probably get more (and more up to date) information just from reading their "Features" page: <http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/>

<comment><USER3> Came here to comment on the age of the article. Thanks for beating me to it.

Since you're a BSD user, can I ask you a few questions? I'm a Linux user with limited BSD experience (mostly running NetBSD on old and/or embedded hardware).

I mostly work on desktop/laptop systems in a workstation setting. Do you think BSD is a good choice for such platforms, or is it strictly a server thing?

<comment> X-Istence BSD on the desktop is possible, especially if you use something like FreeBSD where the hardware support is generally ahead of NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD and OpenBSD, and support for newer technologies is more available (binary drives from NVIDIA are pretty important as well if you want 3D acceleration), sadly though support is lacking for a lot of drivers. FreeBSD for example is just getting around to implementing the parts required for Intel graphics [1].

However compared to Linux I wouldn't use BSD as a desktop/laptop system. Linux is simply further along in supporting what is required for power saving, for clocking the cpu up and down, newer technologies and even older technologies if you are using older devices (in [1] for example, only gen4-6 graphics are supported, so if you have older Intel it won't work, or not correctly).

The other major issue is that many of the projects such as Gnome, KDE, XFCE and others have started using so many different Linux only interfaces for which no good documentation exists to replicate the functionality in the BSD's that you will find that certain features just don't work. See for example [2] which is a post from a Xfce developer on why XFCE had to drop support for the BSD's... on that same post you see a comment from Warner Losh the creator of devd(8) on FreeBSD asking where he can find good documentation on udev in Linux so that he can implement the compatibility stream on top of devd(8) [3].

No, I would not use BSD on the desktop unless it is by purchasing Mac OS X. Personally I am a HUGE FreeBSD fan, I absolutely love it. I run FreeBSD almost exclusively on my servers unless a specific piece of software very specifically requires Linux. I build software for FreeBSD, I deliver to clients FreeBSD installs and do consulting based on FreeBSD. FreeBSD on the server is absolutely fantastic, it is rock solid, I've had machines running for years on end without issues (no, not internet facing ones, yes they were all patched for remote exploits, local exploits I cared less about in this particular setting). Unfortunately I no longer run FreeBSD as my desktop, I used to for the longest time but unfortunately that time has come and gone.

Personally I am currently using a MacBook Pro running OS X 10.8 for my desktop/laptop needs, which provides me the same interfaces as FreeBSD does so it makes programming fairly simple. If it compiles/builds on Mac OS X it is almost guaranteed to compile/build on FreeBSD and run without issues.

[1]: <http://wiki.freebsd.org/Intel_GPU> [2]: <http://gezeiten.org/post/2011/01/Xfce-4.8-on-BSD-flavors> [3]: [http://gezeiten.org/post/2011/01/Xfce-4.8-on-BSD- flavors#c14...](http://gezeiten.org/post/2011/01/Xfce-4.8-on-BSD- flavors#c14587)

<comment><USER4> _See for example [2] which is a post from a Xfce developer on why XFCE had to drop support for the BSD's._

It seems like you can run XFCE on BSD, but some features are not supported.. That said, their about page isn't entirely honest, it should mention what features are Linux-only.

<comment> X-Istence Absolutely, and I am sorry if I implied otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"The ultimate goal of DragonFly BSD is to allow programs to run across multiple machines as if they are running on one system."_

Isn't this OpenMosix? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMosix> <http://linuxpmi.org/trac/>

The two features I miss about openMosix were the distributed filesystem and process freezing. As nodes were auto-discovered, they would be populated in a global filesystem, so you could access the root filesystem of any node from a central tree. In addition there was a tool that would 'freeze' the state of a running process and any files that were open and save it all to a file, so you could 'thaw' it at any time and resume where it left off. This worked well if you only used i/o with the distributed filesystem, so you could thaw it into any system and it would just work. I guess this is an ok alternative: <http://cryopid.berlios.de/>

<comment><USER6> This is called SSI. I believe SGI's larger systems do this aswell <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would love to know how stable Dragonfly is and how its hardware support is. I have read that they regularly pull changes from FreeBSD. So I expect it to be almost on par with FreeBSD. But since they have significantly modified the FreeBSD kernel and they use NetBSD packages, I can understand if they lag behind given their limited resources. Ironically, I am running Linux on my laptop and I am using FreeBSD on my netboot, which I may replace with DragonFly.

<comment><USER7> In my experience (~1.5yrs on small servers and partially a laptop) it is very stable, especially if you stick to the release branches, but even running master everywhere I've rarely run into any problems on that end.

Using pkgsrc for software is actually a good thing as it is portability- oriented to begin with and you get access to almost all of the packages in there out of the box. DragonFly support in pkgsrc has very much improved over the last year or so since one of the DF devs became a NetBSD/pkgsrc committer.

As for hardware support… YMMV. In my experience drivers tend to lag behind a bit and may or may not work for you. Give it a try.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I tried it and could not get OpenJDK installed. Also, it did not detect my wireless card. FOr now, I have postponed using it on my netbook. I will try it again when it has more driver support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would love to know how stable Dragonfly is and how its hardware support is. I have read that they regularly pull changes from FreeBSD. So I expect it to be almost on par with FreeBSD. But since they have significantly modified the kernel and they use NetBSD packages, I can understand if they lag behind given their limited resources. Ironically, I am running Linux on my laptop and I am using FreeBSD on my netboot, which I may replace with DragonFly.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think its the only BSD that uses git for its SCM :)

<comment><USER9> There's a recent fork of OpenBSD, Bitrig [1] that does.

[1] <https://www.bitrig.org/index.php?title=Main_Page></comment></comment>