What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious about possible non-conventional living arrangements to cut out one of my biggest expenses. If location weren't a primary concern (I can telecommute as a programmer, but would still want to live within a few hours of a major city), what's the cheapest living arrangement possible? Buying cheap land and hooking up utilities to a mobile home? What are the fees like to run utilities to new property? Are there cheaper living structures than mobile homes? Are there completely different ideas I'm not considering?<p>I'd be curious if I could set myself up with a basic home for $40,000 or less that would mean I wouldn't have to pay any other living expenses going forward besides unavoidable ones (property taxes [though I could pick a state without property tax], maintenance and utilities). <comment><USER3> I've been able to do this after re-arranging my life over the past 5 years. I bought 7 acres of bare land for $35k and built a 200 sqft tiny house for $4,000. I homestead as much as I can and my bills are approximately $40/DSL, $40/Electrical, $35/Car insurance (I drive a 90s Honda), and approximately $30 a month in property taxes. I spend about $40 in propane for heat in the winter and my air conditioning bill is an extra $15/month in the summer. I'm halfway between Portland and San Francisco and do telecommute node.js/angular work. I'm saving up to build a nice house and a this summer backhoe. Some projects I'm working on this summer include a biodigester to supplement my propane for cooking gas, a rocket mass heater to eliminate my propane, a backyard blacksmiths area, drip irrigation and cistern system, and more fencing for livestock. My property search took me several years and I had no experience in construction but learned most of it from youtube and asking friends. I lived in a camper trailer while I built my place. So to answer your question, about $200 a month is the cheapest I can survive on.

<comment><USER4> $35k for bare land? In Detroit, $35k gets you a lot with a newly renovated, 3 bedroom, 2 bath house. Random example at $37k: [http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/487-W-Green...](http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/487-W-Greendale_Detroit_MI_48203_M33161-98776?row=26)

Edit: I can just keep going and going with nicely livable ~40k houses in Detroit:

[http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/13111-Grigg...](http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/13111-Griggs-St_Detroit_MI_48238_M32244-94109?row=29)

[http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/17593-Monic...](http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/17593-Monica-St_Detroit_MI_48221_M42306-30993?row=30)

[http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/427-W-Green...](http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/427-W-Greendale_Detroit_MI_48203_M33136-27426?row=31&ex=MI568676165)

[http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/18461-Sorre...](http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/18461-Sorrento-St_Detroit_MI_48235_M33965-49040?row=33&ex=MI568982665)

[http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/5510-Three-...](http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes- detail/5510-Three-Mile-Dr_Detroit_MI_48224_M49776-43411?row=45&ex=MI573820009)

... not sure if this is sad or awesome ...

<comment><USER5> I wonder if there is a huge hidden accumulation of unpaid property taxes the buyer would be on the hook for.

<comment><USER6> There likely isn't and risk to the buyer. These houses were most likely foreclosed or abandoned.

Detroit is auctioning off houses and lots that have not been paid up to the highest bidder by the dozens. These were likely purchased super cheap for flipping, and now being resold.

Detroit has a real problem with the city services right now, and as a result of the lack of services, and large land sales houses are SUPER cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pick a college town and rent an apartment, optionally with a roommate. In much of the American midwest this implies an all-in rent & utilities expense in the $500 range.

If you wanted to try something more exotic, you can do the digital nomad thing and rent somewhere in Thailand for ~$100 a month, but honestly as a programmer I feel that optimizing sub-$500 expenses is not the best use of one's time versus figuring out how to make money in a stable and hopefully increasing- over-time fashion.

I understand the aesthetic appeal of going off the grid but if you wouldn't get a job as an electrician or day laborer which paid $400 a month then you shouldn't take on any major construction project to save $400 a month.

<comment><USER8> >If you wanted to try something more exotic, you can do the digital nomad thing and rent somewhere in Thailand for ~$100 a month,

I feel like I should point out that getting something that cheap in Thailand is difficult and certainly will not be pretty. I have previously lived in Thailand for just under a year and then gone on to be a digital nomad for three years and counting, mostly in south east Asia.

Its pretty trivial to live on 800-1200/month in Thailand and I have known people to get it down to $500/month but there is a floor there that, to go under, you would likely need to move somewhere very remote that is likely to have an unreliable electricity supply and probably won't have an existing net connection or a telephone line for you to get access to the net. It would help to speak reasonable Thai too as you will be living somewhere well away from the touristy bits of Thailand where the English speakers tend to congregate.

Now, that isn't to say that its impossible. I know someone who, at one point, was living on the outskirts of Siem Reap (Cambodia) for $200/month total. $80/month of that was rent. Firstly, he is an extremely experienced nomad. Secondly, that involved living in an old wooden house with no airconditioning (Cambodia gets brutally hot) and walking across town to use the wifi at KFC. It worked for him because he was working on a book so he only required sporadic net access. He is also from the Philippines and grew up without air conditioning so apparently the heat and humidity was bearable for him. Personally I find not having aircon in the tropics a really quick way to take your productivity to zero. Thirdly, to keep his costs that low an enormous proportion of his diet was made up of boiled rice with token amounts of vegetables. When he went to KFC he would purchase a single piece of chicken so they wouldn't kick him out and so his diet contained some protein. Handy if you want to lose weight I guess but tightly restricting your vegetable and protein intake is otherwise not particularly healthy.

Anyhow, just wanted to point out that "rent somewhere in Thailand for ~$100 a month" isn't something you are just going to walk off the plane and arrange without making some very serious health and lifestyle sacrifices.

<comment><USER9> If you're keen on Cambodia even a newly-arrived white person could get a _good_ hotel room, with wifi (and television) in Battambang or Phnom Penh for $5 per night for a couple of days a couple of years back, so I'm sure ~$200ish per month is do-able even for beginners if they're keen on the street food.

If you're keen on Asia mainly to minimise costs, Thailand probably isn't the best place to start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You want to live in a city with great medical, great arts, and sports? Then go to Cleveland. Homes starting at $10k (some maintenance required)

[http://www.trulia.com/for_sale/Cleveland,OH](http://www.trulia.com/for_sale/Cleveland,OH)

It is cold...but it isn't Detroit.

<comment><USER11> How's the crime rate in those neighborhoods?

Sometimes I'll check out these maps, which have the state as a whole ranked not-so-good for robbery, property crime, burglary, etc.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/maps-on-fbis-uniform-crime- re...](http://www.businessinsider.com/maps-on-fbis-uniform-crime- report-2013-9)

(Understanding that these are state and not local rates.)

<comment><USER12> There's a crime map on each of the listings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you want to buy a home > [http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com](http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com)

If you want to travel & rent > [https://nomadlist.io](https://nomadlist.io)

</comment><comment><USER14> Used travel trailers and RVs older than 15 years are ludicrously cheap. Arrange with the seller to drop it at your property if you don't have a big enough tow vehicle. You can find small patches of land in rural America for very little money. Say $10k for an acre in woods of no particular scenic beauty with power and water. Once you pick an area a real estate agent can help you find someone's old wilderness retreat or abandoned farmstead.

Speaking as someone with a solar installation, I wouldn't screw with solar if I were worried about cost. Live like you are on solar and you will buy $0.30 of electricity a day from the power company.

Your limitation is going to be fast enough internet, that will keep you close enough to be under cable tv or a benevolent telecom.

<comment><USER11> I've often wondered about that limitation.

I submitted this one:

[http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/12/29/yurt](http://www.mprnews.org/story/2014/12/29/yurt)

"high-speed Internet"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Move to a cheaper country. I moved to Guatemala a few years ago and live for around $8000 a year which includes a nice wooden cottage on a lake with three volcanos, decent internet, and eating out in really great restaurants three times a day.

3:05 is the lake [https://vimeo.com/87304272](https://vimeo.com/87304272)

<comment><USER16> Agreed. I worked remotely in Mexico for 3 months and saved about 2 grand a month && lived better than I'd ever lived in the US. Nice rental in the best part of town, great food, top shelf tequila. I can't wait to go somewhere else and try it again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The cheapest way I've found to live was to buy a 4+ unit apartment building that when the 3+ other apartments are fully rented cover the cost of the mortgage, and utilities. As a result, net out of pocket each year for housing + utilities + taxes + insurance is < $0. (we turn a profit each year) For us, this means we can reinvest our earnings in our businesses and live a very comfortable middle class lifestyle. We live in a city, 3 blocks for 3 different cafes, a dozen restaurants, laundrymats, etc.

<comment><USER18> What city?

<comment><USER19> I've seen 8-10 unit apartment buildings for as little as 300k in Houston and 4 unit buildings for about the same price in a better part of town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I met a "prohobo" once. Chatted with him at a coffee shop. He was living in a squat, had 4G/LTE Internet, and a solar panel for his electronics. Rode Greyhound and/or the rails around the country (the latter, he said, is hard to get away with these days). Said he also occasionally stayed in hotels when he needed to freshen up and get a better nights reset for a while.

I think he made a living doing contract web programming, routed his money to an electronic bank account.

</comment><comment><USER6> You may try looking into Tiny houses, they may cause some problems with zoning in some area's so picking a location will require some research.

A tiny house can easily run under $20,000 fully equipped. Some people have been able to build them for under $10,000.

Fix the house with solar panels, maybe a small wind turbine for electricity. tin roof with a rain water collection, you can run is through a 3 stage or 5 stage filter into a small water tank under a couch. Solar or propane hot water heater, propane gas stove. Grab yourself a 5-mile wifi- antenna to pick up wifi from coffee shops nearby. Composting toilet or a standard RV backwater holding tank to take care of the nasty.

A tiny house with this set up can take care of all of your basic utilities and if you are frugal, resourceful and pick up recyclables, you could drive down the cost possibly under $10k.

Check out this video for my favorite tiny house build. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VckbqU4kK2I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VckbqU4kK2I)

Edit: You will need a car/truck that can tow it around. But an automobile would definitely come in handy if you still want to commute into the city.

<comment><USER21> > Grab yourself a 5-mile wifi- antenna to pick up wifi from coffee shops > nearby.

This sounds incredibly illegal.

<comment><USER22> _> …illegal…_

Barring access controls (like secured-wifi or a 'captive-portal' requiring authentication), I doubt this is illegal, at least in the US.

Lots of people and businesses leave their wifi open specifically to share with anyone within range. The few pennies of marginal cost are outweighed by the desire to be generous, or by actual goodwill earned from neighbors and passers-by.

And there may be no marginal cost at all! On typical unmetered broadband- plans, until the link is saturated, bandwidth is a "marginally-free" resource that expires worthless every second if it's not used.

So it should be used! An extra person hopping on is (until saturation) as close to a "free lunch" as you'll find in economics. It's the sort of ultra- efficient practice that law and culture should encourage, not stigmatize.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You'd do well to consider the life of a digital nomad. Here's some links to get you started.

[http://nomadlist.io/](http://nomadlist.io/) [http://nomadjobs.io/](http://nomadjobs.io/) [https://weworkremotely.com/](https://weworkremotely.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Move to Thailand but have customers in the USA and Europe

Besides Thailand and other countries with a low cost of living, some towns in the USA will actually pay you to move there.

[http://www.thepennyhoarder.com/6-cities-that-will-pay-you- to...](http://www.thepennyhoarder.com/6-cities-that-will-pay-you-to-live- there/)

You can also join various subsidy programs and grants:

[http://becolorado.org/programs/be-colorado- move](http://becolorado.org/programs/be-colorado-move)

Finally I recommend the Mr Money Mustache blog. Anyone read it?

<comment><USER25> You can go pretty low in Thailand, but it can actually get pretty expensive if you want a western lifestyle. And anyways, isn't Cambodia or Laos cheaper?

<comment><USER11> I'd be more concerned with visa issues.

<comment><USER25> Ya, you aren't supposed to work with tourist visas, and you should be paying taxes in your country of residence on your income. Things can get pretty shady, and you really don't want to wind up in a Thai jail!

<comment><USER26> Wait, what? You aren't supposed to work for people in the COUNTRY Just like you aren't supposed to do business with people in the country No one says you can't continue working on projects for clients in your home country

<comment><USER25> That is very very wrong. Thai law doesn't allow you to work on a tourist visa, even if you are working for someone outside of Thailand, it is very unambiguous on this point and they have been cracking down on co-working spaces accordingly. Almost all countries are like this actually.

<comment><USER26> So, a person with a tourist visa isn't able to do any work in their own hotel room, no matter what it is or for whom? Is it that they aren't supposed to do a service for anyone else (such as cook for a friend, or translate anything for a relative back home) or that they can't receive money? What if their company is generating passive income for them back home? Are they not supposed to access it? How are they supposed to pay for all the touristy stuff?

"Sorry sir. We noticed you were debugging your iPhone app in your hotel room, a version of which is being sold in the app store. You will now go to Thai Jail or be deported."

<comment><USER25> > So, a person with a tourist visa isn't able to do any work in their own > hotel room, no matter what it is or for whom?

Yep.

> Is it that they aren't supposed to do a service for anyone else (such as > cook for a friend, or translate anything for a relative back home) or that > they can't receive money?

You just can't get paid. If you were cooking for a "friend" but you were actually their personal chef...you would need a working visa.

For a visa waver country, you usually have the right to go to that country to attend conferences or training, but you aren't supposed to do any "work" like say...programming or writing documentation (again value creation).

> What is their company is generating passive income for them back home?

Passive and investment income don't count, only work that creates value and is paid accordingly. If you want to make investments in the country, there is a non tourist visa for that (and sometimes it is allowed on visa waver).

> How are they supposed to pay for all the touristy stuff?

Through the income you earned working hard back home.

> "Sorry sir. We noticed you were debugging your iPhone app in your hotel > room, a version of which is being sold in the app store. You will now go to > Thai Jail or be deported."

Yep. It hasn't happened yet, but there was a scare a few months ago:

[http://www.itworld.com/article/2695072/mobile/digital- nomads...](http://www.itworld.com/article/2695072/mobile/digital-nomads-in- thailand-get-a-scare.html)

A good description of the situation is here:

[http://ashleyconnor.co.uk/blog/2014/09/07/the-digital- nomad-...](http://ashleyconnor.co.uk/blog/2014/09/07/the-digital-nomad-and- immigration-law/)

<comment><USER27> I can see immigration authorities getting peeved over people who are essentially running a freelance business from the country (hence cracking down on coworking spaces). That looks more like working in the country rather than really working back home: even if all your customers are abroad, the place of your self-employment as a freelancer is where you customarily actually reside and do the work. So if you maintain an office much of the year in Thailand and don't maintain one in the U.S., that sure looks like you're working in Thailand.

But most countries don't categorically exclude doing work for a foreign employer while on a visa-free visit. The U.S. visa-waiver program explicitly allows "travel for business or pleasure" up to 90 days, and the EU has an analogous "business travel" exemption. Doing work for your normal "home" employer is expected under the definition of "business travel", which can and usually does include on-site work in the country (not only remote work for your home office). That's what the business travel visa exemption is largely intended to facilitate: things like BP London sending staff to Houston for 3 weeks to supervise plant startup, or Microsoft sending some staff from Redmond to Ireland to hash out a product design in person. As long as it's temporary (typically <90 days) and the employee continues to be employed normally by the home office (not paid by the local office), it doesn't have to be confined to training or conferences, and can include actual work.

<comment><USER25> So much is wrong here. There is a difference between what people do and what they are technically allowed to do. Enforcement is also quite difficult if you are working under the radar. Non immigration business visas don't allow you to do more than attend trainng and meetings, this includes wavers. Now, you might code, that is technically illegal, but they probably won't catch you. But for gods sake, if the immigration officer asks you what you will do, or what you did, just say "attend meetings and training," or you'll be deported so fast you won't know what happened (especially in the US and Switzerland).

It might not matter so much going from Ireland to Redmond, but going to Redmond it's a huge Pain in the ass, so much so that we have visa training for employees that do it (I work for Microsoft china) to make sure that US laws are followed (thankfully, I'm a US citizen, but unfortunately that also means I'm subject to double tax whenever I work in the states).

<comment><USER27> Interesting. My dad used to work for BP, and their lawyers were of the opinion that short-term engineering exchanges between the US and EU, either between corporate offices or to/from their engineering contractors, qualified as visa- waiver business travel. I wouldn't think they'd be trying to fly under the radar, since BP is a huge company that's often subject to regulatory scrutiny, but who knows. As far as I can find, the exemption is somewhat broader than just training, and also includes "business meetings" and meetings for the purpose of contract negotiation/supervision.

The thing the lawyers _were_ really worried about was any kind of on-site visit to an operating plant, but that was for reasons of health/safety law, not immigration law. The non-operating engineering staff (local or foreign) had specific rules about what they couldn't do, so they wouldn't count as "operating" the plant, or get remotely implicated in anything safety-related. But for visits between corporate offices, they were very un-worried. Even visits to their Chinese joint-venture partner were pretty hassle-free, just requiring an "M" visa arranged by the partner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My advice: don't take a radical path until you control/manage your current path. I am also a web developer and can/have worked remotely but I think that deep down one needs social interaction (even more so if you have kids!). I was also looking to minimize expenses but instead of taking a radical path I decided to control my expenses while keeping most of my lifestyle and guess what? With enough discipline and team work (your partner, if any, must agree with the plan) you may get very low on expenses without having to change too much your routine. The formula was dead obvious for me and you've heard it a thousand times: pay down debt, get rid of credit cards (keep a couple for EMERGENCIES), get rid of unnecessary expenses, buy used, reuse, don't buy toys, don't eat out too much, buy wholesale, bike to work, walk to groceries, etc. Many times the solution to a problem/want/need is not money but creativity and rational thinking, e.g. do you need a backyard b/c you want a bbq on your 'own' place? You will do that bbq maybe 10 times/year. Is it worth it to buy the land/house for that reason? How about a public park for the bbq, or the outdoors? One final word: a mortgage is 99% of the time a bad (financial) decision.

</comment><comment><USER29> If you're serious about _cheapest_ as the most important variable, then the sort of glib (but true) answer to this question is to observe where people who have _no other choice_ end up living, which means a trailer in a rural area or housing in the cheapest parts of any large U.S. metro.

If you're lucky enough to have startup capital, then you can reduce your recurring expenses to practically nothing. You can find a trailer for a few grand, for example, and functional houses can be found for less than $20k in many American cities. You can probably find parks charging only a couple hundred a month for lot rent, if you go the trailer route, and property taxes will be minimal on houses in the described range, if you choose that, instead.

If you don't want to invest anything up front, you can still find housing for around $350/mo in the worst parts of the Midwestern city I live in. (But you shouldn't expect a very _hands-on_ landlord.) You might even find weekly- or daily-rate housing that's cheaper, but I've never personally looked into that sort of thing.

Obviously, there's a reason that these areas are so inexpensive, but I've optimized only for cost.

<comment><USER11> I think that reason is the most important consideration. It looks like you may be referring to the worst parts of #4 on this list!

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/12/highest-murder- rate...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/12/highest-murder-rate-us- cities-2013_n_6145404.html)

<comment><USER29> Indeed, I am. Incidentally, the worst parts of St. Louis account for basically _all_ of that ranking. People here like to focus on the separation of the City of St. Louis from the surrounding St. Louis County (which is critical in understanding St. Louis's ranking on that list), but even within the City itself there are large areas that have basically none or few homicides every year. The most violent areas are extremely violent, in other words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Keep the regular job. Just buy a cheap van, and rent a 24/7 parking space.

You can figure out the rest. Buy takeaways or use a gas stove for food, use a 24/7 gym for showering/toilet, and go to your job for the internet (alternatively, the library, free WiFi places, or mobile net).

That's probably the cheapest way to live without being entirely homeless (or just buying land/house).

</comment><comment><USER31> The cost to run utilities to a property varies considerably with location. Typically it depends on the distance of your property from existing electrical lines. If you purchase land way off grid it can cost > $100K to get an electrical connection. So you need to do some research before buying any land. At some point it is cheaper to generate your own electricity. If you generate your own electricity then you need to research what form of energy is most plentiful for your region (solar, wind, hydro, or a gas / diesel generator). You might consider getting a property with decent hydroelectric "head" (water flowing with a significant elevation drop) as microhydro power tends to be more reliable than solar or wind. I advise you to research this site for more options: [http://www.homepower.com/](http://www.homepower.com/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Trying to go completely off grid - building your own house - is way too much hassle.

I think of it as an optimization problem. you do not want inconvenience yourself too much with having to worry about your own home being towed !. It will add unwanted stress to your life.

The best approach as someone said - "college town with a roomate" \- this is the lowest you should go since college dorms are really fancy these days and are super cheap. the extra saving you will get by going below this ( becoming essentially homeless ) is not worth the other problems associated with it ( security, winter, etc )

Money is not the end of it all. Mental wellbeing and physical wellbeing is always more important.

The other great advantage of college town is its filled with people who want to socialize. You dont want to be 50 and look back at your life as someone who saved a lot of money and lived in a car.

</comment><comment><USER33> > (I can telecommute as a programmer, but would still want to live within a > few hours of a major city)

and

> I'd be curious if I could set myself up with a basic home for $40,000 or > less

As others have mentioned, it's not too hard to build an off-the-grid small house. If you want to go with new, that's certainly an option.

Since you don't mind being a couple hours from a major city, may I suggest spending a bit more and buying used? You can buy yourself a decent one family home within that distance span. Add some solar panels and you're good to go.

You can also buy a two-family, rent out one of the units, and actually make money. Lots of options in real estate if you don't want to spend a ton.

</comment><comment><USER34> Cheapest for whom? Many of my mates worked at mines, and therefore lived on site with all expenes paid - utilities, meals, boarding, etc. In the off time, I'm sure you could find some way to minimise many of those expenses too.

Basically, any job that requires you to relocate will minimise YOUR expenses, because your company will pay for it all. But I get the feeling that's not what you were after.

<comment><USER35> I know a guy who works trucking the chemicals for the oil fracking. He makes a lot of money, and when on the job all expenses are paid.

Once his rotation is over, he hops on a plane to Thailand. He owns a house there that he paid comparatively nothing for, has a housekeeper that he pays a good wage to for the area - but really a pittance here - and he chills out drinking on the beach until his next rotation comes up.

<comment><USER36> This used to be very common with offshore oil drilling too. You work 21 days straight on an oil platform and then get 14 days off. Company paid all expenses while on the platform and also paid air travel to/from your home base to the town nearest to the offshore oil platform and from where company will ferry you to/from oil platform on a chopper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> the generic term for "tumbleweed houses" is "tiny homes" or "tiny houses". there's also a couple in New York? who built a great house out of a shipping container.

</comment><comment><USER38> How about living in a van or RV? Check out [http://www.reddit.com/r/vandwellers](http://www.reddit.com/r/vandwellers).

</comment><comment><USER11> @dang/HN admin: It was disappointing to see this thread instantly go from Page 1/Top Ten to Page 3/#64.

Did some auto-filter get triggered?

</comment><comment><USER39> Draw a fifty mile circle from a mid sized city, and look for a recent vintage double wide trailer.

</comment><comment><USER40> 1 ) college town / sharing flat 2 ) short period: live in your office building

</comment><comment><USER41> Move to a big city in a poor country.

<comment><USER42> I hope that's a joke, that's a terrible advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> As an aspiring writer (read as: as someone aspiring to earn less money) I've looked into this quite a bit.

I'm married with kids (well soon to be plural anyway) so the cheap rents are out of the question, and despite their generally lower cost apartments aren't ideal. Not only is there a high risk of bedbug infestation, which will set you back significantly if you get hit, but the costs are fixed and will increase every year.

From what I've figured out reading other peoples stories, the best way is to go nearly-off-grid. If your area allows mobile homes as a primary dwelling, then this is generally the ideal. They're generally cheaply available, they're normally of a size comparable to a single bed apartment, but they also come up to 3 and 4 bedroom models with two bath.

In rural areas these often have wood stoves as the primary heating with small propane/electric ones as backup so your pipes don't freeze if you go away for a weekend.

If you're setting up in a rural area, with 5+ acres of land you can easily be self-sustaining on your own wood supply. You can set yourself up with a small wind turbine and solar rig for your electricity.

Honestly though, the majority of my work experience is from various construction fields. I want to go this way to maximize my freedom. Cutting wood and tilling soil is just exercise to me so I don't have a problem growing my own vegetables and managing my own wood lot. The only thing I've spent money on owning my house was getting my furnace replaced, and only then because I didn't have the equipment to do the piping due to the age of my house.

My dream is to build my own house from the foundation up, and if possible using lumber I harvest myself.

So really you need to quantify what your reasons for doing this are. If it's just reduce expenses for a few years to maximize your savings you're probably best going for a college town apartment. If you want to escape the city and are merely using your skills as a means to an end to fund this endeavour, then I'd say learn the skills and go rural.

There's people in Alaska and elsewhere who can make ends meet at $10 a month. You need soap? Save your stove ashes, put them in a lye barrel and you make your own lye that you can mix with fat you've saved from cooking or - <USER2> you're really into it - your own hunting, or your own animals.

When you pay for a burger at McDonalds you're paying for the guy who grew the corn, the guy who fed the cow, the guy who drove it to the slaughter house, for the slaughter, for the processing, for the guy who drives the delivery truck, for the kid who cooks and makes the burger, and for the kid who serves you - and for every owner, manager and foreman along the way.

You can pay nothing at all for a burger by growing your own corn, raising your own cows and slaughtering them, growing your own wheat, raising your own chickens and making your own bread.

So: Earn a shit ton of money, buy a $750,000 house and never do anything around the house. Gardener does the outside, maid does the inside and takes the garbage out on garbage day. You pick up most of your food from restaurants, or you can even hire a housekeeper that does the groceries and prepares an evening meal for you.

You can earn good money, buy a $250,000 house. You'll mow your own lawn, you'll do your own cleaning and cooking. You'll do small repairs around the house, etc.

Or you can do what off-grid can do. You earn nothing, you sell what you have to. You grow your own food, hunt/raise your own meats, and you make pretty much everything you want.

The question is, how far down the rabbit hole does your happiness lie?

</comment><comment><USER43> Yurts!

<comment><AUTHOR> Just google yurts and see what I find?

<comment><USER44> I think the intended suggestion is: If you are going to build a dwelling, a yurt is one of the most cost-effective structures you could construct. They can be lived in year-round in almost any climate. In some locations they may be regarded as temporary structures, and therefore would not be held to the same building requirements as a standard house. Furthermore, if you decide to move, you can take the yurt with you, since it can be dismantled.

Also, the hexayurts linked by the sibling comment are probably not what you should be looking for. They are not designed for wet or cold weather conditions. They are designed as temporary shelters for festivals and such, not as permanent dwellings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Buy a property with separate unit(s) in the back and rent them out. You're now living near-free or even making a profit.</comment>


Show HN: Observable Notebooks - <AUTHOR> https://beta.observablehq.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Before this post fades from the front page, I just wanted to take a moment to link to some of the things folks have been publishing this morning:

Nick Strayer shows how t-SNE is similar (equivalent?) to a force-directed graph layout: [https://beta.observablehq.com/@nstrayer/physics-based-t- sne](https://beta.observablehq.com/@nstrayer/physics-based-t-sne)

Jim Bumgardner published a tutorial that starts with drawing circles with canvas, then fibonacci spirals, then colorful sunflower seeds: [https://beta.observablehq.com/@jbum/circles-spirals-and- sunf...](https://beta.observablehq.com/@jbum/circles-spirals-and-sunflowers)

Kamil Slowikowski drew a lovely Barnsley Fern: [https://beta.observablehq.com/@slowkow/barnsley- fern](https://beta.observablehq.com/@slowkow/barnsley-fern)

Alan Palazzolo did a Mandelbrot fractal with randomized coloring: [https://beta.observablehq.com/@zzolo/mandlebrot- set](https://beta.observablehq.com/@zzolo/mandlebrot-set)

Justin Palmer uses PROJ4JS to transform and scale a local map: [https://beta.observablehq.com/@caged/local-map-projection- wi...](https://beta.observablehq.com/@caged/local-map-projection-with-d3)

<comment><USER2> Inre your first link, things can get a bit awkward if someone uses javascript features that aren't supported in your browser. The error message is not especially non-expert-reader-friendly: [https://i.imgur.com/Hw9NDPA.png](https://i.imgur.com/Hw9NDPA.png)

Any plans to add some kind of transpilation or ...?

<comment><USER3> Oh no! That's my bad. I always default to using the spread operators because it's so nice and I live in nice new browsers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just in case people were wondering, the site seems to have been overwhelmed for the past 10-15 minutes. But there's a YouTube demo of the tech [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16275040](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16275040)

I guess an oversimplified description would be that this is like a Jupyter Notebook specifically for JavaScript. Libraries like D3 are pre-loaded and immediately accessible. Am definitely interested in hearing the details about what it is built with and medium to long-term plans for the service.

Note that the Jupyter Notebook service generally requires you to be installing and running Python etc. on your own computer. Jumping into an Observable notebook is as easy as opening your browser and signing in via GIthub

<comment><USER5> There's a reason why you would want to run Python and that's the huge, well supported scientific computing libraries it has.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely! We all quite like Python, and there's no denying that JavaScript doesn't have the same caliber and range of scientific code (yet!).

I fully expect plenty of people to do some of the data-crunching in Python, Julia, R, and so on, and bring it into Observable to explore and experiment. And I also expect JavaScript's ecosystem to blossom, especially with WebAssembly & WebGL hitting the mainstream.

<comment><USER5> No doubt you're right, but I don't think JS is well suited for scientific computing. At least Python gives you operator overloading. Julia and R are designed for this field. It's better for JS to remain on the presentation side for anything sophisticated.

<comment><USER7> Forgive me if I read the response wrong but that seems like exactly what the author is saying? Do your computing in Python/R, export a generated CSV, and then present it in Observable?

<comment><USER5> With the possibility that WebAssembly and WebGL will make the libraries in Python/R available to JS. Which might be alright. You probably won't be able to utilize vectorization with operators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please, Observable, put something on the page that says what language this is!

I figured this was like Colaboratory ([https://colab.research.google.com](https://colab.research.google.com)) or Azure Notebooks ([https://notebooks.azure.com/](https://notebooks.azure.com/)) or some other hosted-jupyter variant. There was no information about how it should work when I went to the scratchpad, and I could barely tell it was Javascript when picking one of the sample notebooks.

<comment><USER9> Not only the language, but have at least one line that says what this is. I can guess that it's a hosted notebook service, but I can't tell how it's different from Jupyter Notebook. Is the difference in the language it uses, or are there other differences?

<comment><USER2> See [https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/five-minute- introduc...](https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/five-minute-introduction) and the links therein, e.g. the video they made [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEmDwflQ3xE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEmDwflQ3xE)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks fantastic. The model appears very clean and different than Jupyter in many ways:

\- cells can have names (it seems each cell can only export one name that is visible to the rest of the notebook)

\- dependent cells auto-update when a source cell changes

\- cells can be generators that auto update up to 60 times/sec

\- cell values can be tied to UI elements easily

So instead of Jupyter's model where all cells execute in the same namespace, here you have named cells explicitly connected to each other in a graph and executed in topological order (not linear order).

The introduction covers these pretty well: [https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/five-minute- introduc...](https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/five-minute-introduction)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is really cool and would be a great way to introduce programming concepts in an educational setting. Instant-feedback, inline documentation in a narrative style, and running on a browser really lowers the barrier for entry.

I would have loved something like this when I was learning programming in middle-school decades ago.

Since it comes from the guys behind D3 it's not surprising that much of the visuals come from D3. This is really evocative, but it may limit some of the audience for this tool. I would encourage the developers to take some cues from Apple's swift playgrounds and add visuals and sliders for even some of the simpler language constructs like loops and add some "simple" wrapper functions for drawing elementary shapes. This would definitely be a shift from the intended purpose as I see it right now, but it would have the side-benefit of increasing debugability as well.

Great work - look forward to having the occasion to using it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would have loved something like this while learning to program as well. I mean ... the Ruby REPL was fun, but this sort of thing is just so much more tactile and visual.

We haven't had time to produce as many demo notebooks as we might have liked, but these notebooks really aren't D3-specific in the slightest. They're a reactive flavor of JavaScript, and anything that produces a value or can be rendered to the DOM will work.

For example, here are a whole mess of Plotly charts: [https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/plotly- js](https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/plotly-js)

Here are some (wild) WebGL, Three.js and regl sketches: [https://beta.observablehq.com/collection/webgl](https://beta.observablehq.com/collection/webgl)

And here are some simple native inputs you can use to control your sketches: [https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/inputs](https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/inputs)

Remember — a "slider" here isn't anything special. It's just a chunk of DOM that produces a number as a value. It can be replaced with anything else you can imagine that produces a number as a value. There's no API there ;)

<comment><USER11> Oh that's cool I thought there were special hooks with D3. The native inputs demo seems really compelling especially in a learning environment. I'll definitely play with this and bring it into my next mentoring group meeting. (They'll be so glad to get away from scratch!)

One cool thing that Swift playgrounds let you do is advance program state through loops and other flow-control line-by-line using a slider. I think they have to have cooperation with the compiler/runtime to make this happen. (I'm also not sure how truly useful it is after a few days of learning the basics.)

I suppose you could do something similar with the native inputs but not using native syntax. What I'm thinking would be a massive undertaking I realize - it's cool that this offering generates so many "ooh and what else" ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's absolutely worth exploring further — and we definitely have notions for ways to further expose and make interactive the running state of the notebook.

But for starters: You can do something similar to expose the internal state of loops and flow-control constructs by just using JavaScript's generators.

Here's an extremely simple example that slowly yields the value of a loop's `i` variable:

[https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/flow-control- demo-w...](https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/flow-control-demo-with- generators)

If you remove the delay, it'll instead yield `i` at 60fps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The app itself is well done, but the editing experience is quite lacking...It's 2018 and people don't want to write html/css/js as if writing txt files. [https://codesandbox.io](https://codesandbox.io) can be a good inspiration to learn from. I believe its popularity is a result of using Monaco[0] and supporting Language Servers[1].

I would advise looking into editing/language support early. Auto completion (for DOM API, D3 API, etc) and error checking can be very helpful to the user.

Still, congratulations to the launch (the app looks beautiful and UX is pretty solid)! When I was reading @mbostock's medium post[2] a few months ago I knew something like this will popup.

Anyway, back to building my own thing which focuses on the editing side of playgrounds, which I think is what most online ones (Codepen / JSFiddle) lack.

[0]: [https://microsoft.github.io/monaco- editor](https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor)

[1]: [https://microsoft.github.io/language-server- protocol](https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol)

[2]: [https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to- code-2b1d2876a3...](https://medium.com/@mbostock/a-better-way-to- code-2b1d2876a3a0)

</comment><comment><USER13> This works by executing Javascript code written by the user. Since these notebooks are shareable, and there is also a log-in feature, do any security features need to be put in place to prevent, say, someone linking me to a notebook that sends my login credentials for observablehq.com to a malicious host? That is, is the javascript inside the notebook sandboxed in any way?

I don't fully understand how modern web security works. But "executing arbitrary javascript written by user A on website B viewed by user C" seems worrying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. We use <iframe>s with the sandbox attribute ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/if...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/iframe#attr-sandbox)) to uh ... sandbox away the running JavaScript.

If you inspect them, you'll see that those frames are hosted on observableusercontent.com instead of observablehq.com.

It's a similar security model to how raw files on GitHub are served from githubusercontent.com.

<comment><USER14> I wrote a simple notebook:

[https://beta.observablehq.com/@ontouchstart/test](https://beta.observablehq.com/@ontouchstart/test)

to confirm that the code is running in an iframe from host [https://static.observableusercontent.com](https://static.observableusercontent.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The homepage copy didn't quite capture me... until I realized it was the new thing by D3's Mike Bostock! Maybe worth name-dropping that somewhere on that page? Though I don't know how many people would respond to that other than myself (hopefully lots of people).

<comment><USER16> Eh. I respect people more for not namedropping themselves, but maybe I'm alone in this.

(Are you sure it's a good idea to perpetuate the status quo? It's hard to get anyone to pay attention to what you've made unless you're already known. That seems a bit unfair to the next generation, and rather the opposite of oldschool hacker ethos.)

<comment><USER15> I totally see where you're coming from - name-dropping like that feels really tacky. I'd shy away from that on my own projects.

The challenge is helping people understand what something is and why it is valuable as quickly as possible. In this case, the fact that the team behind this are Mike Bostock (d3), Jeremy Ashkenas (Backbone, CoffeeScript) and Tom MacWright (Mapbox Studio) feels very relevant to getting me excited about the project.

It's such a strong product that I imagine word of mouth (plus how well it demos) will do that job for them though. This was just my first thought on loading up he page in Mobile Safari (and then realizing what it actually was).

<comment><USER17> Yeah honestly that raised my interest considerably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A+.

Feedback: I instantly understood that it was something similar to Jupyter, and my very first mental question was "I hope it's in JS", and this took a surprisingly long few seconds and two page navigations to establish -- I expected the choice of language to be on the splash page.

Anyway, very well done, and it's quite clear to me that JS is going to _trounce_ Python for nearly everything long-term. The JS ecosystem is just an unstoppable freight train.

<comment><USER19> lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Their new screencast is awesome too!

"Observable: An Earthquake Globe in Ten Minutes" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEmDwflQ3xE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEmDwflQ3xE)

<comment><AUTHOR> And good place to drop few links, if you'd like to cut to the chase.

The finished notebook from the screencast (which you can fork): [https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/earthquakes](https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/earthquakes)

And a fancier version that spins, reuses the canvas element instead of re- rendering it from scratch, projects the quakes as circles on the surface of the sphere, and offers a bunch of other options to configure (like if you'd like to chart the past day, week or month of quakes): [https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/quakespotter-0-1](https://beta.observablehq.com/@jashkenas/quakespotter-0-1)

<comment> d--b Do you guys have a keyboard shortcuts cheatsheet? I can't figure how to move from one cell to another without clicking or creating a new cell.

<comment><USER6> Sure thing! When you're on a notebook, click on your user avatar, then help. Walkthrough: [https://file-oxhnhlfzte.now.sh/](https://file- oxhnhlfzte.now.sh/)

<comment> d--b Most excellent, thanks much

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This couldn't have come at a more convenient time for me. After years of telling myself I'd learn D3 I have finally started to as well as use it at work. I was using an extension in Jupyter but it was behaving unpredictably, and not being a frontend engineer by trade I found the process of sublime + browser foreign and cumbersome. As a big fan of jupyter and zeppelin I am stoked to see notebooks entering the js data viz domain.

Curious as to know how developers view the notebook paradigm? I feel like there is a sense of pride in working from the command line or vi, so wonder how these UI heavy approaches are received by the js/python/scala community.

<comment><USER22> The BeakerX extension to Jupyter has good support for D3 visualization of data prepared in Python and other languages. [http://BeakerX.com/](http://BeakerX.com/)

<comment><USER22> Here's a live demo on MyBinder:

[https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/twosigma/beakerx/0.12.0?filepath=...](https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/twosigma/beakerx/0.12.0?filepath=doc/python/AutoTranslation.ipynb)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> To me the killer app for this is to empower data scientists to create useful, ad-hoc visualization apps for their results. Right now the html / presentation story for Jupyter notebooks is awful.

Mike, Jeremy, and Tom, this looks awesome. I'm looking forward to put it through the paces.

<comment><USER24> >Right now the html / presentation story for Jupyter notebooks is awful.

How so?

Ive found it pretty straightforward to convert matplotlib plots to gif/mp4 for presentation (note: this can be done automatically within the notebook), and plotly is pretty good for truly interactive stuff.

<comment><USER23> I'm specifically referring to the use case of creating explorable apps. Most data scientists I know would love a way of, say, building a map with a few input controls that alter the data or presentation (colors, layers, filtering, aggregation).

I'm currently working on a JS-powered geospatial exploration app that is meant to be run either standalone or embedded into a Jupyter notebook. We often run into questions around how much the embeddable app should be scriptable or how much user control to allow. This would seemingly solve many of our needs.

<comment><USER25> Have you looked at shiny (R) or dash (python)? I found it pretty easy to

        building a map with a few input controls that alter the data or presentation (colors, layers, filtering, aggregation)

with R + shiny + leaflet

<comment><USER23> Yes, but neither shiny nor python (folium, etc) give us the level of customization or control via an actual JS bridge that this appears to.

That said, I tried to create a demo application and it seems like the require / exports / global situation isn't 100% yet. Any tips from the team on what to do here?

[https://beta.observablehq.com/@akre54/deck-gl- test](https://beta.observablehq.com/@akre54/deck-gl-test)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seeing a lot of posts of the "Observable vs Jupyter" variety. I really don't think this has to be a this versus that kind of discussion. There is plenty of room for both.

<comment><USER27> How about both rolled into one somehow!?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I like the idea, I've even written something similar myself, but for me a few things were not clear.

How would I load in data that is stored on my harddrive (not web addressable) without having to run my own server or go through the file selector popup box each time. User JS can't just read the harddisk (a requirement for web security). If I have to run my own server then a major selling point of this is gone.

I work with large tabled data and very often use vectorised functions using numpy or pandas, working on entire columns with a fantastically simple interface. A = B * x, for arrays B, scalars x returning a new array A. Is there something as beautiful available, working around the lack of operator overloading in JS? I've only seen string abuse like p('A') = p('B*x'). Auh.

<comment><USER6> Good question! Mike wrote a notebook about getting data into Observable here: [https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/introduction-to- data](https://beta.observablehq.com/@mbostock/introduction-to-data) \- the gist is that right now any host that supports CORS does the trick, and the combination of GitHub Gist & RawGit is pretty good for the task. It'd be nice to drag & drop data right in the app, though, so... stay tuned.

And, yep - something like pandas for JavaScript would also be nice... also stay tuned.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b FYI: got some 'Oops, an unexpected error occurred.' error message, then the notebook I was testing just disappeared.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm afraid that we're running into a database error at the moment. We're on it...

 _Edit 1: Deploying the fix now..._

 _Edit 2: ... and we 're back._

<comment><USER29> I thought I broke it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So I finally got around to taking a good look at this last night after work. I adapted a single page d3 app that I'd written many years ago to model sous vide cooking.

A few comments:

\- Probably needs some more documentation. Maybe a quick reference for the API that's available and a list of keystrokes. I will admit though, I bailed halfway through the tutorials so I could start playing with it.

\- I'd like to be able to drag and drop cells (or otherwise rearrange them). I created my page, but then wanted to better organize it. Making new cells and cut/pasting content was annoying.

\- The Opt-Return thing is killing me. It executes the cell in Jupyter and splits the cell into two in Observable. I can't think of a reason I'd want to split a cell in the middle. I believe splitting in the middle will always result in two cells with syntax errors. Perhaps just always create and focus a new, empty cell?

\- It'd be nice if there was an easy way to delete a cell. Currently, I'm emptying it and then joining with the previous via option-del, which concatenates cells. I believe joining two cells with content will always result in a syntax error, so I'm not sure the utility of that.

\- The samples were useful, especially for learning how d3 fits into this. I ended up breaking up a long function (to build the d3 graph) into multiple cells, taking cues from the samples. (I also learned that d3 has changed a little since v3.)

It would also be nice to be able to rename variables (i.e. refactor), but that's not a critical feature.

</comment><comment><USER31> So please let me know if this is rude, but how is this funded?

<comment><USER18> The monetary cost of running this can be very low, since the computationally expensive part runs on the client. So it doesn't really need much "funding" to build and run, just time investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Glanced over this yesterday, came back to it today when I saw it was by jashkenas, who has done some real innovative work over the years. @jashkenas -- is this your primary project now? Are you building a business around this or is it more for fun/open source?

Would be curious to hear plans to monetize it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Would be cool if there was reason / typescript support.

</comment><comment><USER34> How is this different than Ipython/Jupyter notebooks? Whys everyone freaking out about this.

<comment><USER35> A few differences. 1. You don't have to install anything, so running (or forking) someone else's notebook is as simple as clicking a link. 2. It's reactive, which means simpler code and better feedback, particularly when building user interfaces or analyzing realtime data. 3. It runs in the browser so you have direct access to powerful graphics (and GPU computation): Canvas, SVG, WebGL. 4. You can quickly import code for reuse from other notebooks, making a notebook a kind of lightweight library as well as a human-readable document.

<comment><USER5> > 3\. It runs in the browser so you have direct access to powerful graphics > (and GPU computation): Canvas, SVG, WebGL

Jupyter is a web server. Notebooks run in the browser. iPython the kernel can run on the command line in addition to the browser.

> 1\. You don't have to install anything, so running (or forking) someone > else's notebook is as simple as clicking a link

Jupyter lets you clone notebooks with the click of a button.

Also, you can run Javascript from a Notebook cell, and there are Python libraries that interface with the JS visualization libraries, like Plotly.

<comment><USER4> Jupyter Notebooks run in the browser but what examples are there of being able to write Python and have the same kind of access to the DOM and graphics APIs like you have with JavaScript?

<comment><USER5> ipywidgets for creating interactive html widges & dashboards and Plotly, Bokeh, and nvd3 are 3 examples for visualaition that integrates Python with JS libraries.

Of course JS gives you full flexibility for talking to the DOM and graphics APIs, but web apps are not the main focus of data science. The web is just one possible means to presentation or collaboration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Its still lacking some core features that make jupyter easier to use. I went through the tutorials and 10 min earthquake videos.

There's no shortcut for deleting items on the "help" section. No WYISWYG editor for that either. So if you want to delete a bulletpoint you accidentally made, it just shows up as "undefined"

There's not a way to bind your own hotkeys. Some of default hotkeys get overridden by my own set of hotkeys, so this isn't too helpful

I'm not a big fan of the UI/UX. I see where its going, collapsing items you don't want to see. But this gets rather tedious to always do everytime. There should be a default setting that lets you bind whether pins are defaulted or not.

</comment><comment><USER37> Great product! I've been using RunKit ([https://runkit.com/home](https://runkit.com/home)) a bit, what would you say are the key differentiators?

<comment><USER38> Yeah, a while ago I discovered this slick JS notebook app called Tonic, and could never remember the name until one day I came across this thing called RunKit and I thought that it must be a clone. Nope, name just changed when Striped acquired it.

When I saw this app, I thought Tonic must have gone through another rebranding. Wrong again! This just looks more geared for data visualization and collaboration though. Would be curious to see if Tonic/RunKit (or iPython even) were used as inspiration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is fantastic & a huge congrats from the Azure Notebooks team!

</comment><comment><USER40> Legitimately very cool. As someone else mentioned I'd also really like the ability to embed these on another page, and possibly have these run locally offline.

I do have a question: for notebooks linking to outside notebooks: is there anything that prevents breakages? Ie external notebook variable name changes or is completely removed, would parts of my notebook relying on that one then also fail? Is there some kind of public versioning of notebooks so that I can refer to a value at notebook ref,v1?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fantastic question.

It's not ready yet, but we're hoping to roll out import pinning for notebooks soon.

Each notebook is versioned — every time you make a change and re-run the cell, a version is saved to the server. And every time you publish, that's a publication of a specific version of the notebook.

Our plan is to pin the version of any code you import from outside the notebook, including require(npm-module), import {value} from "other-notebook", and even the version of the Observable standard library that was current when you wrote the notebook.

Hopefully, that should provide a good foundation for robust notebooks that don't break as libraries change over time. Of course, you'll be able to re-pin a new version if you want to upgrade something.

<comment><USER40> Awesome. Thanks for replying. I'll definitely be watching your team at work :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Any plans to make the notebooks embeddable in other sites?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and single interactive cells as well.

A notebook already runs in a sandboxed iframe, and is able to load its dependencies there (libraries, data, values from other notebooks). So we're in quite good shape to be able to do that soon.

<comment><USER42> Fantastic.

One final question/request (for which I'd happily pay for!) : it would be awesome to have a path away from Observable's infra if desired. Say I _really_ want to host a particular notebook locally: is something like that planned? I know this is not a trivial feature since notebooks can call other notebooks, but I'd love to develop stuff on Observable knowing that should the worst happen and it doesn't exist anymore, I can run it all locally on my webpage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, something like that is in the roadmap.

We've been scrambling to get things ready enough for this initial launch, but Mike managed to get the Standard Library open sourced this morning: [https://github.com/observablehq/notebook- stdlib](https://github.com/observablehq/notebook-stdlib)

One of the next pieces we'd like to open-source is the Notebook Runtime — All of the JS that you need to take a blank webpage, and host a notebook within it.

After that, there's some file format details to figure out — hopefully a notebook can just be published and consumed as a standard ES Module. But then we'll be most of the way there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I found the source for a "standard library" for this project, but nothing for the project itself. Anyone have any pointers?

<comment><USER44> That's because it's not open-source.

</comment></comment><comment> crooked-v This is cool, but I'm annoyed at yet more intentional overlapping of names in the JS ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER45> Strikes me that a markdown syntax with small extensions would serve well as a format for this. This seems to invert the default mode from text to code. Is there a reason for this?

Also, where are the notebook stored? Can I get an offline copy? Wasn't obvious from a quick look.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd love to see a notebook environment that could somehow combine Python data science tools with DOM/JavaScript interactive visualization tools like D3. Jupyter and crew do former and this does the latter. What we really want is both. Would obviously be tricky to both implement technically and to design a good experience that lets you swap between the two languages and paradigms. Like you might have run webserver behind the scenes to expose the Python produced data to the D3? Stuff like that. Sounds like an interesting challenge. Because I'm generous though, I'd like to give this idea away for free to anyone willing to execute on it. Just joking! Devil in the details. More accurately, I'd just be pumped if someone had the energy to tackle this beast. Also, I'd definitely pay for a hybrid tool like this.

</comment><comment><USER46> Really useful tool to iterate and riff on ideas.

The visualizations especially good as a feature to promote it.

im sure im not alone id love to create pretty charts and would wow a customer.. But cant justify spending the cycles to fully learn d3 etc..

</comment><comment> d--b Ah! At last!

Mike: if you're reading this: thanks a million!

<comment> d--b Btw, Tom & Jeremy: thanks too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Nice work, it looks pretty slick. You have a right to be proud of your work.

But....

IMO, the project name is a disaster.

If successful it will muddy the water on searches for RxJS (and other Rx) observables.

Please do like the Amber.js team did when they learned of a name comflict and rebrand as Ember.js. That would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's amusing that their markdown example is not reactive.

</comment><comment><USER49> so... what IS observable?

</comment><comment><USER50> I like it, but I'm not sure I have a user case for it.

</comment><comment><USER51> Sorry, I can only see "Oops, an unexpected error occurred."</comment>


Millions holed up at home as U.S. routines shift profoundly - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/b64cf00f37d8da2fad3533aa7686c53d <comment><USER2> Funny article my coworker shared about everyone being home: [https://babylonbee.com/news/nations-nerds-wake-up-in- utopia-...](https://babylonbee.com/news/nations-nerds-wake-up-in-utopia-where- everyone-stays-inside-sports-canceled-social-interaction-forbidden)

</comment><comment><USER3> My partner is a k-12 teacher who has been told to wfh. This is relatively uncharted territory. I don't envy her. She's trying to figure out how to support students in households without internet, with parents who are technologically illiterate, in households with very high risk individuals, etc. These are hard problems in a functioning society. I might get laid off this week too. I don't look forward to being cooped up inside for weeks to months. I guess I can keep trying to learn web dev to keep my mind busy, at least until we get evicted from our home.

<comment><USER4> > I don't look forward to being cooped up inside for weeks to months.

There's no need to be cooped up unless you're actually sick.

You can go for walks, runs, hikes, bike rides, do whatever outdoor activities you want as long as it's not crowded, without it being a problem.

<comment><USER5> Just so long as it doesn't involve touching public objects with your hands. Playgrounds, gyms, maybe even outdoor rock climbing are out.

<comment><USER6> Or just don't touch your face and wash your hands

<comment><USER7> This hits a core point: some rules protect you; other rules protect others from you (even if you're asymptomatic)

In Italy the rules are designed to protect others from you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yet my software company refuses to even let people do voluntary WFH. Amazing.

<comment><USER9> Assuming they didn't have a WFH policy in place before, it sounds like they're remaining level-headed while everyone else is panicking, which is respectable. Although, hopefully that won't continue to hold that line if things get bad enough. All this assuming it's not already located in one of the few areas with a high number of confirmed infected.

<comment><USER10> Once it's bad enough, it's too late. It's like putting on a seat belt after the crash.

<comment><USER9> That's a disingenuous interpretation of what I said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With these changes, I wonder how much this impacts gas purchases. If people are not going out for work, not going out to eat or shop, there has to be a massive reduction in gas purchases.

<comment><AUTHOR> We already have the biggest oil surpluses ever recorded, and it's just going to get bigger:

[https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Largest-Oil-Glut-In- Hi...](https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Largest-Oil-Glut-In-History- Could-Force-Oil-Even-Lower.html)

<comment><USER12> Oil prices seem to be about half of what they were in Jan - but gas prices don't seem to have fallen as much. Any idea why?

<comment><USER13> Gas prices can include significant taxes. I'm guessing it also takes a while for the lower prices to propagate through the system. You also have refinery bottlenecks, so even though we might have lots of crude, we don't have a glut of refined gasoline yet.

<comment><USER14> There's costs to refine (requiring lots of energy input) and to transport the gas, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "'hacker' 'news' needs their hourly reminder that people are WFHing"

</comment><comment><USER16> But not millions of kids, not here, they are running around the neighborhood screaming their lungs out unsupervised. Bringing that virus home to their parents. At night the teenagers hang out in the parking lot and drink/smoke. People just do not get it or more likely just do not care. It's one big holiday for the carefree.

You can do everything right, be responsible for yourself and family but your town is as screwed as the weakest link which are the thoughtless who do not give a darn and no-one can stop them.

<comment><USER3> Bad parents are going to be negligent regardless of the circumstances.</comment></comment>


Regarding EGLStreams Support in KWin - <AUTHOR> https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox/%3C20190220154143.GA31283%40homura.localdomain%3E <comment><USER2> For completeness, here is the reply from one of the KDE developers: [https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public- inbox/%3CCAGeFrHA7FyqR2...](https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public- inbox/%3CCAGeFrHA7FyqR24VkOgYO7tfsVEkfhCcvg6DX_jiJSm-y40hdhQ%40mail.gmail.com%3E)

(It doesn't appear in the thread because it's been forwarded)

EDIT: and here is a blog post about EGLStreams from another KDE developer (2016): [https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2016/09/to- eglstream-...](https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2016/09/to-eglstream-or- not/)

Here is a follow-up blog post from the same author (2017): [https://blog.martin- graesslin.com/blog/2017/10/plasmawayland...](https://blog.martin- graesslin.com/blog/2017/10/plasmawayland-and-nvidia-2017-edition/)

Here are some (technical) discussions on wayland-devel about EGLStreams (2016): [https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland- devel/2016-Ma...](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland- devel/2016-March/thread.html#27547)

Here are some recent IRC logs from #wayland, also discussing EGLStreams: [https://dri.freedesktop.org/~cbrill/dri- log/?channel=wayland...](https://dri.freedesktop.org/~cbrill/dri- log/?channel=wayland&highlight_names=&date=2019-02-21#t-1155)

</comment><comment><USER3> Either the technical or the political appeal is enough to reject the EGLStreams series.

There are APIs that offer the same features and are used by _every other_ Open Source driver. Just implement those.

Nvidia truly is the last vendor in the GPU space that is actively hostile to Open Source.

Don't get me wrong, the developers at NVidia that are out there contributing to projects are nice&intelligent people with the best intentions. But their corporate parent _is actively hostile_.

<comment><USER4> There are actually technical reasons GBM can't be used by nVidia.

first is that it's tied to Mesa and secondly it has performance issues with non-display outputs (e.g. VR).

<comment><USER3> GBM doesn't necessarily have to be the answer here.

Just providing an implementation of EGLStreams support for mesa could be another.

<comment><USER5> Or the allocator library, they were talking about and didn't get anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am not sure if open source developers rage against nVidia for justifiable reasons or not.

They were the first to provide actually usable GPU drivers on Linux. But then the kernel guys became upset because they couldn't see the insides of the drivers. IIRC they started the holy crusade when they introduced the tainted flag in the kernel and made it policy to ignore all bug reports from kernels with that flag set. That was designed specifically to make nVidia look like a bad actor. There have been a number of similar sleights against them from various developers and the company took the beating and has so far worked stoically around all of these hurdles that were erected.

I am not saying that they are saints, but singling out the vendor of the objectively best GPU hardware and software package in the market like that does not feel right, either. There are tons of users out there that have practically no alternative to that hardware and they are being screwed over. And they are one of the few markets in which Linux actually has a dominant share in.

Long story short: I believe that kind of ideology first thinking might do the Linux software stack in in the long run.

<comment><USER7> > They were the first to provide actually usable GPU drivers on Linux.

Indeed. They raised the bar for Linux graphics. Maybe 10-20 years ago?

And then later ATI/AMD came along. And now their driver, the only driver, is open-source.

That is, they publish not only a driver, but more importantly the driver source. As is now true for pretty much all drivers for all HW Linux supports.

The bar has clearly been raised again. And now Nvidia is the only one lagging.

I don't see anything unreasonable about asking them to contribute at the same level as everyone else.

Imagine how Linux would look today if _all_ vendors got a free pass with doing things "their way" like Nvidia does. I doubt it would be functional at all.

I'm not going to cut Nvidia any slack _today_ over what they did back in the days where everyone agreed M$ was evil and Google could do no wrong. It was a loooong time ago.

<comment><USER8> Unless you have a really old OS version, you actually don't get your driver from AMD, you get it as a part of your Linux kernel: most Linux drivers aren't managed as standalone open source software projects, they are simply merged into the kernel itself.

<comment><USER9> > you actually don't get your driver from AMD, you get it as a part of your > Linux kernel

Thankfully.

However, the open source driver that is now part of the Linux kernel did indeed come from AMD, and could not have come from anywhere else.

Your parent said AMD publishes the sources to its (only) driver. That they happen to publish it with the Linux kernel wrapped around it, through kernel.org, is also true, but not incompatible with the claim that they publish it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: best music background to work?  - <AUTHOR> For example, I am finding I prefer <i>not</i> to listen to songs I know since I would try to follow the lyrics and that would take part of my brain and distract me.What's your favourite music when you code,design or work in general? <comment><USER2> Like many people, if I'm thinking and designing I prefer to have no music. If I'm doing these things in a noisy environment I may listen to some rain recordings such as [1].

When I'm coding I mainly listen to classical music. The problem is that I need to listen to things I know very well or I'll get distracted, so I end up listening to the same compositions over and over again, to the annoyment of my wife ;-)

These days the compositions I list the most while coding are:

\- Beethoven String Quartets, for instance [2] (I really like the fugato at 5:00 ;-)

\- Mahler Symphonies, for example [3]

\- Ravel music

\- Some Monteverdi madrigals [4]

I like to use headphones, either a Sennheiser PX 200 [5] or a Sennheiser HD-280 PRO [6].

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvRv-243Cmk>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55PIXCQgEfE>

[3] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkoeH5BtLyQ>

[4] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkDyNzPUQbo>

[5] [http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-PX-200-II- Headphones/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-PX-200-II- Headphones/dp/B002VPDOHS)

[6] [http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD-280-Pro- Headphones/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD-280-Pro- Headphones/dp/B000065BPB)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.I am switching to classical music and works much better. Right now I am listening to Yo-Yo Ma and Ennio Morricone playing Moses and Marco Polo Theme. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssoQbusZ7os>. It's beautiful (when not interrupted by Spotify ads!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've tried white noise, Naturespace, Kap Slap mixes, Pop mixes, Gregorian, etc.

I've found that I am pretty productive in a cafe these days, so I started listening to tracks of cafe background noise when I work from home recently, such as "People Talking in Coffee Shop" by Finnolia Productions [1].

Might write more about this if it works well enough.

[1] iTunes affiliate link: [http://click.linksynergy.com/fs- bin/click?id=dE0y3GuqVK4&...](http://click.linksynergy.com/fs- bin/click?id=dE0y3GuqVK4&subid=&offerid=146261.1&type=10&tmpid=5573&RD_PARM1=https%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2Fus%2Falbum%2Fpeople- sound-effects-2%2Fid582685672&u1=h)

</comment><comment><USER4> I usually listen to one of the Music for Programming[1] mixes, and when I'm in the mood for more ambient music I listen to Brian Eno.

[1] <http://musicforprogramming.net/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not it. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Depends on your work. For instance, if you have a good software design a web application, you can code it with heavy metal music because listing metal music with programming is improving the velocity of coding.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. As I listen to a lot of classical music, I realize I am thinking better but also slowing down too much. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Best site I could find was created by a fellow HN follower :)

<http://www.getworkdonemusic.com/#>

I listen to it everyday and never get bored :)

</comment><comment><USER7> I usually listen to slow tempo piano jazz or rainymood.com

</comment><comment><USER8> There are a couple threads on this already.

turntable.fm's "Ambient Chillout & Trip Hop" room is usually quite good.

</comment><comment><USER9> I usually just go on 8tracks and listen to the first 'coding' or 'programming' playlist that shows up.

</comment><comment><USER10> Depends on the mood I'm in. From slow piano/classic to techno.

</comment><comment><USER11> soma.fm - Mission Control, Space station or Drone Zone

di.fm - Chillout, Minimal or Ambient

bassdrive.com (liquid dnb)</comment>


Twitter Powers of Ten (data visualization) - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/a/zjgRY

<comment><AUTHOR> The url should probably be corrected to this blog post: [http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/03/twitter-powers-of- ten.ht...](http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/03/twitter-powers-of-ten.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Best books on leadership? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Search for FM22-6. Army manual on leader development</comment>


Ask HN: Its ok if we mention in our TOS that we are not GDPR compliant? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It depends...

If you don't have (and won't acquire/process) any personal data on individual in Europe, then you're not bound by GDPR.

But if you have any personal data on at least one physical person in Europe, then you're bound to the GDPR, whatever you write in your TOS. That's what Instapaper didn't really understand (same for US's newspaper that may have subscriptions from people in Europe). GDPR is above your TOS. Your only way out would be to delete identifiable datas bound to european people.

BTW: not all datas are "personal". For example: there's no problem for advertising... only for TARGETING (based on informations bound to an individual). If the target is "big enough" not to be able to single out a specific person, then everything is fine. You can display ads following gender, age, country, city... because these categories are wide enough. You can assign a "profile-id" to anybody... but not a "user-id" (this would be "personal")</comment>


Frexit? Italeave? After watching Brexit, other European countries say no thanks - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/frexit-italeave-after-watching-brexit-other-european-countries-say-no-thanks/2019/03/29/7b6e059a-4be0-11e9-8cfc-2c5d0999c21e_story.html <comment><USER2> I hope that one of these days the world is going to just wake up from this nationalist phase with a hangover and regrets, take an aspirin, and get things back on track.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was the ultimate point of the EU's approach- to make it so unpalatable that countries with weaker economies would not dare to try.

</comment><comment><USER4> They're going to change their mind if the EU keeps going in the direction we're going.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely not. Especially not after seeing how the EU is in total control of the Brexit process, and the U.K. can't pass any deal in Parliament.

<comment><USER4> I don't think any of that will matter in the long term considering how hostile the EU is towards technology.</comment></comment></comment>


iOS 7 and Xamarin: Ready When You Are - <AUTHOR> http://blog.xamarin.com/ios-7-and-xamarin-ready-when-you-are/

<comment><USER2> Congrats! Xamarin looks ace.

Has anyone published a decent app on their FREE/Indie plan? I keep wanting to buy our small team the Business edition but it would cost tons.</comment>


Modern Fortran by Milan Curcic - <AUTHOR> https://www.manning.com/books/modern-fortran <comment><USER2> An "App" I just threw up in my mouth</comment>


Cover letter that landed me an awesome startup gig as a non-technical - <AUTHOR> http://polaske.tumblr.com/post/66892352791/my-startup-cover-letter

<comment><USER2> FYI, deleting and resubmitting links is a bannable offense on Hacker News.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx for the warning. I was unaware.</comment></comment>


Learning to Code no longer good advice - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/learning-code-yields-diminishing-returns-douglas-rushkoff <comment> dino-neil I agree with a lot of things this article says, displacing labour, short term 'money-saving' projects reducing the health of our economy etc...

But the idea that we will have 'too many' techies is absurb. At least in the UK, kids coming out of school have no idea how this IT stuff works. It's just a magical iPad to them.

The world is becoming increasingly focused on technology, and the general public has no idea how any of it _actually_ works. I'm not talking about transistors and 1's and 0's. I'm talking about databases, text editors and command lines. How are the youth of today supposed to gain exposure to this stuff, when installing a program means typing in the name and and clicking 'Get' in the App Store?

Stuff like Minecraft helps, but the desktop PC is no longer something that families tend to have lying around. My 7 year old niece can use her iPhone, but if I put her in front of a keyboard, she would be clueless.

Maybe tools will evolve, but people will still have to make the tools.

</comment><comment><USER2> Yep, general programmers are the blue collar workers of this generation.

It's important to understand the technology but just programming alone is not enough of a valuable skill to separate someone.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author lists 3 reasons (2 are essentially the same argument) why ""learn to code" is looking like bad advice."...I disagree with all of them...

> CODING CAN'T SAVE YOU

The author essentially states that coding will increasingly be outsourced and so don't bother. But this logic assumes that the size of the market is static...in fact it is not.

Literally every industry right now is already or on the verge of being dramatically changed by technology. Even traditional companies IKEA to McDonalds are turning themselves into tech companies, and all of these companies need coders. Regarding "learning code is hard"...yes...it is. But it is immensely rewarding and provides a very in demand skill set.

> TRAINING OUR ROBO-REPLACEMENTS

> HIGH-TECH UNEMPLOYMENT

I'm not disputing that automation will trigger widespread job losses but an individual is still far better to be the robo training worker than the person being replaced by a robot. If learning to code is such bad advise what alternative does he propose for the individual? Deny the fact that high tech is disrupting traditional industries?

My two cents.

</comment><comment><USER4> An immediate thought here is that learning _data_ may be better than learning code. When I was just starting out I was an "admin assistant" at various companies - I lost track of the number of poorly structured Excel spreadsheets I found that contained all of the data required, but in a format that made them utterly impossible to parse programatically.

Not that people shouldn't learn to code if they can. But learn to use Excel, and when you should turn that spreadsheet into a database. You don't need to learn a new programming language for that, just some broad concepts.

</comment><comment><USER5> Learn to create things that provide value to the world and can make you money.

Code is one of them. There are others. Carpentry, art, product design...

</comment><comment><USER6> The link sends me to the linkedin login page.</comment>


Startups: These are the people you're enriching. - <AUTHOR> http://unicornfree.com/2014/startups-these-are-the-people-youre-enriching

<comment><USER2> > Tom Perkins [...] wrote a letter about it [...] And the Wall Street Journal > published it.

Until a few years ago, Perkins was on the board of directors of Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, which owns the WSJ... Probably still a big stock holder.

Perkins retired from the board after the wiretapping scandal. See here: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/09/02/jim- bre...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/09/02/jim-breyer-joins- news-corp-board-as-tom-perkins-departs/)

So, no surprise WSJ published this $hit.</comment>


Facebook: Do not release your new app feature that listens to users - <AUTHOR> http://action.sumofus.org/a/Facebook-app-taps-phones/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand this fear mongering.

First, all apps out there have the capability to do this, once given the permission to do so. And yes, you do have to enable this feature for it to work at all, so you're in control.

Second, this feature only listens while you're posting (after you've explicitly enabled it), so it's not like it's doing this by itself while you're having super secret conversations (if it did you'd know because iOS makes the top bar flashing red while recording in the background).

Third, you should have some faith in the tech competence, morals, or at the very least legality of big companies. There are laws in place to ensure that your voice doesn't get "recorded indefinitely", and in the case of this feature, it's just finger printing the audio which means that the only data being used cannot reconstruct the original audio – only compare two pieces of audio to each other.

Lastly, if you don't trust this feature, you shouldn't trust anything else about the company either. I don't see how preventing this feature makes your life any more secure because if Facebook truly are using all your information against you, you've already given them more than enough. Not to mention that if there really was a conspiracy and they could record you without you knowing it, they'd hardly need to mask it behind this feature. If that was the case Facebook (or some other app like Skype) could just plain out record your microphone 24/7 anyway.

<comment><USER3> Yes but people are not really aware of the already present severe privacy implications Facebook has. They are suppressing or downplaying it like overweight people are pushing aside such thoughts while eating. Every now and then when a new story or feature pops up that highlights that craziness, there is an outcry and nothing happens. Same for overweight people. It is just human to set aside the reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best way to stop Facebook from releasing this feature is to stop using Facebook. The users are their customers and the most impressionable feedback you can give to Facebook is to deactivate or delete your account.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm Aryeh Selekman, the product manager on Facebook's optional audio recognition feature. I wanted to chime in here around some misunderstandings around how this feature works.

The feature is completely optional. You get to choose whether you want to turn it on or not. If you do turn it on, you can always turn it off at any time and your Facebook experience will not change.

If you do turn it on, the feature never listens to or stores your conversations. Here's what happens after you turn the feature on. The app converts the sound into an audio fingerprint on your phone. This fingerprint is sent to Facebook's servers to try and match it against our database of known music and TV fingerprints. We do not store fingerprints from your device for any amount of time. These fingerprints can never be reversed into the original audio.

You will always get to choose whether you want to post about what you're listening to or watching. Facebook will never automatically post about what you're listening to.

In turn, if we don't find a match, we log that we failed. We don't store the fingerprint.

I hope this clears up a lot of common questions around the feature.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's a cool idea, your phone listening to the world around it and reacting to it. Technology like this is probably inevitable. Someday people might even ask their phone to play back something from awhile ago, or to give them a transcript of a conversation.

<comment><USER7> >As production techniques for hard drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines improve, cost of access has dropped significantly, leading to increased use of these substances in children. Technological progress is inevitable, so we might as well embrace it and accept the fact that children will be using hard drugs from now on.

Of course, that's an extreme example of the argument that has been used on HN a lot lately in favor of data collection, but it still gets the point across. Just because there's an industry push towards something doesn't mean that it's right.

<comment><USER8> Yeah except one is supposed to make your life better and the other destroys your life.

This is not an extreme example. This is (I hope, for your sake) a joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if facebook plans to start tagging people's voices as well, so you can instantly tag people in photos via voice recognition.

Although i shouldn't be worried, this campaign will definitely work... /s

</comment><comment><USER10> Do people think this will actually work? Isn't facebook generally already disliked by most, but used by all because everyone else uses it? What's going to happen if they put this in there? People will continue to not like it but use it anyway

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to- sh...](http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/05/a-new-optional-way-to-share-and- discover-music-tv-and-movies/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I uninstalled the facebook app from my phone last week. It works just fine in the phone's browser.

</comment><comment><USER13> Have you ever read the Whatsapp permissions ?</comment>