Real-Life Massive Multi-Player Spy Game - <AUTHOR> http://labs.blue74.com/ <comment><USER3> Promoting a game like this would be an interesting way for China, Russia, NastyCorp, etc. (insert bad guy) to cultivate a network of HUMINT sources within the U.S. for low priority work. Create and run it as a game until you've got someone who lives near that scientist you want to keep tabs on:

"Welcome operative. Your neighbor at 2201 Main is also playing, and is your next target. To earn points, select from the missions below:

(500 points) For each day of the week of 2/24, call your handler at 212-555-1212 [twilio number] and report the time that the target returns home from work.

(1000 points) Your target has left an important clue in his trash. Rifle through his trash midday to find the clue. You will have to determine what it is. When you've found it, mail it to 2222 Anystreet."

<comment><USER4> Nice! Crowdsourcing national intelligence, now there's a way to reduce the deficit. ;)

<comment><USER5> Plus, you are _charging_ them to collect the intelligence for you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess my concern might be the potential for actual crime being unknowingly committed by game partakers.

As a simple example, I could imagine a simple "courier mission" which uses a player to pickup and to deliver a package. If the mission is to covertly deliver the package without disturbing the contents, who knows what those contents might be (ie drugs, illegal content).

Another example might be a reconnaissance mission where you have to follow and observe (presumably) another player. Of course such a mission could be abused as well, perhaps by making the subject someone that isn't actually a player. Suddenly you've gone from playing a game to stalking an unwitting individual.

I'm actually quite intrigued by the game idea--personally I'd like to submit my $5 and play but I'm having trouble ignoring my (perhaps overactive) imagination.

<comment><USER7> This is quite similar to the setup in Daniel Suarez's novel, but with updated tech.

<comment><USER8> Hah, yes, the first thing I thought of was the Daemon was asking me to join in.

<comment><USER9> No offense to captaincrunch, but I think the Daemon would have a better graphics design team.

Then again, maybe that's mission #2.

<comment><USER10> I don't think real spies have very good graphic design either. Maybe European spies at least use Helvetica instead of Courier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Probably needs to be mentioned here. The guy running this game, HN user captaincrunch, isn't the "John Draper" captaincrunch most of us are familiar with.

It's an interesting idea, though. I hope HN captaincrunch keeps us updated on his successes and challenges.

I played in a game like this back in high school (late 80s). It involved at least a couple hundred students and had everyone from chess nerds to football players involved. It was an insane fun time. Couldn't get away with what we did, these days, though (think paintball "assassination" during social studies).

<comment><USER12> I remember this "assassination tag" game from the late 80s also. It was played with squirt guns in my hometown. Everyone drew names. The name you drew was your target. When you made a "kill", the person who was eliminated gave you the name they'd drawn and that person was your next target. The game proceeded until only one person remained.

It turned out to be considerably more dangerous than expected. Entertech motorized squirt guns were popular at the time. They were made of all black plastic and looked very much like real automatic submachine pistols from a distance. Players in the game liked them because they could fire a nearly continuous stream of water and they had good range. Unfortunately, because they looked so realistic, misunderstandings occasionally happened and a player of the game could find themselves staring down the barrel of real policeman's very real loaded weapon.

<comment><USER11> This is the game. Though all kinds of implements were used, up to and including paintball guns. Luckily, we never had an run-ins with the police. It was very, very fun because you didn't know who to suspect. Everyone was involved, and walking/biking to work was an interesting journey of paranoia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Intriguing, but with no way to gauge what's minimally required to participate I'm finding it difficult to commit...even if it is cheap. Bear in mind that I'd say the same thing even if it were free. I don't know what to expect, or to what I'm potentially exposing my family.

Don't take this as so much a criticism. The lack of specifics certainly adds to the intrigue, but I think it limits your audience exclusively to young singles as a result. It would certainly benefit me if you provided a few more breadcrumbs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have a hobby or a skill set that would benefit an organization like this? Do you have 30 minutes to spare in a week?

<comment><USER14> Does this organization serve the interests of mankind, art, science and enlightenment generally? Does it serve the interests of some elite power group? Does it directly or indirectly serve the interests of death and war? I won't work for anybody; I have to sleep at night. I wouldn't serve communist China, a known entity, for a million dollars a day. And for damn sure I won't serve an unknown entity for free.

<comment><USER15> Is the game hackable? I figure it'll be worth $5 to see if I can have someone execute a mission to "remove nanobot surveillance drones from the surface of my transport using a mild detergent and slightly pressurized water."

<comment><AUTHOR> Deploying agents in your area now, I wasn't sure your transport was a threat until now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Inspired by 'SPOOKS' from Charlie Stross' 'Halting State'?

<comment><USER17> The location for the underground office of the game company in "Halting State":

[http://www.secretscotland.org.uk/index.php/Secrets/BarntonQu...](http://www.secretscotland.org.uk/index.php/Secrets/BarntonQuarry)

[Edit: This bunker is unlikely to be used as office space any time soon as it is rather badly contaminated with asbestos]

<comment><USER16> I keep meaning to go and have a look (I'm local, although trapped in Fife lately). Not that there'd be much to see, really.

<comment><USER17> The place has a grim fascination for me as somewhere that was obviously a planned ground-zero for a Soviet nuke - probably a ground burst.

(NB I live between central Edinburgh and Corstorphine Hill).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If this was posted anywhere else I'd assume it was a pyramid scheme chain letter.

<comment><USER19> Just because it is posted here, how do you know it's not? The poster might have been duped himself.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only assurance I can give to you, that this is my creation, and like all things, you will be risking your $5.00. This may not be for everyone, but if it does sound interesting, try it.

<comment><USER19> Alright, based on your previous karma, I am willing to try this out. My $5 is yours :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It sounds familiar. I'm sure there was an attempt at a subscription based "Real Life Spy Game" several years ago (>10 ?) already. You would receive phone calls from strangers, mysterious emails, have to check website links, and such.

It wasn't a success as far as I remember, but it was definitely ahead of the times, and also "single player" only . A massively multiplayer game based on the same concept has definitely more potential...

<comment><USER21> As mentioned above, there was Majestic, which came out about 10 years ago. It was sort of an X-Files conspiracy type thing. I played for a while because I was interested in the tech. You would get calls on any phone you registered, faxes of documents, emails, etc... there was even an alternate web universe where you would search for information and they would inject results for their sites via a plugin in the browser (if I remember the tech correctly). I stopped playing right around 9/11. For me, it just seemed awfully silly to be getting emails about fake "threats" when it seemed like there were some real ones out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm pretty certain that this was inspired by Neurocam. For a thoroughly entertaining read -- which raises more questions than it answers -- I recommend an article from 2004: [http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/12/17/1102787276356.h...](http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/12/17/1102787276356.html)

(neurocam is not a psychology experiment.)

<comment><USER23> Agree. I thought the exact same thing when I read the article. And then proceeded to be voted down in the comments for posting about it. It's a conspiracy! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Depending on the missions this may get you on the real "watch list". Right now taking pictures of rail, buildings, monuments, etc can get you flagged by the DHS. I'm going to keep my spy activities in the virtual world.

<comment><AUTHOR> All activities are optional, and at the discretion of the agent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I had a lot of fun playing "Stop The International" - an ARG developed for the movie The International. We were sent through a bunch of missions in Central Park and had to find leads, solve puzzles and then obtain a hidden stash (which had a CD with content, a bunch of foreign cash and a bunch of papers). The three of us that attended split the cash, and I still have the two-dollar bill with a big red sticker saying "This is blood money", as well as the CD of "classified" documents. I think I might have to join in on this game...

Here is a recap video of our NY mission (with pictures of me included that were taken by their "spy") : <http://www.stoptheinternational.com/recapvid.aspx?id=3>

And here is a recap I posted right after our little outing: [http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=27014&...](http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=27014&start=100)

And the files from the CD:

[http://www.trendinteractive.com/stoptheinternational/NYCX-0....](http://www.trendinteractive.com/stoptheinternational/NYCX-0.mp3)

[http://www.trendinteractive.com/stoptheinternational/NYCX-1....](http://www.trendinteractive.com/stoptheinternational/NYCX-1.eml)

[http://www.trendinteractive.com/stoptheinternational/NYCX-2....](http://www.trendinteractive.com/stoptheinternational/NYCX-2.jpg)

[http://www.trendinteractive.com/stoptheinternational/NYCX-3....](http://www.trendinteractive.com/stoptheinternational/NYCX-3.jpg)

[http://www.trendinteractive.com/stoptheinternational/NYCX-4....](http://www.trendinteractive.com/stoptheinternational/NYCX-4.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER26> I just might have to hop into this. The last ARG I played was a decade ago, and few premises since then have excited me as much as this one.

Unlike a few other commenters, I'm not particularly worried about being a party to real-life crime. It's in keeping with both common sense and the watch-your-back nature of the spy game to perform a little due diligence on each mission. Plus there's a reasonable paper trail in the event of something going wrong (PayPal, HN account, captaincrunch's internal security measures?).

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some interesting outcomes revolving around factions and the command chain. Whether trust is intentionally broken (i.e. by design of the mission coordinator) or whether mistrust arises spontaneously, there's great potential for each mission to be merely a pretense for gathering intel on your teammates or superiors... then using that knowledge to manipulate others to your ends. This may end up testing the game's operators more than the players in the end!

<comment><USER9> > Plus there's a reasonable paper trail in the event of something going wrong

How would that help you if you're transporting a suitcase of heroin across the city?

"No, look, I _paid_ to transport this heroin! I mean, I didn't know it was heroin! It was all anonymous, to, uh... well... can I have a lawyer?"

<comment><USER26> You're suggesting that a criminal would put valuable illegal merchandise in the hands of a stranger and trust that he'll carry out nefarious schemes for a reward valued less than a Foursquare badge? Interesting.

The paper trail doesn't help after the fact, naturally -- it's merely a passable indicator that I'm not secretly signing my life to the Mafia up front.

<comment><USER9> Well, I guess it depends on what you're transporting. Criminals would probably not use this to transport anything of value - the risk of loss is too great. But if instead of heroin, the box contained explosives wired to an alarm clock - the value of the container is now much cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I had this idea several years ago. What stopped me going forward was a feeling I couldn't make the game spy-like enough to be as fun as I'd like. There are practical limitations to the real world vs. virtual world as some comments already point out -- potential legality/abuse issues etc. Although I thought I could push some of those bounds as much as possible I still couldn't envision how to keep gameplay new and interesting.

I'm glad to see this concept going forward! I would be in, except I don't know how interesting it could be considering the practical limitations as I saw them. From your description I imagine something like: Agent A hides Object along a Mountain Trail where Agent B must find and recover it. That does sound like it could be a fun activity to get fresh air and exercise, but would get old pretty quick in terms of fun factor for a real spy-like experience. I'm pretty sure there would be more in store for the game than that, but how much more is the question...

</comment><comment><USER28> How much of the fun of this game is dependent on geographical location? Would it be worth playing at all in small towns/cities? Similarly, how would having friends you see every day playing affect it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've had several groups of people sign-up that wanted to be grouped, on the same token, I've had just as many sign-up to play against each other.

The game has several aspects to it, some which incorporate short distance interactions, and some interactions that happen over several weeks, exchanging hands several times (due to longer distances).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting, for $5 I'm in. Why not? Even if this is dare I say malicious, I'm not worried too much. Is this going to be coordinated through email, snail mail, or what? I just realized that the shipping address on my PayPal information was not updated to my current address, as I had just moved recently. That old address no longer holds my being. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> First contact is through mail, send your updated address to firstname.lastname@example.com, I'll update it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This reminds me of Electronic Arts Majestic game -- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_(video_game)> \-- an alternate reality game. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game>

<comment><USER25> Sadly Majestic just wasn't run well and in the end was a complete failure. If you want to see tons of Alternate Reality Games currently in action or just starting check out <http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/>

The big problem with ARGs are that most of them die out, sometimes without a good resolution - you always hope the next one will be better than the last.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The season 2 finale of Castle used an idea similar to this, only with an excursion-style agency where people were given elaborate missions, equipment, etc., for a hefty fee.

</comment><comment><USER32> Will 1000 players be enough? I feel like you'll hit the limit by this time next week -- if not tomorrow (I signed up).

I understand that 1000 players will be a lot for you to handle, but that being said, if this thing seriously catches on, you'd be completely justified in charging $1 per month recurring, and I would definitely pay it for the increased density of spies in my area.

<comment><AUTHOR> Removed the limit, as you're right - it will be more fun, with increased density of spies. I'll come up with a way to handle the load :D

<comment><USER16> Automation can help with routine things, and in areas where you have high density you can effectively have spies create missions for other spies: one person's mission is to take a picture and deliver it with a note for the next person, the note tells them their next mission, and so on.

For added fun, check things like Twilio and their telephony APIs. Phone calls and text messages can add a layer of realism.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have an asterisk system up, with several numbers via Vitelity. It could get interesting... ;)

<comment><USER16> The holy grail, as seen in Halting State, is to procedurally generate all the missions, so you get something like:

SMS text to player 1: Go to place X at midday, write code 12345 on the ground in chalk.

SMS text to player 2: Go to place X at midday + 10 minutes, reply by SMS with the code you find.

If you have sufficient density of spies, arranging that kind of interaction should be fairly easy. On the other hand, everyone that doesn't live in a large city with an active population in the game is going to have a more abstract experience - no finding secret messages other people have left!

<comment><USER9> One way to get around that is to find live online webcams - traffic cams, for instance, with a good enough resolution - and get the spies to leave something visible in front of them. Player 2 then just has to locate the area on the web, and view it through the cam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> PayPal will freeze their account in 5... 4... 3...

<comment><AUTHOR> mission #1: assess and secure paypal funds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> There are a bunch of things you can do for $5: <http://www.fiverr.com/>

HN is a good place for finding enthusiasts. I am definitely intrigued, but I'll have to pass unless I can bound some sort of output value. This is especially problematic as it is a spy game, and by nature, secretive so you'll need an even bigger effort to sell. To gauge any sort of confidence, I work with whatever information I have:

1\. Service's description

2\. captaincrunch's karma, previous posts and his blog

3\. Post address (maybe even street view if I want to be presumptuous)

EDIT: I noticed the post address was removed from the description.

Just in terms of opportunity cost, there is too much uncertainty to commit and I'll let my $5 accrue some interest or buy something else.

<comment> DanI-S 'Cause nobody ever sold nothing based on mystery and exclusivity...

<comment><USER34> No one ever sold anything to me (and maybe others) with mystery and exclusivity _alone_ without any word-of-mouth or any feedback/context. The value in exclusivity comes from associated prestige. The value in mystery comes from curiosity or expectations of the potential of the service. Prestige or exclusivity isn't the point of the service (it is probably done for thematic reasons), so I don't care about that, but I'd like more expectations of what the mystery entails. I do not think this is too unreasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> To go even more Hollywood, some friends and I sat around the student dining table many years back and brainstormed ways of doing a laser gallery shooting game (I don't know what they're called internationally - for UK brand names think Quasar or Laserquest) that could be worn discreetly in public so you could play around your local town centre, shopping mall, garage, wherever you happened to be. And probably get hassled by security for running through crowds and making anything like shooting gestures, but it'd be fun :-)

</comment><comment><USER36> Is it worth the money for non-north-american players? (i.e. Israel)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is a global game, and I have had several sign-ups from Israel today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This looks like fun. Sucks that you have to have a Paypal account. What about international players - do they get mail delivery also?

<comment><AUTHOR> Paypal is preferred, but not necessary, there is an address where you can send a $5.00 check/money order on the website.

Also: If there is a postal outlet in your area, the game exists.

<comment><USER37> Converting South African Rand into (5) US dollars and sending it to an American postal account (hoping it doesn't get stolen in the process) is unfortunately not worth the while.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps you could suggest a payment method, and we could implement it. We've had a good amount of people sign-up from SA today.

<comment><USER9> Maybe you'd be willing to accept the foreign currency, and exchange it on your end?

Or, hell. $5 isn't that much - you could actually incorporate the physical foreign currency into the game.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can send a check in your own currency, I can exchange it here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> By the way, it's "involved" not "envolved".

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder what the best webpage idea is to get people to send me $5 for nothing or very little in return.

</comment><comment><USER40> Obligatory XKCD: <http://www.xkcd.com/842/>

</comment><comment><USER41> I had this idea - rather, an idea for something very similar to this - <USER2> after the first iPhone came out a few years ago. Never did anything with it. Should have. Let this be your daily reminder to execute on your good ideas!

Also, I'm totally in.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm willing to take the bet for 5 bucks. Signed up, let the gaming begin! :)

</comment><comment><USER43> I really like this idea, sounds like it could be a lot of fun. $5 is yours.

</comment><comment><USER44> reminds me of one of the plot points in Charles Stross's "Halting State"

</comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of Gotcha!

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089222/>

</comment><comment><USER46> IIW (International Intelligence Agency)....? Bad start, BIG turn off.

</comment><comment><USER47> Have any other australians signed up for this yet??

<comment><AUTHOR> I am seeing about 50 people in Australia in the DB now.

<comment><USER47> excellent..I'll get some ppls together and we'll be in, looks hoopsnakin dude :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looking forward!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> a reasonable margin + font would go a long way towards getting me to actually read the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> I added the margin, just couldn't change the font.. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> 5$ for an experiment. Paying up :)

</comment><comment><USER50> It says IIW at the top, not IIA.

</comment><comment><USER23> neuro___...</comment>


San Francisco, Silicon Valley rents plunge amid downturn - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/San-Francisco-Silicon-Valley-rents-saw-sharp-15307118.php <comment><USER3> This article seems to be based on only a few transactions, as not a lot of people are actually moving right now.

I manage a couple of properties in the Bay Area, so I keep a close eye on these things. What I'm seeing is not a drop in rents, but an increase in $0 deposits and many weeks of free rent upon move in (sometimes 6+ weeks).

Landlords are very reluctant to lower rents, because with the statewide rent control that limits increases to 5% a year, we're incentivized to keep the rents high and give months of free rent, just so our base rate doesn't drop.

<comment><USER4> > Landlords are very reluctant to lower rents, because with the statewide rent > control that limits increases to 5% a year, we're incentivized to keep the > rents high and give months of free rent, just so our base rate doesn't drop.

How is it that Mission Bay apartments are not subject to these rent control regulations if this is state wide? Asking because when I lived in Mission Bay, UDR properties each year tried increasing my rent much higher than this.

<comment><USER5> Statewide rent control in California wasn't enacted until January 1, 2020 (with a retroactive period of several months I believe).

So, if you rented before Jan 1, and your rental unit was built after 1979, it wasn't covered by any rent control. Landlords could raise rent as much as they wanted on those types of units.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for clarifying, I wasn't aware this is a recent change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the reality will set in soon on this once the CARES bonus UI is removed (and if it is not replaced) and the PPP loans run out. Right now everyone I know in real estate is still convinced it was just a minor blip and love to cite cherry picked stats about how a recovery is already under way.

Coincidently I have been seeing a lot of fully furnished units coming on the market which I assume were former Airbnbs.

<comment><USER7> > Coincidently I have been seeing a lot of fully furnished units coming on the > market which I assume were former Airbnbs.

I've been noticing this as well (I can still find some of them on Airbnb actually).

I'm currently in the market for a house, but wondering if waiting a year might be a wise move..

<comment><USER8> If you're staying in the same market and you already own, then it doesn't matter much. What matters more is that your other investments are relatively outperforming the house (likely already true because of the Fed's money printer).

If you don't already own, waiting for a drop might be wise, but if you're going to sell stock to do it, you might wanna do it now. I'm looking at trading up to a new place right now and that's my plan.

<comment><USER9> Doesn't "the Fed's money printer" inflate housing just as much as other assets?

<comment><USER10> With a lag, and it really depends on the area and how many people benefit from money printing. If the scheme is QE like in europe, the housing prices will not gain as much as the market prices in low to middle-class area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a former NYer, I'm hearing stories from friends who got out when offices closed. Many relocated back to their parent's homes (mostly to suburbs in Indianapolis, Cleveland, or NJ) or to family vacation homes (in Maine, Poconos, or Florida).

Selfishly, I hope these friends thrive in these new locales, whether that's through remote work or finding new opportunities. I hope they get out of their inflated NYC rents and bring new energy and ideas outside of the city. SF and NYC have had a chokehold on tech and other prosperous industries for way too long and this had ramifications nationally and in the cities themselves.

<comment><USER12> > Selfishly

Not to pick on you cause I agree, but I feel like this is a problem with a lot of analysis of this phenomenon. A lot of people really really really hope this happens and the growth of megacities reverses. WFH/Remote job growth is the mechanism they are counting on because outside the cities there is so little economic dynamism, outside of a few firms in a few locations that are almost the only game in town.

At the end of the day, when this is all over, companies are going to want to have their employees in the office, especially as tech jobs become more and more commoditized. My guess is in five years you're gonna have superstars that built insane resumes the past 15 years living wherever they want but the vast majority of tech jobs will remain in tech hubs.

<comment><USER11> It's funny you bring up remote work. Despite working from home myself, I believe remote working as a trend can contribute to displacement and inequality.

Any job can be enhanced with additional tech literacy, but I don't believe we will achieve a world where the majority of work is telecommutable. Spending my salary enriches the local economy a little bit, but I am taking advantage of a lower cost of living without making much of a major investment. In my current arrangement, I'm not going to rent office space, hire an intern, work with local businesses, or do other actions expected of a small business.

In my "selfish" prediction, some of those employees are caught in a dilemma when lockdown orders are lifted. Spoiled by the potential of life outside of the megacities, they start businesses in their new locales. And yes, maybe these small businesses will lease offices, warehouses, or plants locally. Maybe then we'll see nimble companies competing against the SF/NYC incumbents.

Optimistically speaking, we may even greater diversity in tech, as locals join the workforce and industries that were suffocated by SF/NYC costs find space to grow. In particular, I'm always perplexed that agritech, manufacturing, design, and entertainment feel the need to stay SF or NYC-based.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If remote work becomes permanent for a lot of people and/or social distancing lasts a long time, I would expect a number of changes to happen:

\- Homes with more bedrooms will become significantly more attractive because people will want home offices (maybe one for each spouse!)

\- Homes with outdoor space will become more attractive

\- Quiet homes without noise from neighbors or the surrounding area will become more attractive

\- Proximity to public transit, freeways, and downtown areas will become less attractive as the drawbacks will exceed the benefits for most people

All of this will tend to push buyers toward large suburban homes rather than apartments or condos. In the long term, I expect rents and sale prices for apartments and condos will drop for those reasons.

House prices might even go up, relatively speaking, compared to prices for apartments and condos.

What we are seeing right now is not that -- right now, what we are seeing is people unable to pay rent and landlords desperate for paying tenants.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure remote work will drive much of that. Most families were already moving out of the cities into the suburbs. And young people want to be in the city for the social aspects and cultural aspects, and proximity to others.

I think what we might see is an increase in demand for bigger units _in the city_ as a young single person may want a two bedroom place, one for their home office and one for sleeping, but still want to be in the city to be near all the cultural and social amenities.

And we'll also see increased demand for even bigger suburban homes as each spouse needs their own home office.

So I think we'll see increased demand for larger homes in both the city and the suburbs.

<comment><USER13> I don't think very many of the social and cultural amenities of big cities will come back anytime soon.

I think we are in for at least a year of social distancing and heavy restrictions on restaurants, bars, concert venues, sports arenas, etc. A lot of things that were previously considered amenities will now seem dangerous, such as public transit.

<comment><USER3> In the short term yes. In the long term I think more remote work will stick around as the amenities return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The rental market is losing it legs in SF for sure, though landlords are going to try and prop up their values however they can. Like a sibling comment said, giving free months rather than actually adjusting the rate. The funny thing is, they price these free months into the rental rate so it looks cheaper than it is.

Here's some anecdata from my little corner of SF. I know THREE separate homes trying to fill rooms, and it's going awfully. The rent is too high, and there aren't enough people looking for rooms.

My old luxury apartment building has cut rents by around $500 for a two bedroom, about 10% (though I think they're doing it by way of free months).

The luxury building down the street, Duboce, is also offering 2 bedrooms at about $500 off peak. They're also listing their rooms on craigslist.

I rent a flat with two others in San Francisco. They're both leaving the city, and rather than find another apartment, I'm going to leave temporarily too. Funny, the landlord could have just given us a reduction and sign a new lease. Unfortunately, he'll now have to contest for a dwindling pool of applicants or let the place sit empty.

</comment><comment><USER15> My community has dropped prices 10% and is offering 1 month free (4 year old complex in north san jose). However they are not offering this to current renters whose renewals are coming up. They offered me a 0% increase and when I cited that the 5 other identical apartments are currently available for essentially 20% off (10% discount over 12 months plus one month free), they began been pushing the narrative that the rent will increase by the end of June and that I should sign now before they change the offer. So now its a waiting game.

<comment><USER3> You're actually in a pretty strong position. Normally to leave a lease you need to give notice, usually 30 days. But there is one time you don't have to do that -- when the lease ends.

If you lease ends on July 1, you can turn in your keys on June 30 and walk away. Your landlord knows this.

Rents won't go back up in July. Even if the economy recovers 100% in the next two weeks, most tech employers in the area are doing WFH until at least the fall if not next year or forever.

If your lease ends on July 1, start looking for a new place now, but don't sign anything. As soon as you find something tell your current landlord that you are about to sign a new lease but you'd much rather not go through the hassle of moving. If they say yes, great, and if they say no, at least you have a new place lined up.

Just make sure you take lots of pictures when you move out because your landlord sounds like the type that will nickel-and-dime you on your deposit.

<comment><USER16> >Normally to leave a lease you need to give notice, usually 30 days. But there is one time you don't have to do that -- when the lease ends.

Every lease I've ever signed required 30 days notice from either party to end the lease when the lease term ends, otherwise it proceeds on a month to month basis with no further action required.

Edit: Technically not required in California but confirmed that it was in fact required for a previous state I lived in.

<comment><USER17> This is not really an option in California in my experience. There is no automatic month-to-month conversion, and it's pretty rare as far as I can tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Rents for a one-bedroom apartment dropped most in the cities richest in high- paying tech jobs, falling 9.4% in San Francisco compared with May of 2019. In Mountain View, home to Google, rents fell 15.9% year over year, while in Apple's hometown of Cupertino rents dipped 14.3%, according to the rental search engine Zumper. In San Bruno, where YouTube has its offices, rents tumbled 14.9%."

<comment><USER19> This really doesn't match my personal experience at all. I live in Mountain View (work at G) and pay 2k for a 1 bedroom (non luxury).

Lived here 3 years and pretty happy with it but I checked Craigslist and padmapper last week for some of these supposed 15% rent discounts and found rent to be pretty much the same as pre pandemic.

This is anecdata and I'm using human memory to compare rates per location/amenities but I think I would be noticing even 10% decreases... and I'm just

<comment><USER20> The 15% drop is in actually signed renewals. The listings you're seeing are the ones that haven't yet caught up with the new market realities (rents seem to be somewhat sticky). These listings are aspirational, and aren't being signed at these levels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This also might open many landlords eyes to how ugly their situations can get when they want to remove a tenant in Oakland/SF/Berkeley even if a tenant stops paying rent. I have two friends who are currently refusing to leave in- law units and it is quickly getting bad for their landlords ($30k deal to get one of them to leave). That said I totally welcome this, part of the reason why our communities suck in the bay area is because everyone is renting. Owners have a vested interest in creating a nice place to live while landlords and renters have less reasons to care.

<comment><USER22> In Germany about half the population is renting. That in itself doesn't mean they're not fostering a community. The difference of course is, that in Germany there are very stringent renter protections, so tenants do usually plan to stay for long times (a good share for a lifetime).

<comment><USER23> We have similar pro-tenant protections in the Bay Area to Germany.

<comment><USER24> The German housing laws are protective with rent spikes.

<comment><USER23> California now has statewide rent control. San Francisco has had it for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Although I might benefit from this, but I have to point out that this is supposed to be the intern season, and there were always a surge in rent during this season in the past.

That is not happening this year. So comparing to last year, you are seeing a larger drop, but it will left to be seen whether the scale of this drop is temporary or long-term.

That said, the Bay Area landlords have benefited from the bloom for a decade, they are losing anything significantly, not yet.

<comment><USER26> Bay Area and indeed, California landlords have increased rent at every opportunity for more than thirty years; multiple studies show that rent in the 1970s was more like ten percent of a working income, that has changed to thirty percent+ across the entire State of California (on the other hand, San Francisco itself has always been pricey, at every stage for a hundred+ years).

Isnt it somthing that the last thirty years is exactly when millions of US adults had turned thirty+. The cost structure of a young adult in the last thirty years has been nothing like the previous thirty. Building new housing (and rental units) has been substantially restricted across generations in California, but it got particularly noxious with the six-figure twenty somethings taking the rentals, while the other ninety-eight percent of the population just ate the cost increases at every turn. These are economic facts and are documented extensively at the Terner Center at UC Berkeley among other places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Looks like people are really leaving the Bay Area. you don't see 10-15% price drops in a year without corresponding drop in demand.

<comment><USER28> As an anecdote, I left the Bay Area (and California (and the USA)) in January.

Amongst my cohorts/closest friends I know in the Bay Area: \- one moved to Colorado a year ago. \- another moved to Berkeley from SF, to buy a house. \- several moved to New York City and Seattle. \- a few moved back to Canada.

In my time in the Bay Area, it always seemed like there was constant migration: some folks leaving, some folks just arriving. Usually more of the latter.

Due to the current pandemic, I'd definitely guess that the rate of folks leaving hasn't changed significantly (compounded with layoffs, etc.) but the rate of folks arriving certainly has! No interns are flying out, no recent grads are moving in.

If things "return to normal" then I'd expect this to revert, but those people aren't just milling about waiting for the gates to open. They're finding other opportunities, and when the dust settles, the opportunities in the Bay Area aren't going to be the highly competitive opportunities they once were.

<comment><USER20> Don't underestimate how many extra people are now leaving because they are working from home for the indefinite future and can get a lot more for their money (and lower SALT) elsewhere.

I'm in NYC and we are strongly considering moving out when our lease expires in July. Google NYC isn't reopening at least through the end of the year so it doesn't make sense to continue paying a lot to live in a one bedroom apartment that is sub-optimal for multiple people to work from, especially while most of the typical amenities of city life are closed. The main reason I lived here was for a short commute and that's irrelevant now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Keep in mind this a thinly traded market, during the pandemic even more so. We're talking about dozens of transactions here.

<comment><USER30> At the same time, you have to also keep in mind that apartments in the Bay Area frequently get rented after a single, 15 minute open house, set at the convenience of the property owner or leasing agent. This does not seem to be happening right now, based on how my & my girlfriend's apartment search has been going. We've also been seeing insane move-in incentives, like 2 months free rent, which I've never seen before. I'd love to see if there was more data about it, but my experience is leading me to believe the price drops are real (not statistical aberrations due to a small sample size), and likely caused by the immense negative demand shock we've been experiencing in the economy at large.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> My office has announced WFH through the end of 2020, with permission to work from anywhere and no changes to compensation during that time. I would estimate 1/3 of people have moved out of the Bay Area as a result - <USER2> moving back home to stay with family or friends. Saving 6 months of Bay Area rent is a big deal.

The folks who haven't moved out of the Bay Area have mostly moved to the distant exurbs, expecting (probably correctly) that even if we do "return to the office" in 2021 they'll likely be able to continue to WFH 2-3 days a week, thus the commute won't be as painful as it would otherwise be.

</comment><comment><USER32> > The 9.2% drop in the average one-bedroom San Francisco rent of $3,360 still > leaves it unaffordable for the vast majority of city residents.

Yeah, that's not much of a drop.

<comment><USER33> For a 1-bed that's actually $500-700 cheaper than it is in my area (Kendall Sq. in Cambridge).

<comment><USER34> That's absurd, I'm in running distance from Kendall and my rent is <$1k.

<comment><USER33> ....how?

<comment><USER34> Roommates, I guess? Also, for clarity, Kendall is 1.7 mi away from me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I live in the greater Boston area and recently all suburbian homes I've seen sold for more than the asking price. I'm not following rentals so cannot tell. I don't think prices gonna drop any time soon. I hope I'm wrong.

Boston has tech but smaller than SF. It's big on pharma, hospitals, and universities. Such industries cannot switch to fully remote so change here might not be as drastic as in other places.

<comment><USER36> Houses are still selling for over asking in the Bay Area as well, although I did see an article saying 2019 prices were down 1.9% over 2018. Rentals are a different market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Rents IN SF other than downtown actually seem stable or marginally lower except for downtown and SOMA coz people are running away from downtown due to homelessness among other issues.

Also colleges are closed so when colleges open in Aug/ Sept, many students will be back who left this year due to the COVID crisis raising the demand. This summer the demand is lower than ever due to COVID and homelessness.

</comment><comment><USER38> I expect in the near future, the urban rents in general will fall. Between COVID and rioting, living in a dense city just lost a lost of luster.

<comment><USER39> You overestimate our cultural attention span :)

Anyway, even with COVID + Rioting, I'd much rather live in a big city than in the countryside.

<comment><USER40> Long term, sure. But there's little point in paying $$$ for a tiny place when everything is closed due to Covid. Why not decamp for the suburbs/parent's house for a year and save 20-30k?

<comment><USER39> I think this one's definitely happening.

The cost of renewing your lease and staying in the bay area vs simply moving out for the year to your parents' house / LCOL area where if it really comes down to it, you can simply break your lease much easier is an easy trade-off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Anyone seeing a similar dip in the NYC metropolitan area? I've been casually watching rents and not seeing much of a dip. It seems that there are less units available as well, so perhaps that is counterbalancing a decrease in demand.

<comment><USER42> Streeteasy data [0] shows a drop in listings but no fall in asking rents. However there has been a sharp rise in concessions - i.e. free month upon new lease signing. My guess is landlords are currently keeping apartments off the market rather lock in lower rents, and when they do need to move a unit they use concessions since they look better from an accounting basis. I think eventually we will see a fall in gross rents but it may take longer than expected.

[0] - [https://streeteasy.com/blog/data- dashboard](https://streeteasy.com/blog/data-dashboard)

<comment><USER41> Now that I think about it, you are right about there being more concessions. You are seeing a lot of "2-3 months free" listings now.

<comment><USER43> Even before the pandemic it felt like 50% of places on Streeteasy had been listed with net effective rents in recent years... the current situation is probably just accelerating a trend that was already well underway.

Doesn't mean I'm not kicking myself for signing a 2-year lease on a place last fall, though. I love my apartment, I've been here 2 years already, and its a fair price, but I'm basically 8 months into a 24 month lease and could probably save almost 10k over the next 16 months if I had the option of breaking the lease and moving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> About time. When I worked there in the mid-90's I thought it was double what it was worth. That would be dirt cheap today.

</comment><comment><USER45> Interesting news. I've heard that real estate prices haven't budged much and with the stock market remaining relatively strong, I wonder if we will see a corresponding rebound in rent sometime soon.

<comment><USER46> The demand drivers of students and tech workers is gone, and the street conditions are abysmal.

The volume of anyone else obsessed with 'networking' is much lower.

<comment><USER47> well said

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is happening a bit in Seattle too. I was able to negotiate a _decrease_ in rent after several years of 9% increases. 10% is the max allowed increase in Seattle if I understand the rules correctly.

</comment><comment><USER49> Weirdly, I put my place up for rent in South Bay in April and got 10 applications in 5 days without any tours. So there is still underlying demand in the market

<comment><USER3> Same. Put up my place in Berkeley on April 28th, had it rented by May 1. Never rented it out that quickly before, and I had no showings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'm curious how much this is driven by foreign students, specifically Chinese, staying home. On social media I've noticed the meme that China is peaceful and stable vs the USA which is currently still fighting the virus and plagued by massive unrest.

I think the lack of interns, tech layoffs, and WFH may be a larger part of it, I'm just wondering if there is any data out there on how it breaks down by category.

<comment><USER51> I would think that international students from China is not only a minimal amount of the population, but also that very few have even left. (thanks to China's "five one" airline policy making it very difficult to go back to China)

<comment><USER52> five one?

<comment><USER51> one flight per week per country per airline

[https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-05-28/china-wont-ease- curb...](https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-05-28/china-wont-ease-curbs-on- international-flights-as-fast-as- expected-101559869.html#:~:text=Dubbed%20the%20Five%2DOne%20policy,more%20than%20once%20a%20week).

It's extremely expensive to fly into China right now because of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> My landlord in SF offered to lower the rent around 9%.

<comment><USER54> A corporation or private?

<comment><USER53> Private (individual)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The SF market is extremely differentiated. The market is still tight in many verticals and not hugely changed for any landlord not already on the bleeding edge and pushing higher prices believing them to be reality. The towers are going to have huge vacancy rates since they practice this price "edge game" diligently.

</comment><comment><USER55> My lease in Sunnyvale is ending in 3 months, already last month my landlord approached me and asked if I want to stay for an extra year at a 5% increase. I told him I'd like to take some time to think about it and see where things are headed, but I'll need to get back to him soon. My house is below market already from looking at Zillow, and even with a 5% increase it still will be, but I'm not sure what I should do (besides asking nicely to drop the increase). I'm not sure if/how this will affect big 4-5 bedroom family homes vs. smaller places. Young single people can just up and leave, for a family it's less trivial.

<comment><USER52> I've had that happen to me and I told them that I would move if they increase the price. I really didn't want to move, but I'm also too proud to let someone up my rent like that. It worked, they didn't increase the rent.

<comment><USER55> Yeah, we're both playing chicken I guess, and they're good landlords and I think the feeling is mutual; plus they really lucked out to rent to someone working at a very stable company with low risk of layoffs at the moment. So I believe I have better leverage at the moment, but if there are two things I hate, they have to be moving and negotiating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Seems to be very localized ups and downs. In the core of cities prices are crashing and people are trying to get out. Meanwhile in surrounding suburbs prices are rising and people and getting into bidding wars.

It seems that many want to stay in region but not right in the core of things, especially if their companies are shifting to WFH where daily commute is less of a deciding factor.

</comment><comment><USER57> so far it seems home prices are still high though. however, the data is kind of unnatural because many are not buying homes right now while many are not listing homes. I'm very interested to see how home prices in markets like seattle, nyc, and sf play out over the next year or so.

<comment><USER58> House prices are down 8-10%. Rent is down 10-14%. ymmv depending on location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Holy shit! I just checked craigslist and there are a number of super nice place in SF now for an extremely good price. There's no great place for sale though.

I'm talking apartments that were above 4k/month which are now around 2-3k/month.

I think this is a good time for me to change flat.

</comment><comment><USER37> Rents have dropped marginally everywhere than than downtown where rents have dropped drastically coz people are running away from SOMA and downtown.

Rents elsewehere are stable as the demand has gone up from people who are abandoning downtown for more space and mobility and avoiding homelessness.

</comment><comment><USER59> I was thinking about moving to The Villages in San Jose and purchasing a condo there. I know that this blog is about rentals, but would someone like to comment about if I should purchase now or wait and see if there is a price decline. Thank you in advance.

</comment><comment><USER60> I suspect this is happening in NYC too, but have not seen any data or articles on it.

</comment><comment><USER61> The employers and employees is getting use to work from home.

It is just matter of time for certain percentages (20,30% or more) of folks decide to move out to Tracy, Sacramento, etc to just commute to work may once every 1,2 weeks or as needed.

<comment><USER36> There's an entire 1/8th complete housing development at Diablo Grande that looks like the result of a nuclear holocaust from last time someone thought people would commute 3 hours for the luxury of living _absolutely nowhere_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I just rented 2 bed apt in peninsula - absolutely no drop in rent - 1 year lease is norm (could not find any month-to-month lease) and I was not offered any free rent for any weeks. Not sure where this plunge is happening!

</comment><comment><USER63> Between Covid and the current protests/riots, I think we're going to see a major reversal of the urban renaissance that took place from roughly 1990 to the present.

A formerly tacky suburban bungalow with a fenced in backyard starts looking pretty good in a quarantine compared to a one-bedroom apartment where the only way outside is via a germ-filled elevator. Watching downtowns like Chicago's burn is going to make a lot of business rethink locating to urban cores, especially when remote work is proving to be highly effective.

Even if all of this passes quickly, the imagery and emotion will remain. Just like 3-mile Island effectively put an end to nuclear energy in the U.S. even though it was an isolated incident, memories of quarantines and burning police cars are going to do lasting damage to economic development in urban cores.

<comment><USER64> > the imagery and emotion will remain

People have short memories.

> Just like 3-mile Island effectively put an end to nuclear energy in the U.S. > even though it was an isolated incident

Construction cost killed nuclear.

<comment><USER63> People are already moving out of places like NYC and SF, buying up houses in the surrounding burbs. It would be nice to believe that people will just forget this in a few months, but unfortunately that's just not going happen. You couple that with companies' newfound comfort with remote work, and you're looking at a long-term slump in investment in urban cores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> How long until Seattle drops?

</comment><comment> Paul-ish So many believe remote work will cause rent to drop. But if we end up in a situation where you work from home only part of the week, that could actually spike demand for larger properties.

</comment><comment><USER59> Is the purchase price of a home or condo in San Francisco or the San Jose area being effected by the rent downturn? Thank you for any comments about that question.

</comment><comment><USER66> You can work from home, but you can't career from home

</comment><comment><USER67> Yawn. Wake me up when the rents plunge 50%.

The market there was already excessively over-valued. The virus proved how unnecessary they actually are.

A real correction is good.

</comment><comment><USER68> Can't read due to paywall but I wonder how much of this is due to most Airbnbs presumably going empty.

<comment><USER32> Here's the last sentence of the article: "In addition a lot of Airbnb listings are being offered as regular apartments now, which could also increase supply and lower rents, Goss said."

"Goss" is Charley Goss of the San Francisco Apartment Association, FYI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Time to buy the dip

<comment><USER70> rent_price != property_price

<comment><USER71> No, but in a more or less normal market, they aren't completely disconnected. The rent-price ratio will not usually vary a whole lot (one of the markers of the Great Bubble was that the ratio was completely out of whack). Since units of housing are somewhat functionally the same whether you rent or buy, price changes in one part of the market will eventually catch up to the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Never saw allure of living there..sky high rent, smells of a homeless epidemic like no other I've seen and overall the desire to live in any big city with COVID and riots/protests is even more unappealing! Hopefully all that and remote work pushes many to buy in more suburban and rural areas.

<comment><USER73> Jobs + weather. Put both of those in the median american value and the city would become a desert in a year.</comment></comment>


SQL JOINs, Without the Venn Diagrams - <AUTHOR> http://www.helenanderson.co.nz/sql-joins/ <comment><USER2> Thank you! That's crystal clear and short. Page bookmarked.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're very welcome :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to use the Internet if you have only 64 kbps of disposition? - <AUTHOR> So far I'm only using Pi-Hole and Squid cache, so maybe you're getting better improvements how to speed up such a slow Internet?<p>PS. HN works amazingly fast at 64 kbps! <comment><USER2> WAN acceleration comes to mind. I know this tech from the enterprise world of the past, but maybe there's something FOSS out there!

Besides that I'd go with some good stuff long forgotten: pure text email, terminal based web browsers, pre-downloading web resources you use often during the night (some browsers were able to do that in the '90s), IRC, etc.

When I started to use the Interned we've had ONE dial-up 64Kbps modem shared over 10 PCs :D It wasn't amazing, but everyone was able to get something valuable out of it. Now I'm sitting alone on a 1Gbps cheap fiber looking on my CHEAP router capable of 10Gbps... I've almost forgot how it is to be limited by bandwidth. But I also remember that limitations of that kind were responsible for people becoming very creative with how they use infra.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps you should install NoScript extension for Firefox.</comment>


Growing a Language (1998) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6TaiXzHAE <comment><USER2> Absolutely my favorite tech talk—brilliant idea that's explained so well it seems obvious in hindsight, even though it really wasn't. It's rare for a single talk to change my fundamental way of thinking about an area I already care about (programming language design), and "Growing a Language" managed it in a _big_ way.

It applies to more than just language design too. Why do I love Emacs so much? It isn't the idiosyncratic terminology or weird keybindings, it's the fact that Emacs is an editor that grows. Once I understood basic Elisp, there was no real friction to take Emacs and start molding it to exactly my needs and preferences. Something I don't like? Something that's missing? I don't have to spend hours setting up a plugin to fix it; chances are it will only take a few lines to change whatever I want to change, and I can use Emacs's remarkable discovery features to quickly find _which_ lines those are.

Why do people swear by command-line invocations and bash? Bash _is awful_. But it's an environment that grows in a way that I've never seen with GUI apps. A small set of simple tools and a universal way to compose them is remarkably powerful, even if it's as awkward and error-prone as POSIX shell scripting.

Excel? I don't use it myself, but I've seen the same thing from Excel power users: it goes beyond mere calculations to letting people seamlessly build what they need _on top_ of Excel. Excel is integral to the modern world in a way that no other pieces of office software is because it can grow to solve complex problems in a way other tools can't. (With, as I've seen working at a large company, occasionally terrifying consequences.)

What I would really love to see next is an alternative to Jupyter that can grow in the same way. Maybe gtoolkit[1] is a candidate? That's what I'm exploring now, and it's pretty exciting so far.

[1]: [https://gtoolkit.com/](https://gtoolkit.com/)

<comment><USER3> I used to work for a company that made simulation based corporate training games. All the data was modeled in Excel and served as a database to read from and write back to during runtime.

The frontend was written in Flash. I was the sole frontend developer for one of the projects in this space and the backend had always amazed me. The Excel sheets were nuts :D

<comment><USER4> Training for what corporate purposes?

<comment><USER3> It was back in '07-'09, we would take a few server laptops and a whole bunch of loaner laptops out to internal corporate seminars/conventions at like Bank of America, Hilton, etc.

It appears to still be active but using more modern devices and UX. [0]

0: [https://www.abilitie.com/executive- challenge](https://www.abilitie.com/executive-challenge)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previous threads about this classic, but HN has perhaps not really done it justice yet:

2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16847691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16847691)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9918286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9918286)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10153391)

2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744125) (seanmcdirmid was there!)

2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359174)

2009: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626380)

2009 (2 comments): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=827107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=827107)

2008: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152311)

2007 (1 comment): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92542)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a great example of content that should get reposted every six months or so. Every budding programmer should digest it.

Also, this line cracks me up every time.

"I have to say the full phrase "Java programming language," for there is a guy who works where I do who deals with the laws of marks of trade, and he told me I have to say it that way."

</comment><comment><USER7> This was good, and much needed.

I'm currently writing my own programming language, and I'm thinking about how to I encourage growth since I'm realizing that I'm still at the starting line.

I'm sorting out how I balance out "telling people and inviting people in" versus "how do I polish what I want to polish?" versus "use the damn thing to make things!"

The language is: [http://www.adama-lang.org/](http://www.adama-lang.org/) and it is a work in progress

<comment><USER8> Very cool. Focusing on a domain is a good idea and this strikes me as a good domain to focus on.

While I've never managed to write anything useful in Inform 7, I'm glad it exists; it stretched my idea of what a programming language can be.

Good luck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This talk is also available in PDF form:

[https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf)

Although I would agree watching this talk with Steele's delivery is best.

</comment><comment><USER10> "And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?"

      – Guy Steele responding CL programmer criticism of Java

</comment><comment><USER11> I was lucky enough to be at that talk in '98\. I distinctly remember the "what the hell is going on" vibe at the start. It felt like a Christopher Nolan movie.

</comment><comment><USER12> One of my favorite tech talks of all time. Really worth just sitting down and truly listening to its full length, regardless of what programming tradition you come from. I wrote some commentary on it related to a different HN post here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10568382](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10568382)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not often that "art" and "computer science lecture" sets overlap.

</comment><comment><USER10> Steele is the definition of "language lawyer". He knows programming languages. He has been part of ANSI C, Common Lisp, Scheme and Java language standardization.

He has coauthored "C: A Reference Manual", Common Lisp the Language, Performance Fortran Handbook, and The Java Language Specification.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't language lawyer usually imply pedantry? That's not Guy Steele. How about language ascended master?

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lambda_Papers](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lambda_Papers)

<comment><USER10> _language lawyer_ : n.. A person, usually an experienced or senior software engineer, who is intimately familiar with many or most of the numerous restrictions and features (both useful and esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming languages. A language lawyer is distinguished by the ability to show you the five sentences scattered through a 200-plus-page manual that together imply the answer to your question "if only you had thought to look there".

[http://catb.org/jargon/html/L/language- lawyer.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/L/language-lawyer.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of the best tech talk ever. Great example of a mise en abyme.

<comment><USER15> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_abyme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_abyme)

<comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing a link explaining. I realize it's not obvious :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> so does anyone know why he apparently failed to get his proposed changes through? given that the talk was so well regarded, it's curious it had zero impact

</comment><comment><USER17> Worth watching even if you hate Java.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't believe I had never seen this. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER19> For some reason that version has a large number of audio glitches.

But very recently the Computer History Museum published a cleaned-up version:

[https://youtu.be/lw6TaiXzHAE](https://youtu.be/lw6TaiXzHAE)

Good!

<comment><USER5> Changed from [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Its funny, I enjoy python for different reasons. The import statement and all the "allowing the language to grow" is great, but not what makes me use it over competitors. In fact, I'd argue pip and virtualenv are kind of worse to use than npm, go get, rust crates etc - some might disagree here, but I feel the experience could be a lot better.

Main reasons I love and continue to use python...

1\. Python 2/3 break. A breaking update sounds scary, but getting rid of the accumulation of "language warts" all at once was literally amazing. And by all at once, I mean a gradual transition over a decade. I also think Node's way of having individual API's have an independent "stability" metric that is unrelated to the platform or language is another decent way of handling this.

2\. They've taken great care with the most common data structures, with regard to both performance and ergonomics. A python dictionary is wonderful to use and is actually quite fast (specialized for common cases and transparently alters hashing algorithms depending on input). You can use any immutable data structure as a key (tuples!). Its so nice.

3\. For somewhat complicated work, the standard library actually has all the good stuff baked in. heapq, deque, bisect, permutations, combinations, lru, and the list goes on. Then convenience oriented data structures like Counter, defaultdict and such that other languages would balk at adding. When you have stuff like list and dictionary comprehensions layered on top of these baseline algorithmic tools, it feels __so damn good __. Do these things have warts? Yes, sometimes. Like heapq is default min heap with no way to change the behavior other than negating the input /output - but I don't care, its there, and its usable and you can explore it to the edges pretty quickly.

The only still-pretty-shitty parts that makes it less than perfect in my eyes is the GIL combined with asyncio/async/await being modal.

This is just a guess, but it seems like languages that over-specify internals paired with a goal of never breaking backwards compatibility are doomed to ... not fail, clearly, but to be a pain in the ass to use forever. Take unordered_map from C++: what an unholy mess made out of the most common data structure in computer science. Yes, you can use Google's swiss table impl in Abseil or some competitor, but the fact that I have an unwieldy poorly designed hash map baked into standard library for all time is such a missed opportunity. std::async was a huge missed opportunity as well (bad default arguments, not guaranteed to be backed by a thread pool).

In short, not allowing for mistakes is a tragedy that creates pressure to over-specify, which I think damages __everything __in ways you cannot predict.

</comment><comment><USER21> At the beginning of the talk he needs to define "person" in terms of one word axioms. So he takes "man" as an axiom, and says:

 _A woman is like a man but not of the same sex_

and

 _A person is a man or woman_

How about just:

 _A person is a kind of ape. It can talk, make tools, and walk on two legs. It has hands and thumbs._

<comment><USER22> Because that does not illustrate the concept of building a language as clearly and succinctly.</comment></comment>


Fractals and Stories - <AUTHOR> http://basecase.org/2012/12/fractals-and-stories/

<comment><USER2> Extending into written text, the narrative of 'Infinite Jest' was modeled on a Serpenski Gasket [1].

I'd be interested to hear of other novels formed of fractals.

[1] <http://kottke.org/07/12/infinite-jest>

<comment><USER3> Author of TFA here.

Discussing that very Wallace–Silverblatt exchange with a friend is one of the reasons I picked this as a Contextmas topic. I'm delighted to see someone else picking up on it. To me, "Infinite Jest" feels a lot like folk art in this way.

This also connects with DFW's zoom effect, at least the way it feels to me: he keeps getting deeper and deeper into a topic or situation, and you keep seeing the same structures go by (or are they quite the same?), and before long you don't really know where you are in relation to the starting point, but it doesn't matter.

I think the numbing effect that critics like James Wood complain about, analogous to the "but so what" feeling of fractal zooms, is exactly what he's going for. Or at least part of it.

The topic that I didn't want to actually dig into, but I hope I point the reader at obliquely a couple times, is how people use synecdoche and metaphor in fiction. I don't know how to talk about this in a way that seems fresh, clear, and honest. So instead I talked about things on either side of it. It's a writing style I've been experimenting with lately that seems to scratch certain kinds of itch I get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quick fiddle I wrote to draw this, <http://jsfiddle.net/ECYBq/1/></comment>


This Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/posts/uncanny-valley/ <comment><USER2> Voice recognition is not in an uncanny valley. Uncanny valley means there is a point where something that is less real is better than something that is more real. Pixar improves the scene by adding elements that are unrealistic. Another example is a preference for lower frame rate movies.

Right now, every incremental improvement to voice recognition improves its usefulness. It might appear that we're in an uncanny valley because voice recognition is barely usable right now versus completely unusable in the past, but there is no one that prefers worst voice recognition over better voice recognition.

<comment> matthew-wegner I think there is a real danger that people are modifying/learning how to speak to computer voice recognition software. If voice recognition can't quickly become able to parse natural language, it will inevitably have to parse "I'm talking a dumb computer" cadence and inflection instead.

Incremental improvements are very bad in this regard.

These things are hard to reverse, too (people still speak with a very distinct "I'm speaking on a telephone" cadence today).

<comment><USER3> IMHO, people (and hence language) will always adapt in certain ways to get the message across. People already learned how to "google" and expect the same style of search queries to be effective elsewhere. When speaking on the telephone, people tend to slightly change their voice to counteract the channel noise (with acoustic consequences such as increased fundamental frequency ["pitch"], etc.). I would be surprised if a similar adaptation didn't happen for human-computer voice interaction, which would ultimately help making it work well enough to be useful. (Of course, using speech recognition to transcribe human-to-human interaction will still be barely usable..)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The Uncanny Valley is a term that originated from the computer animation industry. In 1992, while finishing A Bug's Life, Pixar had to build a digital valley for..."

Ummm....

Wikipedia: "The term was coined by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori as Bukimi no Tani Genshō in 1970. The hypothesis has been linked to Ernst Jentsch's concept of the "uncanny" identified in a 1906 essay "On the Psychology of the Uncanny"."

<comment><USER5> If you read the rest of the paragraph, it's _quite_ clear that the entire description is intentionally humorous nonsense. I mean, the third sentence _had_ to make that clear... ;)

> _They ended up illustrating a crate of Campbell's® Tomato Soup™ in the > corner to make it feel a bit more canny._

<comment><USER6> The missing word kind of broke the joke for me ("so he [can/could] get a vasectomy") - I got so hung up on wondering whether part of the sentence was missing or whether something had been lost in translation that I missed the fact that it was just an attempt at humor.

Copy editing - it's important!

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Without that auxiliary verb, it was really hard to know the author was kidding about Buzz Lightyear getting a vasectomy in A Bug's Life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I apologize, I'm pretty sure I feel the way I do because I'm getting old, but here's how I feel: talking to computers is a really, really bad interface, so I don't do it.

One reason it's bad is that the sounds we make are mush. It's a miracle if a computer system can correctly retrieve the words from an utterance. Another reason it's bad is that the words we say are nonsense. Our sentences aren't parseable, they don't conform to any actual grammar.

So I see it as another example of people selling something that's supposed to be more convenient than what we already have, but for many reasons, it probably isn't. One day it may be, but it wouldn't be surprising for people to be selling it as more convenient for many years before it actually is.

I'm not criticizing the technology -- it's amazing. It's just clear to me that it isn't ready to be invited into my life. I consider it inevitable that we will eventually lose control of technology, but we can at least try to be judicious.

<comment><USER9> Obviously your sentences are parseable. Millions of humans around the world understand what you are saying.

the usefulness of this didn't dawn on me until I read an interview with Andreg Ng where he talked about the huge amount of voice searches in China. Many adults can't type, so searching with voice is very convenient as opposed to drawing the characters. Many are down right illiterate or young children not old enough to read that much yet.

<comment><USER8> > Obviously your sentences are parseable. Millions of humans around the world > understand what you are saying.

No, I mean parseable in the way that source code is parsed. I'm not aware of any human language that is parseable by a computer. Humans are able to understand each other because our brains are, loosely speaking, magical.

<comment><USER9> Thats because natural language is ambiguous. Even simple sentences like " I saw a man on the hill with a telescope" have multiple meanings.

This isn't solved by magic, but pure statistics. Try and ask your friends who has the telescope in the previous sentence and some will say the man and some will say "I". Without context we can't tell, but we can judge which one is more likely given who had the item in previous sentences of similar structure (the prior). Then usually we also have some context.

Now we can add context: "I got a telescope for my birthday and was eager to use it. The next day I saw a man on the hill with my telescope". Now most people would expect the speaker to be looking through the telescope, but the man might have stolen it and taken it to the hill. Even humans have to guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This post reads like he's experimenting with the Uncanny Valley of Auto- generated Blogging.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm still bummed that with all these companies implementing voice recognition there still is not anything close to a FOSS option. It is a major field and the kind of software that takes a huge amount of work to get right and I feel like in the future free operating systems are going to look archaic without it, but it does not seem like the kind of thing any small club of friends can pick up and build to match Google or Apple at.

The same applies to OCR and other photo recognition techniques like faces or red eye. Tesseract is probably the largest free software OCR project but it still seems to do so much worse than proprietary Adobe and Microsoft products. At least the OCR reader that came with my S4 does a terrible job, though it might be using Tesseract behind the scenes since I think its the one from f-droid.

Digikam does all right red eye correction but it does it with a layered filter rather than any recognition of eyes. It also sometimes can find faces, but not nearly as accurately as Google can.

All these fuzzy logic fields are things that take huge code bases and a lot of R&D to get right and nobody in the free software movement has the organization or just the raw bank to make them happen from what I can see. Red Hat surely is not investing in them (kind of outside their enterprise / server domain) and they are about the only company prominent and powerful enough to do it.

<comment><USER12> > it does not seem like the kind of thing any small club of friends can pick > up and build to match Google or Apple at

Actually I think it's not out of the question now. The recent advances in recognition accuracy are mostly due to deep neural nets. The research is all published open access, and the cutting-edge tools are mostly open source (Theano, Torch, Caffe). Training neural nets is actually a lot simpler than the old methods of doing speech recognition; I think it's much more accessible to a small team. The only really difficult requirement is lots and lots of clean labeled data for training.

<comment><USER3> I don't really see how the "old" methods were really less accessible. There were tools such as HTK, cmu sphinx, etc., or srilm for language modelling, each with documentation and a large user base. Granted, a lot of fiddling is involved if one wants to use speaker adaptative training (MLLR, VTLN), feature transforms (HLDA, MLLT), MLP features (TANDEM), etc., but DNN approaches come with their own set of screws to tweak..

It's just hard to make something work really well for a specific use case; when contributors to an open-source project are all trying to scratch their own itch (make it work for their specific use [language, vocabulary, etc.]), the result may not be universally satisfying.

<comment><USER12> The difference is that the old methods were large systems made up of many different pieces that all required a ton of domain knowledge specific to speech and language. Training DNNs requires a lot of knowledge about DNNs, but not nearly as much knowledge about speech. Knowledge of how to train DNNs is highly transferable between domains like speech and vision. Similarly, the actual code can be mostly shared as well; something like Theano would be just as suited to running speech nets as vision nets.

I don't think we're quite there yet, but DNNs have the potential to replace every piece of the speech pipeline with one single net that gets audio samples on one side and spits out characters on the other. All those acronyms you mentioned (with many, many PhD theses behind them) will be irrelevant, in the same way that tons of previously successful specialized computer vision feature detectors (HoG, SIFT, SURF, etc) are now irrelevant to the state of the art in object recognition.

<comment><USER13> Your prediction that DNNs will replace much of the pipeline is very interesting to me, but I hypothesize that you're at least partially wrong. I predict that DNNs will impact early stages of the pipeline which operate on continuously valued inputs, but I am skeptical that that DNNs will ultimately be the best solution for late discrete processing (e.g., decoding, language modeling). That DNNs ever perform well in discrete classification tasks just tells me we haven't spent enough time feature-engineering.

<comment><USER12> It's the ability of DNNs to replace feature engineering that makes them interesting. They have completely obsoleted feature engineering in object recognition in just a few short years. Have you seen the latest DNN results in translation and image captioning? I think DNNs are quickly going to surpass the state of the art in language modeling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it just me or is the author using the term "Uncanny Valley" completely wrong? Ignoring the silly Pixar story, I still don't understand how voice recognition (or more accurately, speech recognition) is currently in the uncanny valley.

You know when your GPS says "recalculating" in a condescending voice? _That 's_ the uncanny valley of text-to-speech.

<comment><USER15> I'm no valley expert, but it seems to me that uncanny valley refers to an artificial system intended to mimic a natural one. It mostly gets the mimicry right, but not enough that we are completely fooled. This freaks some people out.

Siri's UI intends to mimic a person that understands what you are saying. In practice, it gets it wrong in hilarious and frustrating ways, breaking the illusion.

So "uncanny valley" seems ok to me.

<comment><USER16> Is the term not about getting so close to real that it's that the remaining shortfall makes us uncomfortable?

E.g. something "50% real" is so far off, we psychologically dismiss it as a cartoon, drawing, whatever. It's not trying to compete with real.

Something "98% real" freaks us out though. Surprised I have not yet seen this link:

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/avoiding-the-uncanny-valley- of-...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/avoiding-the-uncanny-valley-of-user- interface/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One important point about voice recognition is in the short term its OK if its slower and harder to use than superior technologies, as long as everyone knows it costs a lot of money.

Once that fad aspect blows over, then usage plummets and its forgotten. See Kinect, or the nintendo power glove, or qr-codes, or google glass, or the cue cat, or a zillion other examples that are in, or now entering, 8-track-hood.

<comment><USER18> QR-codes have found some useful niches. Eg for setting up my phone as a second factor authentication device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Uncanny valley did not originate in the computer animation industry. It originated in robotics, and was coined by Masahiro Mori in 1970.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masahiro_Mori](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masahiro_Mori)

</comment><comment><USER19> > The Uncanny Valley is a term that originated from the computer animation > industry.

Uhh, I don't think so: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley#Etymology)

<comment><USER20> In fairness, this is followed up with:

> In 1992, while finishing A Bug's Life, Pixar had to build a digital valley > for Buzz Lightyear to drive his Ford® F-150™ pickup through on the way to > the hospital so he get a vasectomy.

So I'm pretty sure the author is being deliberately silly.

<comment><USER21> Just not actually funny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Uncanny Valley of HN comments gives plenty of credit to the author's post (which I enjoyed). Most of the comments sounds like coming from underdeveloped AI - awkward perception and total lack of human sense of humor.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Voice recognition" sounds more reminiscent of speaker identification than speech recognition to me. Although I don't work on that myself, my day job is in a related field, and even IBM's "speech to text" is a term I never hear being used (unlike for instance "text to speech"). People around me either say "speech recognition" or "ASR" (for automatic speech recognition).

I'd be interested to learn, though, if / where alternative terms are in more wide-spread use.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I find the use of the term odd and it is not commonly used in an academic context; however, I think I recall having seen it being used informally in the context of voice commands (i.e., controlling a PC or appliance) or, more generally, voice user interfaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The truly best voice recognition pretty much has to be hooked up to an uber- AI. Gaining a friend, yes.

Imagine if they could program things into it that would make your overall life better by slightly altering your behavior? For instance, if you asked "Siri" to remind you every 40 minutes for a ciggarette break, I can imagine her slowly weaning you off, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think Zach was drunk on this one.

Also, "eat a dick", really?

</comment><comment><USER26> Um. No.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd really like it if someone condensed that article and removed all attempts to be funny or sound extremely clever.

<comment><USER28> "Siri's voice recognition is kind of bad some of the time. I've extrapolated this observation to all other voice recognition systems"

<comment><USER29> I have been extremely impressed by Google's voice recognition. It got things right that I never thought it would, such as homophones or proper names.

<comment><USER30> I don't mean to belittle you or Google's speech team, but neither homophones nor proper names are considered hard problems in modern automatic speech recognition.

<comment><USER29> I don't remember the case exactly, but it was something that was hard to resolve, at least it seemed so to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>