Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments - <AUTHOR> http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment <comment><USER2> Detroit is implementing a program along these lines. They are selling properties in so called 'bad neighborhoods' and mandating that they be rehabbed and renovated within 6 months to code.

The average cost of rehabbing a home bought for $1000~$2000 say is $50,000. Have a look at the website:

[http://www.buildingdetroit.org/](http://www.buildingdetroit.org/)

The 'Rehabbed and Ready' ([http://auctions.buildingdetroit.org/RehabbedAndReady](http://auctions.buildingdetroit.org/RehabbedAndReady)) homes demonstrate the transformation from a $1000 to a $50000 property.

To my eyes this approach closely matches the 10% target described in the article, and seems to be a smart way to build a tax base.

<comment><USER3> These conditions are crazy. Requiring in investment of ten thousands of dollars in a home in a high risk neighbourhood within six months after purchase is borderline preying on the gullible.

A street in Detroit can go in a downward spiral within months. All it takes is one bad apple (home) that gets boarded up or goes down in flames near your investment and your purchase becomes a super high risk gamble, most probably with a very unhappy ending.

Add the high property taxes, completely out of touch with the current values of the properties in such neighbourhoods. And don't forget the back taxes from previous owners that you're often required to pay.

You lure people with a limited income, attracted by the low auction prices, force them to invest a significant sum to renovate a property to code within a limited time frame, saddle them with a mortgage and then you slap them with high taxes.

I'm not saying investing in such properties in Detroit is a bad move, you can make a lot of money with it, but it's not for the inexperienced or someone without a buffer to overcome setbacks!

<comment><USER4> I knew a real estate investor who was really successful who's motto was the best investments are those in the worst areas that most people wouldn't touch. Large trailer parks with high vacancy rates, run down neighborhoods, etc.

We don't live in Detroit but bought 3 properties for 40k each with about 18-20% yields. The renters aren't the best (they're paying 800 in rent because they can't afford an 8k downpayment), but they're great investments.

<comment><USER3> Agree. However, I wasn't talking about 40k homes here, but about $1,000 homes in risky neighborhoods, with the obligation to renovate to code, potentially costing ten thousands of dollars in the process.

There's a reason why the value op the property, including home and land, cratered to $500 or a few thousand dollars. It's the state of the neighborhood that dictates the value and it can change rapidly, faster than in regular neighborhoods.

It's not an investment I would recommended for inexperienced investors or people with limited savings who put all eggs in one basket. And sadly, the low prices attract quite a few of them.

<comment><USER5> You're explaining exactly why the properties may be a good value. Most people reflexively assume they're a dangerous investment and never take a close look.

When I suggest real estate investing of any kind, I usually hear a wall of objections about risks, and a lack of interest in how to counter those risks. It's part of the reason I like it.

(Not that I'd invest in Detroit, I don't have a rationale for it. Some people do)

<comment><USER3> There's a big difference between a poor neighborhood and a bad neighborhood (bad for whatever reason: crime, drugs, blight, population decline).

Here's a good example how a lot of the $1,000 homes, and the surrounding neighborhoods, really look like: [https://youtu.be/IuJFLJ0JApA](https://youtu.be/IuJFLJ0JApA) . In the description there's a link to a follow-up video 3 years later. It's not a pretty picture. But then again, who buys properties on auctions without inspecting them first?

<comment><USER6> I tried to skip through the videos to get to the point because they're long and the guy rambles a lot, but somehow I missed it.

It seemed there were some distressed properties and that some work was done on them... which tells me nothing. Were the houses rehabilitated, is work still in progress or were they ultimately re-abandoned? Can any conclusions whatsoever be drawn from this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's quite an interesting take! The differences in older and newer city planning regarding street widths, densities, mixing of zoning, etc. are quite drastic.

However, I believe it will be at least 20 years before my local municipality will be able to learn from any of these lessons. The planning meetings for any type of development are dominated by those with the time to go to them mid- day: retired people that set up the initial zoning and are dead set against any potential change. The same person who is super concerned about negative impact on property values will in the next sentence rail against those wanting to do development for their "greed."

I really gotta move out of California...

<comment><USER8> _I really gotta move out of California..._

It's not a California thing. As part of my job, I spend a lot of time presenting at public meetings and in my spare time I do a fair amount of advocacy (for various causes) which also results in a lot of time in public meetings. I've been in public meetings in small rural villages and large cities across 30 states. And I've observed the same thing - the folks that attend those meetings tend to be dominated by those affluent enough to take the time to go.

The starkest example of that are public meetings in poor cities where projects will affect large minority areas and yet 95% of the attendees will be affluent folks from the outer suburbs. It's not that the affected folks don't care, it just that when the meeting is held at 2pm or 5pm or even 6pm on a weeknight, they have jobs to go to and they can't make time to attend. The most diverse, well-attended public meetings I've been to have always been held on Saturday afternoons.

<comment><USER9> This is exactly why national US voting is held mid-day on a Tuesday. Sure you have mail-in ballots now, but the default in-person voting time/date is surely deliberately designed to favor a particular demographic.

<comment><USER10> That's pretty sickening, but can't help but consider true. Upvoted and added this comment for emphasis.

In Australia voting day is always a Saturday, from 8 am to 6 pm, also with ample opportunity to mail in beforehand. Oh and you'll be fined if you don't cast your vote... It may not be perfect, but appears way more democratic to me than the US elections.

[http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/polling.htm](http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/polling.htm)

(When I left Norway nearly two decades ago, so glad I didn't go to the US now.)

<comment><USER11> I often vote absentee (or "early" this year) in the US because of travel or just because. But if I _had_ to vote in person I'd guess I'd miss at least as many votes on weekends because I'm off somewhere as weekdays.

I'm also unconvinced that forced voting is a positive. If you don't care enough to develop an opinion and vote, why should your random "because you have to" vote count?

<comment><USER12> In some countries you can vote blank(you don't find a good enough representation among the parties) or a non valid vote (as a protest). The problem is how they count those votes, in Spain is like if have not voted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > These places are built all at once to a finished state. Today is peak > wealth; it's all downhill from here, regardless of how much public > investment is made.

 _This_. I've struggled to phrase why most developments seem so terrible, or sterile, or what-have-you, while the areas that developed over time seem so much more... Alive? Valued? This is an amazing way to phrase that difference - it's _possible_ to invest yourself in places that are not at peak value.

<comment><USER14> Go to the poor neighborhoods and look closely and you often find that they built a bunch of row houses that are maybe two to four stories high. Some of them got knocked down, some of them are still there but they've been altered or decorated. When the trees get taller the monotonous aspects are less visible. Some of them are now vacant lots or rebuilt houses, stores, parking lots, etc.

When they went to see Levittown for it's 50th aniversary they were unable to find a single house that had not changed in a major way.

Even the worst architecture and urban planning will be reprocessed over time.

<comment><USER15> You might be interested in the episode of 99 Percent Invisible [1] that talks about how an architect was tasked with designing a bunch of housing for very poor residents in Chile after a disaster.

He chose to build half-houses that are literally unfinished roofs on one side. Over time, people were encouraged to build the other half as they saw fit.

[1] Episode 231 - Half a House - [http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/half- a-house/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/half-a-house/)

<comment><USER16> There's a famous National Geographic photo of a cookie-cutter suburb an hour east of Mexico City. [0] Identical brand new tiny homes in cheerful monotone colors extend into the distance.

If you visit that neighborhood today, you can see the results of laws very different from those in American suburbs. Most of the houses have been expanded. Each one has grown in a different way. They've been repainted different colors, there are Virgin of Guadalupe icons and paintings and Aztec designs and decorations and every other kind of individualistic expression all over. Small shops have opened to provide typical neighborhood corner store services and light industry like auto repair and electronics servicing is going on during the day. Lots of the car parking has been enclosed and some has been eliminated entirely in favor of more living space. [1]

All of those changes would be illegal in the vast majority of American suburbs. When older American cities were built, the laws were more like Mexican laws and neighborhoods could grow up with residents and families and provide local services and develop character.

Plus, the Mexican neighborhood and older American neighborhoods are significantly denser than new American suburbs, without being remotely like really dense development. That makes things much more accessible by walking and creates more cooperation.

That's the difference a reasonably open and humble set of laws makes.

[0] [http://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of- the-d...](http://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the- day/2013/5/housing-development-mexico/)

[1] Try a satellite or street view somewhere around 19º18'30'' N and 98º51'30'' W

<comment><USER17> Yes, this!!

If you want to visit "good suburbs" (single family homes and duplexes mostly, but with variety, character, mixed use, and you can get around by transit, walking, or car -- and a reasonable tradeoff of affordable housing but reasonable commute time) like this in the USA, the middle areas (not center, not outskirts) of northeastern cities developed before or around the time of the rise of the auto have some. Queens, Bronx, outer (ie, not the currently trendy part along the East river) Brooklyn for example.

So often we frame it as a choice, quiet but car-enslaved suburban living versus hectic but convenient urban living.

Wrong! You can have it all. You just need your government to not be stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This blog, StrongTowns.org, consistently has some of the highest-quality, focused content that I've seen in a long time. I'd encourage donating if you also got something out of it.

<comment><USER19> Yea this site is fantastic. I just discovered the site because of two threads that made it to the front of HN today. I've already spent a couple hours reading all the other articles, I think I'll likely become a member

<comment><USER20> There is also a great interview about it on the amazing econtalk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In short: the poor neighborhoods have the most low-hanging fruits, and can be improved in obvious ways using small, low-risk investments.

Affluent neighborhoods are built in a way that cannot be easily improved upon.

<comment><USER22> If you live in an affluent neighborhood you've probably already improved the property as much as you reasonably can because you get a good return on the cosmetic stuff - what's really costing you money is the location of the property.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There are investment groups like [http://www.ohiocashflow.com](http://www.ohiocashflow.com) that go into the rust belt and buy up homes in the poor neighborhoods, return them to being inhatible and then sell them off as turn key rental properties.

With the way automation is taking jobs I wouldn't be surprised if these kinds of low income housing investments turn out to be solid cashflow producing investments.

<comment><USER24> If the people renting these are increasingly likely to be automated out of a job why do you think this would be anything but a very risky investment?

<comment><USER25> Welfare systems will keep them in a home.

<comment><USER26> why didn't welfare systems keep them in a home last time?

<comment><USER27> They never said anything about their target audience being homeless. The target audience is low income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It turns my stomach to say this, but I think the reason why these ideas aren't implemented is the people in the "poor" neighborhoods are of a lower social class than the people running the cities in question.

I very much doubt a legislator or city council could muster money from Us to spend on places where Those People live, even if it makes financial sense. I would love to be wrong about this.

<comment><USER29> To be fair, in my city (Montevideo, Uruguay), government has made a strong effort to spend on poorer areas.

The problem is, most of the money (a staggering 80%) goes to pay salaries !!! They aren't helping the poor or the rich, they're helping themselves.

<comment><USER30> That's not just a problem in your location but a lot of other places. Many municipalities and some states in the US made unsustainable promises to their employees in forms future salaries (pensions). Except instead of doing 80% today, they are doing 80% in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Many economists argue for taxing every equal sized plot of land the same (vs. taxing based on assessed value). There are a lot of benefits to doing it this way, but the main one is that it encourages efficient land use. If a 40 story high rise with 200 apartments in it is taxed the same way as a lot with 6 ranch style homes, then you're going to incentivize building up.

<comment><USER32> If you're thinking of land value taxes (Henry George style taxes, considered highly efficient), it's not taxing every property that's the same size the same exact amount. It's taxing each property based on its raw (unimproved) value. So an acre near a subway would be worth more than an acre that's further away, and would be taxed more, even if it was just an empty plot while the further away lot had a high rise on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't understand the author's argument. Is it "spiff up the 'poor' neighborhoods so the inhabitants will pay more property taxes?"

When I look at the map, it looks like most of the city is lightly in the red and it has several extremely red areas which may drive most of the losses. What is driving those? Are they stadiums or large government facilities that aren't taxable? Or maybe middle-aged neighborhoods with severe drainage problems that can't withstand a hurricane?

What's driving the difference between the lightly red and the green areas? Some of the comments here propose that people in those neighborhoods aren't asking for improvements or the infrastructure is naturally cheaper. It could also be a city-favorable tax to liability balance since the larger portion of the green area is rented and thus doesn't get a homestead property tax exemption or growth cap.

"Putting in street trees, painting crosswalks, patching sidewalks, and making changes to zoning regulations" might put a city in better financial position if they think gentrification makes sense and is possible. But that by definition is not a social justice argument.

<comment><USER34> That's what it sounded like to me. He said they'd take a block of 50k houses to turn into 55k houses which will pay more taxes (and since the area is poor it requires less funds to service). So it's a better investment than affluent areas from a direct profitability metric.

Of course, the bump in those home's property tax revenue wouldn't drive other revenue like investing in making a downtown more upscale would: more local homeowner values (and property tax revenue), corporate business tax revenue, sales tax and tourist revenue. He brushes off simplistic arguments but his argument is simplistic as well - and he advocates for squeezing the poor! The poor would rather have lower taxes than a bump in home value.

> We see this trend everywhere we've done a model. On a per acre basis, > neighborhoods that tend to be poor also tend to pay more taxes and cost less > to provide services to than their more affluent counterparts. How is this > possible? Some of my planner colleagues will say it is density..

Then he goes into how it's cheaper to service but really offers no argument about the density especially as it relates to the 2 photos he proposes as evidence (the 1.1M poor block vs the 618k affluent block - it's actually 803k on his other article). Clearly there are more structures and less parking on the poor block. The poor picture has this: "two liquor stores, a pawn shop, a barber shop, a bankruptcy attorney, a campaign headquarters, a retail establishment, a cafe and a vacant building." How can he shrug off density?

> Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of > the American development pattern.

Bold claim with no evidence. Perhaps he meant to say "poor neighborhoods are more profitable on a property tax basis than affluent neighborhoods"

<comment><USER35> For background, I read his article [1] on why density, so he argues, doesn't matter. Instead, he proposes a different metric - the ratio of private (i.e. productive, main property) investment to public (infrastructure/supporting) investment, which should be high; 20:1 or ideally much higher.

However, most arguments for dense development are EXTREMELY relevant to this ratio - the idea being that dense development is cheaper, per unit population/economic activity, to build infrastructure for. Maybe it shouldn't be viewed as an end in itself, but it _is_ a good heuristic.

[1] [http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/12/16/best- of-2015-d...](http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/12/16/best- of-2015-density-question)

<comment><USER34> Perhaps his ratio makes sense but density is why that poor block example has a higher appraised land value than the single taco joint in the affluent area which is mostly parking.

So his argument doesn't stand up in that case. Sure the poor block has a higher assessment and more property taxes unless those businesses got tax rebates for operating there. But that's just one revenue metric for the block.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Alternate cynical title from the red/green map: Towns pump money from poor neighborhoods and dump it into affluent ones.

<comment><USER37> Socialized risk, privatized profit, 'trickle down' economics

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I would love to these analysis made for Europe.

Here in Italy the oldest part of the city are usually the most popular and most expensive.

We don't have THAT much land over here and regulation are pretty strict on what you can build and where...

<comment><USER21> I bet most cities in Italy were not built with cars in mind, especially the city centers / downtowns.

If you look at US cities that share this trait, e.g. NYC or Boston or Chicago or even SF, the oldest parts of the city are very expensive and prestigious, and have been for several centuries.

Also, "white flight" never happened in Italy, while many US cities were affected last century.

<comment><USER38> I would say all cities (also in the north) but just few exceptions were build before cars where even an idea...

<comment><USER21> An old city could be bombed into a complete ruin and rebuilt from scratch; this happened in Russia, Poland, Germany, UK during WWII. Fortunately, Italian cities were mostly left intact.

<comment><USER39> Still they were rebuilt without cars in mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Isn't the article describing the classic Gentrification move?

<comment><USER41> No, because the gentrification move would be to buy up those $50,000 dollar houses, renovate them/replace with a condo block and drive out the local residents. Gentrification comes from developers, whereas what he's describing comes from the city itself.

Key quotes:

"It's wealth that is shared throughout the neighborhood." \-- about as anti- gentrification as you can get.

"American cities can make low risk, high returning investments while improving the quality of life for people, particularly those who have not benefited from the current approach." \-- indicates to me that the investment he's speaking of is of cities into existing areas, not developers demolishing and recreating neighborhoods.

<comment><USER42> Either way if you make the neighborhood a nice place to live more people will want to move there. The more people who want to move there the higher prices will go. The higher prices go the higher taxes and rents go. After some time the original residents can no longer afford to live there. That's gentrification.

The trick would be to apply the improvements to every poor neighborhood at the same time so you don't create winners and losers and upset the balance in the housing market, but this is basically impossible.

<comment><USER43> > The trick would be to apply the improvements to every poor neighborhood at > the same time so you don't create winners and losers and upset the balance > in the housing market, but this is basically impossible.

Even if you could do that, it wouldn't work. It would simply make all of the poor neighborhoods more attractive to gentrifiers at the same time.

I think there is a tipping point where if you help poor neighborhoods too much, they become attractive enough as places to live that the poor residents end up being displaced by increased housing costs. It's an unintended consequence.

<comment><USER42> There is only so much demand for housing, especially for higher priced housing. You can't create additional demand simply by improving the neighborhood, additional demand is only created when more people move into the area.

So if you increase the quality of all of the affordable housing, then it shouldn't make much impact on the prices of those houses. They're already paying what they can. Now if you create new job opportunities at the same time then the equation changes. If the high quality jobs greatly outgrow the housing then you end up in a situation like San Fransisco or lower Manhattan where rents skyrocket regardless of the condition of the housing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The reason why poor neighborhoods are profitable is because the city doesn't spend money on them. If the city spent money on them, they'd be less profitable.

There's no reason to expect that the city spending more money on a neighborhood increases any tax returns.

<comment><USER45> These are property tax returns. Property tax returns come from property prices. Making a neighborhood nicer raises property values, and thus prices.

The article is making the observation that it's much easier and cheaper to improve bad neighborhoods than rich ones. Painting crosswalks and planting trees is cheap, but rich neighborhoods already have those things.

<comment><USER46> So it is an application of the Law of diminishing marginal returns ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This seems tautological.

Those areas are "profitable" because they are using fewer services.

If you invest more there, they would no longer be "profitable" \-- and increased investment may not increase future "profits."

I think this essay falls down in part because it's nonsensical to use these private industry terms when discussing municipal governance. I want my city to concern itself with equity and quality of life - not which citizens are most profitable.

<comment><USER48> This is certainly a factor with any investment, because they may only be able to effectively utilize a certain amount of assets. With that being said, I think that it is a reasonable expectation that investing into the area would inflate the values of the property in that area, which directly translates into increased tax revenue (profit). Obviously too much too quickly and you might run into the aforementioned limit of effective asset utilization, but that isn't what the author was suggesting.

<comment><USER47> Increasing the value of land without increasing the incomes of the people who live on that land leads to displacement and gentrification.

The goal of a city shouldn't be to increase land values -- it should be to increase the affluence of residents.

<comment><USER48> I don't think that displacement alone is a reason to avoid an action necessarily. I say this because while it may not be increasing their income, even if they were displaced they would get more money for being displaced (when selling the property). I'd also argue that the status quo of letting the area languish is hardly a better alternative for your stated goal (increasing the affluence of it's residents). It seems to be a dichotomy, but I don't think it's a decision between displace everyone or do nothing and displace nobody. Given the tools that a municipality actually has to increase the affluence of it's residents, I think making their living area nicer probably has the best shot at doing so because it might attract better opportunities than might normally frequent the area.

Last thought, what do you think these municipalities should do instead of minor QoL improvements that might modestly increase average property value (as stated in the article)?

<comment><USER49> > they would get more money for being displaced (when selling the property)

and for displaced renters?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It seems like what they're saying is that taxation per square inch is higher in poorer areas, and that areas that are doing better have less taxation. Could it be that the areas that are doing better are doing better for that reason?

A land tax instead of a property tax seems to be the way to go. This would avoid punishing people from improving their property.

</comment><comment><USER51> Tell that to Robert Moses. His slum clearance work turned poor neighborhoods into destitute neighborhoods.

</comment><comment><USER35> A very insightful (but needless rude) comment from a user called Memetic:

"No sh*t, it's called gentrification and has been around forever. Thanks for reinventing the wheel."

</comment><comment><USER52> [This comment has been removed since it was off-topic]

<comment><USER53> He's not referring investment in the sense of individuals coming in, buying houses, improving them and flipping them.

> We're talking about things like putting in street trees, painting > crosswalks, patching sidewalks, and making changes to zoning regulations to > provide more flexibility for neighborhood businesses, accessory apartments > and parking.

His argument is that small civic investments in infrastructure in poor neighborhoods have a good chance of increasing the average property value of the whole neighborhood and thus increasing the tax base. Not all 'investments' will work, but they are relatively inexpensive so you can experiment and replicate the ones that do work across the whole city.

<comment><USER52> You're right, I reread it and it's talking about the city. I guess had never seen it argued before that a city should optimize property values(and hence taxes).

That raises the question: Property taxes increasing won't by themselves increase people's incomes. Since they aren't trying to affect jobs(per-capita income) and explicitly mentioned density is not the issue(population), then the only thing left is to change the demographics(transfer wealth in).

Investment could be meant more broadly(like education or healthcare), but he explicitly disclaims that at the start("What I'm going to present here is pure dollars and cents. "). Somehow it doesn't seem right to advocate for city policy that swaps out the existing citizens for more profitable ones, though I suppose the existing citizens do come out ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Be aware of unintended consequences of improving neighborhoods.

If poor people can't afford to live in nice neighborhoods, and we transform their surroundings into nice neighborhoods, they won't be able to afford to stay. Richer people will move in and drive up the prices.

These effects are likely to be amplified in towns with high demand for housing and low supply.

<comment><USER54> I think a lot can be learned from inverting the spin of the advice you are proposing... What you are saying is: "Leave neighborhoods unpleasant so only poor people want to live in them."

Looking at it this way gets at the heart of the problem with this way of thinking. Can I suggest a counter point?

Solve the systemic issues that prevent low-income people from seeking good housing, rather than advocating to keep them in their place.

<comment><USER43> Your interpretation changes the meaning of what I said, and it is uncharitable at best. I never advocated keeping the poor "in their place." I just pointed out that unintended consequences can occur in these kinds of situations.

<comment><USER55> How is the above not the implication though? At least if a neighborhood changes, there is a chance a % of poor locals are able to profit from it and stay.

<comment><USER43> Saying that one should be careful when trying to help people is _not_ the same as saying that one should not help those people at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Poor neighborhoods are latent negative pressure. In time things will flow back to them because they have no better choice.

</comment><comment><USER57> For development of an area, civic infrastructure has to be developed. When there are people living in an area govt will start providing necessary infrastructure and also presence of people reduce crime. Poorer people migrate to the empty areas first.

</comment><comment><USER58> OMG, apples and oranges terrible analogy. The best monetary returns investment in the real world is typically accomplished rehabbing the worst home in the best area because of the undeniable market power of comparables... the nice, expensive homes will boost the value of a now more attractive-seeming home by carefully-chosen upgrades which deliver maximum ROI, i.e., looks (good front landscaping), wow features and/or adding area/rooms; not sinking cash into pricy, low ROI money pit/white elephant work or hoping a nicer-seeming home in a bad area will magically not be depressed by terrible comparables.

</comment><comment><USER59> I wonder what Strong Towns would think of a land value tax.

</comment><comment><USER60> Investment can be made by anyone but it must be in a proper way. Few of my friends have also done the same and today they are taking the benefit of those past investment.

</comment><comment><USER61> Just wait for gentrification to hit the area. Then the $50k houses will be worth $650k+.</comment>


Open-source Libraries for Working with Open XML Documents (docx, xlsx, pptx) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-Xml-Sdk <comment><USER2> The actual docs for the sdk are at: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/office/bb448854(v=of...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/office/bb448854\(v=office.15\).aspx)

A link from the github page might be helpful!

<comment><USER3> The content also looks to be open sourced on Github, too: [https://github.com/OfficeDev/office- content](https://github.com/OfficeDev/office-content)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So far this looks Windows only. I'm currently using LibXL ([http://www.libxl.com/](http://www.libxl.com/)) to generate Excel documents. Anybody know of any other cross platform alternatives?

<comment><USER5> I don't see any reason why it would be Windows only. All the code appears to be spec-compliant C# that doesn't use P/Invoke to call native modules or rely on C++/CLI. The only sticking point I see is the PowerShell script, and that's pretty trivial to replace since it's just a build script (you could use xbuild/msbuild, since mono supports that, or just use make)

<comment><USER6> [https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML- SDK/pull/3](https://github.com/OfficeDev/Open-XML-SDK/pull/3) suggests that there are issues with use in mono

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is obviously great but I find it annoying the instructions ask your to Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted in order to run the PowerShell script. That is just lazy.

<comment><USER8> The default is Restricted, so no scripts can run at all. So they need to tell the user to change it to something.

Their choices are AllSigned (or RemoteSigned which is the same thing in this context) or Unrestricted.

If they chose the AllSigned route and then sign it with a CA certificate (e.g. Microsoft's Code Signing cert) that would work, but if the user ever made even a one character change to the script the thing will break and it might be unclear as to WHY. Plus you have to be careful not to lose your signature when sending files via certain technologies.

Alternatively they could teach the user how to set up a local CA, make a key pair set, and then install. But that too is going to break a lot as it needs to be re-signed each time the script is updated, and obviously inter-machine coding will be a PITA.

It is fairly standard practice on non-server developer machines to set it to Unrestricted. It isn't really any more dangerous than for example BAT or VBS scripts which have no such default restrictions.

You call it lazy, but the alternatives seem impractical and painful. There are scenarios where you want to enforce code signing, I just don't really feel like a developer machine is one of them.

<comment><USER9> MS screwed up with PowerShell policies. Because the default is so restrictive, corporate sysadmins are worried about altering it to Unrestricted, and signing each script is just impractical, so in practice lots of customers will just refuse to enable it.

This is like a Linux distribution shipped OpenSSH disabled by default, and if you enabled it, you'd have to sign every script you run or allow everyone to run (almost) as root.

I'm not a fan of PS (coming from Python, PS syntax is just nuts), but it's the most useful tool in the Windows world to automate tasks and deployments of all sorts... or rather it would be, if the security model weren't so inane that few people dare touching it.

<comment><USER8> I don't work for MS so consider this pure speculation:

In the past "bad guys" have used VBS to leverage a minor exploit into a full compromise. For example, they might have the ability to write arbitrary strings to the filesystem but not execute or run code. So they write out a *.VBS into the StartUp folder, and when the user reboots they have gone from a relatively minor entry into full remote control.

While VBS and BAT remain on Windows based PCs, having PS be locked down is a little irrational. However I suspect Microsoft might be looking to the future when one day they can remove both BAT and VBS (or force the user to enable/install them manually) so that it becomes harder to use such things to escalate your compromise.

Essentially they're trying to limit attack surface on 90%+ of consume grade machines, as your average consumer will never run a PS script or even care that they cannot. A lot of medium to large enterprises have an internal CA (with the CA cert already on the machines for authenticating with AD) so internally signing their network scripts is of lower cost (i.e. the infrastructure is all in place, just a single command to sign which you can automate with PS, unlike a solo developer who might not be aware of certificate issues anyway and certainly won't be running their own CA).

Your post assumes that PS hasn't been hugely successful, which is definitely not my experience. SysAdmins in the Windows worlds are all over PowerShell, they love it, and if you go read something like SpiceWorks or any other similar community 90% of the new automations are written in PS rather than VBS/BAT (it helps that all of the MS tools in Server 2012 natively support PS). I don't really think the default security restrictions are going to limit PS's popularity, they might limit it for certain niche deployments (e.g. MAKE scripts distributed over the internet) but not for internal use.

As far as you not liking PS, I understand, I really do. Most other scripting languages use strings as their fundamental unit of work (e.g. pass strings from process A to B, even over pipes it is all strings or file names which are also strings). In PS the System.Object is the base unit, and everything above that is also an object (it is classic OOP), so it really takes some getting used to. There's a lot of inheritance in there.

But once you understand the underlying concepts involve, it is quite de- mystified. However it really helps if you've come from a Java/.Net programming background since even things like overloading isn't really something you'd run across in a scripting language based largely on string transportation.

If you want to get started watch this workshop (you don't need to watch the full 4 hours(!)): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ya1dQ1Igkc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ya1dQ1Igkc)

<comment><USER9> This is the most common explanation, but tbh, it doesn't cut it: the consumer market runs on Windows 7/8, whereas PowerShell is most useful on Server 2008/2012; so why can't they enable it by default on the latter?

 _> A lot of medium to large enterprises have an internal CA (with the CA cert already on the machines for authenticating with AD)_

That's not my experience, but I guess we're both going by anecdotes here. (to be precise, in the few cases where an internal CA is actually present, the process to have anything signed is usually a bureaucratic nightmare)

My particular point of view is a vendor who comes in to deploy stuff on customer servers and is told that Powershell should remain disabled (or be enabled for installation purposes and then disabled again, which removes the possibility of automated maintenance via PS). I guess it's a political choice as much as a technical one, but that's what I've experienced; and the larger the company, the most likely that this policy is not negotiable.

I don't disagree that PS has been successful; the Windows world was _screaming_ for a half-decent shell and PS is exactly that. I just think that it could have been _much_ more successful had MS chosen their defaults a bit more carefully (and/or implemented a better security model).

On the syntax, what I don't like is not being object-based -- I don't particularly like the "string everywhere" approach -- but rather the over- reliance on special characters (that tends to make a PS script fairly unreadable compared to Python). It also feels more of a bash-style world than a scripting-language world, which I think is a step back from VBS/JS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder why they call it Open XML. I thought it was called Offie Open XML (OOXML) and it was standardized as ISO 29500.

As it seems, this project does NOT implement the ISO standard, instead it works with the non-standard compliant versions that Microsoft Office produces. Le Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER11> Michael Meeks' (LibreOffice developer) response [https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2014-06-25-openxmlsdk...](https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2014-06-25-openxmlsdk.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> For Python there's also PyExcelerate for creating XLSX files: [https://github.com/kz26/PyExcelerate](https://github.com/kz26/PyExcelerate)

Supposedly it's the fastest, even beating out xlsxwriter.

</comment><comment><USER13> Alternative is my Docvert [http://github.com/holloway/docvert- python3](http://github.com/holloway/docvert-python3) software... it works on Linux/Windows/OSX though it's mostly for reading DOCX/DOC/ODT and not for writing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Really no mention of docx4j [http://www.docx4java.org/](http://www.docx4java.org/)

</comment><comment><USER15> C# only?

<comment><USER16> Can this be used with Mono?

<comment><USER15> Not sure. I guess it's useful as a reference implementation (if it conforms to the specification that is), but not beyond that. Actual editors and office suites which could potentially use the code aren't written in C#.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Microsoft is making it _really_ hard to continue to blatantly dislike them.

<comment><USER18> Spend some time with VSTO on the client and the OOXML SDK on the server and I assure you that you'll still want to kill yourself. I just spent three months doing this and it was akin to knawing your own limbs off. The Office VSTO API is poorly designed, a mishmash of shims that barely work and are impossible to debug. The documentation is awful and their support teams don't even know how to fix problems. It's also absolutely painful making something work on Office 2097, 2010 and 2013. Its bad news when after a week you start wrapping all entry points to stop managed exceptions crashing office.

Open sourcing stuff doesn't make it magically entirely pain free nor does it make a quality product. This isn't a quality product and neither is the thing that generates the documents you will need to parse (and clean all the incongruous crap) from.

<comment><USER9> I know it's just a typo, but I hope our children will never have to suffer "Office 2097"...

<comment><USER18> Well spotted. I'll leave it in for posterity :)

However I expect our Surface 2095 will run Office 2097 and it'll still have VBA jammed in due to some legacy clients moaning that they can't run their financial app in it any more :)

<comment><USER19> If it survives the VBA-pocalypse in 2030, that is, because it interprets dates with two digit years ending in '/30' \- '/99' as referring to 1930-1999...

<comment><USER18> Ah yes I'd forgotten about that. Good point!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside Facebook's World Headquarters - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2012/08/06/facebook-headquarters/

<comment><USER2> > Whiteboards were everywhere. So were blackboards, as well as artwork and > slogans applied directly onto walls.

I'm a little surprised at the blackboards. When we were expanding once at my employer and I was moving to the new office suite I asked if I could have a blackboard instead of a whiteboard in my new office, and the head of engineering said no. His reason was that chalk dust gets into computers and is not good for them.

I wonder if he was wrong, or if Facebook has more tolerance for trashing computers than we had.</comment>


Move to the Big City (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://sivers.org/city <comment><USER2> This stood out:

> So why do I hate to admit this?

> Because I love how the internet has made it possible for anyone to get > successful, anywhere. I love the idea of living in the middle of nowhere, > surrounded by nature, yet being connected to the world.

> But still, when I look at the facts, it's impossible to deny. Living in the > big city, and being where everything is happening, will help your career the > most. Being anywhere else won't hurt you, but it won't help.

Though I'm in NYC right now, I plan to leave eventually. Ideally I think I'd want a remote cabin in Montana with a high speed internet connection. Wake up, go for a 2 hour hike, code a few hours, watch the sunset, read, sleep. Sounds like some sort of paradise.

Realistically though I'll probably end up somewhere closer to civilization.

But it's a shame remote work isn't quite at that level to completely make physical location irrelevant. Maybe someday.

<comment><USER3> Are you me? Also in NYC and also dream of a quiet place in Montana. My team has actually had discussions about Montana specifically.

What is it about Montana?

<comment><USER4> NYers flooding MT would be worse than OHians flooding NYC.

<comment><USER5> I'm willing to bet you wouldn't refer to other groups as "flooding" NYC. Why do New Yorkers find it acceptable to say such things about Midwesterners?

<comment><USER6> Because you can make fun of mostly-white yokels without the PC police coming for your scalp the way they would if you were to criticize the influx of any other demographic.

<comment><USER5> Au contraire, you'll be celebrated for it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm always very conscious of the selection bias of the people writing these types of articles. They tend to have succeeded in a major city, but as the author says:

> "It's not casual. It's not a place for a comfortable work/life balance. It's > fueled by ambition. People go go go."

What of all those, and they will likely be most people, that don't thrive in that environment. Are they getting a net benefit moving to a major metro? I really don't know the answer there. The statistics are messy. All other things being equal, those of my friends that moved back to my hometown after college do not seem less happy or satisfied with their lives than those who went to major metros.

</comment><comment><USER8> As a software developer who has lived in London for a couple of years, this didn't work for me. London was great for having fun but in terms of career it wasn't very interesting. The work atmosphere wasn't great and the problems weren't very interesting. I've found better opportunities in medium-sized cities. Just a personal experience, of course.

</comment><comment><USER9> A year ago, I moved to the suburbs of Saigon from NY to work remotely. My cost of living is 1000usd</month + rent, utilities, food, motorbike/gas, etc. While my savings have improved, I do miss socializing with other developers which in turn creates future opportunities. The isolation is great if you're looking to work in a distraction free environment and relax.

I'm a bit torn as I consider myself a mid-level developer at 7 years of experience. At the moment, I'm looking to relocate anywhere to be surrounded with senior engineers who can push me to the next level.

With that being said, I'll probably go back to the remote life when I feel more comfortable with my skills.

</comment><comment><USER10> I work 90% remote at the moment, and the only thing stopping me from moving to a smaller town is the fear of not having a community or friends nearby.

It's so important to have in person human contact, especially with remote work, that Montana or wherever will always be a dream. Would love some ideas on how to solve this if anyone has any!

<comment><USER11> > _I work 90% remote at the moment, and the only thing stopping me from moving > to a smaller town is the fear of not having a community or friends nearby._

OTOH, you can have more community and more friends nearby in a smaller town -- and actually get to see them and do things with them.

But you need to take the time to make friends with those people. Still I know several people who moved to a small town, small island even, and made great friends with the local community, even people from an entirely different country. YMMV.

<comment><USER12> Right, I think you just need to be more willing to make friends with people who don't necessarily share many of your interests.

The great thing about a big city, at least in theory, is that whatever sort of weirdo you are, you can probably find a group of people that sees it as a positive rather than a negative. On the flip side, many people in cities are very busy and don't have much room for new relationships, so it can be hard to establish close friendships, the kind you can hang out with on a daily or weekly basis, without some catalyst like school or (non-remote) work.

In a smaller town, people will have time for you and it's easier to integrate into a community, but you may have to water yourself down a bit to fit in. It's tough to have it all!

<comment><USER11> > _Right, I think you just need to be more willing to make friends with people > who don 't necessarily share many of your interests._

A, yes, that part is crucial. E.g. a common interest in just life, nature, and common stuff: small talk, food, drink, some games, etc, sure helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My take on this is that the network effects of living in a big city vs. small town actually increased post-internet. Ie. the value proposition of the physical city network is even greater with internet.

One obvious example is on demand food delivery. In a small town you still just get one or two places delivering food, the internet cannot solve that.

But in a city you're immediately connected to every provider in your radius. It was technically true before but required walking around, local knowledge etc. The internet removed that upfront investment and made the physical network available to anyone immediately.

<comment><USER14> A model of the net increase in network size pre- and post-internet would be interesting but I don't know of any.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is news? People have been doing that for thousands of years.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, I don't think it's new. But I think we can work remotely nowadays (especially for software developers). I post it here because I want to know is it still appropriate for now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Paul Graham had it right in his "Cities and Ambition" note:

 _Does anyone who wants to do great work have to live in a great city? No; all great cities inspire some sort of ambition, but they aren 't the only places that do. For some kinds of work, all you need is a handful of talented colleagues._

[http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html)

<comment><USER17> Further from the same article:

You don't have to live in a great city your whole life to benefit from it. The critical years seem to be the early and middle ones of your career. Clearly you don't have to grow up in a great city. Nor does it seem to matter if you go to college in one.

The Impressionists show the typical pattern: they were born all over France (Pissarro was born in the Carribbean) and died all over France, but what defined them were the years they spent together in Paris.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _But still, when I look at the facts, it's impossible to deny. Living in the > big city, and being where everything is happening, will help your career the > most._

Will it help your happiness? Will your goals and career benefit humanity one iota?

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone else read these on impulse, then remember they don't want to make it big?

I want to make it to Comfortable, by working on interesting but non-stressful problems, reach FI at forty, then enjoy my family and work at hobby research.

Am I alone here?

</comment><comment><USER19> I recently accept a job on a big city. I'm excited to see what happens next. I've worked on big cities before, but mostly remote. I only went to the company once every 3 months. This time I'm actually moving.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think the idea is sound, though the list of cities is very US (culturally) centric.

For an IT audience, Nashville is probably irrelevant, also it assumes there's "no live" outside of those cities.

</comment><comment><USER21> For tech, that list of cities could be changed drastically (Dublin, Berlin, Stockholm and Tel Aviv are major tech centers, for example) but the gist of it is very true.

</comment><comment><USER22> The list is somewhat surprising for 2018

Tokyo? Beijing? Shanghai?

<comment><USER23> Derek Sivers is the founder of CD Baby which is one of the largest music licensing companies. He is talking about big cities in the context of his industry which is Music and Entertainment.

<comment><USER24> Why not Nashville? Austin?

<comment><USER23> He did mention Nashville, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think in terms of learning it's true up to a point. I don't think it makes sense to move to a big city for financial reasons though.

You'd think it creates a competitive environment where the best talent rises to the top but this is not the case.

What I've found instead is that the environment is competitive to the point that everyone is focused on politics and social manipulation; for example trying to claim credit for other peoples' work to get promoted or making friends with the founders. Top level managers are not capable of identifying talent and seeing though all the political BS; they fall for it over and over again but it doesn't matter because they're friends with millionaire investors so they can keep raising money even after their company fails.

It feels like behind every powerful person in a position of power, there is either a rich friend or a rich daddy.

That's why I'm into blockchain now, I'm tired of this nepotism. I want to participate in creating a new industry in which human nature can be factored out as much as possible.

<comment><USER26> Sorry, but nepotism, politics and connections are even more important in the cryptocurrency/blockchain industry than in traditional tech or even finance. In crypto/blockchain it's ALL about who you know. And the lack of good regulation means that good contacts can get your firm advantages that would literally be illegal in the traditional finance world. I guess the only real distinction is that the industry is spread out more and not centered in one or two cities.

<comment><USER25> >> it's ALL about who you know

If you want a hyped up ICO, yes it has been like this and that's why there are so many crappy projects with a high market cap right now but this is changing.

Ultimately, cryptocurrencies which are backed by real value are the ones which are going to stick around. Right now the ecosystem is mostly still founded on hype but all that hyped up money needs somewhere to go so there are a lot of opportunities even if you have very limited connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> He's right: big cities are not good places for a nice work/life balance and a nice lifestyle. They are places for serious people. But I don't like being serious, and I don't like working out of balance with the rest of my life.

</comment><comment><USER28> > "(Nashville, Paris, Seoul, or Tokyo only count if you're limiting yourself > to those markets.)"

LOL, as if Nashville is even vaguely comparable to the other three?

<comment><USER29> The author was in the music business and Nashville is very influential in that industry. That's probably why it was added.</comment></comment>


Rackspace Announces API driven Bare Metal Servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2014/06/19/rackspace-announces-bare-metal-cloud-based-on-openstack-project-ironic/

<comment><USER2> Can anyone comment on the state of these "microVMs" they speak of? I didn't realize Openstack went that deep in the sense that I thought it was just a VM management platform.

<comment><USER3> The "micoVMs" are Linux containers [1] running within the operating system that is installed on the bare metal.

Since containers start in milliseconds, you gain a tremendous amount of flexibility in what you run on top of these machines. I believe that Pantheon has successfully run ~30k containers (edit: systemd-nspawn, not Docker) on a single machine.

[1] [http://www.docker.com/](http://www.docker.com/)

<comment><USER2> I thought they wouldn't want to muddle the waters by saying "microvm" instead of just using the term container. I thought they were using something like Mirage:

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

Which, imo, would be more exciting.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be shocked to see "MicroVM" become the buzzword for "container". Sounds much nicer for putting in marketing material and pitching to non- technical management. That's especially true given that management has been hearing their tech staff talk about VMs for so long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would love to know how this is being done, exactly.

Something like having banks of live unprovisioned machines with a managed switching infrastructure, KVM-over-IP, some sort of netboot or UEFI installer for OS installation, all managed via an API?

<comment><USER6> That's how SoftLayer does it, since 2005.</comment></comment>


Why DevOps Fails at Application Security - <AUTHOR> https://blog.prevoty.com/why-devops-fails-at-application-security?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=TAL6t&utm_content=fails&utm_campaign=darkdevops <comment><USER2> Until security is treated similarly to QA this will never improve. Along with quality, robustness, performance, etc; security needs to be treated as a first class feature.

That said, it's a tradeoff. I've seen releases with P1 bugs being released. In those situations it was a discussion between Eng, QA, and Client Operations to determine what was the best course of action. Technically a P1 went out the door. Technically there were 2 additional releases before it mattered to the client that would have been affected.</comment>


Can Multilingualism Survive?: How cities preserve and abandon languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/05/multilingual-cities/482709/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I'm quite pessimistic concerning the future of multilingualism. Small, isolated communities manage to preserve their language for century, but a community the same size in a big city can lose its language in the space of a generation or two.

EDIT : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY) Note that the title is kinda stupid, it's obviously not their native language if they can barely speak it, and that's kind of the point. Note also that their parents come from a huge language community which is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon and nevertheless, it's not enough.

<comment><USER3> That's obvious though, isn't it? People are going to gravitate towards adopting the language with highest economic and social capital (presumably why English took over French as an international language?).

<comment> guard-of-terra English is also less weird than French, written English is pretty easy language. Spoken English not so much. Italian is perhaps much easier, but of course economic and social capital matters too.

<comment><USER2> Weirdness of a language is completely subjective, and easyness too.

Overall, the intrinsic qualities of a language matter little if at all in driving its adoption.

<comment><USER4> Inflected and irregular languages are more complex than uninflected and regular. That's one kind of weirdness that it's difficult to dismiss.

<comment><USER5> But in most cases you don't have a pick of which extra language to learn.

People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British). Everything else is irrelevant.

<comment><USER6> I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school. For me it was English, Latin (hated it) and French (as third language I also could have chosen Russian (would also have interested me) or ancient Greek).

<comment><USER7> >> People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British).

> I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they > have to pick it in school.

You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. People who study a language because they want to communicate with people who speak that language, do learn.

<comment><USER6> > You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far > and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school > don't learn anything.

I know few people who really try to learn a new language after school (which is IMHO a pity, since there exist free options in the internet), so for the typical person it is "one either learned the language in school and got to an at least medium level (on which one can, if one wants to (say, because one wants to communicate with others), build later on in life) or one will never learn the language".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uniting in language is a sign of increased communication and opportunity. The sooner we have a global language, the better. More opportunity, less war. I would think a bunch of engineers trying to create stuff would agree on that.

All of that being said, the study of language is very important, and the differences that exist should be recorded for scientific study. Maybe it even makes sense to preserve the real outlying communities ([http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are- Snakes/dp/0307386...](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are- Snakes/dp/0307386120)) by forcibly cutting them off from the global economy.

But major languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) are redundant standards that should be consolidated ASAP.

<comment><USER9> A common global language doesn't have to be a _human_ language though. Technology to translate in real-time already exists, and is likely to improve far more quickly than anything that requires a rewrite of our cultural and political systems. It's a great deal more likely we'll speak as many languages as we do now but use technology to understand many more.

<comment><USER10> "Technology to translate in real-time already exists"

No. It does not. I do some translation work and a lot of multilingual interaction. There is no decent translation technology even for written communication outside technical documents. Even that is only barely decent between European languages. A serious attempt at usable translation of even the simplest texts between Asian languages and others does not yet exist.

Real time translation would multiply the speech recognition problem onto that still-imaginary translation technology.

I will admit there is a lot of hype but there is no substitute for human translators nor for simply learning a new language anywhere on the horizon.

<comment><USER9> It's early days, but the cutting edge stuff works for some limited value of "works". It's just about usable for casual conversations. But that's not the point I was making; what I'm saying is simply that the likelihood of getting working real-time translation on a computer is _considerably_ higher than getting everyone to agree on a universal single language.

I can see computer-based real-time translation getting to the point where it's putting translators out of jobs in the next few decades. I can't ever imagine humanity transitioning to a single language, or even a limited scope single language for business. It just won't happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In my experience, every langauge is broken into two dialectual parts:

1\. The formal communications dialect 2\. The bedroom + dinner table dialect

People who live in a european contry may notice that the formal dialect of their native langauge is dissapearing, and even, that many new concepts cannot be expressed in their native toung. But that doesn't mean that the bedroom + dinner table aspect of their langauge is going away. Germans don't have tummy aches, neither do Czechs. But both, "compile" their software and both preform a "git commit".

<comment><USER2> It's much more complicated than that, and unless you know french, I doubt you'd guess what a "logiciel" is or an "ordinateur".

Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "concept that cannot be expressed" in a language. More often than not when people say a language has "no word for X", they turn out to be wrong, and even when they're right, the concept can be expressed through paraphrase.

<comment><USER12> There are many concepts in many languages that cannot be expressed in another language with the same connotations and subtext.

That's why we have loanwords.

Why else would a bouquet not be called "a bunch of flowers". Because a bunch of flowers is something different than a bouquet.

<comment><USER13> We call them floral arrangements in the midwest United States, not "bunch[es] of flowers". We also call them bouquets, nevertheless, I think the English language can handle that one just fine.

<comment><USER14> I think what the above poster was referring to was the cultural connotations that are immediately invoked by a word or phrase that isn't really transmissible to someone not familiar with the language and its culture. The example of "bouquet" was likely to touch on the idea that the literal translation of the word would be more akin to their example of "bunch of flowers". Since the word has now integrated into English, there is an immediate understanding that you're not just referring to a bunch of flowers, but something meant to be aesthetically pleasing and usually to signify an event of some importance. I suppose the English language did handle the word, but it did so by just integrating the word, not by translating it.

The response to the parent comment was more to debate that there are a lot of words, concepts, and idioms that may carry an actual translation or similar concept in another, but the translations fail to capture the immediacy of the idea conveyed by the original word or phrase. It's not to say that there is no way to understand or interpret these bits of language unless you're a native speaker, it's that in many cases you lose a lot of the meaning without the cultural context surrounding it.

Culture and language are pretty inseparable; it's why transliteration is often frowned upon when doing translation works, and localization is considered important to helping the audience understand without imparting too high of a burden of knowledge of their part. Sometimes this burden of knowledge is simply unavoidable. But the ability of a word or phrase to evoke a specific idea/image/feeling in one language and to not do so in another is not impossible. If you know anyone for whom English is a second language (and has not spent extended time in the US), try to explain why "cut the cheese" is funny in English. They may understand conceptually that there is a rude meaning to the phrase, but I'm willing to bet they'd be more than happy to tell you that they'll cut the cheese in the kitchen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most european languages are bound to disapear if Europe wants to achieve anything in common. You just can't if people don't understand each others, and if people all have to speak a common language, within a couple of generations, French, Spanish or German will be that old dialect that some old people insist on speaking but that new generations don't understand anymore. Everything has a begining, a peak and an end. Languages too.

<comment><USER2> _Europe wants to achieve anything in common_

It's unclear if "Europe" wants anything of the sort at this point, and you seem to assume that English would be the common language, which is not unreasonable since it's the one currently being used, but it's not politically acceptable, and it'll be worse if the UK finally decides to leave.

Note also that Europe is probably the part of the world where minority languages are in better shape. E.g Catalan is spoken by 4 million native speakers, which is more than all of the native american language speakers combined.

<comment><USER10> Mayan and Nahuatl (Aztec) are each spoken by more than that before we even address the much more diverse South American languages. Europe is far from the most prosperous place for minority languages. SE Asia and Central America are far better.

<comment><USER2> I thought I'd written 'North America', but apparently I didn't, so yeah, point taken.

Even if there are more minority languages in SE Asia and South America, I'm not sure they're treated better there than in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are a lot of factors here. Some communities fiercely protect their local tongue. Take Brittany in France for example. They still teach their native language, completely distinct from French, in public schools. This is how long after French has been the official language of France? Additionally, some countries in Europe, such as the Netherlands, have high rates of multilingualism. It is supposedly easier when you are born into it. This enables you to speak the administrative languages fluently while still speaking a native language at home only a few million people on the planet still speak. Loyalty to one's culture can have a lot to do with sustainability of a language. To an outsider, it may seem futile to learn a language like Italian for any kind of practical reason. To an Italian, to abandon their language would be sacrilege.

Globalism may be weakening some languages in the near term as it may make sense for people around the world to learn English or even Chinese, and maybe a few other languages. However, imagine if translation technology became advanced enough to conduct a normal conversation with each party speaking a different language. We might even hold on to that mysterious 4th official language in Switzerland (Romansh) after that. There are plenty of people who would love to go back to their hometown and speak nothing other than the language their parents taught them.

</comment><comment><USER17> "The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects; In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings."

[http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...](http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Tower of babble must come down. We are so obsessed as a civilization with at the same time destroying languages through things like global capitalism, while at the same time preserving them. It's a weird combo.

<comment><USER19> You're mixing your metaphors, the tower of babel was struck down the same time ADMIN invoked the curse of babble upon the land.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to manage expectations in finding talent in a small city? - <AUTHOR> I work at a young startup that got funded. This startup is based out of a small city. We conducted somewhere between 20-30 interviews for software developers in the course of 5 months. Even though most of the people seemed nice enough and ready to work at a startup, they failed even the basic coding puzzles.
Now, since the first 10 candidates's levels were pretty low. I have simplified the coding puzzles to the point that my first question is: "Given 'n' a natural number, can you write a method that returns the sum of numbers from 1 to n?". Almost every person out of the next 20 interviews failed this question.
I wouldn't mind training a junior or taking an intern if he has the foundations covered. In fact, I did this with one of my friends that joined this company. Now he is doing a stellar job.
Talking with local business owners, I got reprimanded a bit because I ask such "algorithmic questions" and they don't matter when you do the actual job. In my mind, I wonder how you can do your job without knowing how to write a "for" loop. The questions just test that the candidate has a good grasp on data structures, they are not at all complicated for someone that actually does coding. I guide them through the puzzles that they get stuck at (mind you, most get stuck at the sum test) with helping questions. If they fail the test, I tell them on what to improve upon if they want to have another go at the interview (no candidates returned for a second interview).
I'm not going to get discouraged and keep searching, but how do I manage the expectations when interviewing in a small city? <comment><USER2> Are you asking them to do these "puzzles" on a whiteboard with you watching or with a bit of privacy and a computer and development tools?

<comment><AUTHOR> If face to face, it is on a white piece of paper. If it is on skype, I just ask them to open up any code/text editor they want. Also, I allow them to use whatever resource they want. And yes, in both cases I would be watching them, the reason being I want to see the way they think and how they reason.

<comment><USER2> Personally I don't think that kind of approach is a _great_ idea as coding isn't really a performance activity - I prefer letting people work on a task in isolation then discussing what they have done afterwards. YMMV.

Edit: Also, and I do mean this constructively, some people can be pretty intimidating on a 1 to 1 basis without knowing it. I only realised this when I was in a CTO position and had some training where I was videoed in meetings and I realised that a lot of what I was doing was actually pretty rough on people....

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting point. I never thought of this. I'll give it a shot in the next 10 interviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does your city have an institution of higher education, and does it have a computer science department?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and it has a CS department. Although, I have a feeling it is not such a strong department.

<comment><USER3> It may be that the best graduates are leaving town because of a lack of challenging or well-paying jobs.

Have you interviewed any brand new grads? Surely immediately after completing a CS degree you'd be able to write a function with a simple loop?

How competitive is the salary you're offering?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, candidates are leaving this city. Some of them return though, but prefer working in corporations (lots of benefits, not so stressful job, etc). I don't think we had any fresh grads, although we did do some efforts in organising workshops based on the tech we use in order to meet devs and some of them were pretty young, but without a CS degree.

Our salaries are pretty competitive, its as much as you would get in a bigger city. Other companies here face the exact problem we are facing, but I think they can attract talent based on job security alone (i.e. IBM), whereas we don't know if we're going to be around next year unless we get another round :) I do agree that there is a lack of challenging jobs around here, most companies are web-shops that do basic websites/blogs/web-apps. We had a candidate that spent 2 years doing just css/html for forms.

<comment><USER3> I suggest you try recruiting on campus toward the end of each semester, and right after graduation in spring. Maybe even try to get some interns. Young grads will be hungry and trainable, and are facing the toughest hiring market of any software developers these days. And if the program is halfway decent, they should at least be capable of writing a fizzbuzz after graduation.

The downside is that new grads need a LOT of training.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you hire remote contractors/employees if local talent pool isn't enough?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have a remote team that we work well with for third party plugins and such, but I do prefer having one more person here to work on the core of the product.</comment></comment>


Internet 'is not working for women and girls', says Berners-Lee - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/global/2020/mar/12/internet-not-working-women-girls-tim-berners-lee <comment><USER2> While I do think that this is a very real problem that should be addressed somehow, I think Tim Berners-Lee should stop making useless statements to capitalize on being "the inventor of the Internet". It just feels more and more like a celebrity chiming in an issue to get public appraisal and I think it just adds noise for the people actually working on the problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> By unambiguously taking this side of a highly partisan political issue, I fear TBL has lost a lot of credibility in the eyes of many of the people he needs to fix the actual problems that have befallen the web.

<comment><USER4> I don't read anything in the article which I would consider political, or taking a "side" other than admitting the issues mentioned exist. Nowhere is any specific political party or ideology mentioned or blamed.

I don't know why TBL would lose credibility, or what he would lose credibility in, specifically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Public spheres of all sorts have long not worked that well for women and girls.

I don't think this is the way to remedy that.

</comment><comment><USER6> He, being older white man, knows this best.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best business you can start with $250k? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I would guess that most businesses in history were started with less than this -- it's a pretty broad question. Can you narrow it down? Are you looking for a lifestyle business? A specific field? Are you open to buying businesses?

</comment><comment><USER3> Check out feinternational.com

It has online businesses for sale, with a few different business models.

SaaS, Affiliate, Display advertising, drop shipping.

Assuming you're somewhat familiar with one type of business model and an industry, purchasing one might provide the most bang for your buck.

</comment><comment><USER4> Stock trader, because your risk is only 250k. Other businesses involve even more risk than your principle.

<comment><USER5> Amen.</comment></comment>


Xterm(1) now UTF-8 by default on OpenBSD - <AUTHOR> http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160308204011 <comment><USER2> I and others have pushed changes into XTerm to improve mouse support of terminal-based applications. All terminal emulators should implement XTerm's command set, especially these:

Bracketed paste mode: allows editor to determine that text is from a mouse paste instead of typed in. This way, the editor can disable auto-indent and other things which can mess up the paste. Libvte now supports this!

Base64 selection transfer: this is a further enhancement which allows the editor to query or submit selection text to the X server. This allows editors to fully control the selection process, for example to allow the selection to extend through the edit buffer instead of just the terminal emulator's contents.

One patch of mine didn't take, but I think it's still needed: allow mouse drag events to be reported even if the coordinates extend beyond the xterm window frame. Along with this is the ability to report negative coordinates if the mouse is above or to the left of the window. Why would this be needed? Think of selecting text which is scrolled off the window. The distance between edge and the mouse controls the rate of selection scrolling in that direction.

BTW, it's fun to peruse xterm's change log. For example, you can see all the bugs and enhancements from Bram Moolenaar for VIM. [http://invisible- island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html](http://invisible- island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html)

Thomas Dickey maintains a lot of other software as well, in particular ncurses, vile and lynx: [http://invisible-island.net/](http://invisible- island.net/)

<comment><USER3> Bracketed paste mode is also useful for IRC, to prevent misfiring a huge paste into a channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Every time some link or headline reads "now UTF-8 by default", the only reasonable response in 2016 is "about time".

<comment><USER5> That's not why this article is interesting. Rather, it highlights how profoundly _not_ UTF-8 ready the (terminal) world is.

(It does work in practice, but in-band signaling over a channel carrying complex data that receiver and sender interpret according to settings that do not appear in the protocol at all is, predictably, terrible.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminded me of a Rob Pike comment. I can't find the text, but it was along the lines of, "I recently tried Linux. It was as if every bug I fixed in the 1980s had reverted."

<comment><USER7> That was baseless posturing. A famous study and its follow-up found that the utilities on GNU/Linux are more robust, and that was twenty years ago:

ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.pdf [1995]

" _This study parallels our 1990 study (that tested only the basic UNIX utilities); all systems that we compared between 1990 and 1995 noticeably improved in reliability, but still had significant rates of failure. The reliability of the basic utilities from GNU and Linux were noticeably better than those of the commercial systems._ "

I doubt there has been much improvement in those commercial Unixes; they are basically dead. (What would be the business case for fixing something in userland utility on commerical Unix?)

The maintainers of the free BSD's have been carrying that torch, but they don't believe in features.

Stepping into a BSD variant is like a trip back to the 1980's. Not exactly the real 1980's, but a parallel 1980's in which Unix is more robust---but the features are all rolled back, so it's just about as unpleasant to use.

<comment><USER8> I don't think Rob meant stability. Rob was probably referring to the reality that modern Linux hasn't innovated itself past SVR4 by any appreciable amount.

We are still using X, still using terminals powered by control codes, etc.

Rob probably sees things like LANG and LC_ALL as bugs. His fix was UTF-8 everywhere, always. Where is Linux? Still in bag-of-bytes-o-rama.

<comment><USER9> That and getting rid of the TTY altogether.

We aren't using punched cards

EDIT: people hate when I say this, which amuses me. The TTY must die !!!!

<comment> nils-m-holm > The TTY must die!!!!

Being sight-impaired, I have to disagree strongly! The TTY is the only thing that lets me adjust the font size of all programs running in it without going through lots of trouble.

(BTW: didn't downvote your comment.)

<comment> guard-of-terra Browsers let you do that. KDE also does, so do other environments. For a quick hack, set your sceen DPI to 50.

<comment> nils-m-holm Set your minimum font size to 32 points and browse the web for a while! Let me know how it feels!

<comment> guard-of-terra Browsers can set default zoom, not just font size.

<comment> nils-m-holm Doesn't help. When the zoom factor is big enough, you have to scroll sideways while reading.

Anyway, I have tried a lot of things over the years and _nothing_ even comes close to using a text interface.

To name a few nuisances: controls moving outside of the screen, overlapping elements in web content, unreadable buttons, unclickable input fields, tiny fonts in menus, etc. Nothing of this happens with text interfaces.

Thanks for your input, though!

<comment> guard-of-terra For reading, consider installing beeline reader (yes the name is stupid-ish), in plugin or bookmarklet form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been trying to teach myself some unicode code points because I'm getting sick and tired of continually Googling them and copying and pasting the result or bringing up a symbol character table.

In fact, I'd say keyboards are woefully out to date.

Specifically, I keep looking up † dagger (U+2020) and ‡ double-dagger (U+2021) for footnotes, black heart (U+2065) to be romantic, black star (U+2605) to talk about David Bowie's last album and ∞ to talk about actual non-finite entities.

I olny found out recently that Ctrl+Shift+u and then type unicode hexadecimal outputs these in Ubuntu, presumably all Linuxen. AltGr+8 is great for diaeresis while we're at it so you can go all hëävÿ mëtäl really easily.

edit: _black heart and star are not making it through, why Lord, why?!_

<comment><USER11> On OS X, if you type Command+Control+Space, it brings up a character insertion menu where you can search by character name. I can get both daggers, black star and black heart quite quickly that way.

<comment><USER12> Also on OS X, † is option-t, and ‡ is option-shift-7.

<comment><USER10> Ok, On Linux I have found ‡ and †

† is AltGr-Shift-%, and ‡ AltGr-Shift-:

I'll never remember them :(

<comment><USER13> U+2020 (†) and U+2021 (‡) aren't that hard to remember for the sake of a few extra key-presses and wider compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wouldn't it be better if all those dangerous escape sequences (like Application Program-Control, redefining function keys, alternate character sets, etc.) were disabled by default in xterm? Anyone using the obsolete software that uses them could enable them if they wish.

</comment><comment><USER15> Repeat after me: UTF-8 is the sane default in this day and age. This is a good change.

The whole "the ISO 6429 C1 control code 'application program command'" thing is a bit surprising though. (I'm guessing this change doesn't actually avoid this directly? If you sent an APC it'd still do it, it's just that APC is multiple bytes in UTF-8, and hopefully a bit rarer?)

> _Reinterpreting US-ASCII in an arbitrary encoding_

This way will likely work — at least, I thought. The vast majority of encodings are a superset of ASCII, so reinterpreting ASCII as them _is_ valid. The only one I know of that isn't is EBCDIC, and I've never seen it used. (Said differently, non-superset-of-ASCII codecs are incredible rare to encounter, so the above assumption usually holds.) (The reverse, reinterpreting arbitrary data as ASCII, is not going to work out as well.)

Though it is rather horrifying how easily it is to dump arbitrary data into a terminals stream. Unix does not make this easy for the program. The vast majority of programs, I'd say, really just want to output text. Yet, they're connected to a terminal. Or better, if perhaps a program could say, "I'm outputting arbitrary binary data", or even "I'm outputting a application/tar+gzip"; the terminal would then know immediately to not interpret this input. And in the case of tar+gzip, it would have the opportunity to do something truly magical: it could visualize the octets (since trying to interpret a gzip as UTF-8 is insane); it could even just note that the output was a tar, and _list the tar 's contents like tar -t_. If the program declares itself aware, like "application/terminal.ansi", then okay, you know: it's aware; interpret away.

But it doesn't, so it can't. Part of the difficulty is probably that the TTY is both input and output (not that the input can't also declare a mimetype or something similar). And the vast majority of programs don't escape their user input before sending it to a terminal; it's like one giant "terminal-XSS" or "SQL-injection-for-your-terminal". And it is probably unreasonable to expect it; I don't really know of any good libraries around terminal I/O; most programs I see that do it assume the world is an xterm and just encode the raw bytes, right there, and pray w.r.t. user input.

catting the linux kernel's gzip into tmux can have consequences from "lol" to "I guess we need a new tmux session".

It was also just today that I discovered that neither GNU's `ps` nor `screen` support Unicode, at least, for characters outside the BMP.

<comment><USER16> UTF-16 isn't a superset of ASCII, for one. Doesn't seem that anyone uses a native UTF-16 terminal, but if you're trying to use grep or whatnot on a UTF-16 encoded file, it'll happily silently not do what you want...

<comment><USER17> 畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴!

<comment><USER16> 唀吀䘀ⴀ㄀㘀 戀礀琀攀猀眀愀瀀猀 愀爀攀 愀氀猀漀 昀甀渀.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is really great! Just a few days ago I got very confused when I saw tofu characters in xterm and had to switch to uxterm to see them (or set some locale flag in my home dir).

</comment><comment><USER19> UTF-8 must be the default and only encoding. Why does anything else still exist?

<comment><USER20> Yes but UTF-8 with or without byte order mark ? ;-)

<comment><USER19> Without. BOM (when used for UTF-8) is an obsolete crap invented by necrosoft in order to make their software incompatible with normal.

<comment><USER17> It's not a Microsoft invention, and MS's use of it is really quite sensible. They had a problem of distinguishing UTF-16, UTF-8 and non-Unicode (possibly a single-byte "extended ASCII" type encoding, possibly some multi-byte monstrosity) text files. Since UTF-8 and ASCII-compatible encodings look similar when there aren't many >U+007F characters in use, and identical if none are in use, they could get confused. Prepending a Byte Order Mark solves this problem, in that it makes a file unambiguously UTF-8 (or UTF-16, for that matter).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great! Now just drop the embarrassing man(1) page reference, and you can call it modernized.

Wow, I'm surprised that the people whose buttons this pushes are able to make(1) a HN account, let alone have enough points to downvote.

Think about it. There is only one man page for xterm. I fyou type "man xterm" with no section number you get that man page. If there existed an xterm(7) page, you'd still get the xterm(1) man page by default. So why the hell write the (1) notation every time you type the word xterm?

Man page section numbers are not useful or relevant, by and large and mentioning them only adds noise to a paragraph.

Even stupider is when the worst of the Unix wankers write man page section numbers after ISO C function names. Example sentence: "Microsoft's malloc(3) implementation is found in MSVCRT.DLL". #facepalm#

<comment><USER21> >Think about it. There is only one man page for xterm. I fyou type "man xterm" with no section number you get that man page. If there existed an xterm(7) page, you'd still get the xterm(1) man page by default. So why the hell write the (1) notation every time you type the word xterm?

Because the convention exists to define the type of the component. It's a handy convention, and I'm betting there are a few people reading this who have never used anything other than GNOME terminal so appending the section number immediately helps the reader to place the component, otherwise they'd have to look it up. etc

<comment><USER7> So, if I don't know anything but Gnome terminal, and don't know what xterm is, if I see "xterm", I have to look it up. However, if I see "xterm(1)", I _don 't_ have to look it up?

Strange.

(And how did I get to the situation in which I know what (1) means, yet I only know Gnome terminal and don't know what xterm is?)

(What about the fact that xterm(1) is also a _hyperlink_ in the sumitted page? You could change the anchor text to "xterm(foo)" and it would still navigate to the correct man page with one click.)

<comment><USER21> unix has got much bigger problems than this</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What should I choose to maximize both learning and earning? - <AUTHOR> Recently I read a news and my mentor also confirms it:
"There are a lot of arguments for jumping ship every few years. The economy isn't what it used to be—and never will be again. Workers who stay with a company longer than two years are said to get paid 50% less, and job hoppers are believed to have a higher learning curve, be higher performers, and even to be more loyal, because they care about making a good impression in the short amount of time they know they'll stay with each employer." [1]
I'm a Developer-turned-Manager in a Japanese startup. I have been working here for 40 months, but there're stuff about business to learn from my bosses and investors. However, the company is quite struggling (I'm being paid 20% below the market) and there're no seniors with higher technical skills than me.
What would I do to maximize both learning and earning: job-hopping after 2 years or staying till I'm the smartest guy in the room or anything else?
[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3055035/the-future-of-work/you-should-plan-on-switching-jobs-every-three-years-for-the-rest-of-your- <comment><USER2> Suster's essay is realted: [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is- it-time-for...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for- you-to-earn-or-to-learn/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the link. Do you have any advice of your perspective?

<comment><USER2> I spend time HN _because_ I am no where near the smartest person and I tend to optimize for learning. But that is _my_ nature...and it only works for me for some odd definitions of "works".

I don't really have an accurate context for Japan's employment landscape - other than believing it is somewhat different from the US. So I don't feel comfortable being specific. My confidence in my imagination fails me unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Do what makes you happy.

<comment><AUTHOR> My happiness is "maximizing both learning and earning," but one of those is not at its best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you have your own answer:)

Regarding to learning, you are the smartest and the most skilled in the working place. You now learn mostly by your self. Stronger people will have you learn faster and more effectively.

About earning, you are low paid. And you know it, and you are unsatisfied about it.

Staying here you cannot maximize neither learning nor earning.</comment>


"We aren't being hit by Future Shock. We are going to be hit by Future Nausea. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/print/

<comment><USER2> I think in order to have the time to say that we are all living in the 15th century, you would have to be doing your chores with electricity and buying your food in a store (that stocks preserved, prepared and rapidly transported goods).

Never mind torturing the impact of air travel (you can get there tomorrow! is a lot more interesting than the forces experienced during a flight) and genetic engineering (A substantial portion of worldwide calories come from GMOs).</comment>


CherryMusic – Stream your own music collection - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/devsnd/cherrymusic

<comment><USER2> Only had a brief moment to play with this but it's already a step up from SubSonic. It's far less bloated and is easier to use.</comment>


Ask HN: Did Google shoot themselves in the foot by creating and promoting SEO? - <AUTHOR>

The job of a good search engine is to return the best possible results for the user. What Google did was tell content creators some of the signals they use to rank pages.
Some of these content creators used and abused this and got better rankings. I see many fake sites built just to link to one site, people asking for or buying links (like in the case of rap genius but which we don't hear about) and other tricks to get good rankings.
Wouldn't it had been better not to give such power to content creators and just tell them to build good content that people want to read? <comment><USER2> Mostly Google does tell people to create good content, but there are still swarms of SEOers who will try to reverse-engineer Google's algorithms regardless of how much or little information Google releases.</comment>