Europe Is Struggling to Foster a Startup Culture - <AUTHOR> http://on.wsj.com/1FvEGtI <comment><USER2> While it is true that a startup culture is very valuable in the IT-section, it's not that true that one needs a startup culture.

I am an engaged computer gamer and we Germans have many successful e-sport stars, E-Sports are not officially recognized in Germany.

Same goes for startups, I can list you 20 Industry leading Game startups and multiple hundred exceptional well doing tech startups in Germany.

Whatever people think about you does not matter as long as you have a great product to sell.

Also the author has a slight notion of american exceptionalism, that something works in the USA is by no means a measurement to go by and say: "Hey you should do this also, it will be working great!" Some detailed research about markets, employees, laws and how to adapt them would do every European government better than simply trying to copy America.

<comment><USER3> Here's another data point supporting the claim that Europe's start-up ecosystem is weak:

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/73-most-valuable-startups- ear...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/73-most-valuable-startups-earth-dennis- k-berman)

This is a list of start-ups(in private control) with value over $1 billion. 73 companies in total , 6 are European , and 15 are Asian.

EDIT: one possibility is that European are suffering a similar problem to that of the Israelis - even though they have great tech/product , they just sell earlier. BTW in Israel(which most agree has a strong start-up ecosystem/culture) it's mainly because they're lacking in certain scaling skills(but they're learning) + and to some extent they try to minimize risk.

<comment><USER2> I once looked at the companies google purchased and saw many German and Israel tech companies being acquired by google. This sounds plausible.

Still this kind of analysis is very weak for two reasons. Most countries aren't as company friendly as the USA. A discussion about whether Billionares should pay taxes would be unimaginable in most most European countries.

Also America has a strong customer base by default with 320 American citizens and the other 900 Million Nativ speakers, who can easily buy products made for the American market (Especially in the Tech area).

Also those kind of graphs usually get smaller, the higher you go.

One should compare the total amount of startups and divide by citizens, the findings will be a better tool for comparison.

<comment><USER2> whoops...

Those were 320 Million Americans and 900 Million englisch speakers, not native speakers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Although there are many start-ups in Berlin it's pretty tough to navigate all the laws and regulations and more often than not it involves money. So when you try to start a garage business you will discover obstacle after obstacle. It is pretty hard to "just try" a business idea because with all the crap you have to do and pay it HAS to work. I still after 5 years discover some regulations that I completely missed and I always hope that there's no big one hiding behind the bushes. There is a saying in Germany: if you own a business you got one foot in prison.

<comment><USER5> Latest complicated regulation: 'Mindestlohn' and interns.

<comment><USER6> Even though Mindestlohn does not apply to interns, who stay up to 3 months, it is still a bad thing for startups.

<comment><USER7> Mindestlohn also applies to interns:

> [http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/milog/__22.html](http://www.gesetze-im- > internet.de/milog/__22.html)

The main exception is if the internship is required for finishing or beginning a degree course or done while a degree course (but read the text of the law yourself for the remaining exceptions).

This was criticized a lot when the law adopted, since there can be good reasons to do an internship even after finishing university even if it is paid really badly (say, as a reference).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The major problem is that some of the best Europeans leave to US to start or join startup companies (e.g. Stripe). And if you look at the best US companies you will typically see a large amounts of Europeans in them. So Europeans are very capable of starting and joining startups - they just don't do it in Europe.

What Europe needs is a better way to keep the talent at home.

<comment><USER9> We know how to keep the talent at home. The simple solution is to pay them more money (which people tend to crave). But because most European countries have more social security cushion, we tend to pay more taxes. This makes it difficult to compete for companies in say France, Germany, Sweden, etc.

So, at the risk of being extremely antagonistic with this, the solution is for us as societies to start caring less about the less fortunate and give more to the "job creators" like it's done in the USA.

Then we'll be able to compete on a level ground.

<comment><USER10> What's the point of being competitive if you throw your quality of life away to obtain it?

<comment><USER9> Exactly my point. It's all about the kind of society you want for yourselves and others. The number of homeless people in North American cities is always a dire reminder that there is a societal cost to deregulation and making life easier for the business bootstrappers. Every other choice you can make for your people as a politician is always a double-edged sword anyway, I'm not knocking the pro-business approach here, it's just that I would choose more taxes every time because I've seen the benefits first hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> At least for me, there are 2 main problems: taxes and language.

Taxes: here in Germany you pay 19% VAT on all transactions. Then, income tax, which quickly reaches 42%, then solidarity tax, basically almost half of your earnings evaporate

Language: it's tough to address a decently large market, the biggest market (German speaking) is about 100M people, that's 4 times less than the USA market

You can easily see that those 2 points quickly add up and create "corollary" problems. With those taxes + social security, to give a strong employee a strong salary you go towards a cost of +150k. To pay that much to employees you would need a big market to address to get revenues, but the market is small-ish, or you might look for VC money, but people with money are too scattered across too many languages and countries.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think we're doing alright in London? Pop over to Silicon Roundabout and every bar man will want to tell you about his App. There's start-ups and incubators everywhere. The one thing we don't have the same structure of is VCs - the US kills us there. It's growing though, and the government is really pushing to grow it further.

<comment><USER13> Slightly OT: what would be best places in Silicon Roundabout to hang out for a software engineer who's thinking about (but not quite ready yet) of starting his own gig? Google Campus closes at the same time I finish work in The City, it's a bit of a shame.

<comment><USER14> I'd hop on meetup.com -- most of the tech / startup events are around Shoreditch. Things like 3beards, open coffee (tot ct rd way), don't pitch me bro, etc.

Or see what's on at tech hub, innovation warehouse, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this really a problem ?

I was under the impression that the vast majority of start-ups 1. fail or 2. require employees to expend huge effort while the lion's share of the revenue gain is made by the C-level officers.

Why would an European labor force want to expose itself to the "start-up" platform ?

<comment><USER16> The idea is that you let a million flowers of innovation bloom. You shouldn't _need_ VCs to pursue your ideas and it's usually recommended (Joel Spolsky, Philip Greenspun, Jason Fried and DHH etc. recommend against it).

It should be better in Europe because of the safety net and limited work hours; sure it's easier to be comfortable, but it's also easier to take some time off and work on a cool idea that doesn't have to be a revenue generator.

<comment><USER15> But the safety net requires companies to absorb the risk that start-ups pass on to the work force.

How would a small company get around the cost of doing business where labor is actually valued?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tell that to the many startups in Berlin, where it is cheap to live and there are a lot of great tech companies. Berlin is like the Los Angeles (aka cultural melting pot) of much of Europe.

<comment><USER18> I think London has a better reputation as a cultural melting pot really

<comment><USER17> And unlike Berlin, it is very expensive to live and work. That being said I <3 both, but think Berlin is a much better place for startup culture.

<comment><USER13> I would have to agree about Berlin (I'm in London), if not the language I'd be there already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> OT, but the only times I've encountered the word "foster", it is in the context of the European Commission, specifically in the context of what they want to achieve with grants.

Is it my limited exposure to English, or has the European Commission appropriated this word, and has by the way infected WSJ to use it?

<comment><USER20> In the politest way possible, it is the former. :-)

"Fostering a X culture" is a common phrase outside of the EC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yawn.

The only major thing we're lacking in Europe is venture capital.

All the other cultural differences (which aren't "European" but vary wildly from country to country), are red herrings Americans and European self-haters like to emphasize. But in reality we a) learned to work with them a long time ago, otherwise we would never have been economically successful, and b) those differences are strengths as well as weaknesses in equal measure.

Yes, the lack of a barrier-free "single market" is also a bit of a pain, but the biggest issue here is _language and culture_ , not laws and regulations, and that's not going to change any time soon. So there's no point on dwelling on it, it's like complaining that the climate in Norway isn't suited for growing bananas.

In reality there are lively start-up scenes all over Europe, with more than enough entrepreneurs willing to take risks, more than enough smart people with innovative ideas, and more than enough people willing to work for them.

The one and only thing that is truly missing is funding, funding and funding. The investment culture is the only place where there is a suffocating risk- averse attitude.

(And most of those anecdotes about how stuffy and risk-averse European culture is are bullshit outliers. I can dig up a ton of totally true anecdotes about the US and make American culture look completely fucking insane. It has nothing to do with the day to day reality of living and doing business on either continent.)

</comment><comment><USER22> In regards to hardware startups, I would think Europe should have the leading edge in comparison to America due to their proximity to China- in America, if I want to start sourcing parts from china, or go into production, It's a significant endeavor. If I'm just a hobbyist screwing around at a workbench, I can pay a huge markup on parts from American vendors, or I can wait 3 weeks to get the same thing from China.

I can't speak from experience in regards to hardware startups, I've just made a handful of one-off boards, but after reading Bunnie's blog in regards to his trips to China and such, the importance of location near it becomes apparent.

<comment><USER23> "proximity to China"? We're not significantly closer. We get our parts by ocean or air shipping with roughly the same costs.

But we do have WEEE and CE regulations which make selling small-batch electronics a huge pain. I'm very impressed that Arduino managed it, and Pi had a last-minute CE approval near-disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> On the other hand... who gives a flygin f' about a startup ecosystem? If to get a strong startup scene I have to live in a society that loves risk (and loves to tell you that taking it is a character quality)... no thanks. I'll happily take degrowth instead.

</comment><comment><USER25> Here in Hungary we have Prezi, Ustream, Logmein, and some smaller startups.

<comment><USER26> I was in Budapest in 2003 and I have to say: the creative energy that was there seemed to be singular. I hope it's still strong. I don't know if I could convince my wife to move (it would set back the clock on her U.S. citizenship) but I'd love to get out there more often.

I came up with this card game (Ambition) out there: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhHZh5IEKBDf56ExgErv4o/edit)

<comment><USER25> I work at Prezi. We have a lot of expats from the US who come and work here in Budapest. Prezi is like a patch of SF in beautiful Budapest. If you're interested, drop me a line :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not only culture, but regulations and taxes also effect the ability to create a startup.

Here is an explanation of French law: [http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that- its-impossible-to-fire-...](http://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-its- impossible-to-fire-someone-in-France)

As it says in the first comment, it almost becomes easier to try to get the person to quit with 6 month severance than go through all the hoops that you need to go through to actually fire someone.

<comment><USER26> Six months of severance per fired employee is a rounding error. If you're doing things right and hiring properly, less than 2% of the people you bring in should ever be fired anyway. So you're talking about 0.12 months (just 4 days) of salary per employee. Again, a rounding error.

Also, the sleazy tech company alternative (to severance) of PIPing the employee for 2-3 months is more expensive than severance, because of the effects on morale to force the manager to run a kangaroo court and the team to deal with a walking-dead employee who's probably pissing on morale intentionally (I would).

France (and, more generally, Europe) has its problems but that is not even on the top 20. Social class fatalism is more of a problem, and that's reinforced by the fact that (unlike in the U.S.) it's very hard to get even moderately wealthy by working. Programmers and lawyers and doctors make less than here, and costs of living are higher, which means that born social class imposes a ceiling. European countries are far better places than the U.S. for the poor and working class, but the middle-class people who want to rise further tend to come here. This is even worse in parts of Asia, where the idea that you can get rich by working is laughable.

<comment><USER28> _Six months of severance per fired employee is a rounding error_

For a marginal startup founded on a Mastercard and only tenuously on the right side of the border between life and death six months of severance is not a rounding error.

<comment><USER26> 1\. Don't found a startup on a Mastercard. If you're bootstrapping, pay for it out of consulting income. Stop believing the HN party line that failure doesn't have consequences. It can and, for many, it does.

2\. Feel free to ignore #1, it's your life, but don't hire employees if your "funding" is a personal credit card. Really, don't. You're all kinds of not ready to be responsible for other peoples' income.

3\. If you really can't afford a 6-month severance, then pull connections and give an amazing reference so he'll take that as his severance. Let him represent himself as employed, pay him during the gap, and have him line up a better job than the one he has already. Don't have the connections to place someone out on terms that he'll accept? Then how the fuck are you ever going to get funding or a first client? Take the message and hang up the phone.

<comment><USER29> Is this the attitude in France?

<comment><USER30> jbob2000, you are hellbanned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's funny, I guess, to read about the WSJ referring to _European culture_. There is no _European culture_ that I know of. Maybe if you look across from the other side of the ocean, contrast your own culture with Europe as a whole, you note the differences and contrasts and then conclude that what you are looking at is tight-knit enough to be called _a culture_. Maybe like someone travelling from one part of Eurasia to another side, noting how people look and behave and contrast them with the things that are different to their own, and then concluding "this is a distinct culture/group".

Now watch a European disagree with me just to be contrarian.

<comment><USER32> I disagree with yo not to be contrarian, but because you're wrong.

Firstly, inner-European differences are almost by definition smaller than, say, those between Europeans and Asians. Of course there are still cultural differences between Greeks and Irish. But to deny similarities is equally misguided.

Secondly, these differences are getting smaller and smaller. Timothy G. Ash calls it "The Easyjet Generation": young university students, used to cheap airline travel, are creating a unified European culture. I know young people from almost every European country and I feel more connected to them to, say, my 50-year old working class neighbours.

<comment><USER31> > Firstly, inner-European differences are almost by definition smaller than, > say, those between Europeans and Asians.

To say that the differences are smaller is one thing. To call them _one culture_ is an entirely other.

> I know young people from almost every European country and I feel more > connected to them to, say, my 50-year old working class neighbours

Yes, I bet you feel very connected to the English-speaking, or German- speaking, or whatever common language-speaking friends you have who have the inclination, interest and time to learn these common languages and to travel to several countries in order to meet new people (not just to go on a vacation and/or "meet new people while getting wasted"). But is that really such a big group that you would call them something relating to a _generation_? That's a big word to throw around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The difference isn't that Europeans are risk-averse. It's that, if you come from a relatively privileged background and have connections in Silicon Valley, you can launch a startup _without_ taking any real risk.

Speaking for my fellow Americans, we're as terrified of being broke as anyone else. (In fact, we have more to fear, because we don't have universal health care.) That said, these kids who become founders straight out of Stanford aren't taking any real risk. They _say_ they are, to justify getting 100 times more equity than their employees, but their backers have enough pull to ensure a "managed outcome" (acqui-hire into a middle-management role) even if the worst should happen.

We are just as risk-averse as Europeans. On both sides of the Atlantic, there are a few people who naturally tend toward creative risk (who are usually socially rejected, there and here) and a much larger set of people who climb the ladder that's put in front of them, follow the rules, and get into positions of power or influence the old-fashioned way (two parts schmoozing, one part birth, two parts luck). The major difference is in the window dressing. In Europe or New York, that ladder tends to be banking or consulting. In Palo Alto, it's programmer or PM to executive to founder to angel investor to VC... but if you go to the right schools, you can skip a couple of the bottom rungs. The actual willingness of _the people_ to take risks isn't any different in one place or the other.

Of course, when it comes to risk attitudes around _capital_ , it's a different environment entirely. Europe is too conservative and cynical for its own good, and California is too optimistic (and thus prone to "capital evaporation" by socially well connected types) and far too trusting of the wrong sorts of people.</comment>


Do-Sshuttle: Transparent Proxying via DigitalOcean Droplets - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/f/do-sshuttle <comment><USER2> I don't feel like this tool adds a whole lot, though an A for effort.

      # ~/.ssh/config

      Host bastion
        User user
        Port 2222
        Hostname my.host.com

And then as a bash alias in `.bashrc`:

      # ~/.bashrc

      alias stun='sshuttle --dns --daemon --pidfile=/tmp/sshuttle.pid -r bastion 0/0'
      alias stunx='[[ -f /tmp/sshuttle.pid ]] && kill $(cat /tmp/sshuttle.pid)'

Works on OSX and Linux.

</comment><comment><USER3> This appears to be a shell script to deploy sshuttle to a DO droplet.

I've seen this sort of thing be helpful when the software is cumbersome to install and/or use. But, looking at the sshuttle docs, it doesn't look terribly complicated.

I've not used sshuttle myself, so maybe I'm missing something? Is it difficult to install or use? Honestly curious what problem this shell script is addressing.

<comment><USER4> This project is yet another example of a thing someone built to solve some problem, but .... that someone didn't bother to explain just what the problem is, or why this solution is preferred over the other possible solutions.

A readme that describes only how to install a project, or the commands to type, is not sufficient. Every readme should start with a description of what the thing does, and why doing it _this way_ is better.

<comment><USER5> On the other hand it led me to learn that sshuttle is a thing that exists, so that's cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, I too learned of sshuttle from this thread, and was wondering why anyone would want to use sshuttle over just the built-in socks5 proxy of openssh? ( -D: [http://man.openbsd.org/ssh](http://man.openbsd.org/ssh) )

Why and how do you use sshutle? The doc-page for shuttle claims it's smarter than port forwarding - and I guess that might be true for some subset of protocols that isn't quite real-time (builds on udp), but yet isn't something simple like http?

[http://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/how-it- works.html](http://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/how-it-works.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> If you have configured the host in your ~/.ssh/config then you can simply do:

        sshuttle -r <hostname> 0/0

<comment><USER8> The --dns flag will also tunnel your DNS reqs through sshuttle, which is generally worthwhile.</comment></comment>


Fay: a subset of Haskell that compiles to JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://fay-lang.org/

<comment><USER2> I'm really curious about the article "<http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2012/10/yesod-fay-js> " that is linked to in the "Fay in the Wild" section.

Does anyone know how hard it would be to integrate AngularJS with Fay as described? Sounds like it would be a great way to build large client-side applications entirely in Haskell (Fay).

</comment><comment><USER3> There is previous discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4276625> (106 comments of discussion, in fact).

</comment><comment><USER4> For those interested in functional programming, but with a desire for something a bit more pragmatic (and highly compatabile with CoffeeScript), you can check out LiveScript <http://livescript.net>

Functional Programming in JavaScript using LiveScript and prelude.ls: [http://livescript.net/blog/functional-programming-in- javascr...](http://livescript.net/blog/functional-programming-in-javascript- using-livescript-and-prelude-ls.html)

<comment><USER5> What is unpragmatic about Fay?

<comment><USER6> LiveScript is more like a functional sugar coat over JS, so it preserves most JS core semantics. Especially strict evaluation and duck typing. Because of that, i think it is much easier to do the conversion from the JS world to LiveScript, and viceversa.

Introducing Laziness, pureness and static typing into the JS world is a much bigger challenge. I'd _love_ to see some of these efforts take off; especially Elm, which is even more ambitious, as it not only provides a safer alternative to JS, but also to the DOM model and HTML altogether.

The biggest problem i see these projects facing is the abstraction gap. As the abstraction over JS/DOM that they provide is much bigger than, say, CoffeeScript of LiveScript, when that abstraction breaks and you have to dig into the generated JS/DOM world, it's very painful. And this is a necessary pain every time things don't work as expected and you need to debug in the browser. I think that for these projects to be successful efforts like source maps are crucially important. But for projects as ambitious as Fay or Elm, i think we need even better debugging tools; some environment where we can debug _entirely within the abstraction layer_ that these languages provide, and make the cases where you have to resort back to JS much more uncommon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not big on the glaringly inefficient transpilers that Haskell has come up with. You can replicate a lot of Haskell's functionality in JavaScript very elegantly.

See for instance:

* <https://github.com/clux/autonomy> \- prelude like thing

* <https://github.com/clux/subset> \- basically Data.List

* <https://github.com/clux/operators> \- currying helpers

* <https://github.com/clux/interlude> \- a collection of the above 3

It has made my JavaScript development very enjoyable. JavaScript really doesn't suck have to suck. You can write very elegant code in it. It's just not as elegant as Haskell.

<comment><USER8> Its semantics are still silly and extremely error-prone.

Also, that's not the point. There's already Roy and Elm for simpler compilation and decent semantics with interesting features. Fay lets you share code between server and client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fay has to be compiled using a compiler that can't run in the browser, which is a disadvantage from my point of view.

Personally, I quite like roy <http://roy.brianmckenna.org/>.

<comment><USER10> Why do you see that has a disadvantage? From a production perspective, I don't think it would matter much, since you'd most likely compile your app to JS ahead of time no matter what, for performance reasons. From a development perspective, I guess it could be annoying from the compile-debug-refresh cycle. But I could also imagine a tool to watch your app for any changes, recompiling on demand.

Anyway, if you really wanted to run Fay in the browser, you could probably get it to work using UHC (<http://uu-computerscience.github.com/uhc-js/>) pretty easily.

<comment><USER9> The compile-debug-refresh cycle is exactly the problem. Tools that watch the file system are no substitute for servers that can guarantee you get the latest version when you hit f5.

Quickly and reliably seeing your code in action is one of the more important things you do when coding, and anything that messes with that makes your life less fun, more painful and less productive.

<comment><USER11> ClojureScript is not yet self-hosting. That is, the compiler does not run in the browser, although quite a few people want it to, so it's being worked on a bit.

That said, I haven't found it to have any serious impact on my development experience. There is no compile-debug-refresh cycle because I can evaluate forms against the browser REPL remotely. Compilation occurs server side and the JavaScript code is eval-ed on the client.

More details here: <http://blog.fogus.me/tag/clj-compilation/>

<comment><USER9> Yes, when you can update parts of the code on the page with a streaming connection it's a little bit different. I guess I'll give ClojureScript a pass on that one, but it's not a feature that nonlisp systems seem very keen on integrating so far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you want a different browser scripting language, start hacking on Firefox and Chromium and start a campaign to get it adopted. Otherwise, you are adding unnecessary complexity to apps that are already unnecessarily complex in the first place. Coffeescript, Fay, whatever. Build it right or stop with this bullshit.

<comment><USER13> And you think you'll get your new language adopted by Chrome, Firefox, IE and mobile devices? It's not happening.

I don't really see this extra complexity. You might almost as well dismiss all software development that isn't done in raw machine code. Plus, JS these days is blisteringly fast — if it helps, think of it as the web's assembly language.

<comment><USER12> It's highly unlikely, but it's the path to pursue. JS is not the web's assembly language except to people who can't program in it. The added complexity is another (3rd, 4th++) language. If you can't see that, you're blind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another language that compiles to JS. Really? Just learn Javascript already.</comment>


Why isn't anyone writing about Yahoo's amazing stock gains and Microsoft's plunge? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kottke.org/08/05/yahoo-stock-plunges <comment><USER3> Because we're not dumbasses. Give it a few days and I think it will become clear that he is.

<comment><USER4> it's up about two dollars from Monday May 5 open of 23.25 as of Wed close at 25.55; how many more days should we give to become clear?

<comment><USER3> Yes, I'll have to admit, I'm the dumbass. Which is a great lesson for me - <USER2> can't predict the stock market.</comment></comment></comment>


Is the website Zero Hedge a Russian trojan horse? - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/156788/zero-hedge-russian-trojan-horse <comment><USER2> I read Zero Hedge to see a concentrated layout of russian conspiracy theories. Good propaganda is entertaining. But I understand its purpose.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is everything you don't like a Russian Conspiracy?

Yet Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union and expressed his adoration of the country for years, is perfectly acceptable to run our country?

We could also solve many of these issues by having basic voter ID laws. But for some reason that's a problem too.

It's all Bullshit politics.

<comment><USER4> He is not perfectly acceptable to run the US; he's going to lose the primary.

<comment><USER3> He's acceptable to a large percentage of the population, and there is most likely a large percentage of this group that also believes in the Russian->Trump conspiracy.

<comment><USER5> Some surely do, but his supporters, in general, are less likely to believe that Russia had a significant impact on the 2016 election than their more centrist counterparts in the Democratic Party (who were surprised that Hillary didn't win by a landslide and struggled to come up with an explanation).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/the-design-history-of-athens-iconic-apartments <comment><USER2> That's where I grew up - amid the polykatoikies!

It's very strange to see such a positive view of Athens. I mean, growing up, I can't remember anyone ever having a good thing to say about our own homes. Looking down from Lycabetus hill, Athens -rather the entire Attican basin from Penteli to Piraeus and from Parnitha to Hymmetus- looks covered with gray, frayed, books or document binders, or perhaps a mille-feuille without its top. That's the effect of all those balconies and floors stacked on top of each other in houses stuck next to each other, 6 to a building square.

In the summer, all this concrete makes the heat of an already pretty hot place unberable. At the same time, the city is at its best in the height of summer, the 15th of August (δεκαπενταύγουστος, dekapentavgoustos), when most Athenians take their holidays to coincide with the national holiday of the Dormition of Mary (Jesus' mother) by the Orthodox calendar. Those days, the bustling life described in the article disappears and the streets are deserted of people and cars both, so much so that when I found myself in Athens on the dekapentavgoustos, I would casually walk in the middle of the largest streets of the city, without fear of being run over.

But most of the year, Athens is an ugly, unbearable shithole. I appreciate what the article says, about the constant, but not overwhelming, presence of people, about the constant activity that makes the city look alive, etc. And the summer evenings are magickal. But it's also a city of grey concrete covered in a yellow-brown soup of smog, where there is never a quiet place that the noise of cars stuck in kilomter-long traffic jams or the Ilektrikos (the overground metro) doesn't reach, where trash bins overflow (even more when the binmen are on strike) where the air smells of burned fuel and dust, where black dust covers every surface inside a home unless one dusts and brooms and slops every single day.

So, I miss it, yeah :) But it's an awful place to live and nothing makes it more obvious than travelling a bit around Europe and seeing the cities and towns of the Europeans, most of whom have preserved their beautiful architecture, like our neoclassica, instead of replacing it with boxy concrete monstrosities. When I was growing up in Athens, I thought everyone, in all the world, lived in polykatoikies. Turns out, they don't.

<comment><USER3> I was looking at the top image in this article and thinking "that'd be even more amazing if all those cars were kicked off that street and it was more pedestrianized." And in your comment you talk about the noise from the cars too. Cities are not loud, cars are loud.

I think many of the areas of issue you discuss with this could be solved, and many of the strengths that the article's author expresses could be maintained.

We learn something from each microexperiment in housing and city building.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I wish. Unfortunately, Greeks (not just Athenians) suffer from a horrible case of car-i-itis, meaning they have to go everywhere by car (I swear, people get in their car to go get milk or cigarettes) and every family must own a couple of cars, etc. This makes it a lot harder to pedestrianise large parts of the city, if nothing else because there's no space to put all those cars, other than on "pedestrianised" streets.

I've seen this often. Once, I was sitting at a cafe in a "pedestrianised" street and first one, then a second car, came through, in touching range of where I was seated - in a narrow street half of which was already occupied (illegally) by the cafe's chairs and tables. That has stuck into my mind because I have a big mouth and there was an er altercation with the drivers and some of his friends who was actually sitting at the same cafe as me and my friends. Anyway it's a common occurrence and a hard problem to solve.

Don't even think about going around on a bicylce in Athens, of course. You'll just cut years off your life, either because you'll be breathing cars' exhausts constantly or because someone will just run you over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The part of the article that mentioned vertical stratification to avoid horizontal stratification hit a chord with me. I personally come from a family of great means but due to unique circumstances spent much of my childhood living in low income areas and having friends whose parents worked fast food jobs. I think it's the best thing that ever happened to me and I think we would have a better society if more people had close interactions with people going through a different experience than themselves.

<comment><USER5> That part jumped out at me, too.

> "There were wealthier people on the upper floors," says Dragonas, "people > who had just arrived from the countryside further down and poor students in > the basement. That sort of vertical stratification inside a five-story > building helped Athens to avoid horizontal stratification — there weren't > really neighborhoods that were only rich or only poor.

In the US before Brown v. Board, many cities were similarly integrated along racial and economic lines. It wasn't necessarily integrated within individual apartment buildings, but Blacks and whites would live in the same neighborhoods. When Brown v. Board mandated that schools integrate, racist whites, unwilling to let their children go to the same schools as Black children, fled to the suburbs, taking with them their disproportionate share of wealth and leaving behind impoverished Black ghettoes. Any Black families with the means soon made their own escape, and the downward spiral continued.

In many states, the vast majority of school funding comes from property taxes. So schools in wealthy neighborhoods are better funded than schools in poor neighborhoods, and this guarantees homes in wealthy school districts maintain their value since everyone wants their kids in those schools.

Here in Ohio, the state Supreme Court ruled that the system of public school funding relying on property taxes is unconstitutional over a decade ago, but nothing has changed.

I agree with you that economic segregation is huge societal ill. Studies show that poor folks are vastly better off when they live in economically diverse areas.

<comment><USER6> White flight wasn't only because of fear of blacks. That was an issue, but suburbs were in style and offered other benefits. Most people left for other reasons if they could. This is that couldn't afford to leave were poor. Often enough they were black as well.

Remember even a tiny minority acting in a bad direction can make the whole that way. Don't descend too far into racism to explain a complex situation.

<comment><USER7> These are certainly multi-factor situations, as you say, but white flight isn't the only race-related contributor to deteriorating home prices in predominantly non-white neighborhoods.

For example, the impact of federal policies denying mortgage loans in non- white neighborhoods in the 1930s (aka redlining) are still detectable today. If your pool of buyers is lower (because of the lack of availability of a loan program) its reasonable to expect the prices would represent that, and if your prices are growing more slowly that non-redlined neighborhoods, its reasonable to expect prospective buyers could be concerned about investing in those homes.

We don't have to meander too far from the facts to see this as racism (assuming we take racism to mean the promotion of white dominance using institutional power).

[https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation- infrastructu...](https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation- infrastructure/gov-redlining-race-real-estate-values-lc.html)

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

<comment><USER6> True, but that doesn't mean it was racism that kept individual people out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can't design a new city from the ground up and make it perfect. Cities grow organically over the time. Athens is one of the oldest inhabitated cities in the world. Growing up in Athens I really hated this ugly architecture but now I realize that nearly every little neighbourhood has it's own piece of history and every street is so full of life. I wouldn't trade that with any lifeless good-looking residential area on a European country

<comment><USER9> Communities are interesting things - I grew up in a small fishing village in the north of Scotland which was extremely socially integrated - everyone went to the same school regardless if their parents were worth millions (and some were, although I only realised this years later) or were unemployed.

Then I lived in Edinburgh's New Town for over 20 years which is utterly gorgeous but a bit lacking in community as there is a fairly narrow band of people who live there and school attendance is largely private and even more stratified.

Now I am back living near a old small town and to me the whole place just feels more "organic" than where I lived in Edinburgh (although I dearly love the place).

<comment><USER10> My whole life growing up I was taught about how repressive the socially integrated model was, where everybody knows everybody, and how we should celebrate that the modern world has left it behind.

As time goes by, I'm starting to realize that while it can be very repressive for people who don't fit in, in trying to discard that model outright we've lost something incredibly important.

<comment><USER11> I think what is important is that everybody find community. And it shouldn't be a surprise that that is easiest in the smaller settings that most humans have lived their lives in before the modern era. But we can have both. The great cities of the world have vibrant local neighborhoods AND "scenes" based on common interests. And for the smaller towns and villages the internet enables both online communities, and more importantly, the coordination of regional communities of shared interests. More Meetup.com, less twitter.

<comment><USER10> Well, we've gone all-in on "digital community", which has the unfortunate outcomes of 1) easy to find your echo chamber of choice and 2) limited in- person interaction. In-person community can still be found, but it seems to be in decline. For example, teenagers are spending less & less time with their friends, and church congregations continue to shrink.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _To solve this conundrum, Greeks created their own funding system called antiparochi, in which developers saved themselves the cost of buying land by giving landowners a share of the constructed units when they were completed. "The best translation of the term is probably 'flats for land,' or as some people say, 'quid pro quo,'" says Panos Dragonas, an architect and professor at Greece's University of Patras. "The system saw landowners hand over their property, and in return get, say, two to five apartments back in the completed building to live in, or rent or sell. It was a bottom-up system of housing development not created by any law change by the government, though the state did offer motives for construction by granting tax breaks."_

I'm surprised to see that this arrangement is mentioned as novel/quaint.

This kind of deal is extremely pervasive here in Brazil, and I suppose in the rest of the world as well: developers don't acquire residential lots with cash; rather they build up an apartment building and pay the original land owner(s) with apartment units. This is so common I assumed it was a worldwide "thing".

<comment><USER13> I think most people in the US find it more expedient to use cash for the land, rather than take in-kind compensation. Consider, for instance: where will you live while your apartment is under construction? And, can you actually trust the value that the developer touts, attached to the new apartment? Financing for this sort of up-front buyout will be readily available so there is no major barrier.

<comment><USER14> Credit is insanely available in the US. Developers can get a significant loan; which is a better deal than channeling your apartment through such a scheme (assuming selling is easy).

<comment><USER15> Right, this sort of scheme is a great way to get things done without a lot of formal banking & legal machinery. And it's pretty resilient: if building is interrupted by (say) political unrest, or there's an episode of hyperinflation in the middle, everyone understands the deal -- the landowner still gets his 2 flats when it's done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> design-of-homes _" In poorer quality apartments, there might be full windows only along the balcony side of the apartment, their kitchens only lit naturally by dingy light wells."_

Housing blocks built with 1, 2, and 3 bedroom flats (apartments) are routinely built with windowless kitchens and bathrooms today. This is regardless of whether the housing blocks are 'architect-designed' or cut from generic layouts.

In modern flats, the kitchen is shoved to the back of the living room away from windows and lacks any natural ventilation. This is sold as 'open plan living'.

Mechanical ventilation has became a crutch for many architects and housebuilders. It lets them lay out unappealing single-aspect apartments (including north-facing flats which should be banned). Single aspect means windows run across only one side of the apartment as opposed to dual-aspect design where windows run across two sides of the flat allowing cross- ventilation.

Modern blocks of flats, including 'architect-designed' ones, show a completely paucity of imagination when it comes to layout.

<comment><USER16> I frequently think I should sell my townhouse and buy a flat, but then I look at photos in various real-estate listings and they're all dark and gloomy. It seems you're lucky if the flat has floor-ceiling windows in the main room, even luckier if it has a balcony. I don't know how people live in such darkness. As it is, the dining room in my townhome sits between thee kitchen and living room and is noticeable darker then either (and subsequently rarely used).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What I say to my non-Greek friends is that Athens is a really beautiful city, because it is really ugly. I have yet to meet a person living in Athens that likes these buildings for any other reasons than that you've grew up in them.

In fact, the houses made in what Greeks call "neo-classical" style are considered to be a major improvement. This is the style you can find in the area of Plaka, Metz etc.

<comment><USER18> Many people call Vienna beautiful, but I have a direct comparison. I spent most of my childhood in Attica (northern suburbs, 8 Km from Syntagma square, so basically still Athens), in 5 different polykatoikies. All of them had balconies, bidets, elevators, good heating, plenty of light, were quiet and relatively clean. Here in Vienna, I've had one apartment with terrace and 0 with balconies (of 6 total I've lived in), lots of noise, thin walls and dirt. Elevators and toilets inside the apartment were often added in the last 20-30 years in older buildings, balconies are often impossible and you usually have noisy and somewhat dangerous gas heating with boilers inside the apartment. IOW, housing quality in Athens was significantly better even though back then we were lower middle class (my mother was a single mother with 2 kids). The apartment I'm sitting in right now cost me approx. €750k (for 75m²) and has no balconies.

I don't want to go back to Athens, but apartments are typically much better there.

FWIW, the house I lived in from 1985-1990 is still standing and looks exactly the same: [https://email@example.com,23.8094767,3a,65.9y,1...](https://email@example.com,23.8094767,3a,65.9y,1.68h,85.05t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s3_8MyvXKL4he7EzqqbAOnQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=de)

<comment><USER19> I did a similar move from flats in Buenos Aires with balconies, bidets, and modern lifts to flats without those things in London. I would choose the London ones every time.

In paper they might seem worse, but in practice my current flat is much better: London is much less noisy than Buenos Aires, nearby flats don't usually get robbed, and I'm reasonably sure that the fire alarm works. My large and beautiful Buenos Aires flat had an alarm that stayed silent during a major fire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here's a YT video showing how one of these style apartments was redone into a very modern and style - [https://youtu.be/JEnL2nljPdY](https://youtu.be/JEnL2nljPdY)

</comment><comment><USER21> >The municipality of Athens only practiced zoning for heavy industry, leaving people free to set up shop in a polikatoikia.

Really, this should be the article. Zoning is responsible for resiliency and affordability. The actual implementation (Polikatoikias) is just an accident of fate.

<comment><USER22> But the sentence you quoted says there was no zoning.

<comment><USER21> That's what I meant - generous/permissive zoning is responsible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Athens is so ugly that it comes the other way around.

It looks like no other. When I travel around Europe I sometimes feel that all cities look the same. When I go to Athens I feel that I am not in Europe anymore, it's a different planet.

<comment><USER9> "all cities look the same"

Except, of course, for the one that has as a centrepiece a huge old fortress (still used by the local military) on the plug on an ancient volcano. ;-)

<comment><USER24> Which city is that?

<comment><USER25> Edinburgh? ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Geology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Geology))

<comment><USER9> Correct

 _" But Edinburgh is a mad god's dream,

Fitful and dark,

Unseizable in Leith

And wildered by the Forth,

But irresistibly at last

Cleaving to somber heights

Of passionate imagining

Till stonily,

From soaring battlements,

Earth eyes eternity."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Khrushchev apartments get a lot of bad press, but represent a statist approach to a similar problem: mass housing needs in a hurry, in a post war recovery economy.

I really don't want this to descend into 'private did better' because there are climate differences as well as political and social differences. I think the command economy ran out of the will to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER27> > To keep costs down, developers adopted a modernist construction model — the > Le Corbusier-developed Dom-Ino system, in which reinforced concrete pillars > freed a building of the need for load-bearing interior walls.

A modernist, Corbusier-influenced building that actually works and that people like living in! Fantastic.

<comment><USER18> As far as Athens is concerned, they've also proven to be rather earthquake- proof, which is amazing. I was in a polykatoikia in a northern suburb of Attica myself in 1981 during a severe earthquake and while the floor was all wobbly, the building showed just minor cracks afterwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think I key point underrepresented is the government and other authoritative bodies (HOAs) stepped out of the way or weren't present to enforce laws and policies that ensure systemic racism and inequality.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yeah many of the buildings are ugly, but man, the plant-filled wide balconies are something else. I always wonder why eg LA condos haven't adopted balconies. I miss my hometown :/

</comment><comment><USER30> Athens is an extremely ugly city. It's so ugly that, if you grow up there or live there long enough, the ugliness slowly seeps inside of you and empties your inside, too.

Everything looks as if beauty has no role to play in our lives. The ugliness is not confined to the buildings, people dress in ugly clothes and are poorly groomed and rude.

Working for a Greek employer is hell. People hate working and all the time they talk about how much they hate working. Everyone is eager to start their own business in order to avoid having a Greek boss. This has resulted in a fragmented economy with a huge number of self-employed people that invest nothing.

Litter is everywhere, stray dogs are everywhere, dog shit on the pavement is a certainty.

<comment><USER8> Have you ever lived on a different country? Despite it's ugliness, Athens is a vibrant and diverse city that never sleeps. Everything you need to do is close to your home. Jobs, night life, shops, bookstores, etc even a walk by the sea near mikrolimano. It's an interconnected community of human randomness that depicts the randomess of the real life.

<comment><USER22> I can confirm that most Greeks will agree with both comments above.</comment></comment></comment>


New tapes reveal Cambridge Analytica CEO's boasts of voter suppression - <AUTHOR> https://www.opendemocracy.net/brexitinc/paul-hilder/they-were-planning-on-stealing-election-explosive-new-tapes-reveal-cambridg <comment><USER2> Also worthy of note is Cambridge Analytica's trolling of Nigeria's 2015 presidential election:

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/04/cambridge- an...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/04/cambridge-analytica- used-violent-video-to-try-to-influence-nigerian-election)

Amoral doesn't begin to describe these people.

<comment><USER2> Oh and they were busy in Kenya as well.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global- opinions/wp/2018/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global- opinions/wp/2018/03/20/how-cambridge-analytica-poisoned-kenyas-democracy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _" SCL/CA has never undertaken voter suppression and there is no evidence to the contrary."_

Hilarious - like the guilty parties in 50 years of cop/detective/courtroom/true-crime shows, he doesn't just stop with "we didn't do it" but feels compelled to tack on the part about "...and you don't have any evidence we did it!"

<comment><USER4> Apparently in Kaiser's recording, Nix (then CEO), described CA's capabilities as voter suppression.

Does the article link the recording? I wasn't able to find it while browsing by phone.

<comment><USER3> Not that I found. There's a link to the older ones at Channel4.com. And they refer to the newer recordings ( _" In explosive recordings that Kaiser made in the summer of 2016, excerpts from which are published exclusively by openDemocracy today..."_) but no link.

<comment><USER4> Weird. Thanks for confirming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > They talked about 'honey traps' that used Ukrainian prostitutes and boasted > of secret teams who "ghosted in, did the work, ghosted out" of countries, > and "put information into the bloodstream of the internet… with no branding, > so it's unattributable, untrackable"

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and write lies?

[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet- and-t...](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-tell- lies)

</comment><comment><USER6> >In the recordings, Nix describes one of his major clients, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, as a "fascist".

</comment><comment><USER7> This was a bit of an eye opener on how much information Robert Mueller's team has and could be an indication of what is in the many sealed indictments in the DC citcuit given he flipped Sam Patton.

On the Brexit side it's probably time to stop and step back to investigate whether the vote was unduly influenced with foreign cash or interferance.

</comment><comment><USER8> The story is written in long form, so it's difficult to figure out what methods of "voter suppression" were used. I hesitate to cry "fake news" here, but only barely.

Typically, in my experience, "voter suppression" refers to techniques designed to prevent certain targeted groups from voting -- things like voter ID laws are often accused of having this motive, or closing polling stations, or limiting polling hours, or refusing to protect workers from discipline for taking the time to vote. These are almost always structural in nature; creating barriers that prevent people from voting.

It appears that the voter suppression they are referring to is a completely different beast -- they reference this [1] Bloomberg article, which says:

> "We have three major voter suppression operations under way," says a senior > official. They're aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: > idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump's > invocation at the debate of Clinton's WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the > Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The > parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and > harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young > women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are "super > predators" is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent > black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.

These are not "voter suppression" in the sense used above; this is just dirty campaigning; or arguably even just campaigning. For a long time the fact of the matter is that a campaign, especially a presidential campaign, is trying to increase the turnout of your supporters, and decrease the turnout of your opponent's supporters -- nobody is convincing anybody to change sides; everyone is just trying to convince people to not vote. As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique, and it pains me to see the marketing hacks at Cambridge Analytica elevated to some sort of gurus that can magically hypnotize people.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside- th...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump- bunker-with-12-days-to-go)

<comment><USER9> >As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique

What if it is done fraudulently? For example, lying to people about when/where to vote or lying about your opponent's positions. That doesn't seem like a reasonable technique to me.

<comment><USER8> That's a ridiculous straw man. None of the cases cited above or the referenced article refer to any techniques even bordering on that.

I suspect those techniques are rarely used because when they are exposed as being fraudulent they are massively counterproductive to voter apathy.

<comment><USER9> You made this comment:

==As long as it is done through non-structural means, convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique==

I took your own generic statement and asked you to further qualify it. I did this by posing a question (opposite of a straw man) and applying it to a hypothetical scenario (to make it realistic). I never accused anyone of doing it or claimed it was something you cited. I was trying to understand if there should be some type of qualifier on the phrase "convincing people not to vote is a perfectly reasonable persuasion technique" because it seems to me that it isn't a universal truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like they ran negative campaign ads? Hardly voter suppression and trivializes it by trying to equate the two.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I wish I was able to fit the entire title in the submission. If anything, I feel that the bribery aspect is more damning.

>"You can spend $10 million on an election. Or we can send one of our guys in to go offer the leader of the opposition a bribe, you know, three weeks before polling. It's a very good way to win an election."

<comment><USER11> I wonder if that's what happened to Bernie Sanders. Immediately after his defeat in the primary he bought yet another house, his third. The timing is just too suspicious to be coincidental.

[https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/bernie-sanders- summe...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/bernie-sanders-summer-house)

<comment><USER12> From the article: "Jane told Seven Days that they had recently sold a house in Maine that had belonged to her family since the 1900s, and used the proceeds to purchase the new property, which is located in North Hero (population 803, as of the 2010 census)."

Why would he have bought a house when he was planning on moving to the White House?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Nix ... engineered a highly successful grassroots campaign to "increase > apathy" so that young Afro-Caribbeans would not vote.

1\. He did this via speech. Free speech is a good thing even when the speech is bad, even when spoken by foreigners, even when it's illegal.

2\. To the extent that this campaign succeeds it will tend to remove voters that are a) more suggestive, b) more prone to apathy. That would seem to improve the overall quality of the voting pool.

The drive to get everyone to vote seems to be more about justifying the result than improving it.

<comment><USER14> I'm astonished to hear this said so openly. Whom is a representative democracy supposed to represent - only educated, upper-class, "quality" folks?

We rightly consigned that idea to the dust bin, along with poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. If you want to improve the _citizenry_, a better approach would be to support civic education.

edit: s/What/Whom/

<comment><USER15> > I'm astonished to hear this said so openly.

Increasing "voter apathy" is a 100% legitimate democratic tactic, even for foreign powers.

<comment><USER16> No, it isn't.

The whole point of democracy is to canvas opinion.

If you influence opinion on an industrial scale using significant sums of cash that aren't available to most citizens, that's not true democracy - that's you buying power with money.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Photo Sharing site kinda Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://tusul.net/

<comment><USER2> What a nice time to announce service like Instagram :)

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm sure you won't believe but it is not related. if it would be that way we could have written cute slogans aiming at Instagram :) BTW this uproar is more about Facebook than Instagram.

Instagram is a fine place but filters have become so cliche and so 2012.

<comment><USER2> It really doesn't matter whether or not you planned to do it, it's a good move. It's all business. You need to exploit weakness of your competition</comment></comment></comment>


French bees make green and blue honey after M&M's feast - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/art-and-culture/news/green-honey-mms-france-744/ <comment> daniel-cussen If they charge double they'll have no problem selling it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Whilst coloured honey looks cool, you have to remember its been made from the waste of a manufacturing process.

Just because it looks cool, doesn't mean it is.

</comment><comment><USER3> Colored honey actually seems pretty awesome if it can be a controlled process that is not harmful - rather than the result of the bees ingesting candy waste.

<comment><USER4> If you want colored honey, wouldn't you just add food coloring to regular honey?

That's probably essentially what is happening here—the food coloring from the candy the bees are eating is getting into the honey.

<comment><USER5> It'd definitely be cooler if they could do it from colored flowers or something...

[I've seen a huge range of shade variations in honey, but nothing quite like that bright blue!]</comment></comment></comment>


Even a genius has to sell himself… the remarkable resume of Leonardo da Vinci - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/life-learning/even-a-genius-has-to-sell-himself-the-remarkable-resume-of-leonardo-da-vinci-453fb6d53efd#.bc348grro <comment><USER2> This is one of those HN perennials. Of the 11 previous times it's come up over the last 6 years, the ones with the most comments are [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9398856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9398856) (35), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2234231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2234231) (25), and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2382442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2382442) (20).</comment>


How to get from weekend idea to funded startup - <AUTHOR> http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-get-from-weekend-idea-to-funded.html

<comment><USER2> Very interesting stuff, although I noticed that they left out bootstrapping as an option. While obviously not right for every company, I think too many startups turn to funding as a necessity when they could bootstrap it. It's sure as hell stressful, but it forces you to be lean and build good habits from the beginning.

I'm also a huge fan of the benefits of multiple co-founders. With the startup I'm currently working on, GooseChase (<http://goosecha.se>), we have 5 co- founders: 2 Business, 2 Developers, 1 Front-End Designer. For the business guys and the development guys, they each have different strengths so there's minimal overlap, but it's very helpful to have someone that you can bounce ideas off of. Problems are a hell of a lot easier to solve when you have a fresh take on it.

Anyone have any stories or examples of bootstrapping and/or relatively large co-founder groups?

<comment><USER3> > Anyone have any stories or examples of ... large co-founder groups?

From my personal experience, it is very common to see startups founded with many co-founders. I've seen it a lot in college groups, where one individual is very motivated to bring in their friends with specialized skills.

Unfortunately, the high speed stage of startups where anything goes, and any one founder's ideas can define the product does not last for long. This often leads to a smaller, more refined group of founders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting if straight forward stuff, we've put a lot of that into practice at <http://infostripe.com>. We are trying to break some molds as to what is an app and what is a website, blog or other.

It's tough sometimes but having supportive founders, friends and family is key.</comment>


Want to be more secure? Build two-factor authentication into your webapp - <AUTHOR> http://blog.alainmeier.com/post/28914464388/want-to-be-more-secure-build-two-factor-authentication

<comment><USER2> I think the better advice is to completely decouple your authentication from your web app, and then add two-factor authentication to that.

We use Kerberos/LDAP at work so are able to use CoSign to provide web SSO. I did a quick write-up about a service that I wrote which allows me to use Google Authenticator as an additional factor with CoSign: [http://it.isevil.org/blog/2011/11/13/authentication- service-...](http://it.isevil.org/blog/2011/11/13/authentication-service- using-google-authenticator/)

Since it's just a Sinatra app, the web service could be used by other things. We also use it with FreeRADIUS so our users can use their second factor on the web and in their VPN client.

</comment><comment><USER3> Two-factor authentication is by definition more annoying than regular authentication. The solution to security is not to add annoyance for users, who will simply hate your product, or disable two-factor.

The solution to security is to come up with better and innovative security solutions.

Imagine that you had a "log in with iPhone" button, like the common "log in with Facebook" buttons. It would send down a push notification to your iPhone that shows a dialog "Log in to hn.com? Yes | No." Pressing Yes uses fingerprint-sensing capability under the touchscreen to send anonymized[^1] biometric information to provider to authorize the login with.

You'd also get a smartphone app to generate temporary login keys for when you need to give a friend access to your account, and get a 32-byte "master" key that can be used to unlock the account without biometric access.

[^1]: simply a HMAC / hash value using both the biometric data + the domain being authorized would deal with privacy concerns.

<comment><USER4> Oh yeah, that'll be way more convenient. Right up until you need to login when your phone is out of batteries, not in wireless coverage, under water, etc.

<comment><USER5> "I wish I could log in and check my account balance. If only I hadn't burned one finger, and got a cut on the other!"

<comment><USER6> I had this problem when I was applying for US citizenship. I was on the crew team in college, which means I had callouses all the time on my fingers, and thus blank fingerpads.

I applied for citizenship 3 times over a period of 3 years, and each time got rejected due to poor quality of fingerprints.

Finally I stopped rowing and then got my citizenship. I'm sure there's some way around it, but it was kind of amusing and frustrating at the time.

<comment><USER7> Make a mold of someone else's and then wear those to your stamping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Chances are the only ones who will try this are your users already using two- factor auth somewhere else, and it's most likely they got started with Google. Might as well use an app that's already on their phones, Google Authenticator (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4348475>)

<comment><USER9> Who says it's optional? I make primarily B2B web apps, it's very easy to require all users begin using two factor auth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> of course the issue with 2 factors is that:

\- you can still social engineer your way out (!) - "oh i lost my phone and the recovery keys" "heres my name address cc number, etc please help!" (ie nothing has been solved)

\- its quite annoying to use

\- it doesnt solve everything, only weak passwords/brute force

\- it locks you out if you lose your phone/token until you get back home to get your recovery keys

\- compromising the phone (2nd factor for the general public) allow compromising both passwords and the authenticator

and the issue of passwords managers:

\- they're stored everywhere because you need them (incl. your phone)

\- you have a single password to decrypt them all

\- compromising the phone, once again, give you all passwords, and the authenticator

<comment> X-Istence How does compromising the phone compromise the password? I turned on 2 factor auth and the only thing that would be compromised is the code generated by the 2 factor auth. My password is still secure in my head.

My password doesn't get used for anything, all my applications have a 1 app only password.

An attacker would still need my password...

<comment><USER11> I think the issue is most people have email on their iphone, so you can send yourself a password reset to your phone, get your password, then use the code also generated on your phone.

Personally I have a pin on my iPhone - and I have my iPhone set to 'reset' itself if there are 10 incorrect pin attempts - so even if I lose my phone, I doubt they would get in...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Before you even think about this can you make sure you've got the basics down. No one in this day and age should have basic SQL injection attacks, but there clearly are given the number of 'whoops we got our database stolen threads'. Add to that Remote Code Injection, XSS, CSRF, Session Fixation Attacks etc.

</comment><comment> X-Istence One thing I wish that Google would allow is for me to select what service my 1 app password can be used with. For example, I can create a new password that only allows access to IMAP and SMTP for example, but won't allow the attacker to log in to Google Talk...

</comment><comment><USER13> The trouble with two-factor authentication is that it tends to be a nucleus around which a monoculture of security procedure forms. It is convenient to have a single sign-on that is believed to be beyond reproach, even if that sign on is a bit more obnoxious than the old username + password combo.

Until your two-factor system gets hacked, as happened to RSA: [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/the-rsa-hack-how- th...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/the-rsa-hack-how-they-did-it/)

The more common a security system is, the more attractive a target it is for professional (organized crime) hackers to attack.

</comment><comment><USER14> Two-factor authentication is a good step, a better one is to completely outsource authentication to a third-party single sign-on provider (Google, Facebook, Twitter). It's a little more work upfront than a standard username/password box, but you get out of a ton of annoying hassles by doing this, including email verification, account suspension, enforcing password rotation/complexity, and building two-factor authentication flows into your app.

<comment><USER15> No it's not better. If one'e Google Account get hacked. hacker can access all the sites, including yours. SSO offers good UX but not the security.

<comment><USER16> Isn't this typically the case anyways? A hacker with access to your email account can just use the password reset mechanism to get a sign-in link to your other web sites.

<comment><USER15> Yes! It is the typical situation. That's why 2fac auth comes in.

<comment><USER17> "Have email, lost phone- help me" -Mallory

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Please don't. I need to secure my gmail because it can be used to request password resets from any account and so is in some way the master key to my online life.

<comment><USER9> There are plenty of other apps you want to keep as secure as possible. For me it's: web hosts, DNS providers, Dropbox and source control hosts (GitHub/BitBucket).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you do add it, make it optional (maybe I don't care that much about my data in your web app). And choose duo, they rock!

<comment><USER20> Implementations like Duo help only if you're the service provider, right? As a user, independent of the service provider is there anything I can do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We hope to launch a service precisely to help with this (toofactor.com). It's great to see this additional attention and options in the space.

Google Authenticator is a great service imho, but I find myself moreso pleased with the 'application specific' password feature which allows me to abstract my exposure even further.

<comment><USER22> Unfortunately those application-specific passwords aren't particularly application specific, at least in Google's implementation -- any of them can be used for anything.

If someone built a system which could restrict passwords or keys by some kind of capabilities (e.g. my Adium gtalk password could only be used to authenticate to Google's Jabber servers), that would be useful. It would be complex to manage, especially as your applications change over time, but not impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> None of these options work for the enterprise and only google authenticator works for B2C. The days of just providing 2-FA are over, companies now need to use an authentication broker, or 2-Factor STS (ping & rsa together or secureauth)

</comment><comment><USER24> Oh great, so now I get hassled with two factor authentication for every stupid, crummy, brain-dead web app I use? No thanks. This level of security is overkill for the vast majority of apps out there.

</comment><comment><USER25> If only they had built it with two thousand and one factors of authentication!

Joking aside, once you start down the road to two-factor authentication, you might as well go to three factors if you are truly concerned about security. Moreover, at least one of those factors would need to be based on physical properties, i.e., biometrics, or some other intrinsically unique property that can't be forgotten or copied.

<comment><USER26> It's only n-factor if you have n orthogonal keys. Typically "something you know", "something you have", and "something you are". In the same sense that two passwords isn't "2-factor", I wouldn't say that a finger print + DNA sample is "2-factor". The problem with "something you are" as a third factor is that it typically requires you to have some hardware to get that information, in which case it's just 2-factor again. And if we get the technology to read out brain dumps, knowing a password is just a part of something you are and we're back to 1-factor... Which suggests it's not the number of factors that are important, but the total number of bits of information involved and how hard it is for theoretical attackers to gather all those bits. Is your scheme torture-proof? I doubt anyone would prefer torture over handing over their phone+password to their gmail account. But most attackers aren't going to come torture you. A phone or a yubikey or what have you is immune to OS keyloggers which defeat passwords of any complexity, that alone makes them useful against a big class of attackers. What class of attackers does e.g. a thumbprint further defeat? It sounds like it's more useful as a reset verification than anything else--you can forget your password and lose your phone but you don't lose your thumb--usually. (We can also get the 'mark of the beast' and have chips implanted in our hands.)</comment></comment>