IP traffic over ICMP tunneling - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/DhavalKapil/icmptunnel <comment><USER2> SoftEther, a multi platform and open-source software supports ICMP and DNS tunnelling among other things (SSL, OpenVPN, IPsec, etc)

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

<comment><USER3> After reading the product page, this product seems too good to be true (OSS, supports every OS and every type of VPN). Is there some kind of catch? How come I've never heard of it until now?

<comment><USER4> I know among the pfsense group originally there was skepticism that it wasn't back doored by a government agency (not because there was proof), because of the fact it had such a great feature set while being so new a project. Now that it's open sourced, I'm interested to see if people pick it up. It definitely looks legit.

<comment><USER5> I have been using it since its early releases in 2003 and the feature set really reflects the continuous development.

<comment><USER6> I hope you meant 2013. Looks like the earliest beta users were starting 2012.

<comment><USER7> Before SoftEther went open source, it was sold commercially as early as 2004. It was renamed PacketIX VPN around 2005 and is still sold commercially under that product name at [https://www.softether.jp/1-product/11-vpn](https://www.softether.jp/1-product/11-vpn) (it's up to v4.0).

I remember reading that there was a 10-year agreement that finally ended at the start of 2014, allowing the original developer to go open source. The source tree is different from PacketIX's though, so some of the features are still not available yet in the open source version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not the first of its kind, just look-up in Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICMP_tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICMP_tunnel)

Any captive portal these days block also ICMP.

Most firewalls block ICMP these days, because the days of blacklisting are over and ICMP is not the one who is getting white listed. Why?

The only way these days is to misuse DNS. But even that works less and less reliable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that some captive portals/firewalls do block ICMP but still I've seen many in my country which don't.

<comment><USER9> Well the question is then what's the point other than a personal exercise? There is plenty of ICMP / multi protocol tunnels software out there for both linux and windows much of it doesn't require administrative privileges.

Also ptunnel comes standard with some linux distro's these days Ubuntu and so do probably most of it's derivatives, and as far as raw performance goes ptunnel is also the highest performing one capable of achieving about 150kbps which isn't that bad considering the sheer amount of packets and overhead you get.

[http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/gutsy/man8/ptunnel.8.htm...](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/gutsy/man8/ptunnel.8.html)

<comment><USER10> > Well the question is then what's the point other than a personal exercise?

What's your question? Is it "What's the point of blocking ICMP?"? Or is it the opposite question?

If it's the former, then there are sysadmins out there who cargo-cult their network configuration and listen to folks like Gibson Research Corporation who've been giving _really_ bad advice [0] for the past decade+.

[0] Specifically, they _strongly_ recommend dropping all traffic to ports that don't have listening services, along with all ICMP, rather than rejecting said traffic and allowing all non-problematic ICMP. They also have a "handy" tool [1] to make it look like doing anything else is "DANGEROUS": (The tool reports [2] if your site responds to ICMP echo requests.)

[1] [https://www.grc.com/shieldsup](https://www.grc.com/shieldsup)

[2] Ping Reply: RECEIVED (FAILED) — Your system REPLIED to our Ping (ICMP Echo) requests, making it visible on the Internet. Most personal firewalls can be configured to block, drop, and ignore such ping requests in order to better hide systems from hackers. This is highly recommended since "Ping" is among the oldest and most common methods used to locate systems prior to further exploitation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A few years back, I was assigned to work at a BigCorp's premises. They had really tight network security: all outward connections were blocked except through a dedicated HTTP proxy. This was bad news, since stuff like SSH are absolutely essential in my job.

After few days of mobile tethering, I realized I could ask their HTTP proxy to open an HTTPS connection to a server outside the network, but instead of sending HTTPS traffic through the proxy, I could send any traffic - like SSH. With this, I was ultimately able to open an SSH-tunnel to my own shell server running OpenVPN outside their network, which then allowed a (surprisingly stable and fast) access to the internet at wide – via an OpenVPN-tunnel wrapped in an SSH-tunnel pretending to be an HTTPS-tunnel.

I don't recall whether ICMP was allowed out at the BigCorp., but I am pretty sure someone will one day find a tool like this quite useful in a similar situation.. :)

<comment><USER5> Sounds like they enabled HTTP CONNECT without limiting the accepted port range, so any protocol will go through.

Maybe this is why Microsoft Azure never allowed ICMP travseral through their outer firewall despite frequent request from users....

<comment><USER12> Blocking based on port is a silly thing. He probably just ran ssh on port 443 to get around it.

<comment><USER5> That's another possibility, the comment above can be interpreted either way.

In any case they were probably running something like squid with very basic level 7 filtering, so if something comes on 443 they have no option but to forward it.

<comment><USER11> I think they allowed HTTP CONNECT to any port. Not that it would have been hard to move OpenVPN or SSH to a different port.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just tried iodine and icmptunnel. Can't say for sure but I think icmptunnel was faster. At least for my internet

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good news for me. :)

<comment><USER14> That is what I would expect to happen. The problem is that most captive portals still let DNS through but not ICMP.

Having said that, I'm sure there are other usage for such a tool :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The documentation for this is superb! I know what it does, why I'd want to use it, how to use it, where to use it and what it looks like in wireshark. Well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For anybody that's tried both - how do these compare to DNS tunnels (e.g. iodine), in terms of speed and reliability?

<comment><USER9> DNS is less reliable, but could give you bigger throughput (you can send and request large records) ICMP packets would arrive quicker, will be more reliable will bypass various DNS hijackers (common with many ISP's) along the way.

DNS also requires you to have a DNS server and a domain, and you'll need something to constantly clear the cache on the local machine otherwise you'll eventually run out of room even if you are going to use the max available DNS record size. If anything in the way will keep your DNS queries in cache then you might be screwed and run out of space very quickly.

If you need internet access ICMP tunnel will be better, bandwidth will be limited but it will be more or less a P2P tunnel, if you need to exfiltrate data without explicitly needing to maintain a bi-directional tunnel DNS is the way to go, will also work in more captive portal restrictive cases than ICMP. Today ICMP is usually utterly blocked DNS sometimes work especially in common cases where the restricted network offers some white listed sites (e.g. airport wifi that allows you to access the airport's site and the local train service but blocks everything else).

<comment><AUTHOR> With even ICMP you can send/receive large messages. There is no restriction on the maximum payload length.

<comment><AUTHOR> Normally, an ethernet or wifi restricts an MTU of 1500. I use ping packets accordingly

<comment><USER9> 1500 is the MTU of Ethernet, it's often not sustainable on end to end connection (especially when you add frame overheads) if you are using that high of a payload size you'll get considerably worse performance than say limiting it to around 500 bytes, you are welcomed to try it. Also with how global traffic is managed smaller packets tend to get priority since they can be qued quicker backbone connectivity uses much bigger frames than Ethernet so more often than not generating more smaller packets would increase your overall throughput (to a limit) unless you are on a very controlled network.

<comment><USER16> What do you mean by "it's often not sustainable"? Throughput on a server is higher at higher packet size, so if you're doing a download I'd expect the server to send 1500 byte packets. It's pretty easy to saturate a link with 1500 byte packets, and it's much harder to do so at lower packet sizes (from the server's perspective) since the per-packet processing costs start to dominate over the per-byte costs. Admittedly my knowledge of this sort of stuff is mostly intra-DC; is there some other factor that you're referring to that supersedes this on the web?

I'm not aware of prioritizing smaller packets on the backbone, sounds like something that would be targeted at small flows (i.e. first N packets in a flow get a priority bump)? More info on that would be appreciated.

<comment><USER17> I don't know about cable, but DSL usually uses PPPoE. It has on overhead of 8 bytes, lowering the MTU of those connections to 1492 bytes.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't matter the MTU setting on your end for WAN and ISP / interlink grade networks is meaningless they don't use Ethernet, FDDI frame size is 4500 (ATM is about double that) bytes (minus what ever overhead, but usually 4200 and change) ISP/WAN routers don't care about how many mbit/s they transfer but how many packets they route at per given unit of time, as packets get packed into a single frame the smaller the packet the more packets they can transfer each frame.

Also from a more high level point of view if you think about it the small packets are the most critical ones and they are at least as far as responsiveness goes DNS is limited to 512bytes over UDP, TCP 3-way handshake packets are tiny and those are the packets that need to get to and back from their destination as fast as possible, delays in data transfers means slower speeds, delays of handshakes mean that your application can fail or hang. Other important traffic such as VOIP[0] also uses very small packet sizes for this same reason most critical services need to transfer very little data (per given unit of time) but need to update data as frequently as possible to provide the illusion of real time and to mask the latency, same goes for other things like online/multi-player gaming and so on and on and on. Pretty much if you want your service to be as responsive as possible limit your packet size to the smallest size possible and increase your PPS this will ensure that your packets get quicker to their destination. [0]VOIP Packet Sizes [http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice- qualit...](http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice- quality/7934-bwidth-consume.html)

The only time you would want to use large packets is pretty much when you can have a buffer, this means that you need to handle less packets per second which lowers CPU consumption (across the entire path) so video streaming and such can use pretty much as large of an MTU as they want unless they start getting fragments.

<comment><USER10> > It doesn't matter the MTU setting on your end for WAN and ISP / interlink > grade networks is meaningless [as] they don't use Ethernet...

It absolutely _does_ matter and is quite meaningful. :)

If you set your edge router's Internet-facing MTU to 9k, and the upstream equipment's MTU is smaller than that, then either your packets will be dropped, or PTMU Discovery will try to figure out the MTU of the path. (Better hope _everyone_ along the path is correctly handling ICMP! :) )

> The only time you would want to use large packets is pretty much when you > can have a buffer...

Or if you have high-volumes of data to move and want to dramatically increase the data:Ethernet_frame_boilerplate ratio. :)

> Also ... if you think about it the small packets are the most critical > ones... [because they need to be dispatched as quickly as possible.]

Yes, but a larger MTU shouldn't affect this. Set whatever socket options are required to get those packets on their way as soon as they're created, and your system _shouldn 't_ wait to fill an Ethernet frame before sending that packet.

<comment><USER9> Poor choice of words on my part, if you configure jump frames on your uplink you are going to kill your network stack, if you limit it too much you'll have a huge overhead. The point being is that for transferring data especially when responsiveness is important if not paramount utilizing the maximum potential frame size you can push without fragmentation would generally yield a poorer result in real world applications.

<comment><USER10> > [I]f you configure [jumbo] frames on your uplink you are going to kill your > network stack...

I can't agree with that statement. If upstream devices support larger than 1500 byte MTU, _OR_ PTMU works correctly, then you are absolutely _not_ going to "kill your network stack". At worst, (in the PMTU discovery phase) you'll see poor performance for a few moments while the MTU for the path is worked out, and then nothing but smooth sailing from then on.

> The point being is that for transferring data especially when responsiveness > is important if not paramount utilizing the maximum potential frame size you > can push without fragmentation would generally yield a poorer result in real > world applications.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you saying:

"If you configure your networking equipment to _always_ wait to fill up a full L2 frame before sending it off, you'll harm perf on latency-sensitive applications."?

If you're not, would you be so kind as to rephrase your statement? I may be particularly dense today. :)

However, if you are, then that statement is _pretty_ obvious. I expect that few people configure their networks to do that. However, I don't see what that has to do with the link's MTU. Just because you have a 9k+ MTU, doesn't mean that you _have_ to transmit 9k of data at a time. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I remember postponing my payments to the ISP, which hadn't blocked ICMP for anybody, by using ptunnel: [http://www.cs.uit.no/~daniels/PingTunnel/](http://www.cs.uit.no/~daniels/PingTunnel/)

It was pretty much usable circa 2008...

btw, in debian (and probably, derivatives), it is just apt-get away from being installed.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hans is a nice one too: [http://code.gerade.org/hans/](http://code.gerade.org/hans/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Using ICMP reply only in both side is more convinient than ICMP reques/reply. In this case you do not need to write this, for example echo 1 | dd of=/proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all

</comment><comment><USER21> I use to restrict ICMP to echo/reply using -m icmp on iptables, but this uses just that kind of packets...

Is there anyway to stop things like this at the corporate firewall?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. In my opinion they should restrict the payload size of an ICMP message. Blocking all echo/reply can have adverse impact on other applications as well.

<comment><USER21> OK, I see "length" extension in man iptables-extensions (Debian 8), so for example, to drop pings with a packet size greater than 85 bytes:

        # iptables -A FORWARD -p icmp --icmp-type echo-request -m length --length 86:0xffff -j DROP

Still, until someone checks the code of this tool, or a working test environment, we won't know if the rule stops this tool.

Update: as for the number of packets, there is -m limit and other recipes.

<comment> ryan-c If you're going to do that, set the maximum length to 128 bytes. Different ping tools use different sized payloads - I know of some common ones that generate packets by default that would be blocked with that limit.

Also, instead of using the plain limit match, check out hashlimit. It can apply a rate limit on a per sender, destination, or sender+destination basis. The recent match may also be of interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are DNS tunneling apps which will (usually) get past those captive portals that block ICMP. It's just slower.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have tested it. Internet speed difference is negligible. Yup DNS tunneling apps can also be used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can someone explain to a non-network person the significance of being able to tunnel IP traffic over ICMP?

<comment><USER24> You can potentially bypass firewalls and prevent inspection of your traffic depending on how the network is configured

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Some of the very early IP telephony apps (20 yrs ago) used the very same trick.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone test this against China GFW and get it working?

<comment><USER27> Normal tunnels also work around the GFW, so there's no reason to do ICMP tunneling.

<comment><USER28> The GFW attacks most normal tunnels, causing unreliable performance.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Mobile XKCD in less than 25 lines of code - <AUTHOR> http://shane.xkcd.com.moovapp.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> github repo here: [https://github.com/enahs/xkcdmobile](https://github.com/enahs/xkcdmobile)</comment>


March is encryption bill month - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-cybersecurity/2016/02/march-is-encryption-bill-month-hackers-going-after-japans-infrastructure-a-mixed-final-2015-tally-212865 <comment><AUTHOR> And, in the daily briefing, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest says he is not sure if they will support the proposed bill, which is still being drafted, but he's confident that the administration will be in consultation with drafters of the bill:

 _I feel confident in telling you that there will be consultation between senior administration officials and the senators who are writing this bill._ [1]

This video begins with the reporter's question about the encryption bill. [2]

My interpretation: Obama is consulting with senators on the drafting of an encryption bill that requires government access. This means banning encryption, of course. Our representatives will probably try to say the bill just gives government access when necessary. If we pass this bill, only criminals and government will have the access to such back doors.

[1] [https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2016/02/24/press...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press- office/2016/02/24/press-briefing-press-secretary-josh-earnest-2242016)

[2] [https://youtu.be/j469gTWuk0g?t=19m30s](https://youtu.be/j469gTWuk0g?t=19m30s)</comment>


Software can be racist (and what you can do to stop it) - <AUTHOR> https://glennstovall.com/how-software-can-be-racist/ <comment> g-b-r [https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/betteroffted/images/e/e4...](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/betteroffted/images/e/e4/Racial_Sensitivity.jpg)</comment>


Microsoft Solitaire Inducted into World Video Game Hall of Fame - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/6/18530946/microsoft-solitaire-world-video-game-hall-of-fame <comment><USER2> The artwork on the cards was drawn by Susan Kare, a legend in the industry starting with her work on the original Macintosh.

[https://www.aiga.org/medalist-susan-kare](https://www.aiga.org/medalist- susan-kare)

You can buy a set of playing cards with her original Solitaire art on the backs.

[https://www.areaware.com/products/solitaire- cards?variant=14...](https://www.areaware.com/products/solitaire- cards?variant=14622412804)

<comment><USER3> Oh man those cards are awesome!

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I was really tempted to get it as a gift. Pity the EU version is much more expensive, for some reason.

<comment><USER5> After shipping they cost $22 USD - that's mental for a deck of playing cards.

<comment><USER4> It's almost $40 for my EU country!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish Microsoft hadn't ruined solitaire. It's now "Microsoft Solitaire Collection" with a whole online component and it's crippled if you're using it without an internet connection. It also drains the battery like nothing else. Sometimes you just want to kill some time on a plane without having to buy the overpriced crappy wifi!

<comment><USER7> You should look at [https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/](https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/) . It is open source, and besides the classic Klondike solitaire, also has over 1000 other solitaire games. And it definitely will be a lot more energy efficient, too.

<comment><USER8> Awesome been wanting to fix up my dad with a Linux desktop at some point and Solitaire and Ping Pong from XP were games he played too. Gotta find Ping Pong next.

<comment><USER7> On Linux, the other solitaire program worth looking at is KPatience. It only has 12 types of solitaire, but has a pretty nice interface. It's probably worth it installing both PysolFC and KPatience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They might have credited the intern:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zfadv/til_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zfadv/til_that_microsoft_solitaire_was_developed_by_a/t3_3zfadv/)

<comment><USER10> They might even credit Wes Cherry by name, and not just as "the intern"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very disappointing, clearly they used the wrong deck back, it was all about that palm tree with the sun that had the easter egg smiley face. ;-)

<comment><USER12> The robots were the best! They were animated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The win screen with the jumping cards is my main memory of the game to be honest :) pretty sure that's been parodied in movies as well.

<comment><USER14> For anyone who needs a little dose of that [https://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/solitaire/](https://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/solitaire/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Microsoft Solitaire has likely been installed on more than a million devices."

Probably billion, not million.

<comment><USER16> It's likely been installed on more than a million devices too.

<comment><USER17> Even on more than a dozen devices when you think about it.

<comment><USER18> At least two!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I once put a red card on a red playing MS "solitaire" (ie patience). It was either Win98 or XP. That was a wtf moment, like how could they get _that_ wrong. Would have loved to have known what was going on there.

Edit: I misremembered, it was black on black; on WinXP. I have an image, but of course it doesn't prove anything as it could easily have been photoshopped.

<comment><USER20> Did you have ECC memory? Might have been a flipped bit induced by a cosmic ray...

<comment><USER19> Yes, non-ECC. The possibility of that depends on the internal format used for cards, I guess if it were a binary format then a environmentally flipped bit is a possibility?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I still remember the blue deck (the one showed in the article) had black birds who flap their wings. Nostalgic!

<comment><USER22> That was the spooky castle deck complete with flapping bats. My favorite theme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> On the iPhone, my favorite version of FreeCell solitaire is Solitaire City on the App Store. It supports the standard rules, many optional forms/games, lets you play head to head with friends, accepts the standard game number initialization "seeds" if you want to work on a particular game, etc.

It's the perfect game to pass a few minutes when stuck in a line/queue.

</comment><comment><USER24> In my country, the Gamos' "Lines" game was a strong contender for mass killing of office drones' time―if not the top butcher. It held strong from '92 until around 2000.

(Known also as "Five or more" in Gnome games.)</comment>


Why Microsoft developers need to unionize - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/why-microsoft-developers-need-to-unionize-7000005180/

<comment><USER2> Wait, there are other Microsoft developers?</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for a student partner to get startup off the ground - <AUTHOR>

My fellow founder, student, and friend are looking for someone to come on board and help us get our ideas off of the ground.  We are looking for someone with strong design skills to complement our development skills.  We would love to find another student who has the same work ethic and spirit that we do.  If you would be at all interested, please post a comment here or email me from my portfolio to get in touch.  Thanks! <comment><USER2> Hey Rick, I didn't see your email in your profile but I'd love to hear from you (erwaller at gmail). I'm a developer/sort-of-designer and a senior in college.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi, I'm a sophomore and I'm curious about what you plan to do. email me at khamidou-at-gmail

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey, Im a final year computer science student, I wouldnt mind getting involved.</comment>


Show HN: Chromely – Lightweight Alternative to Electron for .NET and .NET Core - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mattkol/Chromely <comment><AUTHOR> Hi All on HN!

My name is Kola I am a .NET Architect currently working on WPF projects.

I was working on a SugarCrm WPF project - [https://github.com/mattkol/SugarDesk](https://github.com/mattkol/SugarDesk) \- and wanted to include a reporting module to my project. I was presented with many options and concluded that an HTML5 report will be more appropriate. That led me to Cef. However all Cef WPF implementations use bitmap rendering ([https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43362301/automation- why-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43362301/automation-why-wpf- based-cefsharp-uses-bitmap-for-rendering-while-winforms-does)). I started looking into raw html rendering. Long story short - Chromely was born. I found it a lot more challenging and rewarding, as a result, I abandoned SugarDesk to focus more on Chromely as I concluded in my mind there is almost no fully developed framework using Cef and thin native UI host without WinForms or WPF.

 __ __Summary: Chromely is a lightweight .NET /.NET Core HTML5 Chromium desktop framework alternative to Electron.NET, Electron for .NET/.NET Core developers.

Chromely builds HTML5 desktops without WinForms or WPF. Chromely is based on CEF's Xilium.CefGlue and CefSharp using thin Windows and Linux native GUI API as chromium hosts.

With Chromely, you can build SPA's HTML5 desktop apps- using Angular, React, Vue or similar - with or without Node/NPM.

For more info please go to - [https://github.com/mattkol/Chromely](https://github.com/mattkol/Chromely)

<comment> Const-me You embed Chrome into a windows-only WPF app?

The OS already has two web browser controls built-in.

The good old IE has a couple of issues, but they are fixable, especially if you only display your own content.

Also there's newer MS Edge: [https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/05/09/modern- webvie...](https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2018/05/09/modern-webview- winforms-wpf-apps/)

<comment><USER2> Back in 2009, using chromium instead of IE in WPF was the only way to do overlays (that wouldn't burn air space) and effects efficiently. Since WPF has been stagnant for so long, I wonder if there still isn't a better solution than using chrome.

<comment> Const-me > if there still isn't a better solution than using chrome.

A better solution is use WPF for the complete GUI.

Text & typography, raster and vector graphics are very compatible to HTML5. Effects, animations and templating are far superior. The only areas where HTML5 is winner are styling, maybe layout, and definitely the labor market i.e. it's easier and cheaper to find a front-end developer than a WPF developer.

Also WPF is better integrated into Windows. Its easier to implement per- monitor DPI awareness (starting from .NET 4.6.2, released in 2016), easier to support accessibility (narrator & others), etc..

<comment><USER3> Believe it or not modern browsers are a clear winner when it comes to graphics performance. Sure WPF has a slick animation API that can do all sorts of things and a super-flexible "lookless controls" model, but the second you try to display a lot of data with anything fancier than plain text, you're in for a world of pain. Endless optimizing of visual trees and layouts, large data binding operations causing opaque and difficult to control UI-thread freezes that disable all your wait indicators, half-baked UI-virtualization support, it's not fun. What takes me days of fiddling to get to acceptable with WPF I can do with HTML5 and an easy to use battle-tested library in a few hours.

<comment> Const-me Developed quite a lot of WPF apps but very rarely encountered performance issues you're talking about.

> Endless optimizing of visual trees and layouts

Never did that.

> UI-thread freezes that disable all your wait indicators

I avoid doing lots of stuff in the UI thread. This is especially easy to do with modern .NET and async-await.

In addition, I design my wait indicators so they run on the composition thread, i.e. aren't affected by the UI thread being stuck.

> half-baked UI-virtualization support

For me it usually works OK but I agree there're probably some issues with this feature. I remember fixing problems when my code or markup did _something_ that disabled the virtualization and ruined the performance. But it never took days, maybe a few hours.

P.S. The worst issues I've encountered with WPF wasn't performance, it was stability. Once I've spent a lot of time debugging rare render thread crash. I still don't know the reason but I've simplified my visuals a bit (namely, pre- multiplied a render transform with the complex vector shapes I was rendering) and the problem seems to gone for now. Another time it crashed when I opened a popup, and closed it too soon, like 10-20ms after the open. The popup was "loading, please wait…" progress bar so it only happened when opening very small files from very fast hard drives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like you, I have developed quite a lot of WPPF apps and still do (my day job!). I completely agree with all the points you made. Especially the point on composite control handling it's own wait indicator is spot on.

However, I believe @m_fayer is right too. The performance issue can creep up on you if you are not constantly watching it.

The weak-reference used by DelegateCommand in most WPF framework implementations - Prism, MVVMLight, Caliburn.Micro can cause extra headaches if one is not watching it. I have seen memory clogs with InputBindings; I have seen unexplaiined performance issues with ColumnSpan, RowSpan usages, and others issues I can't remember at the moment.

Buttom line is one needs to take C/C++ mindset to WPF to achieve optimal performance - that is you may have to have a strategy to clean up after yourself (just like pointers) and not rely too much on Garbage Collector (GC).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice project. However, I think Chrome is what people are talking about when they say Electron in heavy, not node. I have built apps with CEF and they are not really any lighter weight. You still have multiple processes of Chrome that are memory hogs. It's not like Electron's Chrome build has much more than CEF's.

<comment><USER5> Since all major operating systems in their normal desktop-use configurations now come bundled with one of four browsers - Edge (Windows), Safari (macOS), Firefox or Chrome/ium (*nix) which are actually also all supporting at least HTML5 and CSS3 pretty well, I think it would be an interesting idea if a framework that turned web pages into "apps" could have the app configured to fire up the app in the system browser and not just embed Chromium.

It shouldn't be that horrible anymore to do it cross browser like that, at least as long as you follow web standards and ignore Internet Explorer, requiring Windows 10 support there.

And it would make these apps, of course, absolutely tiny.

How about using that as a starting point, and have that Electron alternative focus on making cross-browser development as painless as possible instead via built in Javascript shims/polyfills where necessary, and special API calls to integrate it into the underlying OS of course (OS native notifications etc)?

<comment><USER6> It's called Progressive Web Apps. Already supported in Chrome, coming (or released already) on Edge. Still waiting for Firefox and Safari to catch up.

<comment><USER7> The major support for PWAs for Edge was released in this recent Windows 10 April Release.

That also includes Microsoft Store support for PWA apps.

Several applications in the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 have already launched or switched to PWAs (one of the most noticeable one was Twitter replaced their increasingly outdated Windows 8 application with a PWA as soon as the April Release happened).

The Android Store also supports PWAs directly in recent versions (the "Twitter Lite" application on Android is the same PWA that Windows users now get by default, and presumably will be the only first party Android Twitter client once usage of PWA-capable versions of Android rises).

Microsoft's Bing crawler is supposed to start adding "high quality" PWAs directly to the Microsoft Store as soon as it finds them on the web and minimally vets them (and will provide tools to PWA website owners to control/enhance their listings).

Google's search crawler team is also supposedly investigating lighting up automatic app ingestion into the Android and/or Chrome Stores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> fake-name If it's built on top of chromium/CEF, it's not "lightweight", and you've missed the entire reason people don't like webapps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. I get that. Still a relative term, I guess. It is easy to make reference to Electron, because people are likely to be more keen on knowing more. If you consider other Cef implementations using Winform, WPF, Chromely is still "lightweight". And it is designed with potential to be pure cross-platform like Electron.

Reason for not liking webapps - what is that reason? Because of chromium/CEF?

<comment> fake-name It's emphatically _NOT_ lightweight. It's basically __just __obese, rather then the morbidly-on-the-deathbed obese that is electron.

There are a lot of potential reasons to use something like this, but having a main selling point of it being "lightweight" is just flat out lying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your response, but I do not get the "flat out lying" part.

What has lying got to do with a subjective definition of "lightweight". See discussion on Javascript - [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39797181/why- javascript-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39797181/why-javascript- is-called-as-light-weight-programming-language)

What does "lightweight" really mean?

The idea that everyone sees "lightweight" and they ONLY think of Chromium size seems an ascription of "lightweight" ONLY to chromium size. I understand that has been a more common approach to chromium based solutions. This is not it here.

I have said in a few of my comments that this is simple referring to "simpler".

See a definition of "lightweight" from wikipedia:

A lightweight programming language is one that is designed to have very small memory footprint, is easy to implement (important when porting a language), and/or has minimalist syntax and features.

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

So if we replace "lightweight programming language" with Chromely, while the small memory footprint, may be arguable false, it is however easier to implememt and minimal features. Note the "and/or" part.

<comment> fake-name Ok, I'll retract that statement.

Corrected:

There are a lot of potential reasons to use something like this, but having a main selling point of it being "lightweight" is just flat out lying or willfully misunderstanding what lightweight means.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>

Javascript, and all scripting languages in general (maybe excepting lua and similar) are fundamentally __not __lightweight. They require enormously complex runtimes.

I'd say a reasonable definition of "lightweight" for an application runtime is if a complete, distributable app _including all the required components_ can fit in 1 MB (This functionally excludes things like .NET too).

There are, or course, odd corner cases (using the OS UI components, etc...), but it's broadly applicable.

Other relevant bits to being lightweight - how fast is the application to start/stop? What's the minimum runtime overhead? etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your explanation. If you read my intro, you will notice that Chromely was not started as an alternative to Electron, I was trying to solve a problem and over time I realized I came up with something that can be used instead of Electron (for .NET/.NET Core).

> Other relevant bits to being lightweight - how fast is the application to > start/stop? What's the minimum runtime overhead? etc...

I have not had the bandwidth to check this. My hunch is Chromely may have some edge on this. But we leave that until it is proven or not.

> There are a lot of potential reasons to use something like this ..

I thought so too, so have many developers, thanks for pointing this out.

Appreciate the feedbacks! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The repo looks great, I can see a lot of thought has been put into the project. It makes sense to leverage HTML/CSS/JS to build UIs for desktop apps. Chromium and Electron get a tough treatment here at HN, for valid reasons, but I'd say, the more experiments and implementations the better for the ecosystem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your encouraging comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Did anyone combine this with Blazor yet? That would make it possible to create the entire application, backend and frontend, in dotnet, running it as webassembly in the UI. No javascript needed, just c#/f# against the DOM.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just knowing about Blazor from you. That should be interesting and doable.

Chromely is relatively new, so may be soon someone may show interest and combine with Blazor. I will also take a look.

Thanks for pointing that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's the point of this? Xamarin is cross platform and a lot more "lightweight" than this will ever be. xamarin.forms supports mac, windows (uwp right now, wpf soon), GTK, Android and iOS.

<comment><USER11> So your team is only using one UI tech.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, for now, just humble me. Others are already showing interest, and the team will grow, I hope.

Contributions are always welcome, via issues raised, or PRs or any other means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I noticed there's no mac version. Linux and windows only, is that correct? Is there a version planned for Mac OS? Most electron apps seem to target Mac OS and Windows primarily with Linux as an after thought, so I would imagine this would be a deal breaker for them.

It's a great project though, thanks for building it!

<comment><USER12> Ok not sure what I did to upset the HN masses with this post. I genuinely want to know if there's a mac OS version

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the late response. Just a busy day for me.

<comment><USER12> It's ok, I just meant I got downvoted initially and I don't know why

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Chromely uses Windows and Linux native GUI API as chromium hosts.

No plans to support macOS?

<comment><AUTHOR> No support yet for macOS, but the plan is to make Chromely truly cross- platform. The only limitation now is the required skill. I have never developed on macOS before and do not currently have the bandwidth to learn enough.

However, as I have mentioned to others in the past, help and contributions are welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17132823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17132823)

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not include the link in this post. The admin sent me an email advising me to re-submit. Thanks for pointing that out.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help me find a show HN/ISS viewings - <AUTHOR> Sorry folks, this is a horrible request. A few months ago, someone posted an amazing show HN that showed positions/times for viewing the ISS along with this amazing street view implementation that showed you where to look.
My 3 year old is a hacker. I can't describe her in better terms. I've never met anyone more interested in learning everything about everything and bending systems to her will, other than perhaps myself. She's obsessed with space now and wants to see the International Space Station. But, she's three and this will mean keeping her up past her bedtime. I don't want her hacking to get fucked over by her old man's inability to point out the thing.
Lauren and I would greatly appreciate any help. Or, if you've raised a little person and have more ideas, please help. I'm a single dad, I'm not particularly qualified and I need help. <comment><USER2> No idea why you had trouble finding it, but here it is: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037167](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037167)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh crap, thank you. I must have tried 250 searches and couldn't find it.

Also, thanks for disparaging me before you answered the question. I'll use this as an example when I teach Lauren how to respond to people who have tried hard but just can't find something.

<comment><USER2> Look, I'm sorry I helped you out. Won't happen again. Hopefully Lauren doesn't model her behavior after you.

If you found that disparaging, I'm afraid the Internet isn't really for you.</comment></comment></comment>


If San Francisco is so great, why is everyone I love leaving? - <AUTHOR> https://sf.curbed.com/2019/1/30/18196549/san-francisco-everyone-leaving-first-person-migration-california <comment><USER3> This article was originally published on November 8. (I knew I'd read it before; it was probably linked to and discussed here.)

[https://medium.com/s/story/if-san-francisco-is-so-great- why-...](https://medium.com/s/story/if-san-francisco-is-so-great-why-is- everyone-i-love-leaving-d2b167471c35)

<comment><USER4> Yup: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18766216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18766216). This is a somewhat better discussion, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> After recently getting back from Portland, it couldn't be more painfully obvious that the entire problem comes down to housing. They are building new (affordable!) apartments there like nothing I've ever seen. You literally can't walk two or three blocks without seeing a construction crane. And the local culture reflects that. So many business that simply _could not exist_ in SF were thriving due to the cheap labor and plentiful customer base of 20 somethings that can actually afford to live on their own in the city.

<comment><USER6> It's also possible that there is such a pent-up demand for housing in San Francisco that no amount of building could realistically do enough to make things truly affordable.

<comment><USER7> "It's also possible that there is such a pent-up demand for housing in San Francisco that no amount of building could realistically do enough to make things truly affordable."

I am an SFBA (Marin) resident with a fairly large financial and personal interest in the health and welfare of the city of San Francisco - so this is something I think a lot about.

I think your point is interesting and should be considered.

Obviously it isn't _literally true_ \- clearly there would be a point at which enough housing could be built in San Francisco to hit any arbitrary affordability number.

However, it's worth considering that any politically and physically feasible[1] amount of development might not satisfy the latent demand, nationwide, for a house in San Francisco. It is not inconceivable that there are literally 2 million people in the US that would like to immediately move to SF if housing prices were in line with, say, Minneapolis or Denver.

I also think there might be a corollary to this with regard to homelessness in the state of California. I have read with great interest about the successful "house the homeless" projects that have been implemented in places like Salt Lake City which _appear_ to suggest that you can solve a cities homelessness problem by building enough units to house that population. But what if there are (essentially, not literally) an _unlimited number of people willing to be homeless in California_ ? What if the Salt Lake program really only works because it gets cold and snowy there and, really, there are only so many people willing to be homeless there and you can, in fact, house them all ?

If either of those are the case, I don't know what a good solution looks like.

[1] Including the time dimension ...

<comment><USER8> What's odd is that you talk to people in the following places who are convinced that an "unlimited" number of people want to live in their area:

* The bay area

* Boulder

* Austin

* Portland

* Seattle

And so on and so forth - and even right here in Bend, Oregon!

I have a suspicion that everyone wanting to live in _all_ those places probably isn't actually true.

<comment><USER9> There has been a general flocking back into the cities in the last ±20 years.

I don't know about Bend but all other cities you mentioned are desirable urban hotspots with (relatively) plenty of attractive jobs.

I find it very easy to imagine the supply of people interested in moving to all of them outstrips supply by so much as to practically be indistinguishable from unlimited.

There really are _a lot_ of people around and there are as many in not more decaying/depopulating areas to compensate for the Austins and Berlins of the world.

<comment><USER8> Except for the fact that when you start looking at data instead of imagining, it turns out that it's possible to provide enough supply:

[https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2019/01/29/oregons- housin...](https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2019/01/29/oregons-housing- supply/)

Housing in Portland is catching up to demand and rents are leveling off.

Seattle is seeing something similar. The bay area is not, because they fight housing tooth and nail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > It's not my fault she's gone, that all 12 of them are gone. Normal. People > move all the time. Nothing I could have done.

Except allow building more homes. Vote for politicians who'd have allowed building more homes. My guess is, the author has voted against her own interests.

Which one is more important, keeping the "charm" of houses and neighborhoods where you cannot afford to live anyway, or keeping those 12 your closest childhood friends, even if that means allowing to build apartment buildings for them to live in? You choose.

<comment><USER7> "Which one is more important, keeping the "charm" of houses and neighborhoods where you cannot afford to live anyway, or keeping those 12 your closest childhood friends, even if that means allowing to build apartment buildings for them to live in? You choose."

It is worth noting that _both of those_ are reasonable, acceptable democratic outcomes.

I personally would like to see much more in-fill and height in a lot of the city of San Francisco - but I am dismayed when I hear other such proponents of this idea rejecting the results of democratic processes as illegitimate.

There is a serious movement underway in California to remove local control of housing/zoning/development and enact statewide, top down controls and incentives - simply because democratic processes did not produce "acceptable" results.

The common retort is that local councils and county boards and neighborhood associations - local control - is by nature undemocratic (something something only old retired people have time to go to county board hearings something something) but I would like to point out that those very same people who hope to _remove local controls_ in favor of top-down, region-wide planning, were very much in favor of legalizing marijuana (as I was) and _instituting local control_ at the expense of the (federal) top-down, region-wide planning.

Democracy for thee, but not for me ...

<comment><USER11> Very few people are pro- or anti- local control in general. People have specific policy goals, and achieve those goals at the level (local, state, federal) where they're most feasible. There's no hypocrisy there.

<comment><USER7> I encourage you to read the local progressive press in San Francisco - <USER2> instance, the 48 hills blog[1]. There is a serious and growing sentiment that removing local housing authority and controls is the proper solution to these problems.

In fact, there are governmental working bodies that are moving in this direction - Plan Bay Area comes to mind, as well as Governor Newsome's proposed transportation funding mechanism[2]. Or just read the literature from the Yimby party in SF[3] - see part VI, bullet #2 ...

[1] [https://48hills.org/](https://48hills.org/)

[2] [https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/gavin- newsom-...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/gavin-newsom- housing-reform-transportation-budget-homeless/580192/)

[3] [https://yimbyaction.org/sf/platform/](https://yimbyaction.org/sf/platform/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > There is an apocalyptic amount of people moving into California, and no one > blames them for the overcrowding and the shifting culture. But when too many > Californians leave California and settle in, say, Portland, they are blamed > for ruining the place by way of simply being themselves.

Part of this is where the money comes from.

Poorer/lower-middle-class people (mostly) move into California, to work these jobs under varying amounts of duress. It's hard to complain about the kid who moved from Iowa/Wisconsin/Tennessee/etc, and is hoping their first real tech job at Uber or Facebook or Netflix justifies the move. That's why discussion moves to hating the companies, not the people.

But when Californians leave, they leave wealthy (in comparison). Even if they were poor-ish in California, just the act of selling their home (or condo, or any unit, anywhere in the state) instantly propels them straight to the upper- class or upper-middle-class when they move to places like Idaho or Nebraska or Michigan.

So, when they move here, and say things like "$200k for a beat up old house? That's nothing! A _downpayment_ in California would be $200k!" \-- it gets easy to hate the coastal person _for their money_. Because you sure as hell aren't earning that cash local -- Our hometown Gordon Foods corporate jobs aren't paying even 33% of the wages a corporate Uber Eats job does. Our local housing prices are no longer driven by local wages, they're driven largely by what percentage of coastal people are cashing out their wealth and dumping it into our hometowns (or what percent of coastal private equity funds are buying up our cities to rent back to us at inflated rates)

\----

That's not to defend these actions, I am _not_ saying this is right (no one should hate anyone over this). But it does at least help understand why the blame goes where it does. The blame follows the money. In California, that money comes from the companies. But in flyover-USA, that money is coming from the _Californians_ (or NYC/Boston/DC/Seattle/Denver transplants), because you sure as hell aren't ever earning that much money from any local company here.

<comment><USER13> Do you have any stats on the wealth distribution of people leaving California? This really is a situation where more demographic information would be helpful, since an average wouldn't tell you as much. Do the wealthy Californians tend to be old, retirees? Young with kids? Are half the Californians leaving well off, with other half largely penniless?

Your assertion that "when Californians leave, they leave wealthy" may be true, but I would like to see it substantiated with some kind of cite.

Having grown up in SF (I'm in my late 40s), I have, by this point, seen a lot of people leave (and arrive), and they run the gamut.

I know a couple with two small kids who did what everyone in Portland fears most - they bought in SF during the housing bust, sold recently, collected 800k or so, and now own a house outright in Portland.

I know a woman who grew up in Palo Alto in the 1970s and works as a documentary film maker. She left for Denver with nothing but the savings that can get you through a few months.

Lots more, and they're anecdotes, but it's enough to make me suspect that "when Californians leave, they leave wealthy" isn't true often enough to make it a generally accurate statement, even if it does describe a substantial number of these cases.

<comment><USER14> California is bleeding something like 60,000 people each year just to Texas. The Californians moving to north Texas metros do not appear poor relative to neighboring Texans enjoying superior standards of living with deprecated wages compared to California.

When I bought my Texas house about a decade ago the average house price in my metro was about $200,000 and now I think it is about $250,000. These average houses are individual units from 2500-3000sqft on a quarter acre lot. If you are able to sell an equivalent CA house for $2,000,000 you are moving in wealthy compared to Texans. It doesn't mean you can afford a mansion here though, because property taxes are about equal to CA property taxes at about 6.5% per year.

<comment><USER13> You did say "do not appear to be poor". Is there a chance you're noticing wealthy people, because they tend to be more noticeable?

Yes, people who bought a house while ago in California, sell, and move to Texas would have a lot of money. But again, is this typical?

I'm not saying it necessarily isn't typical, just that "it seems like", or "appears to be" isn't data. A lot of people leave California because they can cash in on their house, but a lot of people also leave because they'll never be able to get a foothold in the housing market.

We really do need some data on this to have a meaningful conversation about it.

<comment><USER15> I would love to see the data on this as well. But at least anecdotally around me (an immigrant working in tech in SF), the overwhelming number of people who moved here are following a plan that looks like this:

1\. Get a big tech job in SF and earn > $200k per year (in some cases 2-3x that). 2\. Deal with living in a run down apartment yet still paying $2200-3500/mo. 3\. Shovel a large percentage of your income into savings for 5-10 years. 4\. Move back to <anywhere else> with $300k in cash.

At which point you can pay either pay straight cash, or make a huge downpayment, for a nice house and live pretty comfortable in the upper middle class for the rest of your life.

Again I would love to see scientific data on this, but in my immediate work setting, I've heard 12 of the 15 engineers I work with state this as their "life plan."

Of the three who that isn't their plan, two are Bay Area natives, and one (I think) has decided he'd like to stay.

So, circling up to the parent comments, there are certainly large numbers of these people leaving every year, taking their <geographically relative> big bags of cash back to the corners of the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Unfortunately this is the circle of life in high cost living areas. The NYC area has been expensive for a long period of time. SF now has become even more expensive and this phenomenon is newer to the area than NYC. The people I grew up with had the following outcomes:

* Got a high paying job and stayed (not many)

* Tried to make it here, but ended up moving to NC or FL

* Work lower paying jobs dual income and struggle

* Got a job in the area they went to university

SF was not super expensive 10-15 years ago. I mean it was not like living in a Midwest city but you could still get by on a reasonable income.

Central Fl and many areas in NC have a large amount of New Yorkers. This trend is going to accelerate as top tier cities become more popular and affluent, and costs will spiral. Unfortunately cities like Orlando that take in a lot of fleeing New Yorkers do not build the same density and downtowns as older cities so it is less likely that they will become as desirable for higher paying jobs. They are more suburban in nature and are car dependent.

What needs to be done is to make high density cities from the start somewhere else. Make a high speed rail link from SF to some area outside and start new with affordable high density in mind. Then people will initially commute to SF but the new area can then flourish. Otherwise old high density cities will continue to explode in popularity with post 1950s sprawl cities taking in mid income people.

<comment><USER17> NYC isn't nearly as expensive. I know people who have bought affordable houses in places like New Jersey and have reasonable commutes. That just isn't possible in the Bay Area.

<comment><USER18> NJ isn't NYC

That's like saying Chicago isn't expensive if you just buy in a different state.

<comment><USER19> Large parts of NJ (including NJ's five largest cities[1]) are part of the "NYC Metro Area", right across the Hudson River and well-connected to NYC by commuter rail and bus routes. The commute from NJ to midtown Manhattan can be shorter than the commute from some of the outlying parts of NYC.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > But what this "native" Bay Area kid won't do is start blaming the guy from > North Carolina or Wisconsin or Boston—basically every other person in the > bar—for propelling the rents into the sky and inadvertently forcing the > "locals" to flee.

That's one option. The other option would be to blame all the Bay Area natives who are seemingly happy to build massive employment centers but are completely fucking allergic to building apartment buildings.

But what do I know, I just live in New York, which really does share a lot of the dynamic described in the article as well and has it's share of problems with migration and gentrification, but where we also know how to actually build housing.

It helps.

</comment><comment><USER21> Taking a macro view on it and ignoring individual circumstances, I believe San Francisco is slowly bleeding itself out which may be a net positive for society (and I would apply this to my home NYC as well).

I don't believe it's a good idea for our society long term to have ALL of the nation's leading X (technologists, bankers, engineers) in one city or state. As painful as it is to see your community leave, taking a perhaps heartless view on this, these talented people are going to other places and will revitalize communities.

I live in NYC and it pains me to bump into people who are enslaved by their paycheck commuting 3 hours (no exaggeration) a day. Moms and dads never seeing their kids dealing with crumbling infrastructure. I believe they could cut that paycheck in half, live in Charlotte or any number of good cities and lead a much happier life.

I guess I'm saying that while I wouldn't wish being priced out of your community to anyone, for people on the trajectory of being priced out, the sooner perhaps the better to a happier life somewhere else.

<comment><USER22> We will still have ALL of the nation's leading engineers in one city / area, but no one else will be able to afford to live there. Even non-leading engineers will be forced to move out, and will no longer be able to learn from the leading engineers, lowering national productivity.

I don't know why you assume the leading engineers will move. As a "leading engineer", I don't see why I would take a $200-300k/year paycut and a less interesting job just to leave San Francisco, even though it pains me to see what the local politicians here are doing to their people.

<comment><USER23> I know of a few unicorns that have already started moving their interesting jobs to other cities when a few of their leading engineers express interest in moving out of the SF Bay Area. When I told my boss I was planning on moving, he and my director offered to let me start a satellite team in the office I'm transferring too.

I wouldn't be surprised if some tech companies start creating "moving charters" where a team gets slated to move to another satellite office and engineers interested in that satellite office transfer into that team and then the team is moved after like 1-year.

The SF Bay Area still leads in interesting jobs, but I increasingly see interesting jobs with leading engineers in other cities and that trend will only continue over time. In my company, I can think of four satellite offices that I know has strong engineers with interesting projects in low cost of living cities that I'd consider moving to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Every so often one of these articles comes along and someone writes at length about the struggle of living in the bay area. I've been here over 13 years now and these articles are a constant.

First, the Bay Area never promised to be anything to anyone. It had its roots in the gold rush and then the military, followed by the semiconductor rush and today the internet. At each iteration, people flooded into the region to work in lucrative jobs and push out the farmers that lived here for generations.

There may have been a larger creative scene in SF, but it never was as rich and diverse as people think they remember it to be. 13 years ago, the entire eastern 1/2 of SF was abandoned warehouses and homeless encampments. I mean, potrero hill was where you could go buy your coke, it was full of drug dealers! Now look at that neighborhood.

But ultimately, SF is a small city, not that diverse and lacks many of the things that make paying NYC prices worth it for NYers. That has been true for its entire history and I don't think that will change.

However, if creative industries are your thing, and what you crave, move to LA or NYC. That's where you'll find all of that, from amazing artists to bands that are amazing, even if they're playing at your local pub.

<comment><USER25> > However, if creative industries are your thing, and what you crave, move to > LA or NYC

Having done this, I still think it's a little sad if the Bay Area can't figure out how to make room for a creative culture. There's so many reasons it matters:

* a region that economically squeezes would-be bands or artists starting in a garage or warehouse is also going to squeeze capital-poor garage startups, not to mention supporting everyday labor that may not be making tech industry money

* it's likely that the same kind of open/change-minded/creative culture that feeds artistry feeds entrepreneurship (psychedelics aren't the only thing that can open your mind)

* sometimes people _like_ living in places with vibrant cultural capital

* while it may never have had the creative mass that NY or LA has had, I can't believe the Bay and even a wider region out 101 & 80 doesn't have plenty of creative talent looking for a center

<comment><USER24> Berkeley is as close to that as you're going to get here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think this experience is very different for gay men (speaking as one living in SF). Because gay men are more likely to not want kids (and probably still less likely to be married at a certain age), there is less a need to be able to afford a 3 bedroom home and in my experience there is no late 20/early 30 exodus from SF that I see with some of my straight friends. Then there's the extra benefit of SF and other major urban centers like NYC and LA in just having a large LGBT population, which many "second tier" cities that are cheaper do not have and would be a major downside to moving out.

</comment><comment><USER27> SF isn't so great anymore. It's like New York, but with more junkies and no cheaper boroughs.

It has more drug addicts than people enrolled in public high schools. [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/02/sa...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/02/san- francisco-fact-of-the-day.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> This article is really spot on. It feels like we're in a big speculative mess in Bay Area. The home-price-to-income ratio in SJ is about 20x [1] Anything over 3x used to be considered "risky". Let's say in Costal Areas it was be allowed to double, then you have 6x. That's good, not great, but ok. And that's about what pricy DC and NY cost. SJ is 20x. How is this possibly sustainable? Not even going to get into the dual income trap that only makes it marginally more realistic.

How is this good for average folks, like the ones that keep society running? How will this work in the long run? There will basically be two classes of people, the rich and the ultra poor who barely survive. I suspect poor don't have the money or the knowledge about elsewhere or they _would_ be moving out in droves.

[1] - [https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/where-the-house- price...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/where-the-house-price-to- income-ratio-is-most-out-of-whack/561404/) * I should note peak home prices in the last 12 mo were in mid july and houses have fallen by about 5%, so this ratio might actually be lower.

<comment><USER23> Moving is really quite expensive, especially if you're moving a family. On top of that, many people have a support network of family and friends that they would leave behind too. If you have small kids, these support networks are super useful since you'd have the added cost of daycare or babysitting in a market where you have no support network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> These two statements seem to conflict a bit. Anybody else think so?

> are flooding their home, driving up rents, installing yoga studios, > polluting the local vibe with new technology, and generally making > everything suck while sipping kale juice.

> These people want to be artists, teachers, blacksmiths, therapists, > mechanics, and musicians. They want to have children, open bakeries, own a > house ...they aren't techies; they had the audacity to want something > besides tech.

Are the people who left California and who apparently are driving up rents and sipping kale juice in wherever they ended up artists, mechanics, musicians, and blacksmiths? California rents have gone up apparently because technology companies pay workers enough they can afford $3000/mo rents for an apartment. Is the effect of an influx of bakers, musicians, artists (who I'm assuming probably can't afford high rents) sufficient to inflate rents enough to complain about? I would have said the "californians" people complain about are employed by technology companies (or other high paying companies).

<comment><USER13> You've accurately described what San Franciscans complain about. The writer of this piece mentioned that San Franciscans don't tend to show hostility to people based on where they're from, and that's largely true, we don't have a particular region or state people complain about they way people in, say, Portland, complain about California.

However, a lot of San Franciscans do complain constantly about techies.

One thing to keep in mind - some states, such as Oregon and Washington, have had a strong undercurrent of hostility to California for the last century. This is an interesting perspective:

[http://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/Class...](http://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/Classroom%20Materials/Pacific%20Northwest%20History/Lessons/Lesson%201/1.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's funny to see Californians complain about folks moving to California and driving up housing costs. I grew up in Bend, Oregon where housing was driven up by tons of Californians moving there. Bay area folks only have themselves to blame for their "I got mine" attitude and not allowing anyone to build more housing. I fly every week to Santa Clara because there is no way I am moving there -- my home here in WA is almost paid off.

</comment><comment><USER31> There's a lot of discussion in this thread of restrictions on building, but an equally big problem in San Francisco is constructions costs. Even if all limits on building were liberalized tomorrow, housing would still be extremely expensive because of the high cost of construction. There are many causes, including the accumulation of well-meaning environmental regulations over the last 10 years. The Terner center at Berkeley put together a great focus group with developers and contractors where they discuss these causes:

[https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/uploads/San_Francisco_Cons...](https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/uploads/San_Francisco_Construction_Cost_Brief_- _Terner_Center_January_2018.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER32> Because of exclusionary zoning and prop 13, both of which are supported by middle-aged and retired homeowners, a dominant political force in California.

</comment><comment><USER33> Its not. The quality of life is terrible here for what you are paying for. I pay $3000 for a one bedroom and constantly have homeless people in my garage or camping next to my building. My car has been broken into several times. Cops don't walk a beat or do anything whatsoever to prevent crime. If you call the cops they basically shrug it off unless there's actual violence happening. The traffic is terrible, public transportation is terrible (mostly because BART and Muni let on people who don't pay). There are piles of feces and needles all over the city center. I honestly love the weather, but there are just so many negatives to your daily experience here. If I could move, I would.

<comment><USER29> > I pay $3000 for a one bedroom

> If I could move, I would.

If you don't mind, why can't you move? Caring for family members?

<comment><USER33> Me and my wife both have jobs here and finding two jobs at once to relocate is difficult. Both our families are here, not caring for them (yet) but that also makes it hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > _I can't change the rent._

This ending is poignant and obviously true. However, it's also true that individuals can support the YIMBY movement in whatever manner they are comfortable, which as a unified force is the best means to reducing rents that we have. Campaign to reform zoning to allow denser residential buildings; reform building regulations to encourage development; abolish Proposition 13 to bolster market dynamism; eliminate the mortgage income tax deduction to counter price lift; allow ADUs on single-family housing zones; do whatever you can to encourage increasing housing supply.

As aphextron pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it's all about housing. And the housing problem is solved by _supply_. Demand is what it is, and as long as there is a cultural and employment nexus, demand isn't going down appreciably any time soon.

For me, the key is knocking off any concerns about gentrification or the loss of a community's "character." These are selfish blankets that are comfort for NIMBYs. Yeah, I might jokingly jab at hipsters and their ways. But I absolutely do not want them regulated out of the area by way of restrictive zoning, building regulations, and other thinly veiled exclusion in the form of constrained property rights.

</comment><comment><USER35> A lot of people only see gross salary and forget the only thing that matters is how much money you net at the end of the year.

For most in the middle class if you compare the cost of living index to a less desirable place to live, even with the much reduced wages, it makes fiscal sense leave.

<comment><USER20> > only thing that matters is how much money you net at the end of the year

No it doesn't. Other things matter too.

I gladly give up spectacular amounts of money to live in New York City because I have no interest in living anywhere else. Glancing around it appears I am not alone.

<comment><USER35> True, I would qualify that with 'fiscally speaking', or also 'given regions you would be willing to live'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The article is all qualitative, but the quantitative numbers bear it out, at a state level at least. In 2016, the state had rough 150,000 more internal emigrants then immigrants (from census data) This is a continuation or acceleration of a trend that has been occurring for 30 years- see [https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/great-california- ex...](https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/great-california-exodus- closer-look-5853.html). If my back of the envelope calculation is right, California had a net outflow of 10% of its current population over 30 years. Of course that is made up for by births and external migration, but matches the authors observation.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's not great. Everything interesting has moved to the East Bay or out of state. All that left is high rents. I've already got plans to leave in April. The only thing good that remains is a lot of the most interesting tech jobs at the larger companies like Facebook, Google, Uber, AirBnB, etc. However even those have a shelf-life because it's only a matter of time (5-10 years is my guess) because those are no longer the exciting companies anymore. If SF starts losing the future unicorns to other markets, it's only a matter of time until the golden goose dies.

Word on the street is that several unicorns are planning more and more engineering growth outside the SF Bay Area in 2019 and beyond.

<comment><USER37> If everything interesting had moved out, people wouldn't be moving in and rents would fizzle out. I think you meant to say things you f8nd interesting have moved out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> None of my artist friends who were born in SF can afford to live there any more. My techie friends are starting to move out because it's getting less affordable for even them, or because the only people left of their circles are other techies.

Seattle's going the same way, rapidly. I hope nobody who works for Amazon or Microsoft decides to follow me when I leave this town for the place I grew up, because tech money sure does not trickle down very far and I would like to be able to pay my freakin' rent without whimpering every time I do.

<comment><USER39> Well, that's how the cookie crumbles. If you can't afford the place where you currently live, you move somewhere else.

<comment><USER38> I wonder if SF will get bad enough that it's simply not worth the commute for anyone who's not a techie to live there. No more fast-food workers. Nobody to clean the toilets. Nobody who isn't a software zillionaire in a perfect, shining Galt's Gulch on the ocean.

<comment><USER39> > No more fast-food workers. Nobody to clean the toilets.

If anybody paid attention to how a market works, one would realise, that these workers would start getting SWdev-like salaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The boomers did everything they could to construct the housing supply and ensure their children would be unable to afford to live near them. Hope they enjoy their blessed property values!

<comment><USER40> Did you mean constrict? So you feel that an entire generation of humans conspired against the well being of yours deliberately... just because? I think you might want to consider developing a more nuanced and less reductive view of things.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, meant constrict. Darn phone keyboard. They didn't conspire against my generation just because. They conspired to increase property values. The fact that my generation (excepting the few of us with elite tech company compensation) can't afford those increased property values is just an inevitable side effect of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > I visited Seattle for the first time a month ago and was warned someone > might throw a bottle at my car for my California plates.

This same crap was literally in the air almost 30 years ago when I lived in LA and traveled to Seattle and Portland regularly on business. Californians were responsible for the traffic on the 5, and not being able to get into restaurants, etc. etc.

Also...

> There is an apocalyptic amount of people moving into California, and no one > blames them for the overcrowding and the shifting culture.

Really?

</comment><comment><USER39> The current state of journalism - Red Herring and The Texas Sharpshooter just in the title.

</comment><comment><USER42> In short:

Cost of living + abusive taxes

</comment><comment><USER43> I loved my week in the Bay Area. But...I prefer living around mountains and trees instead of that many people and buildings.

Remote work is the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER44> I rarely post here but fuck it. I was born in Redwood City. I went to school briefly at UCB and graduated from UCD. I spent the entirety of my life in this small stretch of land. I immediately started working as an engineer in tech as soon as I graduated but now had to deal with this new reality the author describes. I was involved in the music and art scene in the Bay Area and almost everyone has left. The few that remained kind of despised me for working in technology. It was also a weird disconnect to hang out with people and everyone knows that I easily make four times the amount they make while living at my Mom's house. I just didn't feel myself around them anymore. I didn't really care to make friends with tons of engineers. I spent my day with engineers (albeit with very few even born in America let alone the Bay Area) and I wasn't rushing to spend time with tons of more engineers on my free time. The shows and parties dried up and I became more and more depressed wondering what am I going to do with my life?

Everyone here is posting in the typical Hacker News way of trying to rationalize the situation. If only we build or built more housing, etc. It doesn't matter. More housing wasn't built and even if more housing comes quickly (which it won't), the area has changed and there isn't really an artistic or cultural zeitgeist to attract artists like there used to be here. Of course, there is Oakland but unfortunately I didn't fit in there because politics and identity seemed to be everything people cared about with their art and it wasn't interesting or fun. I have no idea if Oakland continues to change or not.

I ended up leaving. I sold almost everything I owned and moved to Israel. I wanted to go somewhere radically different than California. My only other options were LA and NYC. I wanted to be near a Jewish population because that is important to me. It's nice to see how different life is outside of the Bay Area. While Tel Aviv definitely has it's fair share of technology, I still see people walking on the street with guitars and there is a vibrant night life here which is nice.

There are of course drawbacks too. The Bay Area really is a special place. I understand what the author is getting at in the piece. There is an implicit cost to these people. If your entire area becomes engineers, data scientists, and product managers, I am sorry but the area is fucking boring and uninspiring. It also becomes a bubble where no one is actually solving anything anymore or creating anything inspiring.

Edit: Another huge thing I forgot to mention is the commute. The commute here is fucking INSANE. We make an obscene amount of money and ride on these screeching subways with junkies and schizophrenics. We get off and walk over corpses on the street to get to our beautiful offices that all look similar with reclaimed wood and steel and program. I couldn't rationalize the absurdity of it all anymore. I couldn't deal with the time and energy cost of commuting. I lived in Redwood City and drove to BART and then BARTed into SF. When I lived in Berkeley, the commute was just as bad. If I was lucky to stand on a Transbay bus, it was tolerable but BART took so long. If I decided to move to Oakland, I would have to deal with an even longer BART where we are packed in like cattle. It is insane to me. The first thing I did was get a sublet where I could walk to work.

<comment><USER37> What I understood from your post is you don't want an area full of product managers, data scientists, and software people, but you're very content in an area that replaces them with Jewish people?

I think everything you said is entirely subjective. I would personally rather be surrounded by techies than people of a particular race or religion, as long as these people come from different genders, races, ethnicities, or beliefs. To me, that's much better than being near a large Jewish population or Arab population or white population or people of ${preferred_religion} here.

<comment><USER4> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER37> What was the stronger or weaker one? Op posted his opinions as being objective truths, which I pointed are subjective.

Enlighten me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> At least you can go to a local CC two years for (almost) free.

</comment><comment><USER46> She says the ones coming in to California _"...flock here for gold and glory, ready to hustle and disrupt, hammering to hit the motherlode and laughing at the odds"_ while the ones leaving _"...leave their families and communities behind on the chance they will, ironically, strike gold."_

In other words they are the same. In both cases they're de-prioritizing more traditional values (home, family, friends, community) to pursue wealth and fortune. To put it bluntly and somewhat negatively (although I'll make a disclaimer in a sec), they're coming for greed, and they're leaving for greed. There's no contradiction.

Here's that disclaimer and a bit of a tangent: Greed has a good side, like Gordon Gekko's speech in the ancient movie Wall Street -- "Greed is good. Greed works." Basically greed is just a thing; the desire for more ___. And keep in mind that all things have dual nature dark/light just like the yin/yang symbol shows. Dark and light are not only coiled intimately around each other, but there is also a spot of the one inside the very heart of the other. It's really a brilliant piece of symbology and a good reminder about the world, that participants in fruitless and polarized political debates would do well to pay attention to. (Though nobody wants to hear there's as much evil in them as in their opponents, or that there's as much good in their opponents as themselves... especially when it's true.)

Anyway, with that in mind, you can state something like "Steve Jobs was greedy" and see what a perfect statement it is. It captures both sides. But yeah so in that case let's not fail to call out the aspects of the Silicon Valley "dream" that are inherently materialistic. Or opportunistic, might be a better word. Should we really be surprised that such a place, through its own success, begins to crowd out other uses/priorities/values including both traditional ones (home, family) and non-traditional-but-non-materialistic ones (art)?

Also what of these other towns where life is cheaper? They are filled with people who stayed put, who chose "home and family" above "gold and glory." Granted some of them had the _luxury of choosing_ let's say "being an artist" because the town is cheap enough to do so. Others had _no choice_ but to be pretty-much without gold or glory because of a general dearth of opportunity. But don't let either one of those things distract you: People in these places, especially people who grew up there, value the things they value. I'd imagine you'd find "home and family" are ranked as higher priorities, as well as "creativity," while "fame and fortune" would be ranked lower. Materialism and opportunism would be lower. Restlessness, shallowness all would be lower. If you could measure things like that.

So again, should we be surprised that when people steeped in the Silicon Valley go-go-get-'em environment -- either the ones who already traded "home" for "success" once in order to go there, or the ones who, like the author's friend, are doing it for the first time -- land in those other places, and end up standing out unwelcomely like the proverbial sore thumb? Try to blend in(0) and you might find less "hate." The "angry locals of Portland, Seattle, Denver, New Orleans, Kansas City, Phoenix, Austin, and elsewhere" aren't pissed because they think you're rich snobs (though those do stand out more, in part because of their disproportionate ability to influence the actual physical architecture of a place, more on that in a minute); they're mad because by virtue of your very relocations, you display a verifiable history of being at least greedy/opportunistic enough (again, in both good/bad senses) to do so in the first place, and of embracing the values the Valley/Bay is famous for, and of actively disdaining the (apparently now contrary) values these people adhere to, which are ironically the ones whose loss is being lamented in this piece.

(0) I shouldn't have said "blend in." "Blending in" sounds too much like fascism. "Harmonize" would be better. Because like people in a band, you might all be playing different instruments and parts, but you sort of have to be playing the same song, don't you.

Architecture provides a good metaphor here. An ostentatious new ultra-modern house that makes no effort whatsoever to harmonize with the surrounding architecture -- there are now plenty of those in these towns. If you say you don't like them, people will disingenuously say it's because you're an ass- backwards hick who hates modernity, but that's not the reason. It's because it's artless, jarring and tone-deaf, like someone who joins a band while it's playing and starts playing a different song.

</comment><comment><USER47> >Several months ago, she had made the difficult decision to move back onto a small corner of her parents beach-town property, after her urban East Bay house became waterlogged during the rainstorms of 2016. We had to move her out over a weekend, after the mold took half the furniture and gave her roommate pneumonia in both lungs. I touched swollen blisters of stagnant rainwater pulsing on her walls. After emailing the landlord about the issues, the housemates abandoned the property. He then successfully sued them in accordance with California tenant laws.

What the actual fuck is wrong with California and its tenant laws?

<comment><USER48> I don't get this part. I've been led to believe tenants have all the power over landlords.

<comment><USER49> Of course the housing crisis has many factors contributing to it. This is a major one. If a place has a majority of renters, has a prevailing political culture of socialism and activism, and the rents start going up fast, you likely end up with an erosion of property rights with rent control and other restrictions on landlords. Tyranny of the majority. If landlords are seen by the local culture as bad people this quickly this becomes true. Only assholes and faceless corporations looking for maximum ROI are going to buck the social stigma and be an evil landlord.

Oakland used to at least let small landowners who lived at a multiple unit building they owed not to be under the strong tenet laws. Last election cycle a proposition changed that. Now a landowner can't refuse to renew a month-to- month rental contract that is a standard after a year lease. These small landlords were the last refuge for people in many cases. You actually had a relationship with the owner and they would often keep rents way below market because they liked you, enjoyed living next to you, didn't need the extra cash as they bought the property many years ago, and didn't want to try and find somebody else to move in.

It is too bad that being a landlord has become so onerous in the Bay area. The state passed a law that forces cities to allow small 600sqft mother-in-law units to be built on properties, if the lot is not too small. This could really help with the housing crisis. As the rents in Oakland have doubled over the last 4 years or so, myself and other people I know were thinking about investing the 150-200k that it takes in the high cost Bay Area to build one of these units or convert a large house into a duplex/triplex. People are not much less interested in doing so now that this new law has passed. Oh well. Maybe cash out and go elsewhere? Who would have thought that Carl's juniors $6 burger would have to be discontinued so soon due to the fact that they would have to charge more than six bucks for it. Now it would be called the $19 burger.

<comment><USER23> This. I would also add that renters with such strong rights as they have in SF also constitute a mutex on a property. When so many of the units have these mutexes, it makes it basically impossible to develop property in San Francisco. The other policies such as minimum parking requirements, CEQA lawsuits and "you'll block my view" lawsuits, etc. are all basically mutexes on a property held by everyone but the property owner, which is the only person with an incentive to develop their property for profit. And by "develop" I mean build more housing that would help alleviate the shortage.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quick Amazon Silk thoughts - <AUTHOR> http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/09/quick_amazon_si.html

<comment><USER2> Sadly it looks like PPK was in too much of a hurry to post some 'quick thoughts'. A little bit of additional reading (heck, even watching the video on the Silk blog) would have revealed that Silk's "split architecture" is much, much smarter than simply having the server send a bitmap of the page to the browser.

From the introductory blog post [1]:

> _All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on > the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes > a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and > which will execute remotely._

Then there's the Ars article [2] that explains some of what Silk's split architecture can do:

> _Amazon will load the webpage on the server side, downloading all of the > necessary content elements in parallel. After downloading the content, > Amazon will send the compiled page—including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and > images—back to the device as a single stream of data… The Silk browser > maintains a single persistent connection to Amazon's cloud (using Google's > fast SPDY protocol), through which requests are sent and content is > received… An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event told us that the > split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine > code on the server side in situations where it will provide a speed boost._

And the Terms & Conditions [3] make it clear that Silk can stand on its own two feet if desired:

> _You can also choose to operate Amazon Silk in basic or "off-cloud" mode. > Off-cloud mode allows web pages generally to go directly to your computer > rather than pass through our servers. As such, it does not take advantage of > Amazon's cloud computing services to speed-up web content delivery._

When they say "split architecture", it sounds like they really mean it.

[1]: [http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing- amazo...](http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing-amazon-silk/)

[2]: [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/amazons-silk- web...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser- adds-new-twist-to-old-idea.ars)

[3]: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775270)

</comment><comment><USER3> "..Android WebKit, the most disappointing mobile browser right now..."

Android is great but this line is unfortunately SO true. It's especially noticable on a tablet.

I tried Dolphin instead and it's awesome. One feature I particularly like is that you can change the User-Agent header between Desktop/Ipad/Android. Now I don't have to rely on websites to determine what content I get, I can decide for myself thank-you-very-much. This should be a standard feature in all browsers.

<comment><USER4> > Now I don't have to rely on websites to determine what content I get

Do you expect normal users to switch user agents so that a website will work for them?

<comment><USER3> If they knew the benefits of doing that, they'd learn. My wife did when I showed her. Now she knows what to do when she sees a website and thinks, "that's not what it looks like on my laptop".

<comment><USER4> So instead of a website being fixed every user should learn how to switch user agents to work around it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Silk seems to be an Opera Mini-like proxy browser, where the client asks > the server to fetch and render the page, and then receives what's basically > a bitmap image. This makes for very fast browsing and little data traffic._

I doubt it's basically a bitmap image, because you lose the ability to highlight the text. My guess is that they'll essentially rewrite the markup, css, resize/recompress images and deliver it all in a single compressed stream that can be decompressed and laid out with something akin to absolute positioning.

It could even be that the assets are encoded inline using data uris, but that seems like a stretch.</comment>


Ask HN: iPhone serial number highjacked for a fraudulent AppleCare replacement? - <AUTHOR> I went to visit Apple to have my iPhone X serviced. I use Apple's iPhone Replacement Program, which is managed via Citizens Bank. After diagnosing the phone and finding the issue was within warranty, they began the replacement process only to find the phone had been marked replaced/ recycled.
After a bit of digging the employee brought over a manager that informed me someone must've stolen my serial number, icloud email address, and other carrier data. I can't think when I would've entered this data into any form (or conceivably think of a scenario as to why I would..).
In May someone apparently brought a broken iPhone X into an Apple Store, and used the stolen data to replace it under the valid AppleCare plan. It was suggested my serial number/ other data was fished, but that seems incredibly unlikely as I can't remember ever entering all that data.
Upon prodding the employees a bit they confirmed this means the Apple Store employee who handled the replacement would've manually had to enter the highjacked serial numbers to issue the replacement, and did not read them off the device brought in.
Has anyone experienced this? Any thoughts on how all those serial numbers were lifted? As conspiratorial as it sounds, my best guess is a weev/ ATT style breach at Verizon or Citizens Bank, coupled with complicit Apple Store employees. <comment><USER2> If the device was brought and damaged enough there is no place to read the numbers off of. They are not printed anywhere on the outside of the device anymore. In fact they are printed on the SIM card tray I believe which is rather easy to replace.

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't unheard of. Call AppleCare and request to speak to a senior advisor and explain the situation. They should be able to see the inconsistencies in the repair and sort it out for you.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you remember what you did with your box?

Can't recall if imei and serial number are one and the same but one is on the box, and your icloud address is your email which is usually easy enough to find.</comment>