Why people hate contemporary architecture (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture <comment><USER3> Industrialization and Baumol's cost disease are the reasons why.

For the same reasons that you need to go to an artisinal bakery to get handmade bread today, you cannot get anything with significant ornament in it without paying enormously. Industrial bakeries are far more efficient so only a select few can afford to pay for good bread, and so there are far fewer individual bakers, and they're more expensive because there's less demand - they can't make it up on volume. It's the same with artisans.

My father was a plasterer in his 20s, and worked with old men who did the ceiling decorations in the British Embassy in Dublin. But they were the last of their kind, because nobody wanted that any more. And now they're all dead.

Richly decorated edifices could be risen today, but they're far more expensive, and thus we can't afford to roll the dice and end up with a bunch of good buildings by process of survival. Instead, everything is mediocre and designed to amortise to zero value within a few decades, to be torn down and built again, not better, merely different.

<comment><USER4> Actually, the opposite is true. The ornamentation of the past was painfully and time consumingly created manually. It is trivial today to mass-produce ornamentation - a simple form insert into a concrete form can create any desired ornamentation. Frank Lloyd Wright is a key example of using ornamentation within the context of modern construction techniques and materials, his concrete block houses a classic example of both with the Hotel Biltmore in Arizona a masterpiece example of it. The key issue is not cost, it is philosophy. The architect striving to present their view of the world. For Wright, his work focuses around the human experience, around human scale, all ornament reinforcing that his buildings are to be measured by our experience of and relation to them. Many of the more grotesque examples of modern architecture are by architects who believe the world is chaos, in flux, that humans have no place in the world, etc.

[Footnote on Wright] If you happen to be taller than 5'8 when visiting a Wright building (like myself), bend your knees until you are at that eye-level to appreciate the full experience. [https://wrightchat.savewright.org/viewtopic.php?t=8915](https://wrightchat.savewright.org/viewtopic.php?t=8915)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but aren't FLW houses/buildings notorious for being crap quality construction? Leaking, cracking, sinking, and molding?

<comment><USER6> No, just the opposite.

His _schools_ have had issues, because the schools were meant to be sandboxes for the students to get real world experience, and try things which may or may not work. The fact that the schools have become landmarks after his death has nothing to do with Wright's design philosophies.

If you look at Wright's own house, it incorporates lots of clever ideas in terms of engineering more rugged forms which will hold up over time (like molding profiles that are designed to be coped from multiple directions to keep joints in place, and stained glass patterns that lend themselves to 'hiding' extra reinforcement on one side where the structure will be invisible to the beholder, for example).

Here are my pics of his house when I went through it last time I was in Chicago. I tried to get as many such above examples as possible...

[https://imgur.com/a/ontIR](https://imgur.com/a/ontIR)

<comment><USER5> I've always heard that his designs and concepts are great (that's my opinion too), but the actual construction quality was lacking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a shame this is a polemic when it discusses important issues.

It's not as if these issues aren't discussed in architecture. And there are definitely weird pathologies and pomposities in architecture (as in any field), which manifest themselves in a variety of unpleasant ways. But this doesn't mean all we have is ugly buildings; we also have new, playful, and enjoyable buildings as well.

Another HN comment this morning (on a different post) brought up Postel's law and how it is usually both misunderstood and overused. The same applies to "a house is a machine for living" or "form follows function": they can be taken as an excuse to ignore the person, or as a call for: make sure the person's needs are at the centre of the design.

A case of both skill and pathology: One of my homes was designed by an architect and one simply built by a developer. The developer house is adequate. The architect-designed house was a lot more expensive but is also a _lot_ more pleasant to live in. But speaking to those pathologies: it needed a lot of interaction with the architect to make sure it didn't get our of control on design (I'm sure we've all seen this in software too). I think this is why so many corporate buildings end up so sucky: many cooks, complex constraints, and in the end the architect has too much control.

<comment><USER8> Polemics are about all there is room left for.

Ultimately, it is a failure of education. Architects will give each other awards and design contracts according to what they were taught, and they are taught crap. It is self perpetuating, as they teach the next class the kind of crap they were inculcated in.

Probably your architect was obliged to make snide remarks over drinks about what he had to put up with doing your house (which I haven't seen, only heard described). I liked the barn.

<comment><USER9> A recent conundrum that occurred to me.

Post WWI we see architecture completely incapable of producing stuff ordinary people like. In fact it would appear the opposite, architects secretly revel in designing stuff ordinary people hate.

Yet there was an explosion of high quality popular music. Probably the most productive 100 years in history.

<comment><USER10> > Post WWI we see architecture completely incapable of producing stuff > ordinary people like. In fact it would appear the opposite, architects > secretly revel in designing stuff ordinary people hate. Yet there was an > explosion of high quality popular music.

These are two sides of the same coin! Both are the result of radical reinvention caused by new and strange circumstances.

Brutalist architects did not set out to make things people would hate. They set out to make habitable spaces that put people first - that residents would love - that prioritised the resident over the casual viewer. They sought novel and sometimes dramatic ways to achieve this in a context of rapidly improving technology but limited funding.

They failed a lot of the time, but I think it's quite unfair to say that they revelled in designing stuff people would hate - they were trying to do an honest job of hard things, the importance of which hadn't always been widely acknowledged before.

In my interpretation of this history, the architect is definitely on the same side as your musician.

The curious part is why the public took against the architect, but (eventually at least - it took much of a generation) accepted the musician. Obviously the architectural idea failed, at least to some extent. I don't know whether it failed in practice (producing buildings that were no use) or in communication (producing buildings that were an improvement, but that other people found unusual and offputting to look at). Perhaps both, but from what I've heard the 60s Brutalist flat is generally no worse to live in than its 1980s postmodernist or 1860s Peabody counterparts.

<comment><USER11> The public has a short memory and also has authoritarian tendencies of its own. Which is why huge country estates and other trophy homes are considered the ultimate architectural ideal, even though they're insanely inefficient and you have to be a multi-millionaire to afford one.

Popular architecture is about _land_ and _status_ , not sculpted living space, and the populist solution is to give people an experience of land ownership - even if it's vicarious. The Garden City movement attempted this with some success, but the political problem is that land is an expensive commodity, and there was no way that kind of low density housing was ever going to be available on a mass scale.

And consider that before modernism, most housing was _appalling._ No one loves the flats built in the UK during the 60s, but they replaced slums which were cold, damp, smoky, and very cheaply built, and often lacked even the most basic plumbing.

There's a lot to hate about modernism (and its descendants) - not least that bare concrete looks absolutely fucking awful in a rainy and cloudy climate. But it makes no sense to compare hyper-expensive hand-crafted Victorian homes of rich elites and high-status civic projects with modern worker housing or utilitarian office spaces.

The fact that high-status civic projects - libraries, transport hubs, town halls - are (mostly) not being built any more, but trophy skyscrapers are, is a political issue, not an architectural one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Because it's _obviously_ and _arrogantly_ aesthetically terrible. Architects, like the elites who commission and support their work, have a fundamentally adversarial relationship with the rest of us.

Even the relatively good stuff stands alone and is, at best, aggressively indifferent towards its surroundings.

Kunstler wrote a good book on it:

[https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man- Made-L...](https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made- Landscape/dp/0671888250)

(and several less-good follow up books)

<comment><USER13> Kunstler is one of those people who has one good point that he makes with a great deal of wit. His point is valid but his critique is not that deep, and outside this one point the rest of his views are reactionary trash. He's a one hit wonder.

This is a common feature of notable critics, probably because it is far easier to criticize than to solve problems. It's far easier to point out why the suburbs suck than to design and advocate effectively for alternatives that address the same needs that the suburbs try to address.

BTW I think your critique is actually deeper than Kunstler's in that it gets to the totalitarian underpinnings of this type of high modernism. People seem to mistakenly associate high modernism with the enlightenment when it's more of a return to pre-enlightenment authoritarianism.

High modernism is a secular materialist version of divine right of kings, with baroque religious theories replaced with opulent displays of indifferent wealth and with sterility replacing aesthetic grandeur as a display of power. The latter may be because aesthetic indifference serves today as a more effective display of power than baroque over-done aesthetics with gold leaf and curlicues.

<comment><USER9> A thought of mine a core part of totalitarianism, pick a flavor they are all the same in this. Is that they seek to callously use humanity as material to manufacture some ego driven utopia. That is at the heart of modernist architecture. People are expected to conform to the vision not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the whole I agree but I stopped reading after this:

" It should be obvious to anyone that skyscrapers should be abolished. After all, they embody nearly every bad tendency in contemporary architecture: they are not part of nature, they are monolithic, they are boring, they have no intricacy, and they have no democracy. Besides, there is plenty of space left on earth to spread out horizontally; the only reasons to spread vertically are phallic and Freudian."

<comment><USER15> What is the problem with the quoted statement?

<comment><USER16> Spreading horizontally doesn't scale. What our society needs is more density, not less.

<comment><USER17> High density is bad for the soul. What we actually need is fewer people, but each doing more meaningful work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Old buildings have gone through a filter. The ugly ones were destroyed with no one caring. The beautiful ones have armies of people fighting to maintain them.

There are beautiful and ugly new buildings. In 1000 years time only the beautiful buildings from this era will have survived and we'll be talking about why the buildings of today are nowhere near as nice.

<comment><USER19> The filter thing seems obviously true, but it doesn't rule out whole styles being better than others, even if the mediocre and pedestrian efforts from those styles were eventually winnowed out. Besides, each day people, somewhere, are making decisions about the next awful building. It doesn't seem enough to loftily let our descendents decide whether to pull down a building after we're all dead, before a single stone has been laid.

Consider this view as a thought experiment: say every Norman cathedral was beautiful. Maybe some were inspired and some were pedestrian, some were less beautiful because of the locally-available stone, some had long delays in construction and ended up with a mishmash of styles. Or whatever. You could filter them by appeal, or randomly, or any other method, and still end up with a bunch of beautiful buildings. Whereas it's not clear that any brutalist concrete cube will withstand the test of time. GIGO.

<comment><USER20> Habitat 67 in Montreal is a Brutalist concrete building (many cubes) that is generally well-liked and has been a desirable place to live for 50 years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67#/media/File:Habitat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_67#/media/File:Habitat_panorama.jpg)

<comment><USER21> It does look fairly discordant and messy, and I'm not sure if I'd like to try navigating the structure, but there is a symmetry and level of detail that goes above and beyond the typical vision of a concrete cube that the word "brutalism" conjurs. From the top it looks really nice with the floor detail and the incorporated plantlife and greenery.

Its perhaps too large of a building for my liking, and it feels a little bit "minecraft" with seemingly unsupported cubic shapes, but it also has a nice focus on human scale details that make it actually interesting to be in and around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This article reminds me strongly of how the design community, seemingly in unison, decided that UI accordances were mere frippery and ushered in our current, flat UI landscape of indistinguishable hamburger buttons and oceans of white space.

<comment><USER23> I agree with you that flat design is bad design, but not that whitespace is bad. Done right it can enhance the understanding of the content and add beauty to a page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Funny, that the author shows two hospitals in Barcelona. To answer the question, you definitely want to be in the "ugly" one.

For starters, the nice modernist building is not a hospital anymore. And partly due to the reason of architecture. While nice to look at, it was not terribly practical. Staircases between different wings meant that they had to transfer sometimes people with ambulance within the hospital. And sometimes even seconds matter.

<comment><USER25> But wasn't the question about where to convalesce, that is, recover after having been treated?

<comment><USER26> The answer to that is they send you home. They tend to kick you out of the hospital unless you are actively dying. At least here in America.

<comment><USER25> Barcelona is in America?

<comment><USER27> It applies everywhere. People recover much faster at home than any hospital, even a pretty one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My architect asked me to tell her stories from the future when my family lives in the house she was designing. She asked me to not speak about details of what the house was, but to tell stories of things I dreamed would happen in the house. I told her of multitasking cooking and monitoring homework, of children laughing while chasing around walls in a circuit, of seeing children and pets from the window while doing dishes.

I love my house and all those stories came true.

But: My architect considers herself to be in Le Corbusier's school of thought. She understands that sleek lines and honest materials can serve human stories.

<comment><USER29> pictures?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly" They aren't all ugly,just functionality wrong: instead of being places for people to travel,they are parking lots for planes with the rest attached to them. No matter how beautiful the airport if I have to walk half a mile to the gate just to reach the stairs with no lift, it's a failed building already.

It used to be relatively cheap to build extremely beautiful buildings because labour was cheap.

Also,some cities have some sort of planning panel,where people can and do try to steer architecture certain way,so there wouldn't be pink windowless office buildings in an old town built 400 years ago and etc.But that's not in every city.

And the last bit is we just need to admit that the king is naked sometimes: there are shit architects and shit designers who, by some magic stroke of luck, ended up in positions that allowed them to create those awful things no questions asked.They wouldn't be allowed anywhere near anything creative related in an alternative world.

<comment><USER31> That half a mile is needed for non-negotiable constraints, like the scale of airplanes (e.g. gaps between landing strips or fingers), the capacity targets (walking to board a plane is better than not flying at all) or the available space to add terminals (Heathrow is a good example).

There are also practical needs, functions that follow the form, that are no less important than minimizing walking, like the convenience and cost reduction of putting a lot of travellers in the same huge terminal and if possible in the same huge hall, with one subway station, one customs funnel, and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Okay I'll bite: "Which hospital would I rather convalesce in?", the one with the best doctors. I find the old fashioned architecture he uses beautiful but even the cherry picked examples of bad architecture some of them I still like; let us look around London today, the Southbank and the Barbican are brutalist masterpieces, the Shard is incredible, especially when the clouds touch the top, together with the rebuilding of Kings Cross or even Terminal 5 modern architecture is everywhere and when it's good I absolutely love it.

I find it really hard to believe people dislike modern architecture; the problem with building something with fine adornments today is they end up looking extremely cheap and fake, we are capable of building clean crisp forms in ways not possible before and providing spaces that function much better at their purposes today than we were in the past. The article is sentimental about the old buildings and we can be inspired by them, but modern architecture like Taipei 101 or the Burj Khalifa just blows me away as spectacles of what science and engineering have accomplished.

Creating something that looks like the Taj Mahal today would just look hokey and seem extremely dysfunctional for its intended use. Each to their own but I'm a big fan.

<comment><USER33> Exactly right. This article seems biased and uninformed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like Brutalism, and I speculate that one reason is that I grew up in a rural area where things are big, surfaces are rough, and there aren't decorative brickwork patterns everywhere. I live in London now, and the brutalist Barbican estate feels a lot more like "the way the world is" to me than much of "traditional" residential London does. I think that arguments like the one in this article are born from overfamiliarity with pretty little patterns - <USER2> find the focus on decoration, "universal" aesthetics, and tradition quite suspicious.

(In particular I'm surprised that the article picks on Alexandra Road estate in London - it's lovely in real life, and it answers a difficult problem as well, namely how to use a road just behind a railway track. Also, while the old Penn Station which the article praises looks kind of amazing in the pics, it's not exactly human scale is it? It'd surely have been just as shivery and daunting in real life as any Soviet edifice)

I had been hoping that the answer to "Why you hate contemporary architecture" would be something about your age. Brutalism has become popular with many people of my age (I'm almost 50) but I don't think it was a widely popular style when it was new. The test for me is going to be postmodernism. I don't really like it, because it's about frivolous decoration, but it's going to be venerated by a younger generation just as Brutalism is by mine. Will I be able to understand that?

<comment><USER21> I agree to an extent. Brutalism can look very good, but I personally think it only works on small scales like houses.

A brutalist skyscraper would look oppressive and imposing, towering above you like a Vogon ship about to demolish your planet to build a hyperspace lane. A brutalist house, however - while maybe not the most inviting place ever - looks simple and easy to maintain, a space you don't have to look after so that you can spend more time looking after yourself.

I agree with the article where it says that some brutalist buildings would be entirely livable if there was some greenery, however. A place that allows you to look after yourself means nothing it it doesn't also provide the tools to help you achieve that goal, and access to nature has time and time again proven to benefit mental health for worldweary citydwellers, and as someone who suffers with clinical depression, I can very much vouch for the benefits of getting out of the four walls.

<comment><USER10> > A brutalist skyscraper would look oppressive and imposing, towering above > you like a Vogon ship about to demolish your planet to build a hyperspace > lane.

This is kind of my point though - Nature is like that. A daunting slab of concrete has a lot in common with a cliff face. An empty, open expanse of concrete is like the rocky hillside. Both are more like "the world" than a regular repetition of patterns in brick rising to two storeys high set off with a tiled roof.

(Perhaps that's why they're offputting to people - too much like the unfiltered natural world, not enough comfortable regularisation.)

There's no equivalent of the forest (the default natural covering for most of the world) in any of these forms of architecture, but it's not like it's any worse in the Brutalist model.

<comment><USER21> You make a valid point, but I still would disagree. The closest cliffs I can think of that are just as stark and imposing would be Dover. They are dramatic, iconic, and even beautiful, but would you want to live there all year round? The winter sea crashing against the shore and gale force winds battering you would make you grateful of any shelter, but that's only because the forces of nature have made you feel helpless, pinning you against this bare rock face, far from the safety that other aspects of nature would willingly provide.

I'd like to reiterate that I like brutalism, I'm just trying to convey that I think its very easy to overdo when you only consider the macro scale of a project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> 1\. 99% of everything is crap.

2\. Crap buildings get torn down before beautiful buildings.

This article brings up many examples of modern crap, but ignores the fact that most of that crap will not be painstakingly conserved for centuries to come, as many of the good examples shown have been. There do exist examples of beautiful modern architecture.

The article also makes some valid points, such as how modern architects seem to be highly reluctant to use ornate details. The reason may be simple economics. The modern international bidding process heavily favours architects who can deliver a beautiful building for less money. Ornate details may please the eye, but they are undeniably expensive.

Some cities have started mandating a certain percentage of any public project be spent on art, but that art is often an afterthought. They'll build a utilitarian overpass and then regulations will force them to put up a hideous and overpriced sculpture in the middle of a pedestrians nightmare. The only people who will ever see it are whizzing past at 80 kph.

We have the will to make the places we live in more beautiful, but how can we better quantify beauty and find ways to fit it into city budgets? I feel that a system flexible enough to say, "Yes, scrap the sculpture and do the funky masonry." is a system in which ornateness could return.

<comment><USER35> I think this is reasoning does not work on this case.

Take Le Corbusier, the "Cité Radieuse" in Marseille is actively maintained and considered with an almost sacred status by the partisans of this kind of design.

This is a fucking ugly building that should have been destroyed decades ago, in my opinion, but I have a very strong bias against anything related to this style of design.

<comment><USER36> Alexandra Road or Barbican Estate are pretty brutal in their brutalism, but Cité radieuse is just a very nice apartment building. Pretty upscale too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't know much about architecture, but I found the essay very biased and unnecessarily biasing - I didn't actually think that most of the buildings they presented as monstrosities were actually unattractive. Many of them looked quite elegant from the outside. I also found some of the examples they presented as positive too complex for my tastes. It feels like the authors overextended themselves in the assumption that their readers would feel the same revulsion to post-modern or brutal architecture that they do.

The article did bring up some good points about how the sentiments of people using the buildings should be taken into account during the design process.

I really enjoyed their take on how democracy should be treated in architecture. It feels profound beyond the scope of architecture itself, and something that society has been playing with in recent decades - e.g. panchayat government in India [0] and decentralized governance and decision making as embodied by various blockchains.

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

<comment><USER38> > ...in the assumption that their readers would feel the same revulsion...

I'm not sure they were actually so revulsed as much as whipping up indignation to sell an article. I don't think aesthetics was really what it was about at all.

Also if you want large amounts of detail, expect to pay for that either directly in lots of money, or in considerable unjust exploitation of a craftsman underclass.

(I also detest articles that say what YOU want or what YOU feel).

<comment><USER39> Skilled crafstmen are not in the underclass. They ones I've met are very well paid, and take pride in their work, and know a lot. The stone decorations of mediaeval cathedrals were very expensive. Modern architecture avoids decoration partly to avoid expense.

<comment><USER38> > Skilled crafstmen are not in the underclass

Not now but they were. Now they would cost a lot more than than, so ...

> The stone decorations of mediaeval cathedrals were very expensive. Modern > architecture avoids decoration partly to avoid expense.

... was exactly my point. It costs money.

[https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval- prices-a...](https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-prices-and- wages/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am buying a house and I spent months to find this perfect, simple, contemporary design. This article made me think a lot about my choice of architecture for my home. In my mind, living in 'boring', modern, blank, mostly empty spaces gives me a taste of how in my mind the future, 300y from now will look. Less colors and sharp edges bring to my mind less chaos, gives a sense of minimalism and simplicity. I do not want my physical space taking my attention, too many colors and shapes do not help me to think. I make my living from thinking and living my digital life, contemporary design aligns with it.

<comment><USER41> So something like [https://japanese-school-asahi.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/01...](https://japanese-school-asahi.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/01/img_9615-1.jpg) ?

No clutter, simple, minimal. Time-tested and completely unlike contemporary architecture.

<comment><USER42> Not the OP but looking at your example I can only think that the place lacks chairs/something to sit on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I almost got married in Boston City Hall, until my now-spouse and I actually went there in person, whereupon we immediately cancelled our date there and rescheduled in Cambridge.

To me, the message of that building is vividly clear: all the concrete enclosed windows are perfect places to put machine guns to mow down protestors in the plaza when america finally goes dictator.

</comment><comment><USER44> _Architects often get mad when non-architects conflate the terms "modernism," "postmodernism," "Brutalism," etc. They love telling people that, say, "Frank Gehry is actually REACTING to postmodernism." These terminological disputes can obscure the fact that everything under discussion is actually just a minor variation on the same garbage._

<comment><USER45> The thing about Frank Gehry is not the architecture, it's the engineering. He designs crap that couldn't possibly be built, and then somehow his engineering team figures out how to make the impossible not only possible, but to actually realize it.

The result still looks like shit, but the engineering is amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> You know what? I love space ships. I want to live on a space ship and flow effortlessly from my bed to the kitchen, rehydrate some food and put it in a crumb-free wrap for breakfast, flow to my office and work on my experiments, take a break in the observation deck and take in the vastness of the planet below, and at the end of the day flow back to bed, wrapping myself up in my tethered sleeping bag so that I can doze off peacefully and not float away.

Do you know what would be really depressing? If that spaceship never left the ground.

I live on Earth, please don't build spaceships for me to live and work in while I'm down here.

</comment><comment><USER46> That Peter Eisenman building looks like it'd be a killer skate park. Say what you will about James Howard Kunstler, his TED talk on Architecture seems to be in the right direction. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ)

</comment><comment><USER47> Well geez. Unlike people, I happen to love contemporary architecture. I suppose that Christopher Alexander must feel sorry for me too. Maybe he could explain more clearly to my aesthetic sensibilities why his prosaic pattern language shouldn't leave me cold and empty.

In defense of the Montparnasse building, it has a good view from the top, because you see everything except for the Montparnasse building.

</comment><comment><USER48> A metaphor: Architects, like devs, are always looking for the next "shiny new thing". Architects, like devs, could stick to their C or even JS but, you know, there is Rust and Crystal and Elm...

Architect here.

</comment><comment><USER49> I sympathize with the author's disdain for brutalist and some deconstructivist work. But to suggest that all contemporary architecture is a movement towards creating deliberately alienating and impractical buildings, seems to me very wrong. I think Zaha Hadid's work (which the author critiques) is aesthetically pleasing to most people, not alienating, for example [https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/e09670a/2147483647...](https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/e09670a/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1500x1000+0+0/resize/2400x1600!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas- brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farchive%2F2016-zaha-hadid-8.jpg) . The author expresses a uniform disdain for skyscrapers, but many skyscrapers are popular with the general public, for example, the Gherkin in London [https://i.pinimg.com/474x/b5/78/c0/b578c0732b532b91b5e8455de...](https://i.pinimg.com/474x/b5/78/c0/b578c0732b532b91b5e8455de3cff219.jpg) or say, The Empire State Building. Personally I do not find the shiny glass and sleek curves of many of these buildings unsettling or alienating nor, I think, do most people. In short, if we accept a basic premise of the author's: that what is good architecture is what is pleasing to most of the people who view and interact with it, then the author's critique is (I believe) too broad because many of the architects and buildings the author implicitly or explicitly criticizes are in fact popular.

Furthermore, something that the author does not address is the movement in contemporary architecture to carefully consider the practical effect of building design on the people within it. For example, how the flow of people is directed by the building, how the layout can help its occupants interact with each other, how interior walls can support privacy or erode it, and how to cater the response to these concerns to the function of the building. This is the opposite of the approach in Eisenman's house design mentioned in the article.

</comment><comment><USER50> I always felt that the contemporary architecture is cheap first and easy to clean/maintain second. All those nice ornaments are expensive, not easy to clean and their replacement in any case is even more expensive. Is there a way around this.

I prefer this older aesthetic, but I think I couldn't afford it. My one idea is to build with CLT and keep wood exposed both in and outside (with proper thermal insulation in the middle). That way it's cheap, but with this warm feeling of wood.

<comment><USER22> This is giving modern architecture entirely too much credit. For example, one of the many crimes of the UWaterloo Davis Center[1] was that the roof (curved and made of panes of glass) leaked every time it rained causing a mess on the floors below. These designs are often neither attractive nor practical. The weird shapes and angles used often waste usable space, are hard to clean, and introduce additional joints between sections where water or air can get in.

[1] [https://uwaterloohistory.wordpress.com/davis-centre- dc/](https://uwaterloohistory.wordpress.com/davis-centre-dc/)

<comment><USER51> Ah, yes, I used to work in a building which had (at great expense, apparently) many curved walls, with "exciting" shiny metal cladding along much of the walls. The roof leaked constantly (frequently into our machine room) and the metal clad walls meant cell phones were useless inside, but I bet that architect got an award.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Modern atchitecture is the expression of an artist pushing the limit of building as an art. If, like me, you are not educated to it this can be difficult to enjoy. Take the someone not specially versed into art to the museum, it's likely they will enjoy and value more Vermeer than let's say Pollock.

Should we design buildings, that people use and see everyday, only for an elite to appreciate it ? I don't have the answer.

<comment><USER53> I think it should depend on the context. One of the problems seems to be that there is no public space for 'monuments' in the modern world, so we get user- hostile bourgeois 'form over function' in buildings where people actually need to live and work etc. I would rather a division between 'temples' of aesthetic value, where the architects can play aesthetic games, and 'secular' spaces of more utilitarian value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> See [http://www.patternlanguage.com](http://www.patternlanguage.com) and "Building Living Neighborhoods" [https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln- exp.htm](https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm) (and especially [http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html](http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html) )

> Our goal is to help everyone make our neighborhoods places of belonging, > places of health and well-being, and places where people will want to live > and work. This has become possible through the use of Generative Codes, > Christopher Alexander's latest work in the effort to make possible > conception and construction of living, beautiful communities that have real > guts -- not the sugary sweetness of pseudo-traditional architecture.

> The tools offered are intended for the use of ordinary people, families, > communities, developers, planners, architects, designers and builders; > public officials, local representatives, and neighbors; business owners and > people who have commercial interests. The processes here are expressed in > the belief that the common-sense, plain truth about laying out a > neighborhood, or repairing one, is equally valid for all comers, amateurs > and professionals. They help people build or rebuild neighborhoods in ways > that contribute something to their lives. Many of the tools have their > origin in 30 years of work published in Alexander's The Nature of Order.

His whole idea was that people should design and build their own buildings and towns. He kind of repudiates the whole process of modern architecture and construction.

</comment><comment><USER55> I absolutely _love_ the all-glass skyscraper aesthetic. I consider it breathtaking. Calming and magnificent. I never understand why so many people say they love the look of old buildings.

I know it's not "cool", but I'll take Toronto's glass over New York's filthy gargoyles, any day. I don't even understand how people can have such opposite taste.

</comment><comment><USER56> Unless an architect is a genius like Wright, _and_ they have a coherent design philosophy, like Wright, decorative architectural features way too often degenerate into middlebrow sentimentality.

The same goes for cars: Bangle-butt was not the response to jellybeaned cars we were looking for.

<comment><USER57> "Mr. Wright, I love the house you designed, but the roof leaks so badly we might as well not have a roof. Could you fix it?"

"No. That's how you know it's a _roof!_ "

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I highly recommend Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House. In it he tears apart modem architectural pretentiousness the same way he went after the radical chic. It's hilarious and devastating.

</comment><comment><USER59> > The Tour Montparnasse. Who can possibly defend this? And if there's > something clearly wrong with it

The arrogance on display is profoundly human.

We've added 1.8 billion humans to the world in the last 20 years. That statistic is too large for our tiny brains to grapple but it cannot be ignored. We need buildings for those people to live and work in. Continuing to maintain cities a density appropriate to the 1800s/1900s is irresponsible.

No city is a zoo to preserve what life looked like 100 years ago. They are places for people to live today.

<comment><USER60> I'm not sure I follow the population and density argument.

City densities were higher in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Paris itself has lost about 700,000 people since its 1921 population peak.

If housing people is your goal, you should build lots of low- to mid-rise buildings, say between 5 and 10 floors. This size of building is able to achieve the highest densities per cost using current construction techniques.

Build lower and you over-allocate and waste land. Build higher and the marginal cost of another floor rises quickly. There's a reason commercial buildings are the tallest: workers need less space working than they do living at home. High-rise residences are not economical unless people have very small apartments, which brings along its own problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Christopher Alexander's _A Pattern Language_ is not only a great book on architecture, but one of the best books on any subject I've ever read. Highly recommended.

That said, once you've read it, you will forever find the flaming garbage dump that is contemporary architecture severely wanting. These days, and architect could almost be summarized as someone who designs buildings and hates people.

</comment><comment><USER62> I very much like it, it feels a lot quieter and cleaner; looking at the often more ornate and colorful older projects makes me feel claustrophobic.

</comment><comment><USER63> Before modern materials and construction techniques enabled the decoupling of how a building looks from its fundamental construction I think it was at lot more difficult to make a building look bad.

You are at least more limited in the ways a traditional stone/brick/wood construction can be bad.

</comment><comment><USER64> Just Gramscian damage:

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260)

Prophecy: 3D printing rescues architecture, allowing a Renaissance of aesthetically pleasing buildings to retire the swath of overgrown Legos besetting us.

</comment><comment><USER65> Reminds me of this [1] old TED talk about horrible architecture that I still find relevant as ever.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ)

</comment><comment><USER66> I was walking around a Dutch city a few years ago, that was about half pre-war buildings and half new ones. The new ones just looked like abominations compared to the lovely old ones. All pipes and glass and strange angles.

</comment><comment><USER67> I think most of these buildings are great. What I can't stand are the contemporary "modern" mixed-use buildings sweeping cities such as Seattle. You know the ones: multi-colored, multi-setback, multi-material. Awful.

</comment><comment><USER68> Adolf Loos "Ornament is crime" Even more valid today.

Only very few people hate modernism, and they can have all the warts they want. Even C++ or perl.

</comment><comment><USER69> I like Denver's airport. Boston's City Hall was originally designed to have trees and landscaping around it, which was replaced by pavement.

</comment><comment><USER33> Less is more. Intricate details where they aren't necessary don't make better architecture. Or better anything, for that matter.

</comment><comment><USER27> oof, it's painful to read this article and this thread as someone who enjoys contemporary architecture. Sure there are bad apples but in general every piece is doing something new. If you take a trip in europe you'll really get bored of classical architecture in few days. There isn't much innovation and while it's great for mom-and-pops culture of homogeneous towns, it's quite boring, tiring and uninspiring.

Might as well advocate for soviet's Stalinkas, just plaster some ornaments and plants on them!

The whole point of contemporary culture is that we finally have the technological, creative and cultural freedom to experiment and create new things. I'm sure for X amount of people that dislike this there are same amount of people who love it.

</comment><comment><USER70> Excellent article.

</comment><comment><USER71> Yeah, well, I'm not in a patient mood today, so I'll just say this is a load of idiotic horseshit not worth anyone's time or serious consideration, and leave it there.

<comment><USER72> I would say exactly the same thing, about this comment.</comment></comment>


Designing Future Interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwAY7i_tVHY <comment><USER2> I liked the concept, but I think anything involving an extra step (scanning bottle) will never be done except by those _REALLY_ involved.</comment>


Ukraine opens its KGB archives - <AUTHOR> https://meduza.io/en/feature/2015/04/21/russia-will-cover-up-stalinist-crimes

<comment><USER3> Who is Meduza?

(It's unfortunate but) we need to be careful what information we consume - <USER2> from where - during these times of propaganda warfare.

<comment><USER4> It's a Russian newspaper-in-exile. It wasn't hard to find:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meduza#Censorship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meduza#Censorship)

<comment><USER3> Looks right. There isn't much of a trail here (the wiki page is relatively new and mostly created by one individual), but I'd buy the general story. They do sound partisan, if not for their history and conflict with the Kremlin. I don't know that this is the case, but given the prevalence of Civil Society Organizations and NGOs in the form of news media fronts created inside Russia and the Baltics by the allies and the recent cleanup of these installations by the Kremlin - properly or no the Meduza team was likely seen as proxy political voices.

Thank you for the research.</comment></comment></comment>


San Francisco median home hits $1 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/2013/05/median-home-price-hits-1-million-in.html

<comment><USER3> This, more than anything else, is going to be what kills Silicon Valley. All those twenty-something hackers today are going to look up one day and realize that they can't have a family in the Bay Area, and leave.

<comment><USER4> Austin is calling: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5794372>

Lower cost of living, less restrictive zoning laws, and a more business friendly legal system.

<comment><USER5> I think the points related to better transit expanding the amount of available housing stock in other commuter markets have more to do with it than a 'business friendly' legal system or even zoning laws.

We're developers. We know shit-all about common vic licenses or actual brick and mortar business, those of us who own businesses incorporate in delaware anyways. Supply and demand of housing stock is much more important than 10% marginal friction in dealing with regulators (who we don't deal with anyways).

Austin will succeed or fail at continuing to grow based on how much they can grow their housing stock without turning into a gridlocked nightmare.

<comment><USER4> Texas has no personal income tax. So it is important regardless of where you incorporate.

<comment><USER5> Cops and teachers have to get paid somehow -- Texas doesn't print the money, it gets it from property taxes and other sources.

I'd say that even if you hypothesize a gain in not-paying-taxes of, say, 5% of income -- that doesn't change the game compared to local economy, as evidenced by the house prices that TFA is talking about.

It's not all about politics. Everyone says they believe in the free market, maybe they should look there first for an explanation of the housing prices.

<comment><USER6> Property tax:

SF: ~1.25% appraised value

Austin: ~1.9%-3.1% appraised value

(consider the typical "appraised value" in both locations and think in terms of actual dollars)

Sales tax:

SF: 8.75%

Austin: 8.25%

State income tax:

SF: usually 8%-10% for tech folks

Austin: 0%

edit: You had a reply that reiterated that TX still can't print money, but deleted it. My response is that you're ignoring the other option, which is to spend less. TX doesn't have a super-train-to-nowhere project or other spending issues that CA has.

CA ranks 4th in per-capita spending, with a (pre-federal) budget of nearly $146 billion. TX ranks 50th per-capita, with an $80 billion budget.

<comment><USER5> That's all great. People still want to buy a house in CA so bad that it costs a million bucks.

Political conservatives go on and on about the free market and then say with a straight face that a single government policy, income tax rates, is the most important thing to business, more so than market conditions, even if that narrative conflicts with the empirical evidence.

We've been hearing about the decline of liberal CA and the northeast for so long now, and it hasn't happened yet. House prices will probably come down and soak some of the new dumb rich, and things will proceed as before.

Texas is doing great, and all power to them, but by the time they eclipse CA/NY, they'll be liberal too.

<comment><USER6> Outside of celebrities I don't hear of many folks who move _to_ California to buy million-dollar homes. The handful of people I know who made it big in business have moved out.

California's a big place. You can get an awesome house on some property for $150k in many many places in CA. The million-dollar homes are concentrated mostly in SF (+Napa/etc) & LA (+Santa Barbara/etc). IMO a lot of it is the tradeup nature of housing - buy a $300k house, sell it 10 years later for $700k, buy another at $800k, sell 5 years later for $900k, buy at $1MM, on and on. And since SF/LA are centers of business, that's where the people earning that kind of dough live. The $500-700k inventory in the Bay is _fiercely_ competitive, and what do you know, that's the price range two young married techies are looking in. Not a coincidence. I agree with the poster upthread who predicts that once the new generation realizes they're basically permanently priced out the whole area will collapse.

> _We've been hearing about the decline of liberal CA and the northeast for so > long now, and it hasn't happened yet._

It's been in progress for a long time and shows no sign of slowing. We've got big swaths of folks who are protected in the armored bubble of technology, but for the average folks things are worse than ever. I could go on and on about business owners I know making plans to evacuate, or the scores of friends rich and poor who have fled, or the stories of the behind-the-scenes trouble from friends and family in the CA government, or just plain looking around up and down the state, but the bottom line is that only time is going to tell. Eventually, one of us will be proven right and I sincerely hope it's you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sell. Seriously. If you own one of these, sell. Then laugh.

This real estate hyperinflation is going to destroy the very engine of class mobility and youthful enthusiasm for a better life that powers the Valley. When that's gone, the Valley will decline. When the Valley declines, the local real estate bubble will pop.

Want a historical example? Detroit. It once had the highest average income in the U.S., and now look at the property values there. The reasons for its collapse are different and it's unlikely that SF (which is desirable for other reasons like climate and landscape) would ever fall as far or as fast as Detroit, but it's illustrative nonetheless. It shows that one should be cautious about long-term value in overinflated one-horse-town economies.

And if SF is not a one-horse-town, it soon will be. Industries other than tech will succumb to the lure of lower costs of doing business and leave.

<comment><USER8> You could sell and laugh, but then where would you live? You either get a ridiculous commute, or you have to pay exorbitant rent. Something decent runs for over $4k/month everywhere in the valley these days. Everyone said the same thing about the Valley during the last 2 bubbles, but it keeps going up. People need somewhere to live - selling now on some hypothetical crash makes living your life very difficult.

<comment><USER9> > _"where would you live?"_

Do you absolutely need to be in the [EDIT] Bay Area?

If the answer is no, then there are a lot of other cities with reasonable tech scenes and much cheaper housing. Boston and Seattle are around $350k median home value. Denver, Atlanta, and Minneapolis-St. Paul are around $200k. Those places all count as "somewhere to live", and don't make life particularly difficult (unless your life revolves around something specific to SF/SV.)

<comment><USER8> All this assumes that people want/can leave where they currently live. Personally, with family, friends, fulfilling job, and a lot of fun stuff to do, I don't particularly want to relocate.

<comment><USER9> "I don't want to relocate" is a far cry from "selling... makes your life very difficult".

If you're particularly attached to and fulfilled by everything you have where you are, maybe you should stay, even if it costs a million dollars for a 2 bedroom house. Personally, I've got family, friends, fulfilling work, fun stuff to do, and a much bigger house that cost under $200k where I am. Life is not "very difficult" here; it's quite pleasant.

EDIT: to phrase it slightly differently, you're criticizing others for _assuming_ people can relocate or _assuming_ people might prefer Denver for the extra money. Yet you yourself _assume_ the Valley is the only place that makes sense to live. That assumption simply isn't valid for most people.

<comment><USER8> Selling makes your life very difficult if you don't want to relocate. I am criticizing folks who say "wow, that's expensive, you should just sell!" without any critical thought as to what that actually means.

<comment><USER9> And I'm criticizing those folks who say "leaving is impossible" without any critical thought as to the potential benefits of cashing out, or potential alternate locations where a million dollars would go a loooooooong way to making a good life.

It's possible we're both criticizing folks who don't actually exist.

<comment><USER8> No, I'm criticizing real people in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Median housing prices in my area (palo alto) have already been well above $1M for a long, long time. Doomsday prophets: nothing new here, really - <USER2> continuation of a well established trend.

</comment><comment><USER11> The title here is a little deceptive; it's the median price for a "single family home". A lot of the inventory in SF is either apartments in small buildings or duplex / multi-residence structures, which are generally less expensive (and it would be better to have more of those and fewer single family dwellings, since they use space more efficiently.)

</comment><comment><USER12> The examples at 322/280/etc. per square foot seem cheap. I live in _WINNIPEG_ and houses on my street go for $450+ per square foot, and that's in Canada where mortgages aren't tax deductible, and Winnipeg in particular where the climate is... challenging. The one's that are $500+ per sft --- well, that's the cost of location. Deal with it.

<comment><USER13> As an American, I don't seem to understand Canadian currency at all. I've watched 'Love It or List It' on HGTV knowing that it's a Canadian show but the prices of the houses are all typically anywhere from $700k-$900k for 1600 to 1800 square feet. Trying to convert it back to a price in US dollars I guess isn't quite right. What's the median income in Canadian dollars that makes home prices so high?

Side nitpick: do Canadians primarily use square feet as a measurement? Is that a real estate standard even though Canada is mostly metric?

<comment><USER12> Real estate and houses are just cheaper in the US -- like cars. That's just the way it is. In real estate, square feet rule in Canada - just one of those holdover things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's what $1 Million will buy you in Vancouver, Canada. [http://realestateresults.ca/officelistings.html/details-2956...](http://realestateresults.ca/officelistings.html/details-29566874) I rent a 2BR apartment in a 1950s building for $1615/month. Would love to see/hear comparisons.

<comment><USER9> Half a mile away from me, on the west edge of Denver, Colorado:

[http://www.redfin.com/CO/Lakewood/1826-S-Manor- Ln-80232/home...](http://www.redfin.com/CO/Lakewood/1826-S-Manor- Ln-80232/home/34685489)

For comparison, here's a $1 mil home in SF:

[http://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/96-Broad- St-94112/hom...](http://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/96-Broad- St-94112/home/1982242)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since I don't really have a sense for the size of the houses in SF, I'd be interested to know how SF's numbers for "$/sq.foot of floor space" and "$/acreage" compare with places like Palo Alto.

<comment><USER16> This site provides some good neighborhood-specific price/square foot info.

<http://pricesquares.com/#/county/1/san-francisco/>

You can see that the north and northeast portions of the city carry the highest rates (close to $1k/sq foot in Pac Heights and the Marina).

Zoom in to drill down to smaller neighborhoods/sub-districts.

For comps between SF and Palo Alto, I'd recommend Redfin. Last I checked, the Palo Alto prices were above SF prices (on a square foot basis).

Edit: I'll just add some more detail!

Here's the Redfin report for Palo Alto ($1,168/sq ft): <http://www.redfin.com/city/14325/CA/Palo-Alto>

Here's the Redfin report for SF ($660/sq ft) <http://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Today's low mortgage interest rates and tight supply of homes for sale are "creating a kind of witch's brew of extreme price spikes," says Stan Humphries, Zillow chief economist. (1)

Logic tells me that when the all-important "monthly payment" rises, as a result of higher mortgages rates, that is going to be instantly detrimental to the housing market to a nearly equal degree.

But when I've asked this question of people I know in real estate (from realtors to investors) the answer is "yah but there are a lot more factors at work"

What are those factors? The FED is going to raise rates and when they do is this going to leave a lot of recent homebuyers holding the bag, again, on an inflated asset?

(1) [http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/05/28/home...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/05/28/home- prices-climbing-but-not-in-bubble-territory/2366953/)

<comment><USER18> Mortgage rates do not affect cash buyers. Despite low interest rates-- and high dollar amounts-- there are surprisingly many cash buyers in the Bay Area.

[http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/04/03/rise-in-all- cash...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/04/03/rise-in-all-cash-home- sales-frustrates-bay-area-first-time-buyers/)

<comment><USER11> Buyers don't buy in a vacuum. When mortgage rates rise, it reduces the buying power of a large portion of the market, and the value of the homes themselves decline as a result. Yes, a cash buyer could still pay the same amount, but why would they?

<comment><USER18> In efficient markets, buyers are theoretically not irrational either.

In theory, the cash buyers of today have factored in their expectations of rising interest rates and the effect on home values going forward.

<comment><USER11> Does anyone really still believe that real estate represents an efficient market?

Regardless, if someone did believe that, and factored in expectations of rising rates, they simply _wouldn't be a buyer_ in this market.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LXC – Running 14,000 tests per day and beyond - <AUTHOR> http://codeascraft.com/2013/09/23/lxc-running-14000-tests-per-day-and-beyond-part-1/ <comment><USER2> If you're interested having this kind of setup for your own team, without having to muck with servers, you can use something like [https://circleci.com](https://circleci.com). We use LXC, and pay lots of attention to having fast I/O. [disclosure: I'm founder/CTO of circle]

<comment><USER3> Stupid question, do you also support bitbucket?

<comment><USER2> Not yet. We're github-only at the moment.

<comment><USER4> I love github and have never used bitbucket or any other service, however I'm always disappointed that no one has tried creating a library that provides an abstraction layer for many of the features on github and other companies like github. This would help foster diversity in a market that is currently a monoculture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Part two is up: [http://codeascraft.com/2013/09/23/lxc-automating- containers-...](http://codeascraft.com/2013/09/23/lxc-automating-containers- aka-virtual-madness-part-2/)

It looks like they're not leveraging LXC via Docker. I wonder if that's because they've been doing it this way pre-Docker, or if there are some technical reasons why it made sense to skip it.

<comment><USER6> They've probably been doing it long before Docker, as most people who use LXC have been. Also, it makes sense to skip it because Docker adds relatively little for their use case.

<comment><USER7> Precisely, you've nailed it.

Docker is great when it fits your use-case, but there are lots of practical ways in which LXC stands great all on it's own.

I've commented on HN before about why I often choose plain LXC over Docker: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6378823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6378823)

<comment><USER8> You have any good resources on vanilla LXC?

<comment><USER7> The ubuntu docs are pretty good: [https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/lxc.html](https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/lxc.html)

And also the lxc-user mailing list is a _great_ resource: [https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lxc- users](https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lxc-users)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Indeed, LXC rocks for this.

Drawbacks are that it's nontrivial to set up and requires some rigid formalism in developer output that sometimes demands training and/or cultural change. But it's definitely something everyone should consider.

In my (currently internal, heavily LXC-utilizing but) infrastructure and OS neutral project, I am looking at specifically this sort of automation but for complex topologies of interdependent services, HA clustering layers, complex emulated network topologies (bonded links, multiple VLANs), etc. Plans are to include failure testing at the communications level (slow links, lossy links, cable snaps, switch failures, etc.) in addition to resource levels (disk, memory, etc.).

Outputs of a successful automated testing environment can include amazingly detailed information for capacity planning, automatically generated security policies (both for container-side, host-side and infrastructure-side deployment).

It's a fascinating area and one that is ripe for great change. Many people have needs here, the question is how to meet them at the intersection of current infrastructure and codebases, existing teams, business level concerns, varying hardware availability, etc. Both pre-commit and post-commit hooks are useful for different types of automation. IMHO LXC's blazing speed broadens significantly what can be tested with pre-commit.

</comment><comment><USER10> You say your dev's local development environment is different to prod. Are you guys letting each dev set up their own environment by hand, or have you provided a Puppet or Chef repo that they can clone and have an exact replica up and running within minutes with Vagrant?

<comment><USER11> It doesn't matter. Developers almost never develop/test in an environment that mimics production - multiple load balancers, multiple app servers, multiple database servers, failover to a second data center, etc.

If your dev environment is not different from prod, you're either insanely rich of your server setup is trivial.

<comment><USER12> I would argue that a dev environment that is identical to prod, no exceptions, is too constraining. As the OP points out, having root access in the VM to go willy nilly and try out new tools is a must for developers.

I'm kind of surprised they didn't have Jenkins setup from the start; I'm also a bit taken aback that they don't use automated code reviews before accepting patches to their "deploy" branch. Even for a small project, it's not that hard to setup Jenkins+Gerrit to reject patches that break tests (or have to pass whatever other hurdles you want).

<comment><USER13> We only really have one branch "master". We encourage the engineers to push small changes, behind config flags if necessary, all the time so there is never any huge merge conflicts, etc. This also means you don't push your code to master until you are up in our push queue.

We've also had Jenkins set up for a long time now, we just used LXC to drastically improve our performance and scalability.

Here is an old blog post explaining some of how it all works: [http://codeascraft.com/2011/04/20/divide-and- concur/](http://codeascraft.com/2011/04/20/divide-and-concur/)

<comment><USER14> When do you do code review?

<comment><USER13> We use a review script that creates a temporary branch in github and sends an email to everyone you specify to review it. We then kill that branch when the review is over. Any time you push code, you run our test suite on your changes then create a review. Since these are encouraged to be small and behind config flags to not affect all our users immediately, it happens quite often. Once feedback is taken from the review you enter our push queue yourself and push it out yourself. If the code is possibly dangerous, we recommend those pushes wait from Friday night to Monday morning for safety's sake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would love to know the OP's (or anyone else's) thoughts on Vagrant and why it is not in use to mimic prod on all of the devs' machines.

<comment><USER16> They've 2 use cases, this test one, which has a rationale linked from 'workload' in article:

 _" Run end-to-end, the 7,000 trunk tests would take about half an hour to execute. We split these tests up into subsets, and distribute those onto the 10 machines in our Jenkins cluster, where all the subsets can run concurrently..."_

[http://codeascraft.com/2011/04/20/divide-and- concur/](http://codeascraft.com/2011/04/20/divide-and-concur/)

...so clearly running these tests on a single devs machine would be a bottleneck. The other use case is the dev env: in a previous blog they described how they're using their own internal cloud to run the dev vm's faster on dedicated hardware (with easy, one click provisioning):

[http://codeascraft.com/2012/03/13/making-it-virtually- easy-t...](http://codeascraft.com/2012/03/13/making-it-virtually-easy-to- deploy-on-day-one/)

which makes sense. Why emulate prod running on dev's own boxes when you can pool the hardware and get better utilisation, & at the same time run them faster?

<comment><USER9> _Why emulate prod running on dev 's own boxes_

It is a good way to have faith in your ability to execute your stuff on new/unfamiliar/heterogenous environments, which can be valuable. People may be geographically distributed. People may wish to work offline. People may want a degree of control not available or even feasible on shared hardware resources.

<comment><USER16> The 'offline' one I agree with, but don't think that's precluded (they have the chef recipes, so why not); but it's an option not the common case. And the last one too - we've got a similar setup, and there are times when there were issues with our xen vms that we explored outside of the shared cluster. One more justification would be overflow - this has happened here, we don't have room for all the VMs on the cluster so some of us run them locally.

So yes, don't rule it out, but still seems to make economic sense to share hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What on earth kind of tests are running that can whip the I/O of 3 SSDs?!

Maybe worth looking at something like a small fusion-io / other PCI memory card

</comment><comment><USER18> What a cool project! Great work.</comment>


New 'Nova' Star Explosion Spotted in Night Sky: How to See It - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/22389-nova-star-explosion-delphinus-discovery.html

<comment><USER2> See [http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingbl...](http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingblog/Bright- Nova-in-Delphinus-219631281.html) for a better article, including a links to a brightness curve and a downloadable start chart. The nova is about magnitude 5, meaning that you can just make it out with the naked eye if you are in a clear dark area far from city lights and know exactly where to look. Most observers not in dark rural areas will probably need binoculars to see it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminded me to look up the naked eye comet predicted for the end of the year.

Sadly [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2012_S1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2012_S1) says that expectations have substantially dimmed for it (pun intended), though it should still be a good thing to look for.</comment>


USA Temperature: can I sucker you? - <AUTHOR> https://tamino.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/usa-temperature-can-i-sucker-you/ <comment><USER2> 538 has an interactive toy that lets you play these kind of games:

[https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/)

More background:

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