Where's the Next Silicon Valley? VC Is Betting on the Midwest - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/wheres-the-next-silicon-valley-this-vc-is-betting-on-the-midwest <comment><USER3> Born and raised in the midwest here, and the article has done well to cherry- pick a relatively liberal spot in an otherwise conservative state. The same could be said of the Carolinas and the infamous research triangle park.

I left the midwest for the west coast because of the culture, full stop. I was tired of my state representatives writing my sexual preference off as a disorder. I was angry when the state decided a pharmacist could refuse to sell me birth control and I hated the legislative decree that tried to exert control over what gender got to use the bathroom or not. In short, I did not want to live in a state where the legislature had nothing better to do than fight the culture war to win votes for the next election. Yeah, I cant buy a house in san jose, but at least I dont have to worry about the ten commandments showing up at the DMV in stone or some toothless anti-shariah legislation burning through my tax dollars.

Drive 15 miles outside Columbus and it doesnt matter how many VC firm employees you have in the city, the bible thumpers win this state by a landslide of gerrymandering and arent ashamed to force their backwoods culture on you from the hinterlands. The midwests relationship with silicon valley terminates at the facebook, google, and twitter HTTP connection for a damn good reason.

<comment><USER4> I think a whole lot of the divide we see is not state/region based but city vs. rural. See how many quite conservative congresspeople CA sends to the house, many of which just voted on a bill that will increase taxes on many Californians, especially those who live in the big cities. The bay area sprawls out pretty far but drive into the Sierras or up north and it's a different story. Trump won Placer county (aka area around Lake Tahoe) by 51-39%. Further north, he won Lassen county 70-20%. This in a state where Hillary won and the legislature is roughly 2/3rds Democrat.

I see no reason the cities in the midwest couldn't host a tech boom, and over time start to turn the cultural tide as a result.

More globally, this divide makes me sad. I have trouble thinking these people who hold views I find quite wrong are bad people, but it seems somewhere our national conversation has broken down completely. Sometimes maybe for good reasons, but still it's quite depressing.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER5> > I have trouble thinking these people who hold views I find quite wrong are > bad people

Even when we are talking about people who support stomping on the rights of others because of something as private as sexual orientation?

<comment><USER6> You do realize that massive swaths of the population in virtually every single country in the world are not accepting of homosexuality (1)?

Are all of these people "bad"? Of course not. There is simply a cultural disconnect, and some ideas die hard.

(1) [http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on- hom...](http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/06/04/the-global-divide-on- homosexuality/)

<comment><USER7> I am acquainted with one very churchy person that admitted to cutting off all contact with a friend of theirs after that person came out.

Yes, that does make them a bad person, and that makes it impossible for them to be more than just an acquaintance to me. And it also makes their religion-- or at least their personal interpretation of it-- a bad religion. My imaginary friends don't get jealous of my real friends, and if yours ever do, you might want to consider pretending to break with them instead of turning on your real friends. It's up to you to determine if your imaginary friends have ever actually prevented you from making a real friend.

Ethical development has come a long way over the last 5000 years, but even the semitic monotheist religions have all had "That which is hateful to you, do not do to others," for the last 2000. And yet the faithful still put their own hateful words in the mouths of their gods or their prophets for the credulous to hear and repeat. They do it for money and for status, and care little for the consequences.

It is wrong. We can explain its wrongness with ethical treatise, and demonstrate the wrongness with game theory and Monte Carlo methods. Private behaviors of any sort are fundamentally unsuitable as discriminators in public life. To the extent that they leak, only that portion that is visible to the public should ever matter.

<comment><USER8> > _My imaginary friends don 't get jealous of my real friends..._

> _And yet the faithful still put their own hateful words in the mouths of > their gods or their prophets for the credulous to hear and repeat. They do > it for money and for status, and care little for the consequences._

To be honest, that attitude doesn't sound any more enlightened or tolerant than the attitude of the person that was being described.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I'm not a very likeable person. People don't like me, and that suits me fine, because I'm not too fond of them either. Things might have been different if I hadn't so often been on the receiving end of so many spiteful kicks, but there it is; experience taught me not to trust strangers, and to not rely on others for anything important, including just doing the job they get paid to do.

At least I know that about myself. I don't have to pretend to be a "good person", and can just be a "barely good enough person". I won't judge you if you don't judge me.

If you're my friend--and I do actually have some, shockingly enough--I won't turn my back on you because I don't think you measure up to my standards. It's more likely I'm just avoiding you because I don't think I can measure up to yours, and I'm ashamed and embarrassed of things I have said and done in the past. I can't even imagine how someone could cut someone else out of their life just for _being homosexual_ and still know what friendship means. That person would definitely do exactly the same to me if they ever realized I was atheist, so we can't be friends, ever, even if they thought they wanted to be.

I just can't bring myself to tolerate the intolerable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone born and raised in the Midwest (and who takes great pride in that) now leading a company in SF, the difficulty truly isn't lack of capital, it's lack of _founder_ talent (and ideas). People with big ideas that can inspire the best technical leaders to join their crusade. There are plenty of great schools (Michigan, Purdue, IU, ND, U of Chicago, Northwestern, Rose Hulman, Depauw, U of I, and many more) churning out folks that are hungry to work hard and get ahead. What's missing is a sufficient population of 25-45 year old inspiring founders with enough of a nest-egg to take a big risk, willing to put a hold on family life, and with a big idea.

There's a second problem that comes about when these rare combination of things come together - which has to do with cap tables... In that good teams get pummeled on early stage valuations compared to the coasts, resulting in exits that return far less to founders than investors (and thus stunt "the ecosystem" growth that exists in SV), but this is secondary to above IMHO.

<comment><USER10> Nah. The second thing is the main thing. Your first point is just the typical SF exceptionalism narrative that has been touted by the Bay VC startup ideology for the last 20 years.

The sad truth is, it's not a coincidence that so many of the biggest economies in the world are built inside of self-perpetuated real estate bubbles. Pockets of land trapped in by ocean and mountains. There's a feedback loop involved in companies that get big enough to own their own buildings, their companies' continued growth drives up the value of their real estate which they can re- finance for easy loans.

There's plenty of people who think it makes sense to take the startup culture to cheaper areas like the midwest or Austin. And they "succeed" in founding profitable startups. But they'll never create the next great thing, specifically because the big companies in big cities didn't succeed in spite of their higher costs, but because of them.

I think if I wanted to move silicon valley I'd look for some cheap semi- peninsular coastal city which is currently priced like a midwest city. Then I would drive up that price. I've eyed Charleston SC as a potential target but I've never actually been there to know if that makes sense.

<comment><USER11> Silicon Valley exceptionalism has proved itself out pretty well, I'd say.

<comment><USER12> This is an error called survivorship bias. You cannot evaluate the strength of a strategy post hoc based on its success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unless the Midwest replicates California's laws on ownership of IP vis-à-vis employment (i.e. it is illegal for companies to claim employee IP for work done outside of work even via a contract), and that non compete clauses are invalid it's at a huge disadvantage.

Without at least those two the Midwest don't even stand a chance.

<comment><USER14> Law is very important and I agree with you.

Perceived culture in the Midwest is also problematic.

USA is dependent on immigration to fill the science and engineering workforce, which is one of the ingredients of SV revolution. ([https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43061.pdf](https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43061.pdf)) Someone denying there is no racism/xenophobia issue in the Midwest isn't listening in my opinion.

My intuition is that the sex appeal of SV versus Midwest won't be compensated solely by VC money. It will require a cultural change, which has been going backwards those last 10 years imo. And that's why the author wrote this article - not to inform us that Midwest is good, but because there is a real issue in getting talents to the Midwest.

<comment><USER15> It's for this reason that I think Canada (Toronto in particular) is better positioned to see the most growth in tech outside of SV/SF.

<comment><USER16> How far down the list of top tech companies do you have to go before you come to one based in Canada? You won't find one in the top 10. You might not even find one in the top 50. If you're looking to bet on strength, that's not promising.

For whatever reason, Canada seems to be able to produce a real contender only occasionally. True, we had RIM and before that Nortel. But RIM is a shadow of what it once was, and Nortel is long gone.

In tech, Canada is a backwater, and seems likely to stay that way.

<comment><USER15> Shopify is the one big standout.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was recently having a discussion with the founder of a very successful company. I was asking him how they got their start and their initial customers. They were not from the Silicon Valley originally.

He said it was slow going at first, until they moved to the Bay Area and started going to meetups. He said that meeting potential customers in person was what really accelerated their initial adoption, far more than their write- ups in the press or their "free customers" from their accelerator program.

My point is, that will be hard to replicate anywhere else for a long time. The density of startups and the opportunities that presents will be hard to have somewhere else -- it's a chicken and egg problem.

I had a friend who started a VC in Montreal. You know what happened as soon as the companies got successful? They took a round from a VC in the Bay Area and then moved here. They kept their dev office in Montreal for the "cheap labor" but made their HQ here.

I suspect that is what will happen with these investments too. Most of the companies will probably leave Ohio when they get successful.

And then they'll exit and have a bunch of money to invest where they now live -- the Bay Area.

<comment><USER18> You're right. There has been no fundamental change, either internal to SV or external, to cause Silicon Valley to lose its status as the epicenter of the technology world and the unparalleled access to capital that the region enjoys [0].

Interestingly, Cleveland in the early 20th century provides a case study that compares favorably to modern Silicon Valley. The key? Access to capital.

First, we have John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Why did Rockefeller move Standard Oil's headquarters from Cleveland to New York City? Two main reasons: 1) a concentration of financiers that he needed to continue to grow his business and 2) oil was flowing to large port cities as the international markets grew exponentially lessening Cleveland's importance in the network. [1]

These were both rational reasons for moving and the second represented a fundamental shift in the oil business.

A research article into Cleveland's entrepreneurial decline in the 20th century points to a similar finding:

"Additional contributing factors may include the destruction of the complementary financial institutions that had supported entrepreneurial ventures in the region and changes in the regulatory regime that advantaged New York and made it difficult for regional capital markets like Cleveland's to recover their earlier vibrancy." [2]

In the early 1900's Cleveland was described as such:

"It was also an important entrepreneurial center, with well-developed, largely informal, networks linking inventors to new sources of capital and to product markets." [2] This sounds a lot like Silicon Valley and especially what you describe in your comment.

[0] Yes, cases could be made that housing in the Bay area, unfavorable immigration climate, increased competition from abroad, and even the maturation of the current mobile environment represent viable threats to the long-term entrepreneurial dominance of the Valley.

[1] Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller by Ron Chernow

[2] The Decline of an Innovative Region: Cleveland, Ohio, in the Twentieth Century by Naomi Lamoreaux and Margaret Levenstein [http://www.econ.ucla.edu/people/papers/Lamoreaux/Lamoreaux47...](http://www.econ.ucla.edu/people/papers/Lamoreaux/Lamoreaux472.pdf)

<comment><USER19> > There has been no fundamental change, either internal to SV or external, to > cause Silicon Valley to lose its status as the epicenter of the technology > world and the unparalleled access to capital that the region enjoys [

What about climate change and the impending major droughts in the next 5-10 years?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't know what's more amusing: the thought that VCs think they'll get _plentiful_ cheap labor in the Midwest (that's what this is really about) or devs in the Midwest thinking VCs will bring SV-level wages and benefits to them instead of saving on all that because "cost of living."

<comment><USER21> What's amusing is a legit VC thinking it's about devs. Technology is (relatively) the easy part.

Critical thinking, finding problems, identifying opportunities, assessing risk, "what if...?", product, UX, etc. That's where the magic happens.

<comment><USER22> Getting a dev is fine but you want the dev that can execute and work in a team

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I work at a Drive portfolio startup. This is neither Drive's nor my employer's opinions on this topic. There are pros for living here (lower cost of living etc.), but I genuinely hate the weather here. I find every opportunity to be out in SF during the winters. Oh and there aren't many meetups/conferences here, which is a HUGE problem if you're looking to grow/network with people as an engineer. People are generally skeptical and uninviting for newer ideas. Hiring is difficult too. If given the chance, I'd choose Seattle or SF.

<comment><USER24> The lack of network reveals itself in subtle ways.

I'm at a tailgate, a curious friend of mine reveals that he was trying to learn Ruby. I ask a couple very _basic_ questions, and I get looks of "not here".

Anything too technical comes across as exclusionary. The nice thing about SF is that every third person you run into is an engineer, so you never have that social problem. In fact, you have the opposite problem of always defaulting to "talking shop" with someone new.

<comment><USER25> I really admire how engineers like to be around other engineers and share ideas/knowledge rather than view them as competition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The Midwest has crappy weather, and rich people as a rule don't like crappy weather. This alone will prevent many investors from moving to the Midwest.

Geographically, Texas and the east coast near North/South Carolina are the most likely places for the next silicon valley. Both are in proximity to large population centres and have relatively good weather, cheap COL, low taxes, and plenty of 'natural beauty' type things that rich people like. Hills, driving distance to ocean, forests, etc...

I lived in the Midwest and IMO it's mostly cold flat and boring endless farmland with little natural beauty and no access to large water bodies outside of Chicago area. It also has high taxes and cost of living. Not really anything attractive about starting business is there.

<comment><USER27> Hah! Minnesota has 10,000+ lakes and tons of natural beauty. We have a lake cabin/home that we visit year round.

I LOVE winter here, couldn't live without it. Yes, I love the cold. Dress properly and it is quite enjoyable.

I'm by no means "rich" but I make well into six figures in software and I love this area and would find it hard to move anywhere else.

Occasionally I visit one of my clients that is in Silicon Valley. While California is absolutely gorgeous in certain areas I find the highways and dreary brown awful for the most part. The only time I really enjoy it is in very early spring (Feb-Apr) when it is green for a short period of time.

<comment><USER28> Before I moved to Minnesota (from Europe)I was very skeptical about this. But my first trip to BWCA and North Shore, changed all that. Crystal clear lakes, beautiful forests and prairies changed me for ever. If you are into bicycling, Minnesota has one of the most robust biking trail systems.

Minnesota seems to be almost Scandinavian in some aspects and I do find it absolutely beautiful.

<comment><USER25> Minnesota is of Scandinavian heritage. Not sure if that's what you were alluding to, but thought I'd mention in case you weren't aware!

<comment><USER29> I think they mean the nature seems that way, not the people that migrated there. But, there's a reason those folks migrated there in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Where's the next Hollywood? This question has always been absurd to me. Silicon Valley is here to stay.

<comment><USER31> > Where's the next Hollywood?

Georgia, it would seem. If being in New York isn't the key point of the show, chances are it is filmed in Georgia nowadays.

<comment><USER17> Filmed yes. But then where does the film go for editing, color correction, adr, and other post? Hollywood. And then the executives screen it and then it's dostributed and all of that is in LA too.

The expensive parts have moved elsewhere (principal photography and special effects) because it's easy to transmit data, but all the stuff that comes before and after still happens in Hollywood for the most part.

<comment><USER32> > The expensive parts have moved elsewhere (principal photography and special > effects) because it's easy to transmit data, but all the stuff that comes > before and after still happens in Hollywood for the most part.

So you'll concede that a strong cost play exists to move away, and are basically betting that inertia maintains the status quo?

Good luck. ;)

<comment><USER17> Absolutely. I myself run my company as fully remote for this very reason. But I think I'm pretty leading edge in that respect -- most companies still believe having an office is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Remote only is the next silicon valley. Office space in a major city is a luxury, and having to do all of your work 8 hours in a row at a specific time is a waste of productivity.

<comment><USER25> Don't underestimate the impact of the generational gap here.

As an 85er I grew up on IRC, AIM, Gchat, etc.

I just moved into my first management role. It only took me a few months to realize I'm a better manager of remote staff than in person staff. I actually prefer remote now. I'm not in tech nor am I someone who's considered socially awkward or anxious at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The next SV is more likely to be China than anywhere in the US other than SV. Massive amounts of capital + appetite for risk and experimentation + love of technology + huge market. Just don't get on the wrong side of the CP and you're golden.

<comment><USER35> No way! China is basically a closed system. You can't even give stock or stock options to foreign employees if the company is not foreign.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot going on in zhongguangcun and Shenzhen, it's just mostly chinese startups employing Chinese, nothing like SV at all.

<comment><USER34> _> nothing like SV at all_

Seems there are different definitions of "SV". Mine is a geographic region with the unique combination of ingredients for incubating new technologies into valuable businesses and services that mature to some form of market liquidity. Has nothing to do with where they hire their employees from.

<comment><USER35> So a monoculture hiring Chinese employees catering to Chinese consumers. Why should we even care then? Google and Facebook employ more Burmese employees in SV than China does in all of its tech companies, guess what companies are dominating the emerging internet sector in Myanmar, a country literally in china's own backyard? China's Silicon Valley is an internal concern that has nothing to do with the rest of the world.

<comment><USER34> _> China's Silicon Valley is an internal concern that has nothing to do with the rest of the world._

This is pretty short-sighted and naval gazing, but I cbf to argue it. I'll just point out there are people with far more credibility than HN rando's demonstrating with their actions the opposite of what you're saying. [1]

[1]:[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-04/cook- kiss...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-04/cook-kisses-the- ring)

<comment><USER35> Actually having lived it for 9 years, I'm not speaking out of my arse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Honestly? Austin is probably already the next "Silicon <Noun>". We have like 160+ people net move here a day and it's a massive tech hub with UT Austin here, Oracle building a big office here, some good coding bootcamps, etc etc. Fastest growing city in the country several years running. Very liberal with plenty of cultural attractions (SXSW, cafes/bars, "keep Austin weird" etc). I'm guessing due to a combination of close cheap land (to build large logistic centers), access to good highways, access to a port, generally permissive state/business relationships, growing young demographic that Amazon will _probably_ build their headquarters either in Austin or somewhere along the Dallas/San Antonio corridor.

I mean, where else is there in the midwest? Illinois is dying under poor governance and high taxes (pension obligations are constitutionally protected until hell freezes over). Indiana and Ohio just don't seem prosperous. Maybe Atlanta Georgia is the only other growing mid-size city outside of the coasts?

<comment><USER37> > Oracle building a big office here

Well...

<comment><USER36> Well what?

<comment><USER38> 2017 Oracle is just about the opposite of what we mean by "next Silicon Valley".

Especially a satellite office.

<comment><USER37> Cleveland has an Oracle office. The sun shines brighter here now and the birds sing a little louder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> From a 2012 episode of The Office:

Ryan: "I've actually done a lot of market research and it actually turns out that southwestern Ohio is going to be the next Silicon Valley. They call it the Silicon Prairie."

For those not familiar with the episode: the character is totally full of crap; trying to explain that his reason for moving to Ohio has nothing to do with his ex-girlfriend moving to Ohio. Funny to see "Ohio is going to be the next Silicon Valley" come around again (but this time in actual news).

<comment><USER15> There's no shortage of "X is going to be the next Silicon Valley". There's seems to be about one a month.

<comment><USER39> Oh, for sure. The funny thing here is that the line in 2012 was crafted to be patently absurd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps I'm mistaken but my impression is...

Silicon Valley isn't a pin on a map. It's a culture. It's a collective mindset. It's a process. It's a high-tech Wild West.

It's also an outlier.

Startups + VCs !== Silicon Valley. It's more complex and more complicated than that.

</comment><comment><USER40> Please, no. It's still peaceful here. Stay in California.

<comment><USER41> You don't know what you're saying. They'll bring higher home prices, more traffic, Californian politics, complaints about the weather, snide remarks about how things are better in CA. What's not to love?

<comment><USER42> Just ask Coloradans, it's wonderful to have your state taken over by people who don't share the same political culture, have far more money, and don't care much about land use!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm from Ohio and moved SF almost exactly 7 years ago. 8 plus years ago I felt like a complete outsider the the business world. I'd been using linux since redhat since version 2, taught myself perl, php and later rails and javascript. I'd go to small business association "meetups" and events and talk to people about a website I built that would allow non-developers to build customized open source software packages like wordpress/oscommerce/phpbb and have it auto-installed and hosted on a custom domain using ec2.

Even the successful tech investor there, who seemed more lucky than anything, didn't have a clue what I was talking about or why anyone might want to do that. I also went to the local small business offices seeking help and they didn't get it either. If you weren't an automotive, manufacturing or physical product company, they didn't take you seriously, didn't know what you were talking about and didn't see value in anything computer or web related.

I also didn't really know anyone remotely interested in the web or linux except one guy. If I had to sum it up I'd say that they're generally quite a few years behind in everything from technology to civil rights. Finding good employees will be hard but possible. Finding forward thinkers is going to be exceedingly difficult. When I lost my job working on microsoft products at an automotive logistics company, I gave up on Ohio and moved to SF. It was one of the best decisions of my life. Since I moved it's been horrifyingly clear that Ohio is in a downward spiral. I joke that I'd sleep on the ground in SF before I'd go back to Ohio but I'm not entirely sure it's a joke.

</comment><comment><USER44> The Next Silicon Valley will be in Texas, because I live here :)

That is wrong kind of thinking, but here is my 2-cent thesis, Tech has not outgrown into such mature industry, you will have whole series of regions with robust tech and venture economies, so in that sense there won't be one next silicon valley, but a whole series of mini-silicon vallies.

</comment><comment><USER45> Wouldn't diversity be an issue in a place like Ohio? My perception of the Midwest is that it's much more homogeneous and less inviting of minorities than California. Consequently it might be hard to attract diverse talent to relocate there.

<comment><USER46> This is purely anecdote, but I found Seattle to be significantly less diverse than Cincinnati or Columbus. The larger cities in the Midwest tend to have governments with goals that are hard to distinguish from any of the Democrat controlled coastal cities.

<comment><USER41> Portland Oregon is officially the whitest city in the USA (goes back to those early-mid 1900s laws that made it illegal to live in Oregon if you were black). So, yeah, the PNW is definitely not the place to be if you are looking for diversity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I used to be a 100,000+ / year flyer as a consultant, plus I spent four years in college in the midwest. I'm a white, straight, male, but most of the country scares me to the point I have no desire to go outside the pacific northwest any longer. I've never been treated so badly by TSA as I was in Columbus, and I'm somewhat disappointed in myself that I did not file a lawsuit. To think that anywhere in the midwest or the southeast could become a prosperous center of innovation? Good effing luck with that. Oh sure, there are pockets where this bank or that manufacturer will settle for a tax deal or cheaper labour, but there's a big difference between that and the west coast culture that enables breakthrough science and engineering.

</comment><comment><USER48> There is only one Silicon Valley. It's silly to think otherwise, although it seems to be getting recycled constantly by journalists and economic development people.

It's high time however that startups become more popular in the Midwest. If you are profitable, growing rapidly you can raise venture capital in the Midwest. However that rules out the majority of startups. That's a big reason that our best and brightest make the pilgrimage out West.

What we need to see are startup clusters, let the companies stay in place. In Michigan it is starting to happen, but progress is still woefully slow. Angels are in just as short supply as venture capital.

<comment><USER49> >If you are profitable... you can raise venture capital in the Midwest

This is the number one biggest difference between Midwest startups and SV startups. Even Basecamp said it, Midwest startups have to prove their profitability on day one before any VC will pay any serious attention. Whereas in SV, you can get money with just a team and a Powerpoint presentation.

Wonder why there are no unicorns from the Midwest? Because if unicorns made money their valuation would be significantly lower. They're only unicorns because no one knows how much they're worth, and everyone knows exactly how much Midwest startups are worth on day one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is cyclical news. It's an amazing marketing campaign for VCs. This is an interesting armchair idea for lots of people, but absolutely inspiring for people VCs are targeting to work for them and shoulder the non-cash component of their risk.

</comment><comment><USER51> The key would be some fiber optic enabled always on teleconferencing pipe which connected teams in Silicon Valley to teams in the Midwest. At this point the differential for rents and cost of living between the two locales is high enough that it would far surpass the Verizon Fios/Google Fiber monthly bill.

That said, my bet would be Fresno, Brentwood, Sacramento, Morgan Hill, Santa Cruz, Monterey, Madera. California High Speed Rail is going to be a game changer. Plus even today those locations are on the way to VC vacation destinations (i.e. Yosemite, Tahoe, Monterey) which could then be expensed as business travel. And they are in the same timezone.

<comment><USER52> The only one I agree with here is Tahoe. No idea why more startups don't operate out of NV.

<comment><USER53> Nevada side of Lake Tahoe? Easy. No space.

Reno? Easy. No ecosystem, aside from specialized things (Gigafactory etc).

I would LOVE to start an accelerator type thing just over the border of SLT, CA. But I would expect everyone would leave at the end of the it for a larger metro.

<comment><USER54> I agree with Reno. I actually think some good things are gonna start happening there due to several positive aspects. It's a big enough city to have nice cultural features. It has pretty good air connectivity. There's a younger crowd arriving and opening restaurants and brewpubs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brian-armstrong As someone who left the midwest for SV, I'm not looking to go back any time soon. Going to the midwest is like getting in a time machine set for 40 years ago.

You have so many good food and coffee options in SF. In the midwest? Hah, nope. Can I work on my open source without my employer owning it? No. Can I get places easily just by walking or taking Lyft line? Fat chance.

Not to mention, I experienced a shocking level of casual racism growing up there. Culturally it is not a pleasant place to be. No, I don't think we'll be seeing an exodus there any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER55> Midwesterner -> SF transplant here. There's fundamental cultural problems in the Midwest that are basically insurmountable. Outside of pockets like Boulder, people are simply culturally uninterested in the future, changing things, or improving on their situation. People correspondingly are very content; they immerse theirselves in their families, their relationships, Football, etc. Starting a technology company here would be a very lonely endeavor.

<comment><USER56> >people are simply culturally uninterested in the future, changing things, or improving on their situation

I'll give you not wanting to change things, but people here are certainly interested in ensuring the future is good for themselves and their kids - there's just a lack of bullshitting ourselves about changing the world by working on a cell phone application.

>People correspondingly are very content; they immerse theirselves in their families, their relationships, Football, etc.

You say all of that like it's a bad thing. The Midwest is a peaceful place, and I happen to like it that way. I don't want or need a constant bombardment of Things To Do, my situation is exactly where I want it to be.

<comment><USER55> I totally agree actually, and maybe worded it a little poorly. I love it back in the Midwest and mostly think positively of it, I just think starting a technology company here would be a mistake, since they are inherently risky endeavors, and Midwesterners are culturally adverse to taking risks in my experience.

<comment><USER56> I think it would largely depend on what sort of company you wanted to start - I would agree that a traditional SV-style startup is probably going to spectacularly fail. However, my experience with starting a small bootstrapped company was very positive, especially given the lower cost of living. It wasn't anything that was gonna make me rich but it was definitely doable.

Honestly, I think the idea that anywhere other than SV is gonna be come SV is silly - but I also do want to help dispel the notion that the Midwest has no technical talent or is unfriendly to tech. We have a lot of tech talent - <USER2> large portion of it just ends up leaving for the coasts for better networking rather than setting up shop here, or working for large established companies for steady pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> SV didn't just pop up in NorCal. It's a historical place where the first software companies and the internet were born. Silicon Valley was involved in creating Google, and self-driving cars. In other words, it's not like any city can, all of sudden, change its industries to compete with the level of IT/software innovations happening in SV.

<comment><USER58> >and the internet were born

There are people from MIT, BBN, CERN, etc. that would like to have a talk with you. (Yes, Stanford was involved early on but pre dot-com, a great deal of the early Internet work was well outside of California.)

<comment><USER22> One of the 3 inventors of Ethernet worked at Matelsham aka the UK's Bell Labs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> On rainy Seattle days I often research other tech cities I could live in without a large mortgage and larger commute. I've decided, for me at least, Raleigh offers the best balance. Good economy, small-ish city, vibrant downtown, cheap-ish houses. As soon as I can, I'll be leaving Seattle for Raleigh.

<comment><USER54> I'm curious what other criteria and what other cities you've considered.

<comment><USER51> I found this the other day. Seems interesting: [https://teleport.org/welcome](https://teleport.org/welcome)

<comment><USER54> Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If I had a pound for every time I have seen an article proclaiming xxx is the new SV id be rich.

Whilst some areas do have the required teir 1 universities and USP eg silcon fen or wider the oxford to cambridge belt a rust belt state is unlikely to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER60> Won't tech development be automated by then anyways :)

</comment><comment><USER61> I've had an idea for a startup for over a decade and have wanted to go to YC. But hell if I'm gonna go to San Francisco from Detroit area. You guys are freaking insane dealing with that cost of living. BTW, said idea is more than ripe now and the right team could get it running it in a month.

BTW, my concept seems like it needs to be a nonprofit. It could make money but if that ever corrupts it people would be very unhappy.

<comment><USER62> I'm from Kzoo/GR but landed out in the Seattle area. While the sticker price might seem shocking at first, as a tech worker I've found my salary has scaled to meet the high cost of living (and then some). I think the high cost of living is more of a problem for people who are outside of the tech industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Austin

</comment><comment><USER64> Well they shouldn't, because it's probably Ontario.

</comment><comment><USER65> New Jersey.</comment>


Vue.js: 2015 in Review - <AUTHOR> http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/12/20/vuejs-2015-in-review/ <comment><USER2> Got into React around November of last year. Did a semi large project with Reflux and React. The popular Flux library before Redux. Not sure what's popular now. I hated every minute of doing React. It started off great, but quickly rage started to set in.

I feel like that whole eco system is full of wanna be engineers fresh out of comp sci degree that want to over engineer the hell out of everything they touch. A ton of stuff to set up.

I used Knockout in 2011 and Angular in 2013. Both frameworks were awesome. Angular improved on Knockout. React didn't seem to improve anything for me.

Vue is a breath of fresh air. I don't do SPA apps anymore anymore. Probably never will again. I hate the lock in. What is popular and supported one year is gone the next. What I do however, is bring in a javascript framework where it's needed, on one or two pages. You'd be surprised, it's not that often, but when you need a library you need a library. Vue handles this perfectly for me right now(until the next thing comes along I suppose). It doesn't make you get a PHD in the you're Fuxed architecture and isn't over engineered out the wazoo. It works similar to Angular but with less terms. I think more similar to Aurelia.

Thanks Vue team.

<comment><USER3> I too went through Angular and React, Vue combines best of both (especially after 1.0, pre 1.0 syntax was _weird_ for me at least)

The great thing about Vue is the beautifully simplistic API (not to mention the amazing documentation) + Vue works WITH the DOM (which gives it performance boost - contrary to popular belief)

Thanks Vue team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excuse my ignorance (this is the first time I'm hearing about Vue) but I have a few questions:

1) The homepage ([http://vuejs.org/](http://vuejs.org/)) says "Reactive Components for Modern Web Interfaces". Does it actually use any concepts from FRP (like signals or event streams)?

2) A lot of things I picked up from the docs just scream "angular". Filters, directives, $watch to name a few. My very naive impression is that this is just reinventing angular. That said, what are the reasons to choose it over angular?

3) Any plans for ES6 support? I expect any modern framework to be ES6 first while all the examples on the homepage are given in ES5

<comment><USER5> 1) Vue itself has little to do with FRP. "Reactive" doesn't necessarily imply FRP in any way. However it's pretty easy to use Vue with RxJS: [https://github.com/vuejs/vue-rx](https://github.com/vuejs/vue-rx)

2) & 3): See [http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re- introduction/](http://blog.evanyou.me/2015/10/25/vuejs-re-introduction/) and [http://vuejs.org/guide/comparison.html](http://vuejs.org/guide/comparison.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Extremely happy with Vue.js. I had the same exact reaction; I started to learn React, got frustrated, found Vue.js and have never looked back. It fits everything that I need in a front-end framework and it does so without getting in my way or making my code feel bloated. Love it, congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER7> Powerful, easy to grasp, and frustration-free - so kudos on that alone. However it's the consideration put into everything around Vue.js that really helps it shine.

Clean website with comprehensive and clear API guide, the responsiveness and outright prolificness of Evan on Github, the thought put into the 1.0 release and the succinct syntax.

So many things that others have done wrong, done right.

</comment><comment><USER8> Started off learning Vue before learning Ember a year ago, but I have to say that Vue was not really that overwhelming to learn. It did a lot of things right and I really enjoyed using it and learning it made a lot of things with Ember just naturally click. Looking forward to see the future of the project and it's trajectory.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wanted to explore the idea of a "server-less" app, so I built a tweet scheduler -- like what [https://buffer.com](https://buffer.com) started their business with -- except I wanted to do it without thinking about a server or managing any processes.

It uses Vue.js as the SPA plus AWS Lambda, AWS API Gateway, and AWS DynamoDB for the server-like stuff. It also uses vue-router and vue-loader, two official Vue.js libraries.

[https://github.com/crcastle/serverless-buffer-app- gui](https://github.com/crcastle/serverless-buffer-app-gui)

I plan to post it to the Vue.js forum [http://forum.vuejs.org](http://forum.vuejs.org) to ask for feedback on my use of Vue.js -- what I could have implemented more simply. Waiting until I finish the setup guide before posting it.

In general, I've been loving Vue.js. It's really simple and quick to get started, but as you get deeper you find that many subtle design decisions were well thought out.

EDIT: This is my first venture in SPA frameworks, having previously been overwhelmed by the learning curve of Angular, Ember, and React.

<comment><USER10> How is it server-less? Seems like the Amazon products you're using are, uh, running on servers? Not trying to be snide, just trying to understand what you mean by serverless.

<comment><USER11> I think he means having the servers abstracted away (i.e. not having to maintain them, not knowing how many of them should be running, etc...)

<comment><USER12> People need to stop calling that "server-less", that's stupid and the kind of buzzword that needs to die ASAP. There is a server, the fact that you don't have to manage it yourself doesn't change anything, you still need to upload your code to AWS lambda, how is it different from uploading a PHP script via FTP to a remote machine? it is not. PHP developers don't call their work "server-less". So people need to give up on using this expression now.

That's the most ridicule thing I have ever heard in my developer career. Who can anybody take a developer that says he is doing "server-less" web development seriously? frankly? What's next? the "database-less" movement?

<comment><USER9> I agree server-less is not technically accurate. That's why I put it in quotes. However, in the spectrum of

bare metal server <-> VM server <-> Heroku-like PaaS

I'd put this architecture to the right of Heroku. I have less to worry about from an Ops perspective than I do running the app on Heroku. On Heroku, I would need to think about and managing one or several processes. With AWS Lambda, there is no concept of a processes exposed to me like Procfiles expose on Heroku. That's nice in many ways but also limiting in many ways.

Also, note that I wasn't building this for rock hard and huge scalability production. I was building it to learn and hopefully help others learn about a fairly new way to build a web application.

<comment><USER10> Thanks. Wasn't trying to be argumentative, just wanted clarity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am actually big fan of Riotjs which is similar to Vue. I think there is a lot of value in simpler approaches and lighter codebase of both of those.

</comment><comment><USER14> Congratulations on 1.0 release. I like the simplicity of Vue.

</comment><comment><USER15> How well is typescript supported? It is hard to imagine going back to javascript.

</comment><comment><USER16> Happy vue.js user here too. Thanks vue team for this nice ui library.</comment>


Dot Obits: First Woman to Design Computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/dot_obits_first_woman_to_design_computer.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d8d063557b9315c%2C0 <comment><USER2> Flagged: dupe</comment>


A Town in Two Countries – The Baarle Problem - <AUTHOR> https://sricola.com/blog/baarle-hertog-baarle-nassau/ <comment><USER2> Judging by your username, I assume you submitted your own blogpost. I really don't mean to put you down, because I am interested in the material but if you want to improve the quality of your blogposts, let me give some constructive feedback on your writing:

The title includes "The Baarle Problem", indicating some problem exists. I assume you mean the problem is the 1995 introduction of the border demarcation? (or is the problem the border complexity in itself?) However, you never really say what the problem is that arises from this policy.

Then you finish with: "It is truly extraordinary how such an arrangement exists - in harmony. Maybe other countries with border disputes should learn something from [this border]", which implies that it is _good_ and not a problem?

"it is not very uncommon for tourists to completely skip this little gem" appears to be wrong. Do you mean it _is_ very common to skip this "little gem"?

Your map doesn't make clear what part belongs to which country. Maybe add NL or BE in a few strategic places?

Judging from the images, you have visited this place. It would have been nice if you could have asked some people what their experiences are living in this place. Maybe the border causes issues,maybe it doesn't? What problems (and solutions) are uncommon in NL/BE (or Europe, or the world) that they have experienced first-hand due to the complicated border?</comment>


Ask HN: Recent graduate with no experience - <AUTHOR>

Hello.
I received my MSc in Networking from a top UK university in October. Since then, I've been applying for Graduate Schemes as I have no relevant work experience. I've never had an internship either and all my work experience consists of summer jobs.
Now, my goal is not to get "any" job for money. I want to learn my field the best I can, and I learn best by watching and interacting.
My questions are:
1) Are there any companies that would let me intern with them, with little or no pay? And would it be worth it? How does one go about finding about small companies that aren't listed on, say, Milkround?
2) Would it be worth it to take a long time off and learn stuff online? I know we should always be learning something new and I am passionate about it, but I think I would be better motivated (and not depressed as I am right now) if I had an actual job involving computers.
3) What would you recommend?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> 2) no.

3) Get almost any job remotely related to computers and grow from there. My first job after university was as a temp doing data entry. It paid minimum wage (US). But I met a guy there that gave me a rec. for my next job doing programming. At my next job if I'd wanted I could have gone into networking.

In 1 year it's possible to go from taking almost "any" job to the job you want.

Does it suck that you can't immediately get a job in your field? Yes!!

I went on many interviews and got turned by every one due to lack of experience. It wasn't until I decided to take any job remotely computer oriented that I had success.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. This gives me hope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can only speak from my own experience, but here goes:

1\. A lot of graduate internship schemes in the UK are partly funded by the universities themselves for graduates from their undergraduate courses. This makes getting one on the back of a MSc a bit more tricky. Either way, I'd go with the advice already here, and look for a full-time job if you can. There's plenty of advice already here for finding the sort of companies you'd want to work for, all I can say is that it's a decision that you shouldn't rush, but don't take too long on either. Spend some spare time over a week looking over companies and see where you'd like to work, then send out some cover letters.

2\. It's really not necessary. That time would be better spent in a job. If you want to work on a personal project there's nothing stopping you from doing so while you're applying for jobs.

3\. Build a list of the places where you want to work, and just apply there. Outside of my first job, every job I've landed was without a formal ad being placed. Honestly, don't worry too much about your chances of getting hired. There is lots of work out there for those that are willing.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean applying for positions that might not exist? I understand that it might be easy if you have an impressive CV and apply to a company with "exceptional applicants welcome at all times" attitude, but it doesn't seem realistic for someone in my position to do that. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should submit your resume to popular job sites and directly to companies. Skip the internships as you are way past that especially with a Masters degree (would have been ok if you were just starting college, but your have moved past that part now).

Since you have a Masters degree you are worth more out of the box now then before you started college. Since you had summer jobs that counts as work experience but it is concerning, you should be able to get a job as a network administrator if the work you did earning your degree was more practical than theory which it should have been. If not you might be in trouble if you do not know the basics to at least intermediate of setting up a network by yourself. If the latter is the case then you have some serious work to do. By now you should have earned a few certifications (CCNA, MCSE, etc.) to help supplement your academic course work, if not I would recommend getting these out of the way so when you do apply for jobs the employers can take you more seriously as you would have a standardized knowledge base but no long term work experience.

Something else you should also have is a home test rack setup if you had a degree of any kind in networking, which would be the same for someone that took computer science, engineering, software development, etc. all students that normally excelled and were serious about their work had something at home physically or virtually to hone their skills. If this is the case with you then you should have some serious fun at interviews when it comes to the whiteboard questions as you have been through the network setups thousands of times by now and they should be very easy for you by now since you should have mastered it by now.

I would also recommend applying for jobs as big companies like Amazon, Facebook, HP, etc. along with government contractors in your area. As some of the government contractors have the funds to bring you on and train you up in your weak areas all while paying you a very nice salary.

Also no need to take time off, you can work on learning new things when you get home from work

</comment><comment><USER5> 1/ For reasons explained in other comments, I would search for a full-time job rather than an internship. To find small companies, check out the most prominent VCs present in the UK and check out what startups they have invested in (it's almost always publicly listed on their websites).

2/ No. Get a full-time job. While you're job hunting, work on a personal project that will further your skills and expertise. You will almost certainly be quizzed on that (at least, if you try to join successful startups)

3/ See above. In case you're interested: we're based in London, UK, and are currently hiring for 3 positions: [https://pusher.com/jobs](https://pusher.com/jobs)

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Seeking a full-time job seems to be the best course of action.

About your company: it does seem interesting but again, I don't seem to fit any of the descriptions because of lack of experience.

<comment><USER6> The best advice my dad ever gave me when looking for jobs is that even if you only match the description 50%, apply for it. Don't be put off by the list of skills/qualities they want.

Show that, while you don't meet all of the criteria on the job advert, you're keen and have a good head on your shoulders.

I'm in the UK as well and I know it's a tough market. But I agree with what others have posted - take anything even vaguely related to IT. The only jobs I had before I got a placement/internship were working in a shop and doing data entry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does your school have a good alumni directory? The old-school tie a good way to connect and start building a professional network even with strangers. Start identifying well placed graduates. Reach out, ask them for advice and specifically, ask them if they know anyone looking junior/entry-level hires. Incidentally, Linkedin is also a good place to find new contacts.

Here's a solid overview by Ramit Sethi on networking> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb03mTqI2Io](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb03mTqI2Io)

</comment><comment><USER8> 1) yeah there are lots of places that like free work, but in my opinion no one with a degree should be doing that unless it's charity. How do you find small companies? Easy. Just go to places where you are likely to meet people working in your field. Seminars, meetups, conferences.

I don't know about the UK, but here I would not even apply for jobs online. That is "front door" job hunting and it is a waste of time. It is so much easier just going to an event and telling everyone I meet "I have a degree and I'm looking for work."</comment>


Open source management tool for Mercurial and GIT - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/marcinkuzminski/rhodecode

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting. Does anyone have any idea how it compares to gitosis/gitolite?</comment>


Single-Molecule Transistors at Room Temperature - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.columbia.edu/news/latha-venkataraman-single-molecule-transistor <comment><USER2> Title claims "transistor"; article and infographic says that only "diode" was actually demonstrated.

<comment><USER3> Im just getting started with hardware electronics so forgive me if this is way off. Also, not to defend the title...

Is a standard transistor just two diodes with similar sides facing each other?

<comment><USER4> Unless I'm mistaken, that would act as a capacitor. A transistor has a slightly more complicated doping pattern with a gate as shown here:

[http://cdn4.explainthatstuff.com/fet1.gif](http://cdn4.explainthatstuff.com/fet1.gif)

<comment><USER5> That's a field effect transistor. A diode is made from a P/N junction in normal silicon (i won't say i know it's the same in other materials). A Bipolar Junction Transistor is made from an N/P/N junction, or a P/N/P junction. On the surface it looks like you could make a transistor out of two diodes because of the junctions, but the problem is that you have to bond them on the silicon to get close to the effect of a transistor, the metal leads and bonding wires inside a normal diode prevent that from working. What this does mean however is that you can use half of an NPN or PNP transistor as a diode, and it's a somewhat common thing to do to minimize the types of parts you need on a circuit board if you're already using the transistors for something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The electron microscope seems to be an integral part of this thing's functioning, and is made up of a lot more than one molecule.

</comment><comment><USER7> Translation: the dudes made a diode, and the writing guy wrote transistor.

Where's the third terminal, yo.</comment>


Show HN: Watch and hear macOS robots argue live in your terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/christophemarois/arguing-robots <comment><USER2> I don't understand the point of this. Is there a cultural reference that I'm missing? At first I thought that it was AI robots talking to each other but it is actually a dead simple script which reads a text file and pass it to a text-to-speech command. So clearly it does not interest HN for the technical aspect. I feel I'm missing something.

<comment><USER3> Even I thought it was something related to AI. But looks like it is just a simple text to speech utility.

<comment><USER2> It _uses_ a text-to-speech utility, it is not even implementing that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had to do a double-take on the source code, as it looked just like Ruby. It's the first Crystal code ([https://crystal-lang.org/](https://crystal- lang.org/)) I've ever seen, and the interesting part is that it compiles Ruby- like code into executable. Anyway, the code can be summed up as "Process.run("say -v #{voice} \"#{text}\"", shell: true)", in which it calls "say" command to speak the voice of text file in macOS terminal.

PS: Does anybody know if the goal of Crystal is to be like Go, and if there's any performance advantage using Crystal, compared to MRI?

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh, yeah. Back to the future.

Does anybody besides me remember the psychoanalyze-pinhead feature in venerable versions of Emacs?

There was a script that offered a parody of Rogerian psychotherapy. For example, you could type, "I'm anxious" into it, and it would respond "Do you feel anxious because of something that happened in your childhood."

And there was a script that blurted random Zippy-the-pinhead quotes, like

"Are we having fun yet? Are we? Are we?"

"Life is a blur of Republicans and meat."

The psychoanalyze-pinhead script connected these two together. So you'd get stuff like

"Tell me more about a blur of Republicans and meat and your mother."

Emacs was pretty fast. You could get a few hundred kb of absurdity in a few seconds.

<comment><USER6> Emacs Doctor ( which was a version of Eliza [0]) is actually more sophisticated than this script.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe i don't know the reference. Anyone care to clarify?

<comment><USER8> What do you mean? I think it's pretty clear what this is. Two bots talking to each other. Like two Alexas/Google Home listening and responding in a never- ending conversation.

<comment><USER9> You clearly didn't actually look at the link at all. It is just a script that reads a text file and outputs it using a text-to-speech library...

<comment><USER8> You're right and I made a fool of myself. I thought it was like seebotschat on Twitch which was actually two real bots talking to each other (and amazing that is).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it's half as awesome as twitch.tv/seebotschat was it's amazing.

<comment><USER10> I don't know anything about that Twitch link, but I doubt it. This one being a disingenuous use of the word 'robots'.

Everybody that's upvoted on HN or starred on Github (over 30 on each!) has clearly not followed and read the link.

It appears to me like OP's experiment in marketing - getting HN readers to react positively to something mundane.

<comment><USER8> Well, ok. The Twitch thing was actually two bots talking to each other (two Google Homes hooked up to Cleverbot or a fork). It resulted in some really hilarious and sometimes deep conversations. I watched for hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> care to share an audio sample for those of us not owning an apple machine?

I'm curious about Navi's voice.

<comment><USER12> Look up Serial Experiments Lain on Youtube. If I remember correctly, it uses the "Whisper" voice that they're referring to when it announces the episode name.

<comment><USER11> eh, I thought the project created a new voice based on navi. I didn't know that serial experiment lain used a MacOS voice. Here it is: [https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=3m11s](https://youtu.be/Z4hqUxb9MmY?t=3m11s)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER14> Meh, I've done better stuff with Hailo from CPAN and 20 lines of Perl.

<comment><USER15> Please don't post snarky dismissals of other people's work on HN. That's especially against the rules of Show HN threads: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

Edit: you've repeatedly posted uncivil comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that, so please stop doing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems important

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the opposite of important, thus it might be</comment></comment>


Man Skipped Work for 6 Years and No One Noticed Until He Won an Award (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/man-skipped-work-for-6-years_us_56c1d32ae4b0b40245c72512 <comment><USER2> "Garcia's attorney, speaking on his behalf, reportedly blamed bullying at his workplace for his absence. He also said there was no work to do."

He did deserve an award, having always executed his assignments without flaw.</comment>


Akido Labs (YC W15) Provides an API Layer for Hospital App Developers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/19/yc-backed-akido-labs-provides-a-standardized-api-layer-for-hospital-app-developers

<comment><USER2> Jared Goodner here (cofounder of Akido) - We're super excited to see what the HN crowd can do with a RESTful API for hospital data! Check out our first blog post for some very simple examples.

[https://www.akidolabs.com/blog/hello- world](https://www.akidolabs.com/blog/hello-world)

<comment><USER3> What do you think of Apervita.com, which is also a platform for working with EHR?

They seem to want "health authors" (developers/scientists) to use their "authoring environment" (locked in IDE/language... wow) to build "insights" (apps) that are locked into their market.

I don't understand the virtue of that model unless they think that they can achieve a monopoly on a lot of data. Is it possible they can?

<comment><USER2> Hey @falsestprophet, thanks for reaching out!

I had been introduced to Apervita a little while back, and while I found it intriguing, it didn't solve the problem I was looking to solve. From my perspective, the biggest problem in healthcare right now is the lack of interoperability between systems -- data within a hospital is frankly rather locked up, inaccessible by reasonable means. This holds back a TON of _much needed_ innovation in the space.

If Apertiva's platform is a means for spurring innovation, then I'm all for it. My prediction is that health data access will hold them back, until Akido is in every hospital across the country ;)

<comment><USER3> I believe they are integrating with hospital systems and standardizing data just like Akido presumably with the goal of getting into every hospital just like you.

I'm sure both Apervita and Akido would love to have a monopoly on the data and hospital network, but it doesn't seem like that is a guaranteed outcome. (So this is perhaps merely a very good business rather than an amazing business.)

But, instead of simply offering an API like you they want developers/scientists/doctors to build on a proprietary platform for a proprietary market on top of their proprietary API.

So they're Akido + Google App Engine + Google Play for health.

These guys raised $18 million, so some serious people believe in the company. But, I just don't understand the virtue of trying to lock all customers into their "Google App Engine + Google Play".

No one in their mind would build a business on that if they could go with a more open alternative, right? And now you are an alternative.

Though I think it would be pretty cool if you guys had an added offering that made it easy for hospitals to buy little apps... um I guess something like Apervita. :)

<comment><USER4> @falsestprophet -- we are right with you on being anti-vendor lock in and supporting open standards. We want to enable healthcare systems to use their data in whatever way they'd like and we think the best way to do that is to keep everything as open and as standards driven as possible.

RE: Hospital apps, couldn't agree more. Keep an eye out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Speaking as a physician, I'm deeply heartened by any attention to health care software from outside of the entrenched players.

Most current EMRs are execrable. Their difficulty is not only frustrating and user-hostile, but potentially unsafe.

<comment><USER2> @phren0logy We hear you!!

The Akido API was influenced by our experience as directors of Univ. Southern California's D-Health digital health lab, where we constantly work with physicians and admins to create better health IT software.

We saw that real innovation and improvement in health IT is prevented by an extremely laborious and difficult "integration" process. We built Akido to make sure it was the last solution to ever had to get "integrated"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool! I couldn't quite tell from the article, but do you see this as an alternative to Prime and, if so, how is it different?

EDIT: One more question: the article says you've reached 200 hospitals already. That's impressive. Are those signed contracts? Or verbal commitments? Can you say a little about how you achieved that?

Good luck at demo day too!

<comment><USER2> Thanks, @brandonb!! We think so too ;) We are seeing far more traction than we expected - we're solving a very serious need!

Please shoot me an email at email@example.com -- happy to talk more about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is Akido something like BlueButton+ [1] but which is used (about to be used) by real EHR systems at real hospitals?

If yes, I'd love to give it a try.

[1] [http://bluebuttonplus.org/](http://bluebuttonplus.org/)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for your question, @smanuel! It's a good one!

At this point in time, we're focused more on software/device vendor integrations into healthcare systems. However, this strategy is aimed at eventually making personal health records a reality.

With blue button, health providers weren't incentivized to adopt - it's just not a high priority for health systems right now. However, if we could solve the integration problem for health systems _while_ paving the way towards personal health records incentive won't be an issue. The FHIR specs are the latest step in the right direction! (We're big proponents of FHIR)

Akido holds real promise to enable personal health records in the near future -- be on the look out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations! A welcome change in healthcare.

Are you building a relationship with the hospitals and clinics so that we wont't have to talk to them, but just use your api to get and push our patient's data?

<comment><USER2> Hey @c0mpute - that's a very good question!

We _are_ building relationships with health systems across the country, but we can't remove the need for you to talk to them. What Akido does is make integration a non-issue - we turn integration into 'plug n play' from the developer's and hospital's perspective. What this means for you is that your sale to the hospital or clinic decision maker becomes far easier!

Please do note that the health system maintains _all_ control over who has access to data -- this is VERY sensitive data, and it's extremely important that access is tightly controlled, logged, and auditable. (Akido handles all of that for the hospital)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I put in my email and click 'Get Early Access', nothing happens and the following is printed to the console (Firefox 36.0.1):

TypeError: t.toElement is undefined [developers.js:1:31160]

</comment><comment><USER10> Is Akido Labs meant to be hired by hospitals to support easier integration with vendors? Or meant to be used by HIT vendors to more easily offer integration with different hospitals?

<comment><USER2> Hey @joshpadnick, great question - It's both!

On one hand, Akido is a technology + service that offloads the entire integration process for application vendors (analytics, patient engagement, scheduling, etc!), lab/diagnostics vendors, and connected hardware vendors.

On the other hand, hospitals have a solution for integration that provides more granular control over their data, and a far smoother integration process.

<comment><USER2> I'd also like to add that it's a free platform for health systems :).

To clarify a bit, a hospital or clinic wouldn't really "hire" us -- Akido is software that's implemented on-site or in the cloud, and is supported remotely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks awesome!

If the Healthcare provider EHR is already compatible with FHIR. What incentive do I have to use your API? Are you also hosting the Healthcare and patient data?

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice Work!

I am part of a startup that needs this like yesterday.

Who can I email regarding this?

<comment><USER2> Hey @up_and_up - would love to learn more about how you could use Akido! Shoot me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com and let's set aside a time for a call/skype/coffee (depending on where you live)!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this supposed to replace an existing LIMS or be an API Layer over your existing LIMS?

<comment><USER2> Hey @buckbova, thanks for your question!!

Akido doesn't actually replace anything - it's an API layer that lives above any electronic health record (EHR) system, and provides a far more developer- friendly and secure means for accessing data than the current state.

Feel free to check out our docs to see what you can do with less than 10 lines of code!

[https://portal.akidolabs.com/v1.0/docs/getting- started](https://portal.akidolabs.com/v1.0/docs/getting-started)

<comment><USER13> Do you have a list of supported EMRs and how does the API communicate with the EMR?

Is this a sort of translation from HL7 to web services API?

Edit:

I found the list of EHR software on the site.

In my experience working with a variety of these types of software is they are all differently difficult and constantly changing. Ones like Cerner can be completely driven by HL7, although not all are like this.

Will this be all hosted in the cloud, or on-site, or both with some "connector" software? What's the cost structure and set-up fees like? Do you have any customers yet?

Edit Edit:

I'm not exactly in the market for this, even though I'd love an API to sit over all the systems we have already integrated including one large COTS LIMS system, a custom LIMS built from scratch, and a third-party cloud system all communicating via web services with varying degrees of functionality.

<comment><USER2> I had stepped away from my computer (sorry!) - to answer your questions:

YES - it's a real pain to deal with all the different interfaces and techniques required to obtain the data that you need.

However, as part of implementing Akido, we handle all of the integration and maintenance for you (it's our expertise ;) )

We can implement on an on-site Virtual Machine, or as a cloud implementation (our preference, of course).

Our cost structure is flexible at the moment (so we should talk), but it's worth saying that we're a low-cost solution!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This feels pretty similar to Moxe Health, the Rock Health portfolio company.

<comment><USER4> Hi @lyyons, we are certainly not the first ones to spot that integration is a pain point for hospitals and we have tons of respect for anyone trying to help solve this problem. Its a big issue and there is a lot of work to be done. While we do share common features with Moxe Health and others, what sets us apart is our origins from an academic medical center, our commitment to supporting open standards and our mission to enable hospitals to fully own and innovate with their health data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The demo widget doesn't work for me. It just says "null".

<comment><USER4> Hi @unclesaamm -- Hugh Gordon here (another cofounder).

Thanks for pointing this out! We've fixed the site. Please let us know if you are having other problems and thanks for checking us out :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How does it compare with SMART/FHIR ?

<comment><USER2> Great question, @yumraj - you can think of Akido as the infrastructure required to run SMART on FHIR. Kind of like Heroku is to Rails, Akido is to SMART on FHIR.

Make sense?</comment></comment>


Meltdown Update Kernel doesnt boot - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1742323 <comment><USER2> This arch/x86/events/intel/ds.c fix is unlikely to have rendered too many things unbootable. I missed ds.c entirely when doing the original implementation. I can't fault the nice folks at Canonical for mis-merging a tiny hunk like this. It really only affects pretty specific hardware anyway.

<comment><USER3> What hardware does it effect?

<comment><USER4> Pretty specific one.

<comment><USER5> Take my hand, I'll guide you back to Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would this entire Meltdown/Spectre thing count as the biggest mess-up of computing history? When yesterday the PoC repo was posted here, the spy.mp4 demo video gave me some chills. And now I can't update my OS before making an installation USB because Canonical can't just follow Linus' releases. Thanks.

<comment><USER7> >Would this entire Meltdown/Spectre thing count as the biggest mess-up of computing history? When yesterday the PoC repo was posted here, the spy.mp4 demo video gave me some chills.

It must be up there amongst the greats, probably with the "halt and catch fire" op code. Normally they just patch this stuff with microcode and never really tell anybody, this time that won't work.

I'm not entirely convinced it was a mistake at all (dons tin foil hat), Intel have been making suspicious design decisions to their chips for a well now (think this, Intel Me, hidden instructions, etc). It seems clear to me that this security by obscurity approach is quite frankly crap.

>And now I can't update my OS before making an installation USB because Canonical can't just follow Linus' releases. Thanks.

Linus' releases need some sort of buffering before they can be considered stable, often distributions will apply their own patches on top. Also consider the scenario where Linus releases a bad kernel and no testing has been performed before rolling out to all Linux users.

<comment><USER8> I think it's absolutely unreasonable to imply that this was intentional. Besides the massive amount of complexity these systems have, there are plenty of "legitimate" places to hide backdoors, instead of in a performance architecture decision.

Keep in mind that whatever "evil agencies" would have asked for this would most likely find themselves vulnerable, and nobody would sign off on.

I do agree, however, the "security by obscurity approach is quite frankly crap". The fact that even large corporations (not the big 5) can't even get away from ME speaks volumes about why this is a bad idea. Facebook isn't the only company with important data.

<comment><USER9> The Intel Management Engine is a backdoor. Speed variations in speculative execution are an inherent property of the technology. Until recently, few people thought this was exploitable, and it took a lot of work to figure out how to exploit this.

<comment><USER10> You do realize those are ideal properties for a backdoor, don't you? If you were writing the spec for a dream backdoor, you would write that down. The only way you could improve it would be "everyone thinks it's impossible, and they never figure it out."

<comment><USER11> the ideal properties of a backdoor were visualized to me the day i hacked into an author of a largely distributed piece of smtp mail server, only to find sitting in his home directory an unpublished integer overflow exploit written by him years earlier for a version of the software that is currently in wide distribution...

<comment><USER12> That's close to perfect, indeed. The drawbacks in this scenario are that (1) not everybody runs an SMTP server, (2) if it's open source (and if it's very popular, then it is), some other smart people will look for the bug and publish it for fame. That's quite different from a backdoor built into a processor (although I really doubt Intel was really involved in any shady practices, it looks like they were not smart enough).

<comment><USER13> Judging from the numerous decades old bugs recently found, the concept of many eyes needs to die.

And in the case of SMTP, it's basically a pinata of bugs for the last 30 years regardless of platform

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> (Copying my instructions from another post).

If kernel 4.4 doesn't work, I recommend compiling the 4.15 kernel. (Note, however, that you may need to apply a patch to NVIDIA drivers).

I've done this on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, 17.10, and Debian 8 so far this week. To compile, set CONFIG_PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION=y. That is:

        sudo apt-get build-dep linux
        sudo apt-get install gcc-6-plugin-dev libelf-dev libncurses5-dev
        cd /usr/src
        wget https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/t/linux-4.15-rc7.tar.gz
        tar -xvf linux-4.15-rc7.tar.gz
        cd linux-4.15-rc7
        cp /boot/config-`uname -r` .config
        make CONFIG_PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION=y deb-pkg

<comment><USER15> I wouldn't really recommend doing this, but if you really want to do this, it would probably be easier just to use the pre-spun mainline kernels: [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds)

<comment><USER16> Exactly, and use 4.14. According to a recent comment from a kernel dev both kernels use the same patch approach. 4.4 and 4.9 are using a different approach that's less ideal, less complete and apparently less tested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Waiting a few days to patch my own servers... Not sure what is more dangerous right now: applying these rushed patches or the vuln itself.

<comment><USER18> What distro are you running? I trust Red Hat to get kernel updates right the first time, I just patched externally facing servers and systems that handle PHI tonight with no issues (outside of one of my PostgreSQL servers showing a non-neglible increase in CPU usage, damnit Intel).

Of course, I also go into any updates with a rollback plan. ITIL sucks, but one thing it taught me was the value of well documented plans any time you make changes to production systems.

<comment><USER16> Same. RHEL/CentOS went without a hitch. The age of the kernel start's to concern me, though.

According to the top comment in one of the posts in HN even 4.9 and 4.4 use a less ideal patch: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16085672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16085672)

I can't really judge how much RH engineers are capable of fixing that kind of stuff in a kernel that's officially out of support upstream.

Based on the general quality of RHEL/RHV I trust them to do the right thing, but I have no insight whatsoever in how kernel development actually works.

<comment><USER18> Red Hat pays the salary of a couple kernel developers, backporting security fixes is a pretty big part of their job. Keep in mind, RHEL/CentOS 7 doesn't even use something newer like 4.4 - it's still on 3.10 because Red Hat guarantees a stable kABI throughout the lifetime of a release

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> See this is why you wait a day or two before patching :)

<comment><USER20> If everyone waited a day or two before patching, this bug would simply be opened a day or two later than it was.

<comment><USER18> How hard is it to just boot an older kernel and rollback the default? Before I even thought about patching sensitive systems tonight the first thing our IT director asked was if I had a rollback plan. The answer? "Yes, boot old kernel, yum history undo [transaction id], reboot".

Always have a backout plan when doing upgrades, I'm just glad EL and derived distributions have an easy way to do it with yum's transaction history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What was the problem?

All the notes say is that 109 fixes it.

<comment><USER22> [https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/4.4.0-109.132](https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/4.4.0-109.132) :

        linux (4.4.0-109.132) xenial; urgency=low

          * linux: 4.4.0-109.132 -proposed tracker (LP: #1742252)

          * Kernel trace with xenial 4.4  (4.4.0-108.131, Candidate kernels for PTI fix)
            (LP: #1741934)
            - SAUCE: kaiser: fix perf crashes - fix to original commit

diff'ing the two changes it was this:

        > diff -u linux-4.4.0/arch/x86/events/intel/ds.c linux-4.4.0/arch/x86/events/intel/ds.c
        > --- linux-4.4.0/arch/x86/events/intel/ds.c
        > +++ linux-4.4.0/arch/x86/events/intel/ds.c
        > @@ -415,7 +415,6 @@
        >  		return;
        >
        >  	per_cpu(cpu_hw_events, cpu).ds = NULL;
        > -	kfree(ds);
        >  }
        >
        >  void release_ds_buffers(void)

plus it's here: [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1741934...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1741934/comments/17)

<comment><USER23> They consider a bug that renders the OS unable to boot a "low" urgency!?!

<comment><USER19> Sorry fam - security issues are more important ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER24> I think it's fair to say build 108 has no security issues :P in fact, it's the most secure one yet.

<comment><USER25> Yup. It's so secure that they don't even load userspace into RAM!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> any report of windows update messing with the bios rendering motherboard non bootable (powers on , but no post, not even an error beep)

<comment><USER27> For AMD chips, yes. Yesterday Microsoft announced they were suspending rolling out updates to certain AMD chips because it was resulting in non-bootable systems. I didn't read the technical details so I can not say whether it was specifically BIOS-related. Both a total non-booting state and BSODs were mentioned in the article I saw (from general press, so might have been garbage, sorry).

<comment><USER28> Microsoft's claim was "Microsoft has determined that some AMD chipsets do not conform to the documentation previously provided to Microsoft to develop the Windows operating system mitigations to protect against the chipset vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown"[1], and their docs simply suggest asking AMD for more details[2].

So it sounds like it was probably specific chipsets and not CPUs, but who knows.

[1] - [https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/09/microsoft-halts- meltdown...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/09/microsoft-halts-meltdown- spectre-amd-patches/)

[2] - [https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/4056892/windows-10-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/4056892/windows-10-update-kb4056892)

<comment><USER29> It happened to one of my HP boxes that has an AMD chipset. After installing the update, windows 10 just hangs at the blue windows logo. Only solution is to turn the machine off and on twice, which then results in it undoing the update.

The Microsoft link you provide says "Microsoft is working with AMD to resolve this issue", so they're not just brushing it off and telling customers to contact AMD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I was under the impression that Ubuntu would automatically revert to last good kernel of the new one fails to boot. Was I mistaken?

<comment><USER31> AFAIK worse case you should be able to select the previous kernel in grub2 upon reboot. It just hangs after grub on this (bad) kernel I think...

<comment><USER32> Yeah but if you have a couple of hundred machines that aren't booting.... That's pretty worst case.

<comment><USER33> That is pretty worst case. OTOH, it teaches the lesson about testing updates on a small number of hosts before rolling 'em out globally.

One has to learn that lesson at some point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a little bit sensationalist (is that a word?).

It's not like Windows that bricks your laptop. It's a handful of hardware config, and you can easily boot with an older kernel.

</comment><comment><USER35> I just updated my Dell, but haven't restarted. Do we know how widespread the problem is and should I roll back the update?

<comment><USER7> I would suspend your machine until we find out more, I have the same problem.

<comment><USER36> You all do realize that (at least by default) ubuntu will keep old kernel versions around, and you can choose to boot them in GRUB, don't you?

This is certainly a pain, but it's hardly the first time a broken kernel has shipped. Reasonable recovery mechanisms are in place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Please look under "Meltdown - x86" section in GKH's (The Stable Kernel Maintainer) blog: [http://www.kroah.com/log/](http://www.kroah.com/log/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Sounds like one way to stop the bug. :P

</comment><comment><USER39> So do we make snide remarks about fixes not being tested like we did when microsoft also had issues fixing CPU level bugs?

</comment><comment><USER40> Did ubuntu botched an update again? Or is it the upstream kernel?

<comment><USER41> Has Ubutu botched or did Ubutu botch... please ;)

<comment><USER42> Muphry's Law strikes again!

<comment><USER43> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law)

 _If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> it's the fault of Intel, why don't they recall all the CPU? just like vehicle company

<comment><USER45> Doesn't this affect all of their CPUs going a long way back? And how do you recall embedded or laptop CPUs, which are often soldered in-place?

A recall would be great, but there's no way they'd be able to do it. Vehicle recalls are a bit different because they impact physical safety. Digital safety doesn't get the same priority.

<comment><USER46> even if it affects all speculative CPUs, if this happened in the car world, all the cars would be recalled. Not saying that is practical in computer world...just continuing with the analogy.

Spectre/Meltdown is a wakeup call for many things, one of them probably being for computer manufacturers to not solder the CPU to the Motherboard and for the x86 world to stick with a standard socket, to facilitate replacing parts.

<comment><USER47> > _" Spectre/Meltdown is a wakeup call for many things, one of them probably > being for computer manufacturers to not solder the CPU to the Motherboard"_

Good luck with that. A large portion of affected CPUs/SoCs are in mobile devices and ultrabooks. Socketed chips simply won't fly in those kinds of devices.

<comment><USER48> Then the whole device should be replaced, that's the price they pay for their design decisions. Being "too hard" doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to consumers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I will not be updating. I have yet to see this mythic JavaScript exploit, and I see too many other ways I, as an end user, can be affected.

I haven't even seen a proof of concept exploit that has the same conditions as in the wild. All the POC exploits seems to have been given some assistance in various ways (such as being given root perms or a preknown memory address).

Does anybody have an example of this JavaScript exploit or any exploit that would work in the wild?</comment>


Infochimps Acquires DataMarketplace - <AUTHOR> http://blog.infochimps.com/2010/12/14/infochimps-acquires-datamarketplace-com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Congrats to DataMarketplace, hopefully they made some scratch off the deal. I hope Infochimps decides to lower their commission, 50% is a bit steep.

Maybe this explains the issues with DataMarketplace in the past few months.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of Microsoft owning GitHub? - <AUTHOR> Tell me what you think. Is it any good? Did you stop using Github? Maybe something else entirely. <comment><USER2> It's actually made me more likely to use it, now that I can be assured that there are adults at the helm and they won't ever do any sketchy things because they are running low on funds.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't mind at all. I've carried on using it.

If they'd bought it in 2005 then it would have been a different story, but Microsoft today seems much, much better.

</comment><comment><USER4> With Satya at the helm of Microsoft, I don't think, there will any drastic change in github. So it's business as usual.</comment>


No, Graphic Designers Aren't Ruining the Web - <AUTHOR> http://jamieforrest.com/2012/02/19/no-graphic-designers-arent-ruining-the-web/

<comment><USER2> Designers aren't ruining the web because they want it to look good, they're ruining the web because they aren't clear on how to do it.

As the author points out, it's not an issue of bandwidth so much as an issue of visual clutter and processor power—although watching a page try to make calls to a dozen separate web services before it will finish loading and let me interact with it smoothly is certainly frustrating. That's not necessarily the designer's fault, though, everyone shares the blame there.

No, the problem is that graphic designers generally approach web pages as if they were designing for print or television.

After many years working in large agencies in New York, I can count on one hand the number of "creatives" who knew any more about the technologies that make up the web than a little basic HTML 1.0, at best.

I started my career as a print designer in the 1990s. Designing for books and magazines, you had to understand your medium. Any print designer worth their salt regularly went on press checks, knew the difference between a sheet-fed litho and a web-fed offset press, how linescreens related to dpi measurements, how trapping worked, drum vs. flatbed scanning, all that.

Compare that to graphic designers for the web, who in my experience have little to no understanding of how a browser renders code, or how different services communicate.

The best graphic designers aren't trying to be programmers, but they know the medium they're working in, and they don't try to force it to be something it's not.

Beauty, usability, and performance aren't mutually exclusive concepts on the web. It's just that most clients only care about the first one (until the site has already launched), and most designers don't have enough knowledge of the second two.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree, just to add a few of my points...

Designers are also ruining the web because they are removing _choice_ in how I view content.

HTML pages used to be designed such that they were a standard _markup_ language. Thus I could change the settings of my browser if I preferred a dark background with light text. Now in the land of everything is a DIV and CSS is used to recreate the markup language, this is no longer possible -- at least not in a generic way. Not to mention it breaks browsing in a completely cross platform way (lynx, small screened devices, screen readers, etc.); you designer, will always forget at least one. And don't get me started on sites that do not load the _content_ without javascript.

My preference would be that designers accepted the constraints of HTML. They are more than welcome to use CSS to offer my browser _suggestions_ to how it should be rendered, but as the viewer, the final choice would be to me. If you _MUST_ make the layout fit some exact format, switch to PDF (or similar) and don't pretend to be HTML.

I kind of feel like in the '90s, we screwed ourselves by having ugly defaults in the browsers. If no-CSS HTML files rendered more beautifully, maybe we would've avoided this mess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a mis-match between the terms "well-designed" and "looks beautiful." I find many sites that look gorgeous, but I can't find what I want, and can't make them do what I need. So I leave. They fail the basic requirement that they meet the needs of me, a potential customer.

But I'm also finding increasingly that I feel like my face is being pushed through mush. Everything seems soft, or rounded, or pastel, or otherwise character-free. This button is blended, that panel is graduated. It's all free of any kind of personality.

It's mush.

And so many times it's slow to load, slow to render, unusable on anything other than the huge screen size used by the "designer," and I _still_ can't find what I want.

Whose fault is that? Maybe it's not the graphic designer's fault, but it's certainly making the web an unpleasant, unrewarding, and sometimes downright frustrating experience.

But it looks gorgeous.

</comment><comment><USER5> Site appears to be down (assuming HN effect) so here's the text-only cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jamiefo...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jamieforrest.com/2012/02/19/no- graphic-designers-arent-ruining-the-web/&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, as a designer who does his best to understand his medium and make web pages load as cleanly as possible I can only agree with some of this.

As for my role as a designer, most of the decisions that are made as to what composes the website is not made by me. They are made by people above me in our company's chain-of-command. Most of these people have no idea what's involved in making a website but if I wish to continue receiving a paycheck I do what they say. I do try to educate them in some ways so that they can understand what's what but it doesn't always work out that way. Most of the things on the websites I work on that I do not necessarily like I can do nothing about, they are mostly marketing decisions.

Some of this hate towards designers can be spread around a bit more I think.

</comment><comment><USER7> Agree, it's about the how, not the who.

Methods evolve, and truly good design is as much about resource efficiency and user experience as it is interaction dynamics and look and feel.

Today, if our most iconic, beautiful buildings required, like the pyramids, 25,000 laborers hand-stacking mud-brick over a 20-year period, that would be bad design. If our intra-city train systems ran above-ground, powered by steam, that would be bad design.

It's not Graphic Designers who are ruining anything, just as it's not Teachers who are ruining public education. It's bad Designers using inefficient methods.

</comment><comment><USER8> Just one comment:

"Last I checked, "bandwidth" is an infinite resource..."

No it is not. There has to be infrastructure to carry that bandwidth, so there is a very real and physical limit on bandwidth. Also, in many countries, bandwidth costs money. Downloading costs money. I know that in America it is easy to find unlimited internet plans (or close to it), but in many countries every gigabyte you downloads costs money. My limit is 40 gigabytes, for which I pay about 40 dollars. After that, every 10 gigabytes I download is an additional 6 dollars.

<comment><USER9> Prices for "mobile broadband dongles with data" in the UK. Surprisingly expensive, and they have Fair Use policies. A big plan would be 1 GB per month.

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3605265>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Take a look at ad placement technology if you want a likely culprit for why any given website is making an excessive number of requests per-page-load. In addition to whatever resource is placed immediately onto the page (and the ultimate ad creative), most ad snippets also bring in tracking beacons, additional JavaScript and completely new documents. Designers have a part to play in this, but I would argue that lack of engineering innovation is at fault for the shameful state of ad placement technology today.

</comment><comment><USER11> If designers are to blame at all, it's as much the fault of clients that won't back down when asking the designers to add more and more to every page.

</comment><comment><USER12> technical note. bandwidth is NOT infinite. comcast certainly doesn't give me infiniteMB/s hell i don't get the 100MB/s i pay for.

</comment><comment><USER13> They did a decade ago, with Flash. Now we're getting it back :)</comment>


Why the grocery store of the future never happened (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbd.com/articles/2011/04/why-the-grocery-store-of-the-future-never-happened-58192.html

<comment><USER2> there are no stores in the future, it's a dated model, that seems pretty obvious even in 2011</comment>