An update on uBlock - <AUTHOR> https://www.ublock.org/announcement/ <comment><USER2> Anyone who wants a low overhead and trusted ad blocker should use uBlock Origin. The developer even refuses to take any donations (for some good reasons).

For those who want a lot more control and a content blocker, uMatrix would help.

Anything named as "Adblock" or "Adblock Plus" or similar is just a way for advertisers to decide what ads users see and don't see, depending on how much they're willing to pay and be held hostage to such extensions.

<comment><USER3> +1 to uBlock Origin

Amusingly, trying to load the uBlock website was initially blocked by uBlock Origin!

<comment><USER4> Still blocked for me

<comment><USER5> I guess the parent meant "until I confirmed I want to look at the page". There's no reason for uBlock origin to remove the block.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is- comp...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-is-completely- unrelated-to-the-web-site-ublock.org)

<comment><USER7> Why doesn't ublock origin change its name to something else to avoid this confusion?

<comment><USER8> uBlock Origin shouldn't change its name just because someone made a scammy website off its name. The issue is the website, not uBlock Origin.

<comment><USER9> That's not what happened. uBlock Origin was originally (heh) uBlock. Gorhill, the developer, got sick of endless hordes of people posting github issues about unblocked ads (an issue which should be directed at blocklist maintainers), so he gave the uBlock project away to some teenager.

It turned out that the kid didn't have the skills to continue the project. He basically ported the addon to Safari and put a donation beg message up on the website. Gorhill soon returned to the project, but was unable to get the rights to it back, so forked it as uBlock Origin. IIRC this was in 2015 or so. Ever since, Origin has been the only adblocker worth using.

<comment><USER8> > He basically ported the addon to Safari and put a donation beg message up on > the website.

No, he _created_ the website. That's why I wrote "scammy website". The domain name was registrated on April 18, 2015 [1]. The homepage has since changed, but at that time, it was begging for donations [2]. It had a donorbox campain, since taken down, that asked for ridiculous amounts such as "$25: Covers hosting the uBlock website for one week".

[1]: [http://www.whois-raynette.fr/whois/ublock.org](http://www.whois- raynette.fr/whois/ublock.org)

[2]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150601002655/https://www.ubloc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150601002655/https://www.ublock.org/)

[3]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150601002729/https://donorbox....](https://web.archive.org/web/20150601002729/https://donorbox.org/ublock)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm using uBlock Origin and get

        uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:

        https://www.ublock.org/announcement/

        Because of the following filter

        ||ublock.org^$document
        Found in: uBlock filters – Badware risks

<comment><USER11> Confirmed. I non longer use uBlock Origin.

<comment><USER12> Isn't ublock origin the 'good one'?

<comment><USER13> Yes, that is correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From Ublock Origin's github([https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock)): uBlock Origin is (and has always been) COMPLETELY UNRELATED to the web site ublock.org.

edit: and here is a commit blocking the site ublock.org - [https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commit/82067d1ef3370...](https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commit/82067d1ef33702fd1abd12fd31a0336bac28c41d)

</comment><comment><USER15> There appears to be so much confusion in this thread about whether or not this involves the open source uBlock Origin. uBlock Origin should seriously consider rebranding to distance itself from the commercial uBlock.

</comment><comment><USER16> Heh:

uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:

[https://www.ublock.org/announcement/](https://www.ublock.org/announcement/)

Because of the following filter

||ublock.org^$document

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems like they are just trying to steal the name of uBlock. AdBlock CEO says they "do love the name" [0] and are "investing heavily" into the product, but the commits in the repo [1] are just cosmetic changes and rebranding. Oddly enough, the only active committer is anonymous.

I wonder if this will cause legal troubles to the true uBlock Origin.

[0]: [https://twitter.com/judemaier/status/1020034358558670848](https://twitter.com/judemaier/status/1020034358558670848) [1]: [https://github.com/uBlock- LLC/uBlock/commits/master](https://github.com/uBlock- LLC/uBlock/commits/master)

</comment><comment><USER17> A good solution I've found for ad blocking is using the following hosts file:

[https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts)

Which sinkholes every known ad/malicious domain. It's been pretty useful, and it hasn't broken nothing important yet.

<comment><USER18> I've been using [http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm](http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm) anyone know how they compare?

(reading github description, seems it includes this as a source, but also others)

<comment><USER17> A quick line count shows that the file from your link has 14354 entries, while the one on the github repo has 65357.

<comment><USER19> My brain read that as 65537.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Well, people like nice, round numbers:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Was a user of "Adblock plus". They partnered with ad agencies and started to whitelist ads. That defeted the whole purpose and also it became clear the for profit organizations can not fight against the ad agencies as they have to partner if they want to make profit.

Ublock origin is so much awesome.Its free software and also very easy to use and its actually much more than adblocker.

</comment><comment><USER8> > If you've noticed recent updates to the product, that's because uBlock has > been acquired by the team responsible for AdBlock. We will be investing > heavily into uBlock to help it deliver on the promise of being one of the > best ad blockers available.

Why would they invest "heavily into uBlock" instead of improving AdBlock? It doesn't make sense to maintain two different ad blockers.

<comment><USER21> Because they are more interested in profits and more subscribers than blocking ads. Also, Adblock is more memory and CPU intensive, so perhaps they are looking to fix those issues in Adblock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> a crowd-fundraising round to help uBlock's actual founder may help him fend off competition from AdBlock, using his own (uBlock) brand name

</comment><comment><USER23> Self-hosted DNS solution with an easy setup and a nice web GUI to manage it.

[https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/)

[https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole](https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole)

<comment><USER24> Pi-hole has made some pretty poor blocking choices in the past, so use at your own risk.

For instance, they randomly decided to block *.microsoft.com - you can imagine the chaos that caused.

<comment><USER25> Only chaos if you run Windows. I wouldn't even notice if it was blocked.

<comment><USER26> >Only chaos if you run Windows

so breaking 80+% (being a bit conservative here) of people's computers is okay?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h The relevant question is whether it's 80% of people who are using pihole; that number is probably still pretty high, but lower than the average population I expect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think this Soylent News article summarizes the situation pretty well.

[https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/05/17/028245](https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/05/17/028245)

tl;dr: the real one is Ublock Origin, get it here: [https://github.com/gorhill/ublock](https://github.com/gorhill/ublock)

From the same author I would also suggest uMatrix, sort of a NoScript on steroids which allows a much finer filtering literally ripping pages of a great deal of their junk more selectively, but be aware that it requires "training" (telling it this can be loaded, that cannot) which for some non technical people could be annoying.

<comment><USER28> Nope.

Ublock & umatrix still don't block autoplaying videos. You should still use NoScript.

IMHO if you push small cosmetic changes in the UI in every update, like Gorhill does, there's a problem.

He has a poor attitide IMHO.

<comment><USER29> So you're saying that someone investing tons of free time in software that greatly benefits countless people, and then gives it away for free, has problems because of a minor update you don't like and have absolutely zero right to complain about?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Found in: uBlock filters – Badware risks

By uBlock Origin

<comment><USER31> I know what you mean because I have gotten te same screen, but if I hadn't I would have no idea what you mean by your comment. If it is your intention to be understood, try to add some context and full sentences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wasn't this the same asshole who hijacked gorhill's work 4 years ago and even asked for money for others' work? now he sold others' work? what a scumbag!

<comment><USER33> Yup

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> deleted

<comment><USER34> Your phrasing is a bit awkward. Just to avoid confusion, Raymond Hill is the original developer, some other fellow took over the uBlock project.

<comment><USER26> chris aljoudi, to be exact. he's also the author of the Purify adblocker on iOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Time for a new fork!

<comment><USER9> There's no need for a new fork. uBlock Origin is the good adblocker, and it is not related to this announcement. It's still as fantastic as ever, and has not changed hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Cue the YouTube video of Michael Scott saying "No God, please no. Noooo!"

uBlock was the AdBlock when AdBlock sold out. Now who will be the uBlock now that uBlock has sold out? And this is separate to uBlock Origin, right?

<comment><USER37> uBlock Origin is _the_ uBlock.

A few years ago, back when uBlock Origin was just uBlock, gorhill (it's sole developer at the time) entrusted the uBlock development to what was supposed to be a community effort. Instead a single developer took over and essentially did nothing with the extension except place donation links to himself in the extension and on the website.

It didn't take long until gorhill himself noticed and decided to pick development back up - under the new name of uBlock Origin. To this date uBlock has barely seen any development while uBlock Origin is actively maintained.

You can find gorhill's reaction on Twitter [https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1019975271443771392](https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1019975271443771392)</comment></comment>


"Faster and safer than typing a password. Just Knock." - <AUTHOR> http://www.knocktounlock.com

<comment><USER2> I tend to leave my phone on my desk. And that goes for both at home and at work. (I don't use 2-factor authentication, so I'm not terribly worried.) All that means is someone has to walk up to my desk, knock on my phone, and steal my passwords.

Hmm, I'm not thinking so. I think I'll stick with entering a password!

</comment><comment><USER3> Just installed it. It works great. As somebody that always has their phone in their pocket, this is perfect and more than worth the $4.

</comment><comment><USER4> How does the Mac authenticate a phone with Knock? Does it use HMAC-based One- Time Passwords (HOTPs) like Google Authenticator?

</comment><comment><USER5> That looks terribly inconvenient. Especially the part with me deliberately knocking on my rather expensive smartphone.</comment>


The Problem with Medium - <AUTHOR> http://fuzzyblog.io/blog/medium/2017/08/14/the-problem-with-medium.html <comment><USER2> "I never did find a way to get back to my hearted items on my phone."

On the phone, you go to your profile then tap view profile and then tap recommends.</comment>


Patio11 on his 362 day work year & what he does in his break - <AUTHOR> http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/08/hello-ladies-patrick-mckenzies-362-day-working-year-other-secrets-of-his-success-a-guest-post-from-patio11/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only one starting to get tired of these 'sell the shovels' sales pitches directed at SAAS startups? I respect Patrick and what he's done, but to me he is coming off more and more sleazy and this particular post doesn't help the case.

Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing? Is it getting worse or am I just getting more sensitive to it? That's an honest question, shlock like this just makes my skin crawl these days, but maybe I'm in the minority.

<comment><USER3> I think its getting so bad that in addition to the 'sell the shovels' there are lots of 'how to sell the shovels' or 'how we can help you sell the shovels' posts going around.

Don't dig for gold, sell shovels! Want to learn how to sell shovels? Subscribe to our newsletter where we teach you 3-4 things and then end up with us trying to sell you on stuff that will help you selling shovels.

Next thing you know, you are paying for 50 different services so you can "focus on selling shovels"

<comment><USER4> You could probably describe most economic activity that way, we have relatively simple core wants and needs (we want sex not SaaS). We spend our lives trying to acquire things that help us satisfy those by increasingly indirect means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this article is designed to promote the Business of Software I think it's failed entirely in my case. Working every day of the year aside from 3 days at a conference is not something I have any desire to emulate, nor do I want to hang out with people who think that's a good idea.

Work should be fun, interesting, challenging, and something that you can put away occasionally to do other things. If you can't, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> As Patrick has already responded, I don't think there is too much to add but apologies if you feel the line is misleading. Anyone that runs their own business is likely to be spending a lot of time thinking about the detail of what they are doing and not have the time to step back and think about working 'On' their business. We try to create an environment that allows people to step back from the day to day, and learn from each other.

We also happen to believe that far too many people spend their time as entrepreneurs telling other people how hard they work etc, and that frankly is not healthy. This is also a little 'tongue in cheek'.

<comment><USER6> > Chris

This is OT but I have mixed feelings about the practice of using someone's first name when responding to them on HN. On one hand, it's a bit e-stalky, especially when the handle bears no resemblance to the name and just... sound off. On the other, it's a rather elegant, understated way of distinguishing comments made in some more or less official capacity from regular opinions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops. Edited an unintentional. I just happen to know who it was. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This... has the voice of a paid shill trying to work in references to the Next Amazing Offer. It didn't read to me like patio11's essay or HN comment tone at all.

[ed] Is this more effective at attracting the kind of people who pay to attend the BoS conference than his usual voice?

</comment><comment><USER8> Whoa! - $2500 for a three day conference. The "Business of Software" conference is a pretty good business.

I know, I know - They rented a hotel ballroom and give you lunch and snacks. It's too bad the self-organizing bar-camp thing kind of died when the great recession ended. I thought it might kill expensive conferences like Craigslist killed newspaper classifieds.

<comment><USER9> I'm guessing that for the target audience, the 3 days of actual time is the more significant expense.

<comment><USER4> That would assume an annual salary of > $216,000 or so.

<comment><USER10> Not really. Opportunity cost and all that.

<comment><USER4> True

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a shame BoS have started selling the videos of talks when most conferences are going in the other direction and releasing videos for free.

Given that many speakers are doing so to contribute back to the community and build their own reputations it would be nice if conferences like BoS would be run by the community for the sake of the community rather than by commercial entities.

I'd be curious to know what percentage of the video sales price goes to the speakers as royalties.

<comment><AUTHOR> BoS releases all of the talks for free within a year of them being made. We, like many organisations are working hard to find a sustainable business model for content. In some cases, the speakers ask that we do not release the talk fro free. We do not share royalties with the speakers but then the cost of preparing the videos is far in excess of the revenue we make from selling early access.

If you have been to BoS you would know how community minded it is. It takes a huge amount of work to put something like BoS on and to be honest, we think we do a pretty good job of hosting and producing an event that is both very different and refreshingly uncommercial in outlook.

<comment><USER11> I've been involved with running events so I appreciate that things like venues, staffing, speaker expenses, etc can build up to a considerable amount and that those costs have to be met somehow.

If it's a case of the event not being financially sustainable without additional non-ticket revenue then maybe charging for videos is what has to be done, but if the videos aren't bringing in a significant revenue stream while presumably significantly reducing the number of viewers I'd have to ask if that's a worthwhile trade-off ?

Obviously the answer for that is going to be different if you're optimising for profit or for community benefit, but that's why I'd rather have community events run sustainably by non-profits than on a purely commercial for-profit basis.

[I have no issues with videos being charged for / with-held at the speakers request though]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman- constant-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant- contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/)

I think this is one of the best talks I ever watched. It's about startup life, without glamour, false-hope or delusional expectations. The fact that it's not a twenty-something year old guy, who sold it's business for millions of dollars in only 2 months, makes an excellent talk to anyone who has a SaaS software, consultancy business or is looking in join the startup bandwagon.

<comment><USER13> She quotes calculating churn as 1/churn rate.. in this example she said her churn was 2.2% month meaning lifetime value of 45 months. But that doesn't make sense, since its compounding/exponential.. its really only 32 months (not 45). Then she talks about having to explain the math to the VC. Am I missing something here, because I find this fairly alarming coming from a successful company.

<comment><USER14> Let C be the original number of companies (or their billings, doesn't matter.)

In month 1, we have 1 * C companies. In month 2, we have 1 * .978 * C companies. .978 is the survivorship rate, which is the inverse of the churn. In month 3, we have 1 * .978 * .978 * C companies.

Given that we are most keenly interested in how many company-months we rack up over time, we can solve for this with sum of an infinite geometric series. The formula is C / (1 - s) for s is the survivorship rate, or C / (churn).

Exactly like Gail said it was.

<comment><USER15>
        the survivorship rate, which is the inverse of the churn

That's an odd definition of survivorship rate though, isn't it? Suppose churn is 75%, that would give a SR of 1.333, which doesn't make sense to me...

More logical I think would be SR = (1-churn). Of course, .978 is close enough to 1.0 that it doesn't matter, and I don't understand how the grandparent arrived at 32 months.

Edit: your two formulas for total company-months also imply that sr = (1-churn), so maybe I'm missing something?

<comment><USER16> Survivorship = (1 - churn)

With this definition, a churn of 0.75 is a survivorship of 0.25.

You're perhaps being misled by the offhand phrase "the survivorship is the inverse of the churn"; in that sentence "inverse" is not being used in the mathematician's strict sense of "reciprocal", but in the more colloquial sense of "a thing that moves in the opposite direction from the previous thing".

None of us understand where 32 months came from.

<comment><USER15> Ah, that makes sense, thanks, in my mother tounge there's no specific word for "reciprocal", we just use "inverse" for both meanings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> TL;DR He goes to the Business of Software Conference.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is everybody saying that this post seems sleazy? Am I the only one that's not seeing it like that? He is only trying to encourage people to attend the BoS conference by telling us about the benefits. How else would you do it?

<comment><USER19> I don't think it's sleazy at all. It's simply enthusiastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ha! I read the first few paragraphs and then scrolled down until I got to the P.S.

Brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER21> I think the problem with this kind of approach to marketing is that you have to be a marketing geek to enjoy it. I wish there was a minimal approach for people who find marketing bothersome.

Also, this is more controversial, but I think patio11 should make his points faster. His posts tend to be overly long for what they bring to the table.

<comment><USER22> The default approach for people who don't want to market themselves or their wares is to get a salaried job that doesn't deal with customers. A perfectly acceptable option for those who want to just hack/just write/just do their thing.

Probably all of us struggle to see where on the continuum of [stereotypical hacker who fears sunlight] to [real estate agent that also writes code] we lie, and what sort of job/career/ambition we best fit into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If a company is big enough and should have documented their network for liability insurance, either A. I know places who didn't have it, or B. I know places that hid it, or C. it isn't always required. Weird.

</comment><comment><USER24> The analogy at the top of this needs a little work. Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) wasn't in the Social Network (Jesse Eisenberg)

Both great movies though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great comment below the blog post...

Matias, this phenomenon is known as the "Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle." A movie fan cannot know whether a character is played by Jesse Eisenberg or Michael Cera with any degree of confidence until he observes the whole movie. This is because the parts played by these two actors can only be accurately modeled by a complex wave-like function. Cinematic physicists are not sure, but it seems likely that, for any given movie, the part of the geeky outcast is played by both Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera simultaneously. Only when you watch the movie does the waveform collapse and you observe one or the other actor.

<comment><USER24> Haha, fair enough, I stand corrected then. Well played.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Who cares?

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice way to sell your brand patio11.</comment>


Build React, Vue.js web apps in no-time - <AUTHOR> https://appseed.us/ <comment><USER2> What types of apps I can built with this service?</comment>


API Harmony Hits the Next Major Version - <AUTHOR> http://www.apiful.io/intro/2017/01/20/new-harmony.html <comment><USER2> > APIful is a blog dedicated to topics in web APIs and API based web services. > Join us on moving the internet forward with APIs!

Not trolling, but seriously wondering what APIful.io's value proposition is. Home page is confusing and after stumbling around a bit, it looks like they crawl API usage on github and stackoverflow questions on those API.

How would a full-stack engineer like me use the site, and for what purpose / value? Also, their about page list over 10 people. How is the site monetized??

<comment><USER3> Hi Sean, there are two things:

API Harmony is a research prototype we develop here at IBM Research. Using it, we explore things like mining API specifications, static code analysis of web API requests, or API recommendation. Some of this research shows directly in API Harmony (with sometimes good, sometimes fair, and sometimes rather poor results, admittedly), and others are disseminated as more fundamental research results (like our static analysis of web API requests, which made it to the International Conference on Software Engineering this year).

APIful.io is a blog about our work, within API Harmony and beyond. We use it to expose our results and (hopefully) foster discussions.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Tool that can check my front-end files for browser coverage - <AUTHOR> I'm searching for a tool that can help me analyse the code in my HTML, CSS and JS files and inform me which browser isn't compatible with the API or method I've implemented in them, currently i end up testing the website on all browsers to check for compatibility issues and once i find them i verify on caniuse.com and check SO for alternatives. I recently found out doiuse.herokuapp.com and check my CSS files there. Is there any other tool that can help me? <comment><USER2> It's probably easier to find tools by searching GitHub instead of SO. It looks like doiuse also comes as a PostCSS plugin so you could have better compile time linter integration with that[0]. There's also a similar plugin for ESLint called eslint-plugin-compat which checks for JS cross browser compatibility[1].

You can also set up automation via WebDriver for cross-browser functional and visual testing if you really want to be sure everything works well. WebDriverIO is good for that[2]. Unless you're going to sink over 1000 hours into the project it's probably not worth it though. It's notoriously tricky to set up correctly if you haven't done it before.

[0] [https://github.com/anandthakker/doiuse](https://github.com/anandthakker/doiuse)

[1] [https://github.com/amilajack/eslint-plugin- compat](https://github.com/amilajack/eslint-plugin-compat)

[2] [https://webdriver.io/](https://webdriver.io/)</comment>


Top-down performance analysis methodology - <AUTHOR> https://dendibakh.github.io/blog/2019/02/09/Top-Down-performance-analysis-methodology <comment><USER2> A note here that "front end" and "back end" are meant in the CPU microarchitecture sense, not the web development sense.

I think Brendan Gregg's _Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud_ is still the single best volume on this topic; I'd recommend Gunther's _Guerilla Capacity Planning_ as a useful followup to get a foothold on theory.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish the author had explained how he went from identifying that the issue is stalled references to DRAM to the CYCLE_ACTIVITY.STALLS_L3_MISS performance event. Similarly from DRAM_Bound to MEM_LOAD_RETIRED.L3_MISS_PS. My complaint is that there's still a lot of magic here that requires carefully reading the Intel manuals that is elided in this post. That said, thanks to the author for the post---it is still very useful.

Edit: the author has another post that covers this information [https://dendibakh.github.io/blog/2018/06/01/PMU-counters- and...](https://dendibakh.github.io/blog/2018/06/01/PMU-counters-and- profiling-basics)

<comment><USER4> Hi, I'm glad you like the article. The process how I went from TMAM metric to particular event that was used to calculate it is describe in the TMAM metrics table: [https://download.01.org/perfmon/TMA_Metrics.xlsx](https://download.01.org/perfmon/TMA_Metrics.xlsx)

In the same row for DRAM_bound metric there is precise event PEBS specified that we can use for locating the issue. Sampling on the precise event will let us detect exact place in the code where we have the most amount of L3 misses.

Let me know if you have further questions!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the reply and the pointer!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would play nicely with the Scalability Prediction tools we built: [https://stacktical.com/demo](https://stacktical.com/demo) As soon as a regression is detected in the CICD pipeline a Top-down analysis can be done to according to the amount of Serialization and/or Synchronization penalties.

</comment><comment><USER6> Would love to see the exact same thing but for ARM, and in particular aarch64.

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately aarch64 does not have anywhere near the number and variety of events offered by the X86 PMU.

<comment><USER6> But it does have some (usually), and it needs perf optimization much more, especially in regards to cache misses and such, because RAM is usually pretty slow on lower end ARM.</comment></comment></comment>


Seattle, in Midst of Tech Boom, Tries to Keep Its Soul - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/technology/seattle-in-midst-of-tech-boom-tries-to-keep-its-soul.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Took a job in Bellevue in April and moved from Philadelphia to Seattle. So far it's a been an interesting experience. I've encountered many people hostile to software engineers in general. A bunch of people immediately ask if I work for Amazon with a hint of disdain after I state my occupation. So it hasn't felt super welcoming so far.

I get it, even in some neighborhoods in Philadelphia the same thing is happening. Although to a much lesser extent, but there is tension between locals and newcomers. I was initially sympathetic to the locals, but now it just seems people will complain about the change no matter what.

But you have no right to complain about this gentrification when you are operating newly built apartment complexes, charging a premium to tech workers. And then go on to say you have Amazon prime. Screw you, Owen.

<comment><USER3> Seattle has never been particularly welcoming to newcomers; people there tend to be insular and it can be hard to make friends if you don't already know people (even before the amazon/tech stuff -- plenty of articles about 'the seattle freeze' that predate it). Being from there helps. Not being in tech helps -- there are so many new software engineers meeting one just isn't very interesting. You can hardly blame people; if every single new person you meet is a software engineer you get real sick of hearing that real fast. You appear like you're a dime a dozen, because as a software engineer transplant in Seattle you are and to anyone not in tech your work is utterly boring; if you can, try talking about hobbies instead and avoiding talking about work entirely. That might help, but it's definitely an uphill battle in that city.

Also everyone hates amazon. So if you don't work there, be outwardly and explicitly proud that you don't -- that's a huge selling point when it comes to making friends. Partly because of the white collar sweatshops (people in seattle generally liberal and pro-labor), partly because of the blue-collar sweatshops, partly because 'large corporation = evil', partly because the countless new techbros with no respect for Seattle culture who spend 11hrs/day at work and don't have time to develop a personality romping around town give it a real bad reputation.

<comment><USER4> I keep reading all these scary stories about how unwelcoming people from Seattle is; I moved here back in February and my experience until now have been completely the opposite: almost every Seattleite I meet is super friendly and talkative, at the point that it feels almost like being in a small town.

Maybe I am just lucky? but I think Seattle is one of the coolest cities in the US, except of course for the traffic.

<comment> steve-howard I think it depends greatly on your personality, how you spend your free time, what part of the city you're in, and how your first few experiences shapes you perception.

I find Seattle to be unwelcoming, personally, but it's not that people aren't friendly when you can get them to talk. It's the pervasive avoidance of eye contact and general desire not to engage with strangers that can make it a lonely place.

<comment><USER4> I had only lived in big cities before (Buenos Aires and NYC) where is very unusual to have any kind of interaction with strangers. In my experience here people starts conversations all the time in almost any public space (grocery stores, parks, buses, etc.) and I have to say that I'm not used to that haha but I really enjoy it. I wonder if this is a neighborhood thing maybe?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _John Criscitello placed posters in Seattle 's Capitol Hill neighborhood > proclaiming "Welcome! Rich Kids," and "Wish you weren't here."_

Its hard not to feel angry at people like this. "Rich Kids" really? These "Kids" spent years developing their engineering skills to get to the point where they are now. Are engineers paid a lot? Of course. But we're certainly not in the same category as those who inherit wealth. Most engineers that I know come from incredibly humble backgrounds.

<comment><USER6> This guy is a terrible hypocrite; he creates art bemoaning new people in his neighborhood, while being a recent transplant from New York himself. He's cashing in on the worst kind of 'us vs them' mentality.

Some people make excuses that he's only rallying against the stereotypical brogrammer, but I don't think that's true. He's really against anyone being in his neighborhood he didn't personally approve of. He's the same as the neighborhood watch keeping the 'undesirables' out of the cul-de-sac.

<comment><USER7> I think "terrible hypocrite" is a major overstatement. The guy is a gay artist who moved to an area built and populated largely by the gay and creative community, only to find it in the process of being colonized by moneyed interests and neighborhood tourists. He identified with the original neighborhood profile strongly and strongly rejects the new one, as I do — though unlike me, he's making his distaste known. I for one salute him, and I love his posters. And by the way, he's not getting rich off selling a couple handmade prints he makes in his own shop.

<comment><USER8> Quintessential hipster bullshit. His community doesn't have any special rights to dictate the culture of the region and if he doesn't like the newcomers he can leave. It's also absurd to presume that just because someone has a high paying job they cannot qualify as a legitimate part of the community. Your petty and insular mindset is gross.

<comment><USER7> We might have to fuck off because the rent is too high, but it doesn't mean we have to do it quietly. The people coming in should know how much they are resented by the people they are displacing.

The mechanics terraformed capitol hill, the current community colonized it, and now the next wave is buying it.

No one here is dictating culture - they are asserting their preference to a community that was built over decades over another that is superseding it, and which they find distasteful.

<comment><USER8> II reject the idea that you can judge someone as a cultural reject based on the salary they take home.

<comment><USER7> Us too. We also reject the wealth-forward culture helping itself to the neighborhood, not necessarily the people who take part in it. But very often we find the representatives of that culture to be intolerable as well. Ye shall know them by their fruits, and so forth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have lived in Seattle since 2009, first working at Microsoft and now working remotely for a Bay Area company. For people who aren't familiar with the Seattle area, it is cleaved into 2 parts:

1) The city of Seattle or the "west side". This area is increasingly dominated by Amazon, local startups and engineering offices for Bay Area companies like Facebook and Google.

2) The cities to the east of Lake Washington (Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland) or the "east side". This is the domain of Microsoft, Expedia, Concur and a smaller set of startups.

Most of the intense change has occurred in Seattle and _specifically_ in the South Lake Union area where Amazon is located. Yes, there has been change and growth elsewhere, but nothing that I would consider alarming.

I'm personally optimistic that Seattle will find a balance between growth and continuing to have an enviable culture and cost of living.

<comment><USER10> I think Capitol Hill is the most glaring change to me in the past 5 years. One of the neatest and most unique neighborhoods in the city, in a way iconic to how Seattle was seen is now filled with brand new condos and multi-use buildings. For god sakes there have been gay-hate crimes on Broadway.

Yes, tons of new development has happened in SLU, but that area wasn't much of an established neighborhood to live in before, so it doesn't bother me as much.

Seattle is quickly losing any remaining "grit" and that as someone who has always called it home that is seriously depressing. I'm in the Central District which to some degree feels more like a Capitol Hill (except with black people!) but I imagine it is only a matter of time before the condos invade here as well.

<comment><USER11> It seems to me that the fact that Capitol Hill was the unique, Bohemian, and affordable neighborhood that it was in your memories was just an accident of the 20th century. It's: * Right next to downtown * Has great views and * Has very easy access to a major road, I-5.

Why on earth wouldn't having credentials like that make it prime property, even if a certain retailer didn't exist?

But from 1950 - 1990, nobody wanted to live in a city, they wanted to drive in from their suburbs. So cities became refuges for the interesting and weird, while the rest of America had their half-acre.

That trend is reverting now, and the real value of property in major cities is being reevaluated, and at something closer to what it probably should be.

Also, I really liked this Wonkblog[1], not just for highlighting the differences in densities in world urban areas, but also because he talks about the mentality of "Well, I've moved here now, but the development can stop now!"

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/06/th...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/06/there- is-no-such-thing-as-a-city-that-has-run-out-of-room/)

<comment><USER12> > * Right next to downtown * Has great views and * Has very easy access to a > major road, I-5.

> Why on earth wouldn't having credentials like that make it prime property, > even if a certain retailer didn't exist?

Crappy transit (49 is your only bus route for many parts of the hill and is slow and only runs on Broadyway; 10/11/43 serve very specific areas); I wouldn't call the I-5 access great (the intersection at Denny is frequently really slow and backed up because people run lights and block the intersection).

<comment><USER11> Bus routes can be fixed, that's a months-years problem. I'm sure the city will adjust at some point, probably before 2018, to give Capitol Hill really amazing service.

I was exaggerating a bit... but the highway basically runs right beside the length of the neighborhood. It's pretty convenient to get on, even if Denny is totally packed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any time I see a line about a city "keeping its soul" or a company "coming for its soul", I have a reasonable expectation that "soul" is going to be defined myopically. The recent past will be regarded as perfection, not to be tampered with.

Sadly, this article continues that pattern. The past is privileged and the future is to dance only to its tune. No wonder people are upset that things are changing - privilege is being challenged.

<comment><USER14> But I have so many great memories of the past! I literally don't have any great memories of the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another born-and-raised Seattleite here. Grew up there, went to UW, etc.

Seattle lost its "soul" a long time ago. For me, Almost Live! going off the air was really the bookmark that Seattle was quickly becoming a homogenized west-coast city (no different really than SF or Portland).

I don't really think Amazon is worth singling out, either. Amazon doesn't help, but Microsoft's a monolith that's been around for quite some time. They used to (and still do) pull a shitload of the UW CSE graduating class straight into MSFT, and nobody wants to live in Redmond or Bellevue until you're starting to think about a family, a house, etc. It also goes totally unmentioned here, but biotech was/is huge in SLU.

My point being, money's been flooded into Seattle for quite some time now. If they wanted to keep Seattle "Seattle", i.e. different from the other west- coast cities, the time to plan that out was 15 years ago.

I also think it's hilarious to hear people bemoan the death of the hill, and even more hilarious to see signs like "rich kids leave" and shit like that. I bet they weren't around a decade ago when the gay community used to say the exact same thing to hipsters that were flooding into the hill (myself included), even down to the insinuation that all hipsters were rich kids. Hilarious to see history repeat itself.

<comment><USER16> Yep. Born and lived there all through the 80s and 90s before moving to the Bay Area. I still read the Seattle Times online, and the gripes about Californians coming in and ruining the place in the past few years are hilarious; it's been the same story for decades. Blame someone else. Boeing engineers. Microsofties. Whatever, it's always somebody else.

Thanks for mentioning Almost Live. Every few years I search for DVDs, search torrents, etc. Truly one of the saddest days in Seattle when it went off the air.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've only lived in Seattle for about 6 years, but have seen / felt a rise in rents over that time. When we moved here, lots of rentals were offering one or two months free rent as a move in special. Now, not so much.

Because he was sick of friends moving away, a friend of mine made his rookie run for the city council this past year. He didn't survive the primary, but he had some good ideas about housing that have in part been taken up by other candidates going forward.

The first was a mandatory inclusionary zoning policy, which would give developers building incentives, such as allowing additional height, in exchange for a fixed percentage of units being affordable. Affordability here was defined in terms of HUD's guidelines for percentage of income spent on housing (in this case assuming someone earning Seattle's decidedly not-livable minimum wage).

Some form of that first idea seems to have survived my friend's candidacy to live on in other proposals / candidate platforms. Another that I thought was clever, but hasn't seen much uptake, tried addressing the problem from the demand side. Here the idea is that Seattle would run its own voucher program to subsidize rents for low-income people. This one was a little more ambitious and would require new revenues, but is a nice alternative to supply side options.

And of course a purely supply side solution doesn't entirely solve the problem. New units tend to command higher rents in general. Also, a glut of condos might not reduce prices so much as encourage speculation from non- resident owners. Certainly more units need to built, but new construction doesn't entirely solve affordability in the near term.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash This is a severely under-appreciated point about housing costs. I live in a college town and rents have been climbing to the degree where the ratio of income to housing expenses is the highest in the nation, leaving New York and San Francisco in the dust.

Every once in a while there will be more proposals to build condos over existing houses or apartments. We've been here before: housing stock is considerably increased while rents around town are given an implicit "go" to be raised across the board. If you're a financially struggling student at an Ivy League school you're not just gonna up and leave cause your rent went up another $100-$200. You're just gonna take out more debt. It doesn't help that aside from campus housing there are like 3 landlords in the whole city

Building housing in a bull market is almost always the right choice, but let's not pretend rents are going to magically fall. Or stop rising. Housing is one of the most elastic goods one can find. Everyone has to sleep somewhere.

<comment><USER18> >I live in a college town

Boulder? Because if so, PLEASE vote down the land use issues on the ballot.

[http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/10/they-are-coming- for-o...](http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/10/they-are-coming-for-our- neighborhoods/408994/)

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Ithaca, where we don't have the luxury of flatness so everything's hemmed in by the lake and the hills, like a reverse geography San Francisco

<comment><USER19> You can build on hills. I've lived on a hill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I moved to Seattle in 1980 and fell in love with the city and it's unique culture. Seattle has grown up for sure but in my view the growth has been handled overall pretty well and we have kept a lot of the coolest part of the culture here(music, beer, coffee, movies check out the SFF, outdoor festivals every weekend during the summer, great outdoors, the sea and mountains and so on). I have been tempted many times by offers from the Bay area and the valley but I still love this place and just can't bring myself to leave, although my second love is SF :) In a lot of ways I see Seattle and San Fran as sister cities.

<comment><USER21> Then what would Portland be?

<comment><USER22> The middle child.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've lived in Seattle since the late 80s when I got the hell out of Olympia WA where I grew up. I remember when it was nearly impossible to find a decent tech job in the city, and you had to cross a bridge to Bellevue or Redmond, which is non-optimal for so many reasons. I for one am happy as hell that tech is booming here. If you are thinking of coming here, do it, lots of us are welcoming to transplanted tech nerds.

</comment><comment><USER24> The west coast has a liberal population less receptive to change than Bush/Cheney era Republicans. SF has a lot of misguided anger towards tech workers.

<comment><USER25> The gender imbalance is a bummer got almost everyone

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> State has zero funding for the mentally ill, so they all congregate in the downtown, many around the largest tourist trap here, the Pike Place Market.

There are Maseratis driving by parks full of tents here.

</comment><comment><USER27> I recently moved to the eastside and haven't been experiencing much disdain for being a tech worker. Most of my spare time is spent heading into the cascades to hike the amazing trails, though.

<comment><USER12> The eastside is less obsessed with preserving an image of itself as a "gritty" place. Parts of the eastside (I'm looking at you, downtown Bellevue) are sort of obsessed with the opposite — shows of ostentatious wealth.

The Cascades have a lot of great hiking and are reason enough to live on the eastside :). If you don't already, get an "America the Beautiful" pass ([http://www.nps.gov/findapark/passes.htm](http://www.nps.gov/findapark/passes.htm)) which will get you into National Forest areas as well as National Parks (Rainier, Olympic National Park). And of course the state Discover pass gets you into a few areas (Tiger Mountain is not super wild, but very close).

<comment><USER28> Also if you have a 4th grader don't forget about [https://www.everykidinapark.gov/](https://www.everykidinapark.gov/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seattle is a godless soulless husk of what it once was, attitudes that spawn things like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_the_Bastards_Out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_the_Bastards_Out) didn't win out. Try living in Utah for a while (as a real or pretend Mormon of course) if you want to see what real culture and community tastes like even in 2015.

I work in Seattle but I'll never live in the city proper. The rest of King County, excepting the south side, is at least a decent and modestly priced ($900/month single bed apartment) place to live even if it has no soul. Unfortunately it won't last, Bellevue is in the same place Seattle was not too long ago.

(This is more hyperbolic than it probably needs to be.)

</comment><comment><USER30> While growing up in the Seattle area in the 70's & 80's, I always thought Seattle was the coolest city in the world. It's still fun for me to visit and I do miss the trees, lakes, and Mt. Rainier, but to me it has completely lost its charm. All that was once cool and unique has been monetized and whitewashed.

<comment><USER31> Whitewashed? I think this is the most diverse Seattle has ever been. Just a smudge above Portland.

<comment><USER32> I think darmok is using whitewashed to mean "sanitized" or "cleaned up" not "has a greater percentage of white people".

Like when congressional testimony whitewashes a friendly fire incident, it generally means that they are covering it up or making it look better.

<comment><USER31> Oh I agree. I was in Seattle in 2005. My girlfriend was here in the 80s to 90s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> People in Seattle very friendly. They are unhappy about rising rents. There is an eerie consensus that Amazon is to blame, but I haven't heard negative remarks or attitudes towards individuals, just towards Amazon the company and the tech boom in general.

I'm really impressed by the city government. Seattle is much more pro growth than San Francisco. There's much more construction. Like SF, people also blame construction for rising prices, but it's pretty normal for people to reverse causality (developers build because of expectations about demand, demand doesn't happen because developers build. But like most professions, if you aren't a property developer, it may not be obvious).

<comment><USER34> I don't think it's that simple, especially when talking about things like "luxury" development that changes the city's housing standard.

<comment><USER33> Imagine you're the loan officer in a bank. A developer comes in and says "I need a loan to build a luxury building. There's no projected demand, but that doesnt matter, becuase luxury buildings /cause/ demand for luxury units".

Seriously, would you loan him the money?

When you view it from the perspective of a property developer or bank, it's pretty clear that projected demand is the /cause/ of building construction and not the other way around.

Amazon moving downtown will create a lot more demand for higher end units. And that demand is the reason higher end units are being constructed. Amazon's plans for their downtown campus (it's huge - all the way over to Denny) /caused/ many residential developers to buy and develop lots downtown.

Think about those 45 minute waits to get on I5 right now. Imagine what it will be like with thousands more Amazon employees in line. All those people waiting in line will be thinking "I need to move downtown, this commute is crazy". That mental image is projected demand. If you picture that, you too will want to build apartments downtown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's fascinating and sad to read these articles, about some cities struggling with the effects of tech wealth while other cities would see it as an almost unqualified boon.

We constantly hear about a desperate shortage of software engineers from tech companies, as well as talk of "six figure" salaries. But the median price for housing in SF is well over a million now, and if you're hoping to have kids and raise a family, trying to buy a SFH or 3br apartment, even in the remaining unfashionable and mildly blighted areas south of 280 (not really unsafe, but a bit depressing in spots, lots of dumping, garbage, paved over front yards with abandoned cars), even that you'll be lucky to get in for much less thank 900k unless the house needs a lot of work or is very small with no expansion possibilities. A shortage of young people who are willing to work for salaries too low to put down real roots is not a shortage of workers, it's a wage vs cost of living problem.

SF needs to build (certainly the bay area needs to build), but I don't see construction in the bay area as more than part of the solution. We will eventually have to accept that it isn't desirable or possible to cram all the programmers into a 7x7 grid and a narrow corridor down the peninsula.

Truth is, there are a lot of interesting old cities in the US that are pretty much neglected.

I thought Patti Smyth said it best:

"The Godmother of Punk recalled coming to New York in 1967 when she was broke and the city was "'down and out,' and you could get a cheap apartment and 'build a whole community of transvestites or artists or writers.'" But today, she says, "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."

I don't think that it's realistic to expect a coordinated effort from the tech "industry", which doesn't really speak with one voice or have one opinion. Market forces may eventually create the change we'd like to see, but for now, the tech industry really has obtained a subsidy in the form of control over the immigration system that prevents these market forces from working as they should. The first step is to stop taking claims of a worker shortage seriously, and don't give tech companies a crutch that allows them to avoid making the adjustments that will help everyone in the long run (in other words, don't allow tech companies to control visas that force workers to work in San Francisco or the valley, make sure all members of the workforce are free to chose their job, field, educational and career path, and where they live, in response to market signals).

Just to be clear, as I have in the past, I feel positively about general immigration, I believe that immigrants must be free to choose their own path in live, including what they study, where they live, who they will work for.

<comment><USER36> _housing in SF is well over a million now, and if you 're hoping to have kids and raise a family_

Why isn't a nice condo in Mountain View for $700K good enough? 1,300 sq.ft is plenty of space to live. For instance [http://www.mlslistings.com/property/ml81517677/1945-mount- ve...](http://www.mlslistings.com/property/ml81517677/1945-mount-vernon- ct-13-mountain-view-ca-94040)

<comment><USER37> Because you can get a nice house with almost 2000 sq. ft. in Texas for under $300k [0]. We're not talking about somewhere out in the country or in some distant exurb, either: I'm talking about housing prices I just looked up in a nice neighborhood within the City of Dallas. It's a safe neighborhood with good schools (speaking from personal experience: I grew up in that exact neighborhood).

Also, I currently rent a 1500 sq. ft. townhouse in Dallas for $1220/month. There's no way I'd be able to get anything nearly that nice in the Bay Area.

[0] [http://www.dallasrealestate- homes.com/Dallas%20Subdivisions/...](http://www.dallasrealestate- homes.com/Dallas%20Subdivisions/Pepperwood%20Estates.htm)

<comment><USER38> Fellow Dallas resident as well. Everyone here in Uptown keeps complaining about rent increasing but these HN threads help me realize how good we have it. The job market is extremely hot as well.

<comment><USER37> Actually, I live in Far North Dallas. Rents in Uptown are too rich for my blood.

I get all the benefits of living in a suburb (low rent and lots of space), but I can still walk to Addison Circle when I want to go out and have fun. It's the best of both worlds to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> hey HN, I'm a happy software writer in Seattle, am happy to get coffee or exchange emails about Seattle culture from my perspective. I love meeting other programmers and talking about our field (or other stuff too. :3 ). Email & twitter in profile!

</comment><comment><USER40> I lived in First Hill / Downtown from 2001 until 2011, and from the perspective of an engineer who is into outdoor sports, I can't think of a better place to have lived. I averaged 3 nights a week of skiing at the pass after work during the winters, and 2-3 nights a week of climbing at various locations (Index, 32, 38, Gold Bar) in the summer. There are also dozens of equally accessible mountain biking locations, sailing, fly fishing, hiking, etc. Sure there are more tech bros and self important hipster douches now, but it's still an awesome place to live. (I moved out to the mountains and live in a remote town of about 200 people in North Central WA now.)

</comment><comment><USER41> >> John Criscitello placed posters in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood proclaiming "Welcome! Rich Kids," and "Wish you weren't here."

Don't hate them, cash in on them. Start a high-end or artistically product and sell to the 'rich kids'.

<comment><USER42> Exactly as Banksy has done in London

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The true soul of Seattle is complaining about the new people moving here.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79SF7UoO1pI&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79SF7UoO1pI&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER44> Yay, yet another city trying out the horribly naive and misguided "Below Market Rate" housing model that only serves to distort the local housing economy further.

I had a front row seat to experience the process because someone I date got into a BMR house about 1.5 years ago.

For those that don't know, BMR housing programs usually work like this:

\- In order to build a new building, the builder must agree to allocate X% of the units in a building to be below market rate. In SF, I think it's currently 15% of units, or 20% equivalent of a building in another project that is located within 1 mile of the original project (I might be off a bit here or the requirements might have changed, but that's the gist of it)

\- To qualify to be able to buy one of these units, someone needs to be an SF resident and make between 70% and 110% of the median income, with most units limited at 90% of the median income.

\- The price of the unit is tied to the median income in the city forever (i.e. you can't sell at a "profit" like with regular housing). The only way you make money is if the city experiences real income growth above and below the median income (remember: median income, not mean income)

\- From what I saw, units are ~ 1/3 of their fair market value. The unit my partner got into was a 1061 square foot, 2 bedroom, 2 full bath in a Hayes Valley luxury condo. The price was about $330k with a $60k down payment.

\- There is a down payment assistance program and special lenders approved. This means it's possible to come to the table with like $10k, since the assistance program covers the other $50k. This down payment can be paid any time during the length of the mortgage including at the end of the 30 years. The mortgage is a safe fixed rate loan.

\- Getting into a unit involves going through a class, filling out some forms, getting an approved lender and then applying to available units you qualify for. This puts you in a lottery to be selected. From the lotteries I saw, few enough people either know about the program or qualify that you probably have a 1/10 chance of getting into a unit. If you apply to 10 buildings, over 1-2 years, you're almost certain to get in. Once you're selected, your application goes through additional scrutiny to check if you qualify. If you do, you close on the home.

\- Overall, on the unit my partner got she's paying about $2100 for a super nice two bedroom that would probably rent for $5000-5500.

\- You can't sell the house except through the BMR program at a price relative to the median income when you decide to sell. There are two formula for calculating the price, you choose whichever is higher. You cannot leave the home to anyone in your will unless they also qualify through the BMR program (you don't really ever own the home except legally because of all the restrictions).

\- Although you can't sell the home at a real profit in the future, the discrepancy between the current rent and the mortgage is essentially "profit" earned today. The $3000 saved per month every month (or whatever amount the person would be paying otherwise to stay in a market with great economic opportunities) is essentially profit earned off the housing now instead of from a future sale of an asset. This applies to rent control as well. Having rent control from 15 years ago and 1x the median income means you're probably doing as well economically as an engineer paying market rate today and earning 2x the median income (or something like that. I haven't done the exact calculation. It's even more if you have rent control on a multi-room unit and charge market rate like most people I know with rent control)

My biggest beef with this program is that it creates an asymptotic condition (hard limit on who qualifies based on specific percentages of median income). In economic systems, asymptotic conditions basically always great pathologies and boundaries that people try to game.

One of the biggest pathologies I see has to do with how much of the market is still excluded from affordable housing. In SF, I've read that it's estimated that you need to earn about 4x the median to be able to afford a home. The reality is that it's worse than that because homes are now being sold in all cash deals above asking before homes even hit the market officially (i.e. put in MLS).

This means that basically everyone between 90/110% of the median income and 400+% of the median income are excluded from the market for no reason whatsoever. The better non-asymptotic way to create affordable housing that is accessible to all is to change how much assistance based on a calculation that compares your current income (or better, your income in SF over the past three years averaged to make it harder to game) relative to the current median income.

The other issue I have with programs like this (and rent control) is that it conveniently satisfies the housing needs for a large percentage of voters without actually addressing the underlying problem of supply. By definition, 50% of voters are below the median income and 50% are above it. There will be roughly some bell curve like distribution around this central value and I would imagine that skewness trends towards the lower bounds, meaning that a huge chunk of voters are satisfied and no longer care or participate in solving the real problem, which is supply.

Taking rent control as the example, the 172,000 rent controlled units probably impacts 3/8s of San Francisco voters. These people vote in their short term economic interest which is protecting rent control and tenants rights and lets them be an ostriches about long-term economic interests, which is affordable housing availability as their housing needs change. That rent control studio that worked with you when you were 25? What happens when your partner moves in when you're 30? How about when you and your partner get married and decide you want a kid? By the time you need to go back to the market to find appropriate housing, there is a massive stepwise jump between the $ per person on your old rent control and the current rent control rates. The only thing that solves this problem is a moving supply and demand curve. Since demand is only going up in the area, only rising supply will actually solve the problem.

Rent control also creates another perverse asymptotic condition which is that effectively becomes a mutex on housing units preventing development and increasing supply, especially when a tenant is a member of a protected class. By the time that member of the protected class moves on or passes away, it's likely that another tenant will be protected in any building with enough units, meaning that building will likely always have a mutex on it.

Anyways, back to BMR since this isn't about rent control. It's a bad program based on no understanding of economics that doesn't really solve the underlying problem (supply) and the good intentions don't magically make it a good idea. The only good thing about Ed Lee's proposal is that it paves the way for taller units. That proposal wouldn't be half bad if it weren't for the asymptotic condition of a specific % of median income and financial assistance relative to your income.

<comment><USER16> It's a huge game of economic whack-a-mole, where "solving" problems here just causes them to pop up in another place. It is very, very difficult to work around the basic laws of supply and demand, and arbitrarily picking winners and losers is hardly a fair way of allocating anything.

Nice to see a comment from someone who's seen it up close.

<comment><USER44> The sad part is that I clicked the link to the Seattle proposal and they are repeating the same mistakes as San Francisco.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm a software engineer with a great job in midwest but I have never been happy here and have been contemplating about just packing my stuff and moving to Seattle for the past 3 years. I don't have any job leads but I have enough in savings to get a place for 6 months. Does anyone think it's sane to just move without job offers?

<comment><USER46> Probably so, if you've got good technical skills. At the very least, you ought to be able to land a couple of contracting gigs to tide you over until you find the right long-term position. There's a lot more demand here in the Puget Sound area for good technical skills than there is supply, so unless you're just not a very good developer, you ought to be able to find something reasonable.

<comment><USER47> A week of rejected job applications has me wondering if I'm not a good developer at all...

<comment><USER46> Don't worry too much about that. Apply for a ton of jobs, for weeks, if not months. Assume that for 80% of them, your resume will get tossed immediately, for no good reason whatsoever. Not your fault. Similarly, for reasons beyond your control, you'll probably fail half of the phone screens, and when you actually get called in, you won't get past 90% of the interviews. Don't worry about it: that's just how it goes. Those numbers will vary substantially with the market, your experience, your innate horsepower, and your asking salary, but the fact is, although there are a lot of developers out there, and employers are careful who they hire, there are also a lot of job openings. Play the numbers game: my rule of thumb is to apply for 100 jobs to get one that you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I don't know if I ever really saw Seattle's 'soul' when I lived there for 3 years. Granted, I lived in the North part. I saw a lot of white and asian people (mainly dudes) looking at their feet or looking at their phones. Seattle is one of the most difficult places to strike up a conversation with strangers or get people to actually want to hang out (worse if they are locals).

South Seattle, on the other hand, truly has 'soul'. Rainier Beach at one point was the most diverse zip code in the entire USA. You got to a coffee shop there and you'll see groups of east africans, latinos, all mixes of asian, white, african american, you name it. It's got gritty parts, nicer parts, and all sorts of interesting restaurants and grocery stores. The Amazon people don't tend to live or congregate down there as much.

As far as cap hill, fremont, wallingford, u-dist, you can keep it. A bunch of bland ass wealthy white/asian dudes looking at the ground.

I moved to SF and lived there for a couple years. The gentrification and rent is bad but the diversity and mix of people across most of the neighborhoods still beats north seattle hands down. It was a way more eclectic interesting experience than anything my Seattle time could offer.

<comment><USER49> The Asians must be very happy they've made it and can no longer be considered diverse. Have you tried getting dim sum with them? You get to eat every part of the chicken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Here is an idea for the FTC: break Amazon into 3 companies: cloud infrastructure, online merchant, and logistics company.

</comment><comment><USER51> Seattle is not for young people. The dude pool is 2:1 in a market where beer is regularly 6.50 a pint.

<comment><USER52> Marrying young and endless dinner parties where first-time homeowners proudly declare "granite countertops!" like checking that box on a list of materials is some major achievement. A bit painful.

But there's a dirty, edgy, interesting indoor culture there caused by the shitty weather. It sprouts up around everything from sex to music to art on occasion. Go find it.

<comment><USER53> Is that the only option available for married life? Surely it's possible to marry someone who is interesting and continue doing interesting things after you're married?

<comment><USER54> Most of us don't see any reason to continue doing interesting things beyond making ourselves look appealing during courtship.

<comment><USER53> Really?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The people who (allegedly) don't perceive Seattle's shitty attitude are almost guaranteed to already be card-carrying turboleftist hipsters + standard uniform, pretty much every single time.

edit: OK, sometimes they're attractive college-aged women. Because progressives have such deep respect for their cultural contributions and intuition, I'm sure.

</comment><comment><USER56> I have a question for all you unrepentant capitalists out there -- why is it that massive concentrations of wealth pretty consistently tend to lead to a decrease in the overall quality of life?

Because if the boosters of capitalism are to be believed, the path to making society better on balance is to enable people to accumulate unlimited amounts of personal wealth and then sort of let that wealth diffuse through the people around them.

This isn't actually happening in places where wealth from the tech industry is concentrated. The rising tide is mostly just sinking everybody, and obliterating everything that isn't explicitly about making money in its path.

So what gives? How can you argue anybody is better off for all this?

<comment><USER57> Every one of your paragraphs contains a strawman.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Making money is really hard. Help  - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN. Does anyone have any bright ideas on how to bring a company with significant design and development resources to a higher profit margin? Currently we work primarily for larger corps designing and developing websites and games for them. It seems like it's getting more and more difficult to build our cash reserves even though we seem to be getting more and more work every year. Our number one expense is our work force, which we love and wouldn't want to downsize if at all possible. Would we be better creating our own product rather than working for other companies all the time? Should we bootstrap as best we can while continuing to pay the bills by working for other companies or should we go after VC? Any books anyone would recommend? Is there a particular industry we should go after for better margins? <comment><USER2> Raise your rates. Stop billing hourly; set a 1 day billing increment for normal clients and a week-long minimum for all but preferred clients. Offer retainer agreements to every new client and to every client you have a strong relationship with. Get better at recruiting, which will ultimately reduce your overhead.

Except for the last one, those are things you can do immediately, without thinking hard, for an investment no larger than a couple hundred words of sales copy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could you productize some of the work you do? So, perhaps you create a software solution that eliminates some repetitive work for you, or something the customer pays for monthly - like a white label option.

It sounds like you start from scratch with each client. Your hours of work, work force & expenses are growing but is your revenue per head growing at the same rate? You could easily have a concerted effort for your team to produce something once & sell it many times. Perhaps a less bespoke product that may appeal to a wider business audience - then you may get clients you can upsell at a later date.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a trick that many companies use successfully.

Step 1. If you do the same type of job repeatedly, create a "platform" (a bunch of re-usable code). Don't actually spend too much time on this.

Step 2. Create a great marketing section on your site for this platform. Create sales materials. You will be telling clients: our "whatever-we-do-all- the-time platform" will save you tons of time and money.

Step 3. Apart from the normal hourly development cost, you charge clients a licensing fee for the platform too. And: PROFIT.

Now let's be clear: your platform doesn't have to be highly polished. It doesn't need to actually save you development time. It's a sales tool to increase your profitability. Pick something hot, like a "mobile platform" or a "social platform" or something like that. And make some pretty graphs for it.

<comment><USER5> My friend, who was nearly broke and strapped for cash started a web design agency solely based on Wordpress.

Started at Wordpress themes online. Built 10 custom theme frameworks, for every client he just picks the one that best suits the job, adds a logo, changes colours, does a bit more tweaking and deploys at 5k/pop.

In his first month he did 5 sites. A month later he opened his own agency with a few employees under him. All on Wordpress.

+1 on reusable platform. So much time saved.

The way he brought in clients was mainly via twitter and running searches. He searched for any tweets within his locale geared towards the web and hunted clients down, mostly through convincing them that they NEED a new website. For example, if someone or a few people tweeted about a small businesses shitty website "omg I wish xy pizza had order options on their site -_-", he would archive these tweets, compile a listing and other market research and pitch it to the company and score himself a new job.

I hope this is at least of some use to OP. Social media + platform + hustle/hounding = $.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> tptacek makes some valid points in regards to securing revenue.

You must have heard of The Lean Startup and like most people get confused about what a MVP really is. The vision behind building a MVP is to identify the most valuable prospects (that make you money) and to get that to the market earliest.

As soon as the MVP starts generating revenue, any further development requires less out-of-pocket investment because the revenue generated will be substituting the cost. This allows for more breathing room to automate, improve, reduce waste, innovate and grow the product.

The biggest secret regarding business is possibly the concept of perceived value. Perceived value is not about 'faking' value, instead it is about defining it.

Example being, instead of charging $ x per hour for web development; break it up into different tasks and charge accordingly: website design, graphic design, copywriting, SEO, marketing (social media, ppc/ppv), system design, consultation (ex. to determine best path forward), training, support, analytics, business analysis etc.

Once you have defined the tasks involved, you can be honest with your client in terms of your strengths and every task will be judged according to its merits (what defines success?). Most clients would prefer paying a qualified copywriter the same amount (or less) than he would be paying a non-qualified web dev.

Defining what you do will allow you to reduce waste and distribute work more easily on your team.

The real trick behind successful software development/consultation is the focus on building systems instead of services. Systems being defined workflows concerning components and participants, focused on re-use. Because lets be honest, real software design reuse either require building generic systems that allow for all scenarios (or can be extended) or defining interactions and components (ea. a design 'pattern').

</comment><comment><USER7> You'll want to read everything written tptacek and patio11 on consulting. I'm off to bed, but I'll dig up some links tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe your rates are lower than expected. Also, once you have a team, it's always better to start a project while doing client work and turn it in an own product, then switch to that to make it bigger.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think our rates are fairly industry standard. A lot of times it comes down to what the clients budget is though. Admittedly we do have an awful time staying on budget.

<comment><USER9> Set rates and stick to them. And when the a project starts to grow beyond its original scope, stop work and renegotiate.</comment></comment></comment>


On Edgar Allan Poe - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/feb/05/edgar-allan-poe/

<comment><USER2> Poe is amazing: he basically invented detective novels with his character C. Auguste Dupin in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Conan Doyle credits this directly in the first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet":

      Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. "No
      doubt you think that you are complimenting me in
      comparing me to Dupin," he observed. "Now, in
      my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That
      trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts
      with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's
      silence is really very showy and superficial. He had
      some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by
      no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to
      imagine.

</comment><comment><USER3> And, in 1849, he predicted modern cosmology?

"In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka ... Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which "radiated" the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe. ... This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology,"

and / but he also drew conclusions:

"for example that space and "duration" are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series."

I'm a fan and didn't know this.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=user_review&id=1207](http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=user_review&id=1207)

I always wondered why there aren't more comic books about him given his stories, his melancholic looks, sad death, etc. He's a ready-made comic book hero!</comment>


Show HN: WalletBook: A simple anonymous crypto portfolio dashboard.No user info - <AUTHOR> https://walletbook.io/ <comment><USER2> Looks very interesting and will try it out.

Possible bug: I cannot go back from the home page. Here is what I did. Visited the about page, then came back to home page and clicked on Register.

Now if I click on the back button, it's trying to send me to the portfolio, and since I don't have one now, it's redirecting me to the home page.

I have to hold the back button and select a page to go back to, which in this case was HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will take a look, thanks for trying it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds good, will try it out.</comment>


MJML – Responsive Email Framework - <AUTHOR> https://mjml.io/?ref=hackernews <comment><USER2> Related: "The Fab Four Technique to Create Responsive Emails Without Media Queries"[0] which has been trending on Reddit, but failed to gain traction here.

A really neat and broadly compatible[1] method.

0\. [https://medium.com/@hteumeuleu/the-fab-four-technique-to- cre...](https://medium.com/@hteumeuleu/the-fab-four-technique-to-create- responsive-emails-without-media-queries-baf11fdfa848#.odey2yjmy)

1\. [https://www.emailonacid.com/app/acidtest/display/summary/qTZ...](https://www.emailonacid.com/app/acidtest/display/summary/qTZqWDjsZgysgtYYv6BzbQaRr7jSx9UmhbBqS9Piweusw/shared)

<comment><USER3> Where is it trending? The most popular submission I found has six comments.

<comment><USER2> It reached my webdev-oriented Reddit home page. Likely the submission you saw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For browsers, multiple sites such as caniuse.com have statistics on browser usage, which can help determine compatibility requirements.

Does anyone know of similar statistics for email client rendering engines?

For that matter, I don't see anything in MJML about how to handle plain-text email clients. (No, "here's a link to the HTML on a website" is not OK; the text version should have all the same content as the HTML.)

<comment><USER5> Nothing I'm aware of here, no but would be great. In a way, that what we're aiming for with MJML by packing all we know about email HTML tips and hacks in a lightweight syntax.

About plain-text, I don't believe it's the MJML role. Most Email Service Provider provide ways to send HTML and Text part separately so shouldn't be an issue to deal with both.

<comment><USER4> > About plain-text, I don't believe it's the MJML role. Most Email Service > Provider provide ways to send HTML and Text part separately so shouldn't be > an issue to deal with both.

The email provider can certainly send mails containing both HTML and text, but that leaves it to the application to generate a sensible text part. And many applications fail at that.

Rather than leaving it entirely to the application to handle, you might consider incorporating or recommending an appropriate html-to-text rendering mechanism known to work well with MJML templates, to make it easy for people to generate a full multipart/alternative mail containing both text and HTML from the same template.

<comment><USER5> That's definitely something we can think about, but the first challenge of MJML is definitely to help developers create beautiful layouts easily

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for working on a tedious problem so we don't have to!

(I know it's annoying when people post competitors on your announcement threads, sorry, but I've also had success with [http://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email- templates.html](http://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email-templates.html))

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't say they're competitors; the real interesting thing here is the components, which should greatly reduce the mess of html you have to deal with. I've used foundation for emails before and the markup involved is quite a pain.

<comment><USER8> Seems like they are solving that problem in version 2: [http://zurb.com/article/1424/call-me-e-schmail-conquering- th...](http://zurb.com/article/1424/call-me-e-schmail-conquering-the-beast-th)

<comment><USER9> Believe me Zurb foundation framework is very difficult to work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great idea. If it's possible, support for a responsive data table would be helpful for invoices/receipts/etc.

<comment><USER5> We're working on such a standard component, we'll publish it next week

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can't you just Html with Bootstrap to achieve the same thing? Why learning a new syntax?

<comment><USER5> Wish it could be that way but actually the HTML for email is a more complex, obsolete and not homogeneous one. Each major email clients (and smaller ones too) come with their own rendering engine, making things super hard for developers to learn and keep up-to-date, which is the reason we decided to create and open source MJML, providing a lightweight and semantic syntax along with a component based approach making it highly extensible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I messed around with a few email tools last (as part of updating emails in our rails app).

I tried MJML, Zurb, and a few others. I ended up settling on Cerberus:

[http://tedgoas.github.io/Cerberus/](http://tedgoas.github.io/Cerberus/)

I'd probably use MJML if I had to do this kind of stuff day-in, day-out. But, for just getting a few views in order, I much prefer just copy, pasting, then adjusting from a few blocks.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing Cerberus, looks like a great tool! I understand the need of a simpler tool to quickly sketch out email HTML ready blocks/layouts. However, there is key reasons about why we decided not to stick to strict HTML with MJML. First, the abstraction layer we provide helps to reduce the maintenance effort by removing the pain to stay up-to-date with the last email clients updates. Second, it is simpler to write (thanks to the lighter/more semantic syntax). Last, but not least, our component based approach powered by ReactJS makes the language highly extensible and helps to reuse the same layout across different email communications.

Hope it makes more sense to you now and you'll have the opportunity to use it for your developments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This may be what it takes for me to stop hating developing email templates. Will definitely check this out!

<comment><USER14> Happy that you love (ok, might not be the right word :p) developing email templates again! Keep us updated once you tried!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey guys, quick update here as we had specific requests about more specific templates. We just added 6 today and will add more in the next weeks! [https://mjml.io/templates](https://mjml.io/templates)

</comment><comment><USER15> Are nested columns allowed? I searched the docs and gave it a shot in the live editor, but didn't have success. I've almost never had to build a responsive HTML email that didn't require nested columns.

<comment><USER5> You can nest columns in sections (which correspond to rows in the design). Do you have an example of the layout you're trying to build? We would love to help you here!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Perfect! This is one of the best documentation I have seen recently!

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing! Glad you love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> From someone that creates email campaigns daily, this will be super useful.

I'm curious, what kind of framework/library/stack are you using for the live code updater?

<comment><USER5> Glad you find it useful! We're using Code mirror for the code editor [https://codemirror.net/](https://codemirror.net/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The documentation is terrific. Is this a standard template that someone can use? I can't find it in the source.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! It's powered by Slate from TripIt [https://github.com/tripit/slate](https://github.com/tripit/slate). It Markdown to static HTML, multi tab. It's now our go-to solution for documentation. We'll open source the MJML one in the coming weeks. You can also check the Mailjet API doc at [https://dev.mailjet.com/guides](https://dev.mailjet.com/guides), also powered by Slate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great job. This will make me want to look at responsive email development again. I've always stayed clear.

<comment><USER14> Awesome to hear! Share feedback once you had the opportunity to play with it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can't wait to see more template. I am still a bad designer... And need help to make stuff look good

<comment><USER5> Get you covered, they're coming very soon! Stay tuned, [https://twitter.com/mjmlio](https://twitter.com/mjmlio)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> >Our markup is at least 50% more efficient in creating responsive email.

At least 50% more efficient than what?

<comment><USER14> Compared to using raw HTML to design the same responsive email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if this can be linked in to Lamson

<comment><USER5> I'm curious about it, never heard about Lamson. What is it exactly?

<comment><USER22> It's Python mail server, that tries to be like Django for Mail. [https://github.com/zedshaw/lamson/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/zedshaw/lamson/blob/master/README.md)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something I have been looking

<comment><USER14> Glad to hear it helps! Have you tried it yet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> looks good! well done

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the love orlisaurus \o/</comment></comment>


Rbash – A Restricted Bash Shell Explained with Practical Examples - <AUTHOR> http://www.tecmint.com/rbash-a-restricted-bash-shell-explained-with-practical-examples/ <comment><USER2> Reference: [https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The- Restr...](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Restricted- Shell.html)</comment>


Khan Academy's LearnStorm: A math challenge to help students learn how to learn - <AUTHOR> http://www.learnstorm2016.org/ <comment><USER2> I'd like to see a challenge to help educators learn how to teach. There's a lot of variation yet our primary education model is still one teacher presenting material in one way to 20-30 kids.

<comment><USER3> I believe one of the goals for Khan Academy in schools is to reverse teaching and homework, so that students watch videos at home and does homework under teacher supervision in school.

<comment><USER2> Some of my daughters' classes are like that. That's a pretty minor change and doesn't really alter the model of "everybody learn this the same way at the same rate".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there any details about what they actually do? This is just a sign up form with the claim that they reward "hustling."

<comment><USER5> "Hustle" in LearnStorm is intended to reward productive persistence in learning how to tackle a new math skill. We don't go into the details of how we measure that because we want the kids to just do the challenge as they naturally would.

<comment><USER4> It looks like it's just a scoreboard on top of the existing Khan Academy.

<comment><USER5> The leaderboards are built on top of Khan Academy infrastructure, but the "hustle" calculation is not reflected (or computed, for that matter) anywhere else on Khan Academy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like the gamification of education is a double edged sword. It can get rather cheesy and I imagine it would turn some kids off to learning, as I was from some of the videos / workbooks / whatever I was exposed to in middle school.

I'd be interested in how effective these approaches are. My faith is in Khan Academy though, amazing work they're doing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know why this is region based? I'm about 40 miles outside of the Bay Area range that they include and my 4th grader would love it.

<comment><USER5> It's region based because there are in-person events and effort that goes in to getting kids signed up. We also have regional sponsors that help provide prizes and make the events great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any reason why these regions in particular? Seems very rando. Maybe focus on areas with problems teaching math?

<comment><USER5> These are regions in which we were able to get sponsors, school district support, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Any plans to include other areas?

<comment><USER5> The regions are set for 2016. We may expand in 2017</comment></comment>