Stuff - Paul Graham - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html Too much stuff is a bad thing. Everything I owned in 2000 would fit in the back of my station wagon. If it wouldn't fit in the wagon, it was out. Now I'm married, and covered up with stuff. When you get married, it's custom for people to give you more stuff. Most of it you don't need. Or want. But you can't just throw it away, after all, it's free stuff. (Sorry if this has already been posted, I didn't see it in the list and can't search....) <comment><USER3> "How do you protect yourself from these people? It can't be easy. I'm a fairly skeptical person, and their tricks worked on me well into my thirties."

It's much easier to never get in the habit of buying things in the first place. I remember two particular childhood events that dramatically shaped my consumption habits:

In the first, I was 4 years old and in the toy section of Spag's (a discount warehouse near Worcester), and _really_ wanted a new Transformers toy. My mom said "Oh honey, we can't afford it. We can come back next month and get it." And then ran over to take care of my sister, who was throwing a tantrum over not being able to have a My Little Pony doll. I realized I could be the "good child" by never asking for stuff. From then on, my parents and I had a tacit agreement: they would buy me anything I wanted, and in return I wouldn't want much. Lesson learned: sibling rivalry can be a powerful motivator.

For the second - my parents refused to let us watch any TV other than PBS until they'd sat us down and told us about advertisements. And when they did, the conversation was basically: "The commercials are just trying to sell you something. They want to control your behavior, so that you'll go out and buy what they want." I was 5 years old at the time and couldn't bear the idea of anyone controlling my behavior. After all, it was bad enough when my parents told me what to do. The idea that some nefarious marketing guy would reach through the TV and make me spend money was just abhorrent. Lesson learned: make marketers seem like parents, but with only the evil "You have to do this!" parts and not the comforting take-care-of-you parts.

The end result of all this? I'm 26 years old and still using my high school allowance for spending money. Essentially every penny I've ever earned has gone into the bank and stayed there.

<comment><USER4> Key to Karma(k2k)

1-Agree with postings

2-Anecdote from real life humanizing yourself by mixing in family

3-??

4-Profit!!

I kid I kid. I enjoy your posts but am unsure how a anti-consumer/anti- corporate/anti-advertising posting is modded up so high on a entrepreneurial board that guess what, mostly relies on advertising to generate revenue.

<comment><USER5> "a anti-consumer/anti-corporate/anti-advertising posting"

Saying "ignore manipulative ads" isn't anti-consumer. Nor is it anti-corporate -- it just means, roughly, "Buy stuff when the focus is on creating something valuable, not convincing you that something is valuable."

<comment><USER4> The quote "ignore manipulative ads" is not in his post. His post appears to demonize advertising in general.

Also, how can you say "Buy stuff when the focus is on creating something valuable, not convincing you that something is valuable."

The context is totally dependant on who the individual is. Who is to stay something is valuable to other people? It is the advertisements job to show to the potential customer why the product is valuable.

Lastly, how does 'ignore manipulate ads' equate to 'buy stuff when the focus is on creating something valuable, not convincing you that something is valuable? That is quite the jump.

<comment><USER5> The quote is not in his post. I got the impression from "I have too much stuff," followed by "Companies that sell stuff have spent huge sums training us to think stuff is still valuable. But it would be closer to the truth to treat stuff as worthless." Is there some other meaning I could divine from those statements?

"The context is totally dependant on who the individual is."

That's true. There's an information component to ads -- which is why I advocated skepticism over censorship. But in general, if you have two companies that are both pursuing a value-maximizing strategy selling the same product, and one does ads, the other is going to have higher quality (have you seen ads for McDonald's? Have you seen ads for, say, Beffa's (<http://www.beffas.com/home.html>)?).

'Lastly, how does 'ignore manipulate ads' equate to 'buy stuff when the focus is on creating something valuable, not convincing you that something is valuable? That is quite the jump."

If you don't spend the money, you either a) destroy it, b) save it, or c) spend it on other stuff. If b), remember that saving is deferred spending, so b) and c) are the same with different timing.

<comment><USER4> Your quoting PG's essay. I was responding to the comment that mine is under. I should not have responded as confrontation is bad on boards that could lead to meeting others in real life.

Basically I found the comment that I commented on deceptive. It used anecdotes from childhood claiming X is bad, then mentions full savings as if that is the direct correlation between the two. I regret commenting in this thread and will stick to more agreeable topics.

<comment><USER3> "It used anecdotes from childhood claiming X is bad, then mentions full savings as if that is the direct correlation between the two."

I actually believe there _is_ a direct correlation - anecdotes (sometimes) lead to habits, and then habits lead to savings. It's much easier to form habits in childhood, which is why I picked childhood anecdotes. But it can be done late in life too - I think that was part of the point of PG's essays.

<comment><USER4> You are doing it again. You try to make a point but suddenly mention an irrelevant point that is correct but unrelated to the argument you are trying to make.

Yes that is one of PG's themes(habits can be changed) but it does not relate to believing that advertising is behavior control and holding this to be true will lead to full savings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think we're in a transitional moment in history, where stuff has become close to free but we're still locked into a mentality that values it. I don't think it'll be much longer before we come around to realizing it.

Funny that Paul should mention kids. When my son was born, I was given a lot of plastic toys that make noise. I've seen them on the shelves at ToysRUs, and they are remarkably cheap.

Thing is, my parents and their friends (who are crossing 60 these days) came of age at a time when a toy was a rare and expensive treat. They were generally made in the US, and required a lot of capital and first world labor. A large room full of toys was a sign of the very well to do. When they were kids, a new toy was a truly wonderful gift, and so they continue to give them.

And yet their houses were relatively cheap relative to their incomes. For 20 and 30-ish people, the great financial challenge is housing, not plastic toys. So stuff is very cheap, but a place to put that stuff is prohibitively expensive.

I have a feeling my 2 year old would really enjoy a toy workbench. The item itself is awfully cheap, and I could probably get one for $25 on craigslist, but the real estate it's sitting on is worth about $2k.(I live in one of the few remaining unfashionable blocks of San Francisco for the low low price of about $650/sq ft- on nob or russian hill this workbench would probably cover closer to $10k worth of floorspace).

So here's another way to test a purchase. Think about how much floor space the item would cover, and ask yourself if it's worth the are*$/sqft.

<comment><USER6> just to add - I've noticed that most of the parents around my neighborhood now buy and sell used toys very frequently, much more often than parents did when I was a kid. This is partly because the web is much more efficient than the newspaper, and it's cheaper to buy used. But the real benefit is that it gives us the ability to essentially rent the toy. There's little doubt that I'm going to end up with a plastic workbench, but my $50 is really more of a deposit - a promise to take good enough care of it to pass it on to the next 2 year old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I was a kid growing up in the USSR, "stuff" was really important to everyone because everything was really hard to get. Those who grew up in the West can't possibly understand how valuable even the most insignificant stuff seemed there. Petty theft was rampant. If you left a load of laundry unattended you could come back and find even your socks missing.

The "stuff" mindset is very difficult for some people to break. Over the first few years living in the US, my mother had accumulated more useless stuff than most people who'd spent their whole lives here. After 15 years in the US, she still worries about leaving her stuff in the laundromat.

I've been thinking about the subject a lot over the years and Paul's essay is spot-on. The more money I make, the more I dislike "stuff". I hardly bought anything since I started my first job after college. In contrast I used to buy a fair amount of junk before. My room was always cluttered and I hated being at home because I felt like the stuff drained all my energy.

It's true that stuff owns people and not the other way around. My neighbor in Cambridge, MA keeps a backyard (more like a junkyard) full of used construction materials and equipment, including 3 dead trucks. He spends every single evening trying to straighten it out, but ends up just wheelbarrowing stuff from place to place without any noticeable progress. I, on the other hand, am now able to spend every evening working on my startup, and not having stuff makes me feel great!

</comment><comment><USER8> Starting a startup has led to big improvements for me in this area. Back when I worked for other people I was constantly buying stuff. Oh, the rationalizations I came up with for purchases of very dubious value. I felt that I had to have every piece of the puzzle, only I didn't realize that the puzzle can never be completed.

Now that I've gone out on my own I don't have the time or money to spend like this anymore. It's such a change for the better.

Here are some stuff-reduction techniques I use:

Books: I have one large Ikea bookshelf. Several of the shelves are reserved as a 'rotating collection' - when the shelf gets full, I make myself sell some books on Amazon before I get new ones. The collection can never exceed the capacity of the one decent-sized bookshelf.

Every August, I take an inventory of everything I own and how often I'm using it. This includes books, clothes, office supplies, everything. Everything gets divided into three categories based on usage: heavily used, not used at all, and marginal. I keep everything in the 'heavily used' category. I sell, give away, or throw away everything in the 'never used' category. Then, I make a list of everything in the 'marginal' category and keep it until the next year. If any given item is still 'marginal' the next year, I sell it.

You'd be surprised how effective this is. What's especially amazing is the crazy stuff you can sell over the net - someone paid 50 bucks for a t-shirt I hadn't worn in 15 years. Last year I made enough cash doing this to buy a new Mac. The reduction in clutter is even better.

<comment><USER9> An idea on top of this would be use the information that you gather from your own "heavy use items", and buy more - or spend more on those. Get better quality items. About the ones that you didn't use ever, when you get an urge to buy them remind yourself of this pie chart that you made!

<comment><USER8> Absolutely! This past year I took the proceeds from all the lesser-used items and bought one pricey, high-quality, heavy-use item. It has completely paid off - I use the new computer (completely loaded iMac) constantly and it positively blows away any other computer I've owned. It does more for me in one week than all the junk I sold to buy it did for me in a year.

Which brings us to the subject of quality. I used to buy budget PC's - <USER2> cheapest thing I could find that would run what I needed. What a mistake that was. I have found that for heavy-use items it almost always pays to get the best I can possibly afford. I'm more likely to use higher-quality stuff and it performs better under heavy use.

There's a corollary to this: I have also found it preferable to buy the cheapest available product if it's a marginal or lesser-used item. Like a cheese grater or something. It's also good to question whether you need such an item at all, as you point out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Procrastination works well for me. Instead of not buying stuff, I just put it off until later, repeatedly.

In some ways, having money actually makes it easier to not accumulate stuff, because you don't feel as pressured by "good deals".

</comment><comment><USER11> Just a week or so ago I went through the process of getting rid of all my stuff. My main reason for doing so wasn't to free up space in my room, it was to free up space in my head. I'm down to approximately one suitcase full of things---I even tossed out the empty suitcase. You start out with a huge mental block against throwing things away, but every time you throw something out you actually feel better, and the more things you throw out the easier it becomes. Eventually I got down to the bare essentials: a toothbrush, a few changes of clothes, and a lockbox full of important personal effects like my passport and birth certificate. The things I didn't want to carry around but couldn't bear to throw away I shipped to my parents' house. In fact, I shipped one of the last boxes there this morning (old photographs, letters from friends, postcards).

If you have to ship a lot of books---are you really going to need your Sipser book anytime soon?---you can do it media mail for next to nothing.

This is something I've wanted to do for years and I can't tell you how relieving it is to finally do it. I'd like to get down the level of the monk with just a rice bowl, or a hobo with a sack tied to a stick, but really I can't give up things like nail clippers and deodorant and razorblades, and little things like that still manage to take up space. (How much? About another laptop-case sized container.) Of course, it helps to have saved up some money first so you know you could reacquire things if you turn out to need them later. Luckily the process of saving for my startup has given me enough to do that. When I was a student I could've never tossed out my hairdryer...that's another thirty bucks. What if I grow my hair out again? With a little money in your pocket you can let the drugstore keep all of these things for you. Durable goods become disposable. America is totally geared for this. Every time I moved I would go to Wal-Mart and buy a whole new collection of silverware.

One of the rules I used to use was to inspect my stuff before moving it out of an old place. If I hadn't used something in the previous year, chances are I wasn't going to use it in the next, and I'd throw it out. I found this to be a good way to reduce clutter. Of course, now I've gotten rid of a lot of things I did use in the previous year, I just found I didn't really need to use them anymore.

On the extreme side I've gotten rid of my bed, though that's perhaps the one thing I miss. Sleeping on the floor is hard. It's kind of invigorating in a way, though it's downright uncomfortable at times. I'm enjoying it now, but when I finally buy my own place I'll definitely be repurchasing a bed.

When you throw out your stuff you just feel better about your day, and when you get rid of things you really don't need, you find it simplifies your routine. When I wake up in the morning I spend less time primping and preening. I grab my laptop case and I head out to my workspace, and then I work without worrying whether I made my bed or if my dresser needs dusting. The experience is a lot like refactoring code. It's extremely liberating.

<comment><USER12> Marked up when I read that you threw out your bed. That gave me a good laugh, as I didn't realize at first that you literally meant that you're down to "one suitcase full of things".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I ditched 700+ books the last time I moved. From a purely physical perspective, books have an ownership cost that is as bad as anything else. Once you have more than 100, they become heavy and tedious to move around, require a lot of space, shelving systems, etc.

I wrote a personal wiki type program that hooks up to a barcode scanner and lets me keep track of the books I have read. I just scan the book, it populates an entry, and then I have places I can store quotes and thoughts about the book. (I wrote this before Delicious Library and other such programs were widely available)

I've found keeping track of what I read has made me a more careful reader and alleviates the need for keeping the physical book around. However, I still have a number of old books that I wouldn't bear to part with.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I've probably bought and given away more books than anything else, and the vast majority of books are not worth keeping around after you've read them once.

I look forward to the day when all or virtually all books are available for download. Webscriptions.net is a wonderful example of this for fiction, given that they have pure HTML books, and not just PDF or some proprietary reader format.

<comment><USER15> I don't understand how people, other than those with perfect memories, can be satisfied only reading a book one time. Any book that I thought worthwhile enough to finish the first time, is at least worth picking up again to see if I still think the same way. Even if I don't find it as useful the second time through, I recognize the perspective I've gained.

<comment><USER14> Well, a novel is less likely to be rereadable than, say, _ANSI Common Lisp_, because you'd use the latter as a reference. I sometimes reread novels, but only the really especially good ones, if I remember that I've read it before. In general, I don't read novels for perspective, though it's really nice when there's some to be gained, rare though that is.

I've probably read somewhere around 10K books, the vast majority of which were novels, and way more than half of which were not really worth reading had my time been as limited as it later became. When I was a teen, it was easy to finish two or three books a day of stuff I'd throw against the wall by chapter two, now. The fact that I've read it and finished it is no indicator of worth. :)

Anyway, I used to own a coupla thousand books, but after moving several times without having looked inside most of them, it dawned on me that carrying around all this dead tree was not very useful.

<comment><USER15> I think the main difference between us then, is that I don't have a great interest in reading lots and lots of books. I generally don't have the patience to finish a book once, unless it's a book that I'd read several times. I wind up reading far fewer books than yourself.

So for me, the comments I made apply to novels as well as reference material. Second reads give me another chance to observe things like structure, or enjoy knowing what's going to happen.

Actually though, the biggest factor for me was recognition of my own mortality. When I was a kid, I'd keep books and reread them 5 times. When I was a teenager, I'd reread them twice, and keep them expecting to read them more. Now, I realize there's a limit to how much reading I'll be able to fit into the rest of my life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Stuff - Paul Graham"

Am I the only one who thought this was going to be about someone's taxidermy startup?

In all seriousness though, I think the best reason to keep relatively unused things around is if they are objects of sociability. That is, things that bring people together such as alcohol, homemade bread, board games, etc. At one point I was even smart enough to buy a tea set because I thought it would help me meet girls. (Of course I wasn't smart enough to see that my gf would be Asian, but hey, who's complaining.) By definition objects of sociability are used less often because you need at least two people, but they seem to be worth keeping around.

It's weird because we seem to be entering this phase in history where social status is signaled more by what you don't own than by what you do. For example, clothing with logos is generally considered tacky and lower class. At this point probably only another world war or a major recession could change this.

</comment><comment><USER17> The sellers of stuff have convinced us (especially americans) that you can't just USE stuff. You need to OWN stuff. Need some specialized tool? Home Depot will sell it to you, but no one will lend it to you, unless it is large and very expensive.

Worse, these sellers of stuff have realized that they can't sell you durable goods! God Forbid! Durable goods last forever! Instead, they've convinced americans that there is value in disposable stuff! Paper napkins and plates, disposable diapers, disposable tupperware, etc etc. Now they've turned those one time purchases into subscription plans.

More stuff in your house. More stuff in landfills.

</comment><comment><USER18> What about sentimental value of things? What about accumulated worth of a box of things after opening it every few years? Little overhead -- it's just a box.

Why save books, besides the memories? Convenience of being able to look things up? I like books, but my wifes parents are book sellers. They have hundreds of thousands of rare books for sale.

She doesn't like to save anything but the most essential books.

The mental load of throwing something away that _might_ have value is pretty high. It might be higher than the integrated attention paid to it in your basement -- unless you move often.

<comment><USER19> If you have some kind of attachment to something, then you shouldn't throw it away. It has real value to you. The kind of stuff you should toss is the stuff that you're keeping because you think it's valuable in the abstract.

<comment><USER18> Indeed. I have a box in my basement with an incomplete set of work for school since grade school and other junk. Each individual piece is pretty useless, and has low sentimental value. The box is easy to store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Every thing you own takes energy away from you."

Wonderful sentence. This is how I feel too.

However, I think its some kind of special mental handicap of nerds.

There are people, who are living perfectly energetic and well in a huge pile of crap.

Too me it looks like analytical people are scared by complexity of stuff, while intuitive people like it.

<comment><USER21> >Too me it looks like analytical people are scared by complexity of stuff, while intuitive people like it.

It seems more likely that analytical people are aware of complexity of stuff, while non-analytical people are not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think the best way to avoid stuff accumulation is to throw away your TV. Or at least disconnect if from the outside world. Whether you think so or not TV makes you buy more stuff.

I like to buy verbs, not nouns. While I was working in the corporate world I lived very simply and saved a lot. I spent all my money on travel. Later I dumped it all into a startup. People talked about the riskiness of startups but I just thought of it as paying to do something cool.

<comment><USER23> _I like to buy verbs, not nouns._

Really? I like to buy adjectives. Example: Cool.

<comment><USER24> I truly prefer to buy adverbs at Lolly's. Love that place. Tremendously. They even have an "LY attachment" for my old adjectives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> PG missed a couple of points in this essay. First, the proliferation of PODS and self-strorage businesses (at least in my part of the country) is further evidence that people have too much stuff. In my neighborhood, folks with two car garages park on the street because the garage is filled with crap.

The other point is why people accumulate stuff (crap). Shopping addictions aside, people get more stuff to keep score. Stuff is a scoring mechanism, especially for folks with low self-esteem. It would be useful to collect data to see if there is a correlation or causation between education / achievement levels and accumulation of stuff. I would posit that high achievers and PhDs have less stuff than the norm.

<comment><USER12> I'm not so sure about the PhDs comment. Nearly every professor's office I've been to is filled with crap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> When our kids play room is filled with a mess of toys, they mostly ignore all of them and act bored.

If those toys are put into storage in the basement and just a select few toys are chosen to leave out, they show a lot more interest in those toys.

We have also decided to hold an annual yard sale with other families on our street to get rid of as much stuff as possible every year.

</comment><comment><USER27> "The average 25 year old is no match for companies that have spent years figuring out how to get you to spend money on stuff. They make the experience of buying stuff so pleasant that "shopping" becomes a leisure activity."

Vance Packard's 'The Hidden Persuaders' was one of the earliest books to deal with this topic in depth. It's scary how they understand us better than ourselves. Book URL:[http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Persuaders-Vance- Packard/dp/067...](http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Persuaders-Vance- Packard/dp/0671531492)

</comment><comment><USER28> Excellent article - and the point about mental overload from stuff is a good one. This is the same point made for stuff in the form of information in GTD.

A great technique for de-stuffing and making $: craigslist.

Best productivity boost I've made: Selling TV on craigslist - it sold in 2 hours. (The extra time has been great for working on the startup)

</comment><comment><USER29> So true, so true.. ... I even stopped buying most books. With the public library database, I can order a book for 75c from anywhere in the Peninsula -<http://catalog.plsinfo.org/> thanks Paul.

</comment><comment><USER30> Duuuude. Like, the stuff we own? It owns _us_ , dude. You know? It's all like, Fight Club redux, man.

 _pause_

Deep, man.

<comment><USER31> I appreciate your sarcastic humor.

Paul's essays on entrepeneurialism are incredible, but this one seemed really sophomoric to me. (e.g. about as intellectually complex as the other stoned conversations I could have had after watching Fight Club!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> "You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet."

The first rule of YCombinator is..

This is a good essay. My mother has a basement full of stuff, hallways full of stuff, and recently moved into my grandmother's house and filled her living room with stuff. Magazines, boxes.. Any average person would be appalled.

She'd probably read this essay and go "Hmm.. Yeah, that's about right", then go buy another piece of furniture from Ikea.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been practicing this minimalist form of existence for some time now. For those that have too much stuff, here is how you get rid of stuff:

1\. Mark a portion of your basement or apartment for some of your "stuff"

2\. After a year or two if you have not had to use something at all from this pile get rid of it - ebay, craigslist, garage sale or donate.

3\. You will feel good about less clutter.

4\. Repeat till you're left with only stuff you really need.

The only place this hasn't worked for me is electronics "stuff".

</comment><comment><USER33> "In fact, the poorer people are, the more stuff they seem to have."

Why would poor people have more stuff Paul? I see rich people living in McMansions have a lot more stuff than poor people and I am pretty sure Bill G has more stuff than me :).

<comment><USER14> I live in a place he'd probably characterize as poor (my neighbors probably all make less than 20K), and everyone has LOTS of stuff around here, often including the mentioned cars in the front yard. When you buy cheaper stuff, it breaks more often, and it's usually cheaper to buy a new one than fix the old one, but if you're poor, you spent too much of your income on the old one to be comfortable just throwing it away. So the old microwave that doesn't work goes in the closet in case it can be fixed, and you buy a new microwave for less than you paid for the old one two years ago. You keep the broken chair in your living room because eventually you'll have enough money and time to fix and recover it, and then for years tell people not to sit in it when they come in to visit, because "it's just broken right now, but we'll get it fixed".

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Completely agree, but even question books. If they are especially valuable, sure, but I recently got rid of most of my books as I felt even they were weighing me down. Still not satisfied though... probably need to get rid of even more stuff.

<comment><USER15> Books were actually my first hint that I had a problem with too much stuff. (Though it wasn't until I was faced with the prospect of moving to a small room in Boston that I actually forced myself to get rid of stuff). When I got my first job, one of my favorite things to do was visit Barnes and Noble. I bought a bunch of books that I didn't touch for at least 6-12 months, during which time they did nothing but clutter my bedroom.

Someday I hope to have a nice big personal library, but until then I only keep as many books as can fit in a couple of plastic bins under my bed.

Things with sentimental value: I have a folder with printouts of a bunch of code I wrote back in 1997. It was one of the coolest projects I ever worked on, and I keep meaning to go review it to see what sort of stupid mistakes I was making in my ignorance. It's been 10 years and I haven't spent more than 2 minutes looking at it, yet I lug it with me wherever I go. Other examples are pictures, concert tickets, recordings, papers, articles, contacts, etc... I accumulate stuff without having to buy anything.

Like paystubs, bills, insurance paperwork, receipts, and all the other bureaucratic garbage that you never know if you'll ever need or not.

And pennies.

Sometimes I feel like I waste half my life trying to get rid of all the stuff that winds up in my apartment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Finally... I'm not the only one that feels this way! This was a very well articulated essay. I obsessively avoid accumulation of objects because they dilute the actual value (to me, not a dollar amount) of the few things I actually enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER36> Paul makes a good point, though I have to say George Carlin made it much funnier! <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac>

<comment><USER37> I was starting to get down about all this 'stuff'. Great Link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Good one! Some comments:

Moving across the atlantic, or to some other suitably distant locale is a great way of convincing yourself that you don't really need that much crap. The problem gets to be when you move back and forth too much and end up getting paranoid about buying anything at all that you know you're going to throw out. We're contemplating going back to the states again at this point... _sigh_.

Books... all I can say is "right on!". I'm glad my wife understood when I paid a bunch of money to have mine shipped over here.

In terms of food, after my latest trip back to the US, I think people there are just starting to wake up to the fact that more/bigger is not necessarily better, and it will take them a while to really catch on, and start really aiming for quality. I actually think my best business idea concerns food, but it will have to wait till we go to the states to try and implement it.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've had the same epiphany, and was doing something about it as recently as today. One thing that stops me from getting rid of my stuff is that my dad has been associated with Goodwill Industries for years, and he is always talking about how he's donating stuff to Goodwill (but not before asking me if I want some of it first---which I sometimes take because even I get tired of saying "no" all the time). But Goodwill is like 15 minutes away, you have to put stuff in a box or a bag and haul it over there, and I've never been there before so I don't know exactly how to get there. My trash can, on the other hand, is right here. That doesn't seem like a big difference, but it's big enough that it has kept probably 50 lbs. of clothes in my closet and drawers that I never wear. I'm as resistant to guilt as anyone I know, but even I have a hard time throwing away "perfectly good" clothing that's only been worn once.

</comment><comment><USER40> I am going to bookmark this essay with the tag girlfriend.

<comment><USER18> i hope you're planning on ridding yourself of all those old girlfriends in your basement :-P

<comment><USER40> On a serious note, I think this was a good essay for guys and girls. The reason we buy so much stuff is everyone inherently wants to be noticed and to feel important. Like Paul said, companies have done a terrific job at making us think stuff makes you important. On my high school senior trip one of the girls brought an entire suitcase just for her shoes. Each of the 14 pairs of shoes made her feel more important. My question is how do we make people think that our web applications will make them as important as their shoes do?

<comment><USER5> "My question is how do we make people think that our web applications will make them as important as their shoes do?"

The standard answer is to make the application that would be your homepage if someone else had made it by now.

<comment><USER18> Don't most people have blank home pages to have faster browser start times? I haven't had a home page for years.

<comment><USER14> Google loads REALLY quickly. I don't notice the difference between a blank page and Google, and I live in the US, where broadband speeds are supposed to be woefully inadequate, per some recent article on reddit. :)

<comment><USER18> Google toolbar in firefox is faster

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Following up on comments about buying good things that get heavy use...

I'm typing this comment on a PowerBook G4 that has probably seen over 6 000 hours of use. At an initial purchase price of ~$1800, that's a bargain. I use this thing all the time and have realized so much value from it.[ _]

Compare this to my "good suit" which cost about $600, and has been worn a total of < 50 hours (job interviews, special occasions, etc).

Both are tools with a specific purpose but I get much more of a warm feeling using this computer, knowing that I bought a high quality tool and am using it to the fullest extent.

[_] This isn't a Mac vs PC comment - if you got a top quality ThinkPad or Vaio notebook and are using it daily, then you know what I mean.

<comment><USER41> oops, my footnote turned into markup... that was the point of the paired square brackets that italicized the middle of my comment above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I agree that Americans are too consumed with stuff. More importantly, though, we don't even make our own stuff any more -- the Chinese do. While stuff might not seem important, if that supply line ever gets cut, we'll see how important it really is.

The making of stuff also factors into global power. The US was able to win a war on two fronts in WWII in part because of its ability to make stuff. Remember the guns vs. butter axes on the production possibility curve in ECON101?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> in 2000 i was moving around a bunch. everything i owned had to fit in the back of my station wagon. that included bed, furniture, musical instruments, computers, books, etc.

i slept on an inflatable mattress for several years. i also lived in a walk-in closet for 6 months. all those things were actually really good. it was an exciting time. living in a closet added to the subversion factor. i was invisible.

with marriage came the consolidation of things, and wedding presents, and now i'm one of the people with a garage full of stuff. strange things. not useful things. bags full of old hammers. children's things that we're saving. the good silverware. a desk that's too big to go in the house.

we live in a large-ish 3 bedroom house and i only spend time in a closet/office, the bathroom, the bedroom, the deck, and the kitchen. i have no use for 800-1000 square feet of my home. but the kids like it.

it's still a very exciting time, but there's lots of stuff. marriage is compromise, and stuff can be a part of that compromise. we have 2 gravy boats. one for everyday gravy and one for special gravy. of course, we only have gravy once every few years. but that's ok. i still work in a closet. somewhat invisible.

</comment><comment><USER43> Stuff isn't really all _that_ illiquid. Ebay and its ilk have created a reasonably efficient market for random junk. There's still a lot of overhead, though: writing the ad, monitoring the auction, and packing and shipping the item is time-consuming. No matter how good I got at it, it would probably still take $20 worth of my time. But if you're poor, it might still be worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think poor people have more stuff, so much as it is that poorer people tend to be less able to organize it effectively.

Rich people have whole rooms or houses full of stuff that hardly ever gets used, but since it's indexed appropriately (eg "Summer Home" or "Ballroom" or "Gallery") and maintained that way by hired help, it doesn't bother anyone.

</comment><comment><USER44> Honestly, I hate buying stuff, and I'm pretty depressed every time I have to. It takes time to go to shopping mall, a very loud place, and there's always risk that a new thing won't serve me well. Later, even if it turns out that the thing is not that bad as I thought, time destroys it, what forces me to repeat the whole pain.

</comment><comment><USER45> I used to put my hopes onto the computer, but by now I am worried that it will merely shift the problem. While space is not a problem on todays hard drive, too much "stuff" still makes navigating it strenuous...

Still, I can't wait for good ebook readers to appear, books are my single biggest "stuff problem".

</comment><comment><USER46> Unfortunately it's not only useless stuff we are buying. We are also buying lies in mass media. Basically, both are result of our inability to reason quickly and independently.

</comment><comment><USER47> The more possessions you have the thicker the prison walls constructed around ones life. Minimalism creates freedom.

</comment><comment><USER5> What kind of heuristics do you use, besides "Buy it if you know who will be happy to inherit it"?

</comment><comment><USER48> i wonder if these advices applies to bookmarks as well.Where i have 5000 bookmarks to be read, look,store share but don't have time where my mind always echoes the importance and usefulness of these bookmarks i own.

</comment><comment><USER49> Paragraphs 8 & 9 are obviously allusions to ClutterMe.com</comment>


Fake Flavours (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140829-the-secrets-of-fake-flavours <comment><AUTHOR> Surprisingly, the title was auto-revised from the original: "The secrets of fake flavours"

Anyway, it contains a lot of interesting (IMO) tidbits about tricking the perception of taste and how artificial flavorings are sometimes not as artificial as one might think.</comment>


Can there be a galactic empire? - <AUTHOR> https://jatan.space/can-there-be-a-galactic-empire/ <comment><USER2> > See how quickly things escalated? 40,000 years and one can cover all the > stars in the Milky Way.

Uhm, no. You're still constrained by the top speed of your spaceships (0.1c as you say) into a sphere of 4,000 light years radius (that is, even if your spaceships somehow magically fork()ed upon reaching a new star system, which is obviously false), and the Milky Way's diameter of ~100,000 ly guarantees you'll only be able to colonize but a small fraction (granted, you'd be able to colonize the whole galaxy in ~1 million years). By the same reasoning no, you won't be able to colonize Andromeda too in another 1000 years (that would require you to travel 2 million ly in 1000 years BTW), or...the whole visible universe in a few hundred thousand years more!!! No.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite Mac App? - <AUTHOR> Here's a few I use listed below:<p>- BetterTouchTool - DeskCover - 1Password - CleanMyMac - Display Menu - Alfred - iStats Menu - ByWord - Flux - Bear notes - BitBar <comment><USER2> Alfred - its workflow feature is amazing and there are so many out there that you will always find something great to use.

Magnet - window management app. I hate that I've to buy a separate app for snapping windows and managing them.. But this is a pretty great and simple app that does what it says and does it well.

F.lux is great for when I'm working on my side projects late into the night. Disabling it at night makes my eyes hurt so much.

iTerm2 - terminal emulator with lots of customisable options. I specifically love that I can use a hotkey shortcut to pull down a terminal window to run some commands and then go back to doing whatever I was doing.

Amphetamine - great small to use when I don't want my Mac to sleep for sometime.

Honestly, Alfred, intellij idea, iTerm2 and chrome/safari are probably my most used apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Notes—I haven't found a better general note taking app and have grown to enjoy using this as its lack of features leaves me focused on just taking notes

Things—makes following 'Getting things done' task management easier

</comment><comment><USER4> Bash, brew, tmux, vim, git, and vagrant.

</comment><comment><USER5> Carbon Copy Cloner

</comment><comment><USER6> Paw

</comment><comment><USER7> Transmit

</comment><comment><USER8> \- Postgres.app

\- Caffeinate

\- NordVPN

\- Magnet

\- Battery Indicator

\- CleanMyMac

\- Monodraw</comment>


Everything You Wanted To Know About Startup Building But Were Afraid To Ask - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/07/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-startup-building-but-were-afraid-to-ask/ <comment><USER3> Don't even dream that this will be your path. This story is like reading a book on how to become an actor written by Steven Spielbergs son.

Aaron is an insider. He belongs to the club. You most likely don't. You'll have to hustle a lot more, you'll have to prove yourself first of all.

<comment><USER4> Excuses excuses.

[Edit:

Oh, so HN doesn't like me calling a spade a spade. Fine. But let's face it; even if the man is well connected, at least he is able to leverage his connection to get a decent deal for his _work_. His connections didn't help him build mint; he did that with his team. He went out and got a programmer who was making $1k a month! If he was so well connected, surely, he could have afforded a $200k/mo boutique J2EE crew and built something fancy.

All of us have experience, relationships, skills, and other assets that give us an insight into a particular market segments and puts us at advantage before all others. The wise ones know how to find these assets and exploit them to the fullest.]

<comment><USER3> I'm really the last guy to believe in any excuses. I am not in any way saying what he did is bad, or that it fell into his lap, but the fact of the matter is that someone like me does not even have close to a shot at doing what he does in the same way he did. I cannot follow his path, because for me it will lead to nothing but frustration.

If I send anybody of importance an email or anything, it does not get replied. If I tried talking to anyone about funding, it will get ignored. I don't have references, I don't have people that will vouch for me, I don't have anyone that will introduce me, I don't have any name-brand colleges. He has them.

Now, if I tried to cold call the same people he gets introduced to, I will meet with failure. For me, the best path is to FIRST establish why these people would want to talk to me at all, either by profiling myself in some noticable way, or by showing them the money. That's the path that works for us normalos.

Insight into market segments are things that are learned the hard way - <USER2> work and focus. Most people will not have this, but will rather follow such paths and try to find funding, not understanding that these people are different from them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An informative video, especially the % given to cofounders/early employees but this is a very _atypical_ startup (when they were starting up) with VC funding (early on) and seemingly everything going right. I mean they signed up Wilson Sonsini as if you just walk in, pitch and that's it. That wasn't my personal experience talking to Wilson Sonsini (via a referral).

I think most of us have a lot harder time in all departments (getting cofounders, early employees for cheap, legal, etc.).

<comment><USER6> My experience with WSGR in 2005 was that they were ultra-interested in helping us despite a near total lack of any credible way of paying them in the immediate future. I'm guessing Mint is _not_ atypical in this regard.

Could it have been the Manila thing?

<comment><USER5> I was in SV at that time. Perhaps it was the sign of the times and WSGR had their pick of startups. Luckily, we were able to raise VC money but at the time, it was a bit demoralizing to have a legal firm say no to your money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everything he talks about is subject to the old YMMV rule, except the last part about entrepreneurship - there isn't a single entrepreneur who walks away from the experience of starting a company unchanged. Success or failure, you're guaranteed to be a different person afterward. It's really not a bad deal :)

<comment><USER8> You nailed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those who are impatient like myself there is a video with working audio here [http://vator.tv/news/show/2009-10-07-aaron-patzer-lays- bare-...](http://vator.tv/news/show/2009-10-07-aaron-patzer-lays-bare-mints- numbers)

<comment><USER10> Thanks. Great stuff by a great guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> edw519's informal rule for giving advice:

If you have suceeded once: "Here's what I did."

If you have succeeded several times: "Here's what I did, and here are the patterns that I have noticed."

If you have succeeded many times: "Here's what I found that works and may work for you too."

If you have never succeeded: You should be listening, not talking.

No advice should give the "rules" (there are none) or claim to know "everything" (you don't).

</comment><comment><USER12> Please, _please_ edit these TechCrunch titles to make them informative.

</comment><comment><USER13> Excellent video. Must refrain from quitting job......

</comment><comment><USER6> The advice to ignore overhead during seed stage and "clean it up when you get funding" is interesting, but you should be aware that if you screw anything up with your employee's taxes, the IRS and, in particular, state governments are going to fuck with your employees. I saw it happen on an innocuous clerical error.

I'd be careful with this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Also, check out Startup Bootcamp next week at MIT. It's free and features many founders and entrepreneurs, including some from YC.

<http://startupbootcamp.mit.edu>

It will likely be streamed as well. Details will get posted to HN on Monday.

<comment><USER15> Thanks. Just registered.</comment></comment>


Crackdowns on Free Speech Rise Across a Europe Wary of Terror - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/world/europe/spain-europe-protest-free-speech.html <comment><USER2> That's such a bullshit spin. The people are not wary of terror; governments are using it as an excuse to whisk away liberties.

In Spain, ETA had been active 1960s–2010(ish)[0], in UK, the IRA waged a (victorious) bona fide terror campaign 1960s–1998[1]. Many Western-European countries faced domestic terror organizations, and life went on.

The only difference now is that the threat is mostly imaginary, victims counted in units or dozens instead of thousands, and the measures are draconian.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ETA_attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ETA_attacks) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do western democratic governments punish their populations for what criminals do? This "crackdown" makes free speech into a privilege, something to be withheld by The Authorities as the consequences of bad actions. Since there are very, very few terrorists, The Authorities are punishing the masses for the actions of a very few.

I don't think this will end well. The price of liberty is a lot smaller than the cost of oppression, as Mark Twain once said.</comment>


People Over 55 Are Quitting Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/people-over-55-are-quitting-facebook-2009-5 <comment><USER2> Demographics are appealing based on two things: the direct revenue that advertising to them / selling to them can bring, and the indirect value of how much they serve to propogate the brand.

Older adults are worthwhile because they've got a lot of discretionary income once the kids are off at college.

Young hip adults are worthwhile because they increase brand cachet.

I hate to be morbid, but with the meltdown in IRA and 401ks since January, people over 55 might not be worth nearly as much as a demographic as they once were.

Facebook probably doesn't care too much about this.

At <http://smartflix.com>, we've done demographic surveys, and our best customers are older adults - speaking in generalities, the women are retired, or working part time, and have enough money to buy canvas and oil paints, and the guys are retired or working part time, and have enough time and money to work on their cars, learn metalworking, or tinker with their guns.

Because our price point is relatively low (our a la carte rentals are ~$10, and our subscription plans are << $30/month), we haven't seen much of a decline in revenue from this demographic.

</comment><comment><USER3> News Cycle lately looks like this:

Twitter. Iphone. Facebook. Twitter. Iphone. Facebook. Twitter. Iphone. Facebook. Twitter. Iphone. Facebook. Twitter. Iphone. Facebook. Twitter. Iphone. Facebook.

ok you get the point.

<comment><USER4> more like

Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, iPhone, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Google, Twitter, Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter

<comment><USER5> More like

Why do we always try to extrapolate made up patterns for the sole purpose of whining?

"Another X is going to buy Y before I eat Z article, ugh" etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How reliable are these numbers? In particular, I'd like to see a precise definition of an active user.

It seems odd to have such a sudden switch with no external factors. To add 1.5M active users in a demographic in Feb and March and end up with just over 2M at the end of May seems fishy

"When asked for comment, a Facebook spokesperson responded, 'Bear in mind that these tools gives out estimates, not real-time figures.'"

<comment><USER7> I'd say lots of people joined in when they heard about it in the news, and left when they noticed:

1\. It wasn't in the news anymore (that's twitter)

2\. It provided them no reason to stay

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is Facebook killing them?

<comment><USER9> They're running out of soylent green

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> ...and joining Eons.com.</comment>


To app or to not app - <AUTHOR> http://benrameshlin.posterous.com/startups-to-app-or-not-to-app-developing-for

<comment><USER2> Things the mobile web is currently missing:

* Native performance.(getting better, still not there).

* Offline is way harder (possible, with manifests, but harder).

* Monetization is harder: you can't just 'sell' a webapp.

* The appstores (can be) a great distribution and promotion channel.

* The web has way less access to the device: No contacts, camera, etc.

It's getting better, but native apps do have their advantages.

<comment><USER3> Wait. Why do you have to choose?

What's wrong with the following pattern: 1\. build an HTML5 app 2\. build a native app that embeds a Web control 3\. package the app and HTML5 app together using application cache 4\. distribute on AppStore

You get the a) offline support b) monetization c) distribution via AppStore

<comment><USER4> the html5 app won't be capable of using device specific input, such as accelerometer, compass, multitouch, etc. All of that is not yet part of the html 5 spec. So when we compare html5 vs mobile apps it's just an apples against bananas type of comparison

<comment><USER3> Well, the strategy i'm describing involves a native app. In that case, would it be possible to expose device-specific API to JavaScript?

Also, multi-touch is actually supported by webkit. There a nice WWDC video that intoduces this capability if you'd like to learn more.

To be clear the idea above isn't new of course. For instance <http://www.appcelerator.com/> provides a native app with a thin wrapper around a web control.

<comment><USER2> Phonegap provides a thin wrapper around a webview. Titanium changed course with their 1.0 version, and now compiles the Javascript to native code. (they used to do the webview thing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _2\. Browser apps when powerful will compete with the apps on the app store._

ie, right now they don't. I don't plan to wait.

<comment><AUTHOR> Patience pays, most of the time.

<comment><USER5> If I was making a product that wouldn't be done for a year, I'd think about targeting next gen tech. But for apps that take at most a month or two? No way.

I tried making an iPhone web app... tooo slooow.

<comment><USER6> My limited experience so far echoes this. I'm in the middle of scratching an itch my wife has in such a way that it's useful to more people than just her, and part of that is a mobile application.

Sencha (and jQTouch before it) is absolutely gorgeous; I wanted very much to fall in love with it. On a webkit browser on my desk, it produced visually stunning results.

And then I tried using it with both an iPhone 3G and a G1. Yes, they're old tech, but they're the hardware I have on hand right now to test on (and not exactly uncommon in the field), and performance is abysmal.

I would assume the same tests run against an iPhone 4 or an HTC Evo would blow me away, but my wife has a G1, and I'm building this for her first. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there any realistic way to do a mass-market GPS-driven app outside of an app store?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. Don't know if there is an option completely outside of an app store. U can use the app store that Tom Tom plans to enable on it's new gps device.

See [http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/04/29/tomtom.to.use....](http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/04/29/tomtom.to.use.webkit.ui.for.outside.apps/)

<comment><USER7> What percentage of the market carries Tom Tom devices? It sounds like a tiny, tiny percentage. What would I be doing there other than proving the market for someone with the stomach to make the real money on the iTunes store?

<comment><AUTHOR> True. Or u can kill ur tom-tom market with ur own iTunes app. The thing about tom-tom is it's a gps device. So u get easy adoption for a gps service. Because you get the pre-established intent to use a gps service.

Basically get noticed with the Tom-Tom(more likely because of pre-established intent) and then come up with an app for other devices. Or like I suggest a browser based app( I don't know if this is currently possible, but am sure it will happen soon)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: SynthJS - extending the Web Audio API (collaborators welcome) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mattdiamond/synthjs

<comment><USER2> Are you aware of dsp.js?

You are welcome to work off of the Haxe code I've been writing for Triad as well: [https://github.com/triplefox/triad/tree/master/dev/com/ludam...](https://github.com/triplefox/triad/tree/master/dev/com/ludamix/triad/audio)

Demo: <http://www.ludamix.com/apps/triad-synth/index.html></comment>


Show HN: An Australian streaming services search - <AUTHOR> http://canistream.xyz/ <comment><AUTHOR> This was my first web project. I really want to change the source of my data. At the moment search is okay but I would like to add more features for tv. At the moment only some of the items will display the seasons available. Have a go you might find it useful.

<comment><USER2> Hi, Thanks for making this, it looks useful! Just a note to say I think the search function needs to be a little more comprehensive.

For example, if I search 'star wars' it tells me the 2008 movie is available on Netflix (but ignores the others in the series). It picks 'the Simpsons' up as the Simpsons movie but doesn't talk to series and doesn't recognise 'game of thrones' or 'always sunny in Philadelphia' (although maybe they aren't available?) \- either way; perhaps including the itunes store would be useful (I know they have GoT about the same as release date, so you can basically stream legally by buying per episode or season)

Otherwise the site looks very functional and clean, well done!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is it meant to show multiple results ?

I searched 'Love' which is a big new Netflix series and it only showed 'American Pie'.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'll be using this - thanks.

Please keep working on it!</comment>


Theory and Practice of Logic Programming [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0208029

<comment><USER2> In case anyone wants to know what it is before dealing with a PDF:

 _Logic programming in the context of multiparadigm programming: the Oz experience_

[http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2FPS...](http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2FPS_cache%2Fcs%2Fpdf%2F0208%2F0208029v1.pdf)</comment>


Myanmar Prepares to Migrate from Zawgyi to Unicode - <AUTHOR> https://globalvoices.org/2019/09/04/unified-under-one-font-system-as-myanmar-prepares-to-migrate-from-zawgyi-to-unicode/ <comment><USER2> This article conflates the _encoding_ uses to store Burmese text with the _font_ used to render it. Here's a chart showing the discrepancies between the two encodings:

[https://confluence.dimagi.com/display/commcarepublic/Myanmar...](https://confluence.dimagi.com/display/commcarepublic/Myanmar%3A+Android+Zawgyi+and+Unicode)

And here's an FAQ from Unicode itself:

[https://www.unicode.org/faq/myanmar.html](https://www.unicode.org/faq/myanmar.html)

Old-timers (particularly outside the US) may remember the ISO 8859 debacle, where there were various encodings for primarily European languages using the same codepoints, causing tons of confusion:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859#The_parts_of_ISO/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859#The_parts_of_ISO/IEC_8859)

<comment><USER3> No, the article doesn't conflate anything, the situation isn't comparable to ISO-8859-* at all. Zawgyi is merely a font that renders certain glyphs differently than specified by Unicode.

It isn't a real encoding, it's a nasty hack and that's what makes the transition difficult.

<comment><USER2> Once more: the encoding is what's used to store the data, the font is what's used to render it. If your data is not _encoded_ correctly, Zawgyi won't show it either. Of course, the fact that Zawgyi isn't properly standardized doesn't help.

Also, most of the technical content of the article is gibberish. Exhibit A: " _It made use of the visual typing and encoding method as one would write it on paper, rather than using logical linguistics and computer encoding conventions of Unicode._ "

<comment><USER4> The reporting here is so bad I'm honestly confused about whether _anything at all_ is changing.

I wonder why this news outlet tried to report this specific piece of news at all, instead of leaving it to the specialist press.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is the scale and potential difficulties involved for a migration like this? I hope some HN readers can inform us on the technical challenges.

<comment><USER6> I'm native Sinhalese speaker, and we have many characters that were not included in Unicode up until 10 or so years ago. To "fix" this, we created different font files, so that when you type "w" in an En-US keyboard, the font glyph is "අ", which we pronounce "A" sound for. This worked out OK in place where we had control over the font. So rich text documents, this was less of a problem.

In web sites, however, these text become mess because they use regular fonts with correct glyph/code-point match. We just abuse the fonts to get the characters we needed.

When Sinhalese characters are in Unicode, we couldn't immediately translate them because you need to check if the fonts were using this botched font or not, and needed to do some serious replacing which is difficult because even with Unicode, we have diacritics and certain glyphs needed more than one unicode code-point to represent them.

One glorious regex replace, in theory, can perform the similar migration for Burmese as well, you just have to write it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a developer who've dealt with those issues briefly in the past, hopefully, this really kicks off this time!

</comment><comment><USER8> Sorry but I don't quite understand what the problem here is. Is it about a different character set? Or encoding? Or glygh rendering? The article keeps using "font".

<comment><USER9> [https://frontiermyanmar.net/en/features/battle-of-the- fonts](https://frontiermyanmar.net/en/features/battle-of-the-fonts) (mentioned in the article being discussed) is much clearer.

Short version: in Burmese, the form a character takes depends on context. Zawgyi 'solves' that by having separate code points for the different forms, requiring the user to pick the right variant. The Unicode way is to make the font and the (font + font renderer) pair smarter, just as Unicode renders "é" instead of the two code points "e'".

Zawgyi also, necessarily, uses Unicode code points assigned for other characters to encode the variants.

<comment><USER10> The shape of "lowercase sigma" depends on whether it's in the middle of a word or at the end. These are adjacent in address space.

ς and σ. I won't shout out their names. Is this the case in modern Greek too?

<comment><USER9> Many of such warts in Unicode are for allowing round-tripping with 8-bit character encodings. I suspect that's the case here, too. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-7) has them, too.

That doesn't explain why Unicode seems to have 27 (!) different "sigma" code points, though ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma#Character_encoding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma#Character_encoding))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And Japan is still using Shift-JIS...

<comment><USER12> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification)

Imagiŋe if all the "n"s became "ŋ" if you accideŋtally used the Helvetica British foŋt instead of Helvetica Americaŋ oŋ your website.

<comment><USER13> Han unification is a bit of a mess, but you can fix it with lang attributes or the equivalent ("Language" selection in office document formats, for example). You don't _need_ to fake things with a custom font.

<comment><USER14> Except those are all application-specific and if _you_ 're the one writing the application, rendering different languages differently still seems to require messing around with fonts. (Or embedding an HTML renderer that does the messing for you.) I'm not sure whether there's any solution for OS-level strings that don't support changing the font (e.g. window titles, application names) beyond requiring the user to pick one language for their system and ignore all others.

<comment><USER15> Do variation selectors solve this problem? i.e., is there some way for me to include a variation selector in a filename or terminal output or something and have things render right?

<comment><USER14> I think variation selectors are intended for the case where even knowing the language is not enough to select the correct glyph, e.g. because they have been unified in a national standard despite different variants remaining in use. If one of those variants happens to be used in another country, you could of course use it to fix at least some cases, but I don't think all unified characters have a selector for each of their country-specific variants.

Even if they did, the Ideographic Variation Database [1] doesn't exactly make it easy to use variation selectors for that purpose, because you only get an example demonstrating what the glyphs should look like. To find out which glyph (and hence variation selector) to use for a given language, you'd need an additional database.

[1] [https://unicode.org/ivd/data/2017-12-12/](https://unicode.org/ivd/data/2017-12-12/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting to see this from a neighbor of India the land of fonts, regulary in use across the board, such as krutidev and its devanagari.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yes finally! I had been waiting for this moment</comment>


How Microsoft can reinvent themselves - <AUTHOR> http://adrtq.com/how-microsoft-can-reinvent-themselves

<comment><USER2> "How can Microsoft reinvent themselves" is the title of that post.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. We reverted it. All: please don't use linkbait titles, as the guidelines ask.</comment></comment>


Homelessness: The Problem That Even Silicon Valley Can't Seem to Solve - <AUTHOR> https://computerhistory.org/blog/homelessness-the-problem-that-even-silicon-valley-cant-seem-to-solve/ <comment><USER3> Why "even"? Why are we still pretending that Silicon Valley has the answers to everything, that tech in general is an all-purpose panacea?

<comment><USER4> Also, Silicon Valley is all about making money. How do you make money solving homelessness?

<comment><USER5> There's money in homelessness, just like there's money in for-profit prisons. A great many people are employed in San Francisco working for publicly funded homeless programs.

> Between 2011 and 2012, SF spent $157 million on homeless services. By the > 2015-2016 fiscal year, it was up to $242 million. In the most recent > 2019-2020 budget proposals, the figure hit more than $364 million. But the > consensus remains that more is needed.

(Source: [https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco- home...](https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/19/21027974/san-francisco-homeless- decade-2010s-kositsky-navigation-center-friedenbach) )

That money's not going to the homeless people. It's going to the people who run the services to support them. You think they'd want to see homelessness end?

And, indirectly, the Police make money from homelessness because they can use it to get their budgets increased.

<comment><USER6> > That money's not going to the homeless people. It's going to the people who > run the services to support them. You think they'd want to see homelessness > end?

Yes, I think those people want to see homelessness end. Why else would you want a career in that field?

Climate scientists also want action to be taken to fight climate change, even if it might put them out of a job. Folks who work for the UN to tackle world hunger want world hunger to end, even if it puts them out of a job.

I don't think rank-and-file workers are psychopaths.

<comment><USER7> There's an estimate of 10.000 homeless people in SF. And the budget is in 400 million.

At 40k a year per homeless person..how are they homeless. Answer: they aren't getting 40k of benefits.

<comment><USER8> A huge portion of that $400M is spent getting people off the streets - <USER2> aren't spending $400M on 10,000 homeless people. They're spending 400M on tens of thousands of housing insecure people and after all of the rent support, healthcare, and mental health expense, there are still 10,000 people that they haven't been able to get off the streets.

<comment><USER7> This is the SF housing project's self-defense argument. But the budget has doubled and homelessness has increased. It's also a sorry defense of the city gov to say that such a small city actually has much higher homelessness numbers that are masked by ludicrous spending.

<comment><USER8> I mean.. have you seen what has happened to rents at the same time? The core problem is that housing costs way too much here. Obviously more people are going to become homeless when rent prices increase by 20% per year, and obviously it is going to cost more to service homeless people when the prevailing rent has increased as much as it has. None of these things are mysteries.

<comment><USER9> The cost of housing isn't the problem, this has been proven over and over again in SF. Yes, housing helps, but its not a cure. During the CV outbreak SF has had a hard time getting people to go into hotels when offered, because people had to abstain from drinking/drugs and to take their medication.

There's a really interesting character from SF who posts on twitter (@MyTwolffamily) about his personal experience of being a homeless drug addict, it might be enlightening to read some of his posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Homeless is an outcome, not a thing that looks the same from every angle. It's a feature not a bug and the steps that lead to it need to be addressed for a meaningful fix. Money and commitment needs a plan and a clue. The idea that you can just add more physical buildings and hey presto is bunk. I have spent two decades of my life volunteering to help and I too started thinking about buildings and homes, but that isn't the real problem.

<comment><USER11> Correct, it is a multifaceted problem. It's an affordability issue, but it is also a mental health issue (pre-homelessness) and/or drug usage issue for a lot of people.

And here's the tricky part, if one city puts more money on the problem, the problem will only get bigger, because it will attract homeless people from other cities (though I can't blame them).

This is not an issue that's solvable only from the criminality/police side but not exclusively from the social side neither.

<comment><USER12> This is not true and a toxic stereotype. Most homeless people are homeless for financial reasons. Income inequality is the biggest driver of homelessness.

Therefore the most effective solutions are economic and perhaps anti-trust.

<comment><USER9> SF has recently proven OP's postulation as fact.

Even the extremely "progresive" mayor pointed it out.

SF's homelessness is not about any of the things you've noted.

<comment><USER12> Hey, I'm sorry. I disagree with you and looks like you disagree with a couple other folks on this thread, but I don't think this conversation is going to help anyone.

I'm going to avoid these political / non-technical threads on HN going forward.

<comment><USER9> I'm happy to discuss facts but I agree that HN is probably the wrong place for politics and non-technical discussion. IMO The community doesn't like politics and honestly I think thats one of the reason HN is such a great place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Homelessness: The Problem That Silicon Valley Doesn't Even Want to Solve

Because you know, it isn't clear how and if solving homelessness will make you money.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, it reminds me of the Monty Python's Merchant Banker sketch: [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hwql1](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hwql1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Solving homelessness is more a question of addressing mental illness. There is unfortunately a strong correlation between untreated mental illness and homelessness. One of my hospital friends has told me about homeless people who regularly hang out near the ER entrance, hoping to be admitted for treatment. If they are admitted, they are discharged right away. The Reagan era got rid of the "Mental Health Systems Act of 1980" which provided funding for community support of mental institutions. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980)

<comment><USER9> The Reagan canard is, well, wrong.

It has way more to do with the ACLU suing Florida and the resulting SCOTUS decision was that it was illegal to involuntarily commit someone. Yes, that means you can't put someone who's out of their mind into an institution until they're actually dangerous and they commit a crime. The longest psych hold (5150) is only about 72 hours, its not long enough to treat a serious condition.

<comment><USER16> I think the comment above is talking about voluntary admissions. Even people who want help with their mental illnesses struggle to get help.

<comment><USER9> I agree its hard to get treatment. There is absolutely no "one size fits all govt approved treatment plan" and that makes almost every case unique.

Since POTUS44 its been mandatory to purchase commercial health insurance and those who cannot afford it have been left with a problem.

I'll overshare a bit but my exgirlfriend was bipolar, she had great care and she still killed herself.

Mental healthcare is a big problem for a variety of reasons and SF and the bay area are a magnet because of how many services are available. I got to spend a lot of time with a social worker in the bay area who dealt with this exact problem, they basically confirmed that people came here for money and services and the success rate was sub 25%.

This is not a problem that tech can solve.

This is not a problem that the homeless industrial complex will solve for a variety of reasons.

This is a problem that govt has to solve, and the govt has more than enough money to figure it out and yet they don't.

<comment><USER15> I'm so sorry for your loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Worth noting that the solution is simple. If you want to end homelessness, you give the homeless houses. It turns out we have a ton of empty houses and apartments in America. If that's not palatable I'd be more interested in looking at why.

<comment><USER18> That doesn't solve the problem. If you just gave housing to most homeless people and walked away, the majority of them would be homeless again after a short time.

You'd need to commit to ongoing, indefinite financial support for the person and for the maintenance of the housing.

<comment><USER19> Your comment indicates the assumption that homeless people are homeless not for situational factors, but because of personal characteristics. However, I think it's more accurate to recognize that homelessness is a trap that makes it hard for a person to attain employment and healthy living. For example, a homeless person must invest far more energy to suit up for an interview than a non-homeless person. I see homelessness as a poverty trap.

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

<comment><USER18> Homelessness is not simply a money problem. A lot of homeless people have mental illnesses, drug addictions, and other significant health problems. Many of them are suspicious of shelters and especially of the police and other forms of government authority because of bad past experiences.

Even for people who initially became homeless because they couldn't afford housing, a lot of those other factors have become part of what keeps them homeless. Just giving them housing doesn't solve any of those other problems.

<comment><USER19> First things first, either you're conflating my response with the parent commenter, who is a different person, or you are setting up a straw man with your first sentence. I never said homelessness is "simply a money problem." Poverty has social, medical, and political elements -- it is not solely an economic problem.

I also never said it is possible to solve homelessness by just giving housing to homeless people.

Now, to respond to your reasoning....

Your comment exhibits some willful blindness. SF housing, for example, is crazy expensive. Research shows that expensive rental rates correlate to higher homeless rates. If you reduce the concentration of housing demand by letting technocrat employees work from home in remote places (Utah, Colorado, other scenic millennial hotspots), that reduces demand for SF housing. Lowered demand reduces price, which eases the threshold at which a homeless person is able to cover the cost of housing.

Cost of housing is but one of many situational factors. That said, it would be somewhat ignorant to look at homelessness as a non-economic problem.

For many homeless people, the issue may not be intrinsic to their mental state, but rather the result of situational factors. One simple proof of this is the fact that many people come out of homelessness after a while. Instead of blaming the person, we should evaluate the situational factors. Often, one of those factors is money. However, other situational factors can reinforce poverty as well.

All people experience shocks at certain points in their lives. If such a shock comes at a time of housing insecurity, it may result in homelessness. Illness is one such shock.

Poor and disadvantaged people must often be more sophisticated than their more-well-off counterparts to accomplish the same tasks. Imagine, if you will, a person without credit who needs to borrow a few thousand dollars to buy a car to get to work. That person may have to go to friends or family. If he qualifies for a bank loan, the rate will be higher than what would be offered to a different person with superior credit. And the loan amount may be less. Thus, he may have to buy a used, possibly problematic vehicle. The debt service of the loan, plus maintenance cost of the vehicle, will be elevated versus a new car at a fair interest rate. If the neighborhood is insecure, insurance will be more expensive.

Those are not solely money problems. However, they work in concert to bleed funds from the individual, preventing him from saving money. That's one example of a poverty trap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sure the big tech companies have no direct financial interest in simply reducing homelessness, but one way to accomplish that would be to lower the cost of housing in San Francisco.

How is it in the interest of tech companies to have skyrocketing real estate prices and as a result, the need to pay huge salaries to their employees so they can afford the cost of living in SF? Surely it would be in the interest of Google, Facebook et al. to be able to pay their employees less and have the cost of their own commercial real estate fall?

Do they not have enough political influence? Or is it not in their interests somehow?

<comment><USER7> I think this is why Facebook wants to build their own complexes.

If they buy the land themselves, they could achieve increasing housing units on one hand, and also provide housing as a benefit which means going around the 50% tax bracket for their employees.

<comment><USER21> Disclosure: I worked at Facebook.

You do not want your landlord and your employer to be the same. (Unless you're a live in manager of the property, then it's more likely to make sense). For one thing, it makes looking for another job much harder, because you'll presumably have to move as well. For another, because an employee that lives at the employer's housing may never interact with people who aren't employees, and end up even more disconnected from the community at large.

It may make sense for Facebook (or others) to put their money to work increasing housing supply by building denser housing, or by financing such building, but they need to divest as soon as practical. If the issue is employees can't live near work, because housing is too expensive, increasing the supply near work should help with that, even if you don't restrict the new units to employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Besides showing great concern about homelessness, the poll indicated that while Silicon Valley residents are anxious to help alleviate the problem, they are less enthusiastic when the solutions include providing homeless shelters and housing in their own neighborhoods.

I think that says most of it right there. We've cultivated an environment where paying lip service towards a cause is more important than actually doing anything about it. Real solutions are too easy to attack, so the only safe position is speaking platitudes.

<comment><USER23> I am not in SV but is there a reason housing for homeless needs to be located on pretty much the most expansive land in the world?

<comment><USER24> No, but there's a persistent sense of entitlement where people honestly believe they have the Right to live in San Francisco.

It's mind-boggling, like commuting is some special Hell only they experience. Nobody bats an eye when Manhattan schoolteachers are in the bridge & tunnel crowd, but if you listen to some folks they will assure you that San Francisco's children deserve teachers who live near their schools, and anything else would be a travesty. Think of the children!

<comment><USER25> There's also a sense of entitlement from homeowners who believe they should be able to stop any and all changes to their neighborhoods, while paying property tax rates from 1980s (and thus having all their services paid for by the income tax of those "commuters", who won't even be able to use the services they pay for).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I always wonder why owners of those RVs are considered part of the problem. They are not on the streets. Most of them do not pollute the streets either. Those who are should be contacted for appropriate enforcement. They likely can afford to pay for a traditional housing unit far away but choose to be closer to their work. Spending 2-4 hours in traffic daily just to go to bed makes no sense as a single person.

I choose to not pay rent since 2015. I make enough money to at least split an apartment with someone, but I see no benefit in doing so. All my stuff is either sold or in storage. I only need a parking spot where to park my vehicle. My minivan converts into a 8x4x4' bedroom and many people walk past it without giving it a second look.

If a city wants to provide a secure parking lot, that is great and I'd certainly park there, but otherwise I have no need for their help. The challenge with this is that whenever such things are mentioned, the city wants to add arbitrary rules. Opponents then at times label secure parking zones as concentration camps.

We need to get people without a tent off the street. They are definitely in danger. Those in tents can be remarkably comfortable with the right gear, but they need land to set them up and the right gear is expensive. They likely don't have it. Sidewalks are not the right land for that, so they need special attention.

Those of us in vehicles are comfortable enough to not be concerned with. If we are able to maintain a registered insured vehicle, that suggests we do not have mental problems.

</comment><comment><USER25> > But there is only so much developable land, which keeps supply low.

Repeating this line is a horrible idea. It gives ammunition to those pushing the idea that Silicon Valley homelessness is the "natural order" rather than the direct result of bad policies by those living here.

There's more than enough land to solve the issue, it's just that it would mean people who already own homes would have to make some minor sacrifices that's they're not willing to make.

</comment><comment><USER27> Homelessness seems easy enough to solve. Build a bunch of free housing, but giving away housing doesn't jive with our society so nobody is motivated to do it. Least of all Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER28> I don't know why this is being down voted. Building housing and giving it to homeless folks would, by definition, make those folks not-homeless.

Though I'd believe that the folks in Silicon Valley are more likely to propose and implement this sort of solution than many other parts of the country.

<comment><USER9> Its probably because its supposition disproven by facts.

You can give someone who's homeless a home, but that gives them zero tools to keep it. There's an assumption that the person doesn't need supplimental support to have a productive path forward, and thats just wrong.

SF presumed that putting more public toilets on the street would keep people from defecating on the street, that was disproven in several areas, people would just relieve themselves wherever they felt like. I unfortunately would routinely see someone drop a #2 on the street less than 100 feet away from the very well maintained public bathroom.

<comment><USER29> Would you rather pee in the open air, knowing you won't get cited, or in an unventilated public restroom that doesn't ever get cleaned? I'd pee on the street, too. Capital improvements always need maintenance and service, and homes for homeless, addicted, and/or mentally unwell people are no exception.

<comment><USER9> I take it that you haven't seen SF's "pitstop" system. They're incredibly clean/hygenic and ventilated.

Yet people still befoul the streets.

The unfortunate "why" is that they DGAF, I wish I was making that up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Work-from-home will reduce centralization of residence demand, eventually thinning out the population in urban areas and permitting technocrats to live in high-appeal remote areas. That will reduce rental demand and thus bring about a reduction in prices for renters and buyers.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is one reason why the "making the world a better place" rhetoric from big tech companies comes off so tone-deaf.

Fundamentally, tech companies have been a major driver in increasing income inequality. For all the productivity gains we get from automation, low-income jobs are lost - at least in the short term.

A popular solution is UBI, but I fear that it's overly-simplistic and could have unintended negative consequences.

</comment><comment><USER30> OK maybe SV are bad for this. The govt needs to solve this by building low income housing but lol building low income housing in the US.

Finland figured it out [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a- miracle...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle- helsinkis-radical-solution-to-homelessness)

<comment><USER9> Finnish society is extremely different, their solutions are non-transplantable to the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> In a related story: Koko-the-Economist-Gorilla flings poo at Human-the- technologist and asks "If you so smart how come I can fling at you the mess I created?"

</comment><comment><USER32> Where are the A.I. designed self-erecting superstructures? Too radical "even" for old tech money.

</comment><comment><USER33> You get what you Fn deserve, Bay Area. Many cities there, especially San Francisco have chosen homeless people over hardworking, tax paying citizens. These leaders literally chose to keep people on the street over the rent- payers. While they get free needles, normal people are forced to move again and again because of the disgusting streets, unbearable noise, and unfair law enforcement. All while paying extremely high taxes and rent.

Homeless people have been around forever, what's happening now is a failure to send the message out to everyone that living outside IS NOT OK. Can you not afford San Francisco, THEN MOVE. If you are not paying rent it should be even easier, but instead it's the rent paying people that have to spend money they can't really afford just to get away from all the madness.

You wanted to be nice to these people who are obviously taking advantage of the system? Well enjoy your post-apocalyptic shithole.

<comment><USER34> You're being downvoted, but you're right. (It would have been nice for you to have said it a little less crassly though)</comment></comment>


Malaysia says there's sealed evidence on MH370 - <AUTHOR> http://www.straitstimes.com/the-big-story/missing-mas-plane/story/malaysia-says-theres-sealed-evidence-mh370-cannot-be-made-publ#comment-1305575057

<comment><USER2> Who knows if it is true, but the article is useless given it says things like:

 _The coordinates in the picture indicate that the photo was taken within 3 miles of what Google officially gives for Diego Garcia. It is NOT EXACTLY what comes up on Google. It is off a couple miles, so NO ONE GOOGLED THIS, thus helping to confirm it's authenticity._

and

 _If anything was used to re-tag this image, it would say so in the software tag of the image. Any time software modifies any aspect of the image, the last thing to touch the image gets put in the software tag. The Iphone's standard software is in the image tag and nothing else. That means this image has NOT been re-tagged and that is the FIRST THING I checked before posting this story. And NO, YOU CANNOT MODIFY IT WITH A PROGRAMMING EDITOR UNLESS YOU ARE A MACHINE LANGUAGE GENIUS._

the former doesn't confirm anything, and the latter is stupid, since it should be obvious that anyone can edit EXIF tags to say whatever they want.

<comment><AUTHOR> i think you're refering to another article? this one is not about any picture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know this seems a hoax from the start, [http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2014/03/hijacked-ibm- en...](http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2014/03/hijacked-ibm-engineer- successfully-dialed-out-of-diego-garcia-2928892.html) and I know EXIF can be changed, can someone show me some big incongruity in this story that I might miss out ?

I know this maybe stupid, but I like good stories, and this seems like a good story, but seems not real. But then I thought it in reverse, what if a story like that would _really_ happen how would we knew was true? Can we investigate with our IT knowledge?

<comment><USER4> More than a hoax, it feels like the beginning of Lost. Did we all just die and are about to figure that out?

<comment><USER3> Good story though...</comment></comment></comment>


Uncov Marches On - <AUTHOR> http://uncov.com/uncov-marches-on

<comment><AUTHOR> This whole post seems like a feeble attempt at addressing the issue that he makes horrible comments about startups that haven't failed when his has.

 _Yes, this is the point: to show you that no matter how illogical something can be on the internet, there will still be hype and buzz around it. It's not supposed to make sense._

Seems like that is what his point is now that he is a lower statistic than the people he rants about.

<comment><USER2> " ... he makes horrible comments about startups that haven't failed when his has."

PressFlip has failed? From what I've read, it is marching on without him.

<http://teddziuba.com/2008/10/moving-on-out.html>

"The product is in good hands. Matt and Kyle will continue to develop Pressflip, and I'll continue to be a user. "</comment></comment>


Thoughts from the designer of Farmville - <AUTHOR> http://iteratingfun.com/post/26029257877/5-thoughts-from-the-designer-of-farmville

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting add on - despite Farmville's success he didn't feel it was creatively that interesting a game to him personally, and he moved on shortly thereafter...</comment>


Facebook hires Sony, iPhone hacker GeoHot - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/faster-forward/post/report-facebook-hires-playstation-hacker-george-hotz/2011/06/27/AGt0o1nH_blog.html?tid=sm_twitter_washingtonpost

<comment><USER2> He was bound to get snapped up quickly by some company or another, it was just a matter of time. Being arrested was the best thing that happend to his carrear!</comment>


Ask HN: YC European Alumni - <AUTHOR>

Hi we were wondering if there is a list of YC Euro Alumni? Trying to get the Euro perspective about applying to the program, the experience itself, and solutions for work visas. Thanks in Advance. <comment><USER2> I'm from England and took part in YCS11 - I'd be happy to answer any questions you have.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Simon, Thanks for responding so quickly. Well one of the questions we had being from Euro (Norway based) is around the turnaround time from say interviewing end of April till starting in June. Such a short time frame must be tough to sort out visas and a place? Any advice on visas?

We are going to start getting some feedback on our application as well (have some friends in SF with friends from YC that are going to review), and there is tons of competition for the program, it would just be a shame to get in and not be prepared/able to go to SF. From what I understand Visas take awhile to process and T1 is difficult to get.

<comment><USER2> No problem, I was in the same position roughly a year ago and so I know it's tough to figure things out in time.

Most people don't actually apply for visas during YC and instead only once the 3 months are over (that is, if they want to stay in the US). This is because most western countries are a part of the Visa Waiver Program (I'm 99% sure Norway citizens are eligible for the VWP) which allows you to visit the US for up to 90 days at a time for business or pleasure (this means you'll have to go back to Norway for 1-2 weeks during the program and then just fly back). Whilst it's somewhat up for debate whether it's legal to use the VWP to do YC, most people do.

As for a place to stay, there is a fair bit of rental accommodation in the surrounding area of the YC office (Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc) and if you twist the arms of landlords of the properties (i.e. pay X amount of rent upfront), they'll generally let you get a place sorted pretty quickly. The YC network itself can also be a big help (we actually rented our first apartment in San Jose from a startup in our batch).

Airbnb is also a great resource to find a place to stay during your interview.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great to know, I guess it is a matter of get over there and deal with the visas afterwards once you get more traction on what direction you are going.

Do you know of any cases where people were accepted into say YC summer, but were able to postpone until winter?</comment></comment></comment></comment>