Ask HN: Any tips for living cheaply in SF? - <AUTHOR> Hi!
I'm a young wannabe-hacker looking to move for a summer to SF area. I'm working on a web project (Rails) and will try to reach ramen profitability over summer. If I fail I'll go back to living with my parents/continue college in the fall.
I can't move until June 13 since I'll only be 18 then (and be able to rent). So 2.5 months of living.
I already have around $3000 (paid taxes recently) and mainly telecommute part-time on C++/COM gigs. I might continue working with my current employer down there but I don't think I should rely on that. I'd rather rely on what I already have rather than hope I don't get cut off :)
Can somewhere answer these questions:
a) Will it be easier to pick up some part-time C++/Rails gigs in SF bay than Seattle? I'd really like to have some continuous source of income so I'd have money to come back/extend my runway.
b) Is it possible to live on $1000/month in SF? I subtract $600 for transit gas, emergency, etc.
For the rest, I summed up rent+utilities to be around $700, $100 for food, and $200 for everything else.
Am I correct in my calculations? Is there anything I'm missing?
c) How is the weather down there? Is it much hotter than Seattle?
e) Am I fucking crazy?
Thank you much. <comment><USER2> _If I fail I'll go back to living with my parents/continue college in the fall._

Why not just do it from home? I don't really see the benefit of moving to SF. You'll reach Ramen profitability a lot more easily if your costs are $0. You might even start college with something that most students can only dream of: income.

<comment><USER3> I'd say it would be 10x easier to do it in SF/bay area. You'll find 10x more entrepreneurs and hacker types. This will help you learn a lot more in a lot shorter period of time. And probably have more fun.

I've found job and contract opportunities are 3-4x more plentiful so you could probably earn a decent income on the side.

I don't think you can live on $1,000/month in SF. The absolute lowest I was able to live on for 1 month was $1,500. I think $2,000/month would be a much better min to shoot for. If you're here for 2.5 months, then you only need to make $2k on the side to have that.

I would recommend trying to get a job or internship and working on your project at night. If it's a website, it will take time to get users and crystallize anyway, and you really can't speed that up by spending 60-100 hours a week on it. So why not spend ~20 hours a week on the site and spend the rest getting paid for things people need right now?

my 2 cents.

<comment><USER4> > I don't think you can live on $1,000/month in SF

I think you can, if you really want to, and it sounds like he does, so I say: go for it.

You can get a room share for $600. <http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/roo/>

That leaves $13 per day to spend, which is tight, but livable if you really want it. Suggestions: bring a cheap bike, so transport costs nothing; make your own lunches; $5 burrito dinners, etc; work from the public library and/or work from coffee shops and spend as little as possible/nothing; go to all the free events (there are lots, and some are free for the first x visitors) - some even feed you for free (saves $5), and give you booze.

And if you do come to SF, I'll stand you one Chicken Shawarma for dinner, because I think moving to SF for the summer when you're 18 is ballsy, so I'll put $8 behind that. (I spent the summer I turned 18 alone working in Scunthorpe, UK - believe me, SF will be better..)

<comment><USER5> if you come to SF you can also hit me up for a free dinner.

<comment><USER6> It's a trap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Beware that a lot of networking events take place in 21+ places (read: bars) so that may or may not be a problem.

You're planning ahead a lot more than most kids that move to SF for a summer. Most end up homeless on haight street before calling their parents for a ticket home (I've hosted two separate street kids who moved here with starry eyes and ended up on the street before they went home...) -- so kudos for planning ahead a bit more than them :)

I moved here with $7,000 + a $2,000/month contract gig and settled in nicely. You're cutting it close, but it's possible. My $0.02x4:

(a) It's possible once you have the network and people who will vouch for your skills. Be aware that CL is full of red herrings; people are not hiring as many contractors in the downturn, but it still happens. Expect to see far less C++ than RoR/python/PHP.

(b) It will be challenging, mentally and physically, but it's possible if you're strategic about it. $700 can get you a sublet __if_you_look_long_and_hard__, but $100 for food is tough. You probably won't have much of a kitchen to prepare your own food. When I went through YCombinator I lived off of Vietnamese sandwiches and Dim Sum for days at a time; you'll get sick of it but $3 sandwiches and $4 for a plate of dim sum is hard to beat. $7 mission burritos are also a good bet, El Farolito's has burritos that'll easily feed you for a whole day.

c) SF is going to be cold during the summer. You should have been able to find this out, it's no longer 1968 ;)

e) You're in high school, you get to be crazy. :)

<comment><USER8> This is the best advice so far.

I want to chime in and say DON'T move to the east bay or one of the cheap places on the peninsula. The 'savings' are misleading. There's a good chance you'll spend as much in transport as you'll save in rent.. For example, from downtown Berkeley to 16th and Mission is $3.55 each way. If you go back and forth every day, it's $210/m. Thus if you find a $500/m room in Berkeley but you still go into the city all the time, it's the same as having a $700 room in the Mission. Also, there is little chance of finding a cheaper room in the east bay that is within reasonable walking distance from BART. The east bay is way more spread out and chances are that you'll have to walk quite a ways to get to the BART. In fact I'm going to risk criticism and say that anyplace you find a shared room cheaper than $700 in the east bay is going to be a sketchy neighborhood. YMMV, but the shady parts of berkeley are the only places in the bay area I've ever been mugged or physically threatened by people.

I speak from experience. When I moved here in 2001 I paid $700 for a place in Berkeley, which was about as cheap as it got. I worked on 17th and Harrison in the outer mission. I had to walk almost 30min to get to Ashby BART each way. If something happened late into the evening I'd have to crash on a friend's couch or take a $40 cab ride back to Berkeley cuz the BART stops running at midnight. It mostly sucked.

I don't want to hate on the east bay, it has it's charms. But unless your job and social life is all on that side of the bay, it's better to live in the city. You can definitely find a $700 room somewhere in SF. That's what I paid for a room in the mission until 2006 (then moved into my own place).

Also don't drive here, having a car is a huge expense in SF. My car was paid for and it still cost me around $400/m for parking, gas and parking tickets. You almost always get a virgin america flight from SEA to SFO for $49 if you travel on any day besides friday or sunday.

If I were doing this I'd bring nothing except a backpack with a few clothes (you can buy more stuff here if you need it) and a laptop. Then I'd just float around different cheap places on AirBNB until I figured out what I was doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm planning to sleep in the car if something happens. And I can't work on a laptop, I'd have to bring my large 22'' display here, and keyboards, so I'd end up walking around with a very very huge backpack :)

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I want to chime in. Not only is having a car expensive, but it even when you can afford it, it does not make anything easier. You don't necessarily get parking spaces closer to your destination than where the bus stop is. Often you're walking farther to and from your spot, than where the bus/MUNI/BART/cab would drop you off.

Also, in a city, you're always having to move your car even when you don't need to drive it anywhere for street cleaning days. If you're lucky enough to have a garage for it, it will be hundreds of dollars a month. You're already cutting it pretty close with your budget. Really, really, really don't bring it.

Otherwise, I think your plan sounds amazing, and I hope you post here from time to time about your experiences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I live in SF, it's a great city, and if "living in SF/bay-area" is your dream, go for it.

But that's not quite the same dream as "reach ramen profitability on my web project". In fact, the two dreams may conflict. Moving to and learning a new area takes a bunch of time and money, and the bay area (especially SF proper) is expensive -- compared to Seattle or living with family.

For a young techie, the biggest benefit I could imagine being in the bay area versus Seattle is a larger job market and scene of potential collaborators. But are those what you need to make your project ramen-profitable -- or do those opportunities represent other paths entirely?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html>

This, and "I-really-want-to-try-to-live-Cali-and-get-out-of-my- parents'-bedroom" reason. I think this is enough to spend $3000.

Basically, I'm making myself a little YC experience :)

<comment><USER11> From what I gather, the 'YC Experience' includes easy access to lots of people, a big network of founders, pg & company's advice, and a lot of other stuff - that's why so many people are keen to get in. I honestly don't know how much of that you can recreate on your own in a short period of time, but my guess is 'not too much'.

One thing might be to consider a shorter trip down there to see if you can connect with some people in the course of a couple weeks, scout out places to live, and so on, and then do a more permanent move at a later date.

BTW, Berkeley might be a better option in some ways - with students leaving for the summer, maybe you could swing some cheaper housing there. It's not a bad place, either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd do it if I were you.

I won't lie. In my opinion the chances of success are slim to none. But this is the best time of your life to take a chance. The more adult you get the less able you are to take huge chances. So as long as you hang on to enough money to get yourself home should things go bad I don't see a down side (where as if you don't you could end up regretting it for the rest of your life)

That said, two pieces of advice....

First, get this book: [http://www.amazon.com/Ask-Moon-Get-Percy- Ross/dp/0722529465/...](http://www.amazon.com/Ask-Moon-Get-Percy- Ross/dp/0722529465/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241369356&sr=8-1)

Percy Ross went from nothing to being a millionare and he attributes most of that to getting help from the right people. In that book he gives his 10 rules on how to ask for people's help and get it. The most important thing to remember if you do this is that 90% of the people in the bay area tech scene have been where you are (aka chasing a dream). If you need help and you ask right I suspect most will do what they can to help you succeed.

Second, look into hostels: <http://www.hostels.com/us.ca.sf.html>

Hostels are basically cheap dorms for anyone to stay in. They're not very popular in the U.S. but in Europe there are tons of them and they serve young people with little money very well. The bay area has more than just about any U.S. city so you should be able to find a cheap place to sleep (and most have free wifi)

Anyway, hope it helps.

<comment><USER13> I _highly_ recommend the Hostelling International hostel at 312 Mason St. It's like $25/night, super-clean, and they feed you breakfast, too! I've stayed there a few times while going to WWDC.

<comment><USER14> HI hostels have a maximum stay restriction. I think it's around two weeks. They certainly don't let you camp out for an entire summer.

<comment><USER12> I'd assume he has sometime line where, if he doesn't start getting work within the first couple of weeks, he gives up. The Hostel is just there to give him the chance to get his feet on the ground and try to drum up some connections

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why? Is there really a point to moving to SF? I see no plan here and really no reason for you to take such a leap, so why bother wasting your money just to move locations for the summer. Anything you would be doing there could be done from where you are. Save your $3000, continue working on what you have, and if it seems to be a good idea, invest it into that product. You gain nothing by moving there (unless you find actual work). I really don't understand why everyone here is telling you to do it. I know at 18 it can seem glamorous to do something so crazy but if you sit back and think about it for a second, its pretty stupid. If you have a finished product and have something to gain by moving there (like finding people to work with or for you on it) then I could see it. If you were simply planning on looking for work then I could see it. I just see no plan and it seems like a big waste to just do something so irrational.

<comment><USER16> notdarkey,

Those people who are telling him to do it probably have done it themselves (that includes me). After moving in the Bay area, I asked myself why I didn't do it earlier.

I have lived in 4 US cities and no city comes close to the startup environment in SF. It's like watching the Superbowl in person versus watching it in your own house. The energy is just different.

He's 18. If he fails, so what. Sometimes, it's better to regret things you have done than regrets things you didn't do. (Ok that doesn't include committing crimes.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> (Background: I came from grad school in Seattle to SF for my job.)

(a) Freelance work is heavily dependent on contacts. If you don't have contacts then it's a crapshoot. Maybe you'll luck into something, maybe you won't.

(b) For housing, scan <http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sub/> ; $700 is not impossible, but you'll be living in a spare room of someone's house, and even then that's the low end & you should expect compromises. SF housing is _much_ more expensive than Seattle, as in 2x the cost for equivalent space. I don't know where you got the idea that the costs are comparable (are you mistakenly including East Bay or South Bay prices instead of SF city prices only?). $100 for food is doable if you know how to buy cheap food in bulk and cook it yourself. As for "everything else", heat/electric/broadband can easily consume close to $200 if you're living alone. In a share it should be less, but you should ask about utility costs in your housing situation. On that budget, you should not count on spending any money on entertainment. There's some free entertainment to be had if you're scrappy, but expect to get most of your entertainment from walking around the city or riding your bike through the parks.

(c) Summer SF weather is _colder_ than summer Seattle weather. Bring sweaters.

(d) [you skipped (d)]

(e) SF is an expensive place to live. If this is your 2.5 months of adventure before college, then you just have to weigh whether you're willing to pay $3k for that experience. (Not a bad way to spend it actually.) If you're really trying to bootstrap into a sustainable living situation, SF isn't the best place to go with as little savings as you have; there's too much danger of burning through your seed capital before you get revenue-positive ;). I get the sense that for you it's more the former than the latter --- that is, there's not much downside if you fail --- so what the hell, go for it.

<comment><USER18> In response to b, c and e, I have one word. Oakland.

<comment><USER19> Oakland is a fine place to live, and I live there, but you have to watch the transit situation when living there. If you are too far from a BART or an express cross-bay bus, you will burn a lot of time waiting for bus transfers. See 511.org or Google Transit when researching potential places to live.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Contact Justin.tv. They're looking for summer interns

</comment><comment><USER21> Living on $1k in the city sounds rough. You'll probably be so stressed for money and busy that you won't even be able to enjoy it. If you're focus right now is building your website, don't distract yourself with contract work and city life. I would recommend just staying with your folks and getting down to it. Being in the city won't make your website any more successful.

But if you're dead set on coming out here, I would recommend looking in the east bay or the peninsula. Stay close to a BART or caltrain station so you can get into the city easily for networking events & to meet with clients.

If you really want to live in SF proper i would recommend looking for a room in the Tenderloin (despite its rep, its a great place to live, i loved it... lots of cheap food and close to everything) or in the southern or eastern part of the mission.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wish you well, and I don't think your plan is totally crazy, but I think $3K is not enough runway for SF. $5K is better. But at $3K, everything has to go right. A single disaster would ruin everything, like:

\- Your freelance gigs not paying you in time \- Finding that your new roommates are impossible to live with \- Getting tossed out of your new place when your housemate wants his girlfriend to move in \- Some unexpected expense (car accident, hospital visit)

Also, you will not believe what some people are offering for those $700/month apartments. On Craigslist at that price, you might find generally terrible places with sketchy roommates and your "room" may literally be a former closet. Believe me, I have seen them. I am very frugal about rent so I have investigated those sorts of listings. There are $700/month rooms that are halfway decent but those don't tend to pop up on Craigslist. Working your friend network in SF might be the best option.

And, your estimates of expenses are too low.

Still, if you are looking to just break even, it might be worth a try. Just be prepared to go home or try to get a parental loan (if that's possible) if it doesn't work out.

Ditto on the false economy of living in the peninsula. Unless you are trying to get a job at one of the Palo Alto or Mountain View area startups.

There are a lot of cool things going on in Oakland so I would consider that as a possibility, but it's also more complex for a newcomer to figure out a decent place to live, and transit is considerably more expensive.

</comment><comment><USER23> In a down economy, with huge unemployment in the valley (lots of competitors, unless you're unique in some way?) are you not better investing in yourself by continuing college?

</comment><comment><USER9> Regarding the weather, I've lived in both places, San Francisco is _much_ colder in the summer than Seattle. San Francisco, and most of coastal Northern California, barely has seasons. Though Silicon Valley and the East Bay (Oakland, San Jose, etc) do get warmer, San Francisco, being surrounded by water on 3 sides, just doesn't get hot in the summer beyond a random handful of days. (On the the other hand, it also barely has winter :D) Bring your jacket(s)!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's like a huuuuuge PLUS as I really don't like hot air. Now I have another reason to go: get away from hot Seattlish weather.

<comment><USER24> > Now I have another reason to go: get away from hot Seattlish weather

As someone who lives in Atlanta, this sentence about made me spit coffee out my nose... =)

(FWIW, I'd love to move to Seattle area, but it's just not in the cards for me.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I moved here when I was 18 (in 2006) with $1500 in the bank (and no parents to fall back on.) It's tough but doable. I ended up taking a job with an existing startup, but at the time my first priority was being able to eat :)

If I were you, I would not move here to do the solo founder thing without having plenty of connections; you need a good support network (which will hook you up with contract gigs too.) Bring a co-founder or hook up with some people who are already here and can introduce you.

That said, just being young and having the balls to move out here and give it a shot will open doors for you. Network aggressively, who knows?

As far as tips go: You can get a room for $500-$700 a month with varying levels of sketchiness; there are enough hacker houses around that you might find something helpful if you trawl CL long enough. Food is a matter of how gnarly you're willing to get :)

Don't bring your car and don't bring a bunch of gear; parking will cost you upwards of $150/mo and it's never included, and gearwise there's a non-trivial possibility you'll need to move fast if you're doing a cheap sublet or hosteling it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Check out the Hacker House v2 <http://tinyurl.com/cvtgyu>. Pretty reasonable rent.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sure you can do it. From 2002-2004, I lived on about that much per month, but it wasn't easy.

-Rent was under $500 - you can still get these prices. Sublet a room in a house with some other young people. \- Electricity/internet bill - $35. \- Cell phone - $50. \- Bring down your bicycle and bike for transport - Free \- If you cook every day, and eat mostly vegetarian and rice - not just MSG-infused ramen - you can live on $5 a day - that's $150 for the month. \- Give yourself $250 for very infrequent meals out, beers, or BART/Caltrain trips - and surprises.

I'm guessing most of the people who said you can't do it for $1000 never tried. If you have to, you make it work.

Summer's a great time to live in SF for cheap - lots of free outdoor activities. 2 months isn't that long to tough it out. Come back again and enjoy the great city when you hit it big :)

<comment><USER14> Prices have gone up a bit since 2004. The cheapest shared living situations I've heard about here are in the $700/month range, and those tend to be dicey and hard to find.

<comment><USER28> Sometimes you can find a shared room for less, especially in the Haight. Those old houses have huge attics often with 3-4 hipsters in them. Would make it hard to work from home though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "a) Will it be easier to pick up some part-time C++/Rails gigs in SF bay than Seattle? I'd really like to have some continuous source of income so I'd have money to come back/extend my runway."

\--Probably. As a rough lithmus test, you could run searches on startuply/ craigslist for both cities and compare the number of returns.

"b) Is it possible to live on $1000/month in SF? I subtract $600 for transit gas, emergency, etc."

\--It's possible. 100 for food seems low ($3 per day). A big expense is rent; if you could cut that down you'd be better off.

"c) How is the weather down there? Is it much hotter than Seattle?"

\--Not sure, I'm from NYC =)

"e) Am I fucking crazy?"

\--No. And keep us in touch!

</comment><comment><USER19> Suggest working on how you're going to meet people now -- figure out which events you'll want to go to, which places to hang out, etc. That will help with contacts, which in turn should help with picking up consulting or a formal internship. You can then use this to help plan where you want to live and whether you need a car. Also, as pointed out in the thread, some venues are regrettably 21+.

In particular, a lot of events happen on the peninsula in the Palo Alto/Mountain View area. For example, SuperHappyDevHouse is something you probably want to attend, and it's recently been at places like Sun. While getting there by CalTrain is possible, you can't stay late without being badly stranded. So if you find yourself wanting to visit places in that area, you will want access to a car. Bringing your own is an option, there's also car sharing services like ZipCar or CityCarShare.

You might also find it fun to drop by Noisebridge, a hacker space near 16th and Mission, to see what's happening. Circuit hacking every monday! <http://www.noisebridge.net> (disclosure: I'm the secretary and a member)

Overall, you are not crazy, but do some prep work by reaching out to potential contacts, setting up meetings, and figuring out the right events now. While the Bay Area _is_ the kind of place where you can walk into a cafe, meet someone random, and then walk out with an incredible conversation that leads to your next opportunity, you will get a lot more out of your summer if you work it ahead of time. Posting here is a good start, but you probably want to do some investigation more closely targeted to your web project idea.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm a SF res about to graduate university. If you make it down here I'd be happy to help you survive/show you where locals have fun.

That being said, another student programmer and myself are working on a startup in Ruby. Interested angel, that kind of thing. If you think you can contribute, I'd be willing to pad your ramen budget. Added bonus: one of our early target markets is Seattle, maybe something will come of that.

email is firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER31> live in the east bay (oakland, berkeley, alameda), not the city. look for roommates, not a studio. move near a BART station. whenever someone starts the sentence with "hey want to go..." involuntarily say no.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think you can totally live on that budget, if you play things right. You might also look into living in some neighboring cities that would allow you to commute for events, but you could live on that budget in San Francisco proper if you were careful.

I think you should just plan on the 2.5 months though and go to school afterwards.

I'm in a very similar situation. I'm taking a break from school (college), I have a bunch of savings built up, and I have a business that makes about enough for me to live off of.

I'm sharing a place now with some other hackers (we were in Palo Alto for a few months) and it's come down to $500-$900/month for rent depending on who gets a roommate. Not too shabby.

Coming from Boston, I thought it was really lame that there wasn't a central, unified subway system. But the busses here are just as good. There's one route that comes by my place every 5 minutes.

Also, I never realized how much the weather affected my emotions. I love how sunny it is out here.

</comment><comment><USER32> A) Extend your runway – heh you may just find a reason to never leave, happens often there.

B) I don't know what your transit costs are going to be, SF has wonderful transit. You could make the investment in a Muni pass and be able to explore one of North America's most beautiful cities.

Many SF apartments include some of the utilities in the rent, just be savvy. SF, being an incredibly choosy market often forces 6-month or 12-month leases: this doesn't apply to you. You probably need to plan on getting a room in a house with some like-minded hackers

C) As Mark Twain said: The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Think LAYERS.

D) Where's D go?

E) Absolutely not. Take a risk, work hard, and meet dangerous fun people. You can live a lot of fun in SF on the cheap because, well, not everyone can be rich as Lergei.

</comment><comment><USER9> I would really try to get a little bit of additional income, your numbers are very tight. Plus, you don't want to move to another city to stay in your room the whole time because you're broke, you want to enjoy your time in SF. $700/room is doable but still quite rare (especially without strange catches, like "3 bus rides away from X.") I'd put a bunch of energy into finding the room before you take off, maybe check out AirBNB? Have a separate post about housing hookup?

</comment><comment><USER33> I have never lived in SF, nor have any plans to — but what are your reasons to be there? Surely it'd be easier (or should I say cheaper) to work out of Seattle?

<comment><AUTHOR> I compared living costs using Craigslist. Turns out apartment prices all almost the same. The only cheaper thing is 200 bucks for gasoline to go there/back.

EDIT: I think that the advantage that moving down there will give me will outweigh the $200.

<comment><USER28> I really wouldn't bring your car. There are no places to park, and you'll get parking tickets unless you're really good at getting up at 7:45 am to go drive your car until the street cleaners have passed. There's cheap airfare, amtrak, and craigslist rideshare to get down there.

Also, I generally found while looking for a place on craigslist, that while there are a lot of cheap places listed, they're heavily competed due to rent control. Places with a room for 500-600 will get hundreds and hundreds of responses, and you'll have to do an awkward interview for the room, which is like a combination date/job interview. It will take time to find a room. Nearly everyone I know that has moved to the bay area has crashed on a friend's couch for 2-3 months, or take an expensive, short term sublet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> e) Am I fucking crazy?

Maybe yes, but taking a leap into the unknown is the kind of crazy thing that more people should do. Progress, unreasonable man, and all that. Go for it!

</comment><comment><USER35> Random thoughts:

If you're looking for summer sublets around universities, have you considered Davis? It's an hour and some away with no traffic, but cheaper, and uh, a lot hotter. I don't know anything about the department but I've been impressed by UC Davis recent grads in CS /EE i've worked wtih.

people start hacker houses at random intervals

<http://searchyc.com/hacker+house>

</comment><comment><USER36> On a related note - anyone familiar with the Berkeley area care to share some tips about housing (places/buildings to avoid, where all the free-wifi coffee houses are, etc)? Please drop me an email at me [at] euwyn.com

</comment><comment><USER37> you still have few time, if you are capable work hard on sites like rent a coder and make some extra cash.. but I'm against going with $3,000 it's way too little and no one knows what may happen

<comment><USER38> LOL, no it isn't. I moved here from Europe with half that amount, twice. If you want to have your own apartment and stuff, then you need $1500/mo unless you get really lucky. If you're OK with roommates, you can do it for $1000/mo and have money left over for entertainment/parties/fast times.

Besides, the point of moving to a cool city at the age of 18 is to get into trouble, no? Look after your property, don't be too trusting, practice safe sex and and avoid over-friendly strangers whether on the street or behind a desk etc. etc.. Don't assume that coming to Sf will launch your career or you'll find a pot of money, treat the $3000 as the price of a useful learning experience and if you do luck out regard it as a bonus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> a) probably -- SF is full of programming jobs b) maybe -- rent isn't cheap (unless you live in a scary neighborhood) and finding a room to rent might be tough c) it's rarely hot in SF -- it's usually mild to cool during the day, and often cool to cold at night e) nope -- you should have a good time, especially if you live in a fun neighborhood (like the Mission)

</comment><comment><USER40> you can get pretty cheap rent if you don't mind living in sketchy areas. I lived on treasure island for a few months, and besides feeling like the set of a zombie film, it was alright living for ~600pm

I lived in the mission for a little more. Definitely try the east bay for cheap rent- if you don't mind getting the bus/bart into the city the rent is a lot cheaper.

<comment><USER41> The catch of treasure island is that in an earthquake, it is at very high risk of liquefaction. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_liquefaction>

<comment><USER31> that, and the high density of crack/meth heads on the island. i checked a few places there that made me feel like i was living the american version of trainspotting (down to the baby scene).

i'd recommend avoiding treasure island.

somewhat related, scratch the north bay off your list. i never was able to find a cheap way to commute from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> LOL. Good luck. SF is expensive. $100 for food? Yeah if you are a 90 lb asian female.

No the weather is not hotter than Seattle. It's cold here. Also, good luck trying to live off of $1,000 per month. Rent alone will be close to that.

It really doesn't help to live out here despite what everyone else says regarding the "networking abilities".

An 18 year old has no place in this city, tbh.

<comment><USER6> I upvoted you because this is a straight up reality check.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Live near UC Berkeley instead, and take BART to SF whenever you want.

</comment><comment><USER5> b) Inside San Francisco proper, probably. Outside San Francisco, possible for sure! (I suggest living near BART or CalTrain so you can get around without a car.)

</comment><comment><USER44> No, you're not crazy. Give it a shot. What do you have to lose really? Whether you will actually be able to find work is a question mark but as long as you have enough money so you won't be sleeping on a park bench, why not? Ah, to be 18 . . . worst year of my life . . . hope you make a better time of it than I did.

</comment><comment><USER6> $3k isn't going to last you very long in San Francisco.

</comment><comment><USER6> My honest advice to you is go to college and do drugs and drink booze and have sex, 3 things you've probably never done before in your life. College is an excellent place to do all those things for the first time. The corner of Geary and Polk is not.

Get that shit (into and) out of your system before you move to SF or you'll never make it out alive. Trust me on this one.

SF is a fucking dangerous place if you go there without your adventure meter properly calibrated.</comment>


" chance that this may be remains of Amelia Earhardt." (1940 telegram) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Tarawa_Archives/1940Bones_File/02bones.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> More context can be found here: [https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Bones...](https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Bones_Chronology.html)

This scan (photograph?) is linked from here: [https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Taraw...](https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Tarawa_Archives/1940Bones_File/1940Bones_File.html)</comment>


What Is Bubble and Why It Can't Substitute Custom Software? - <AUTHOR> https://gbksoft.com/blog/bubble/ <comment><USER2> This is literal, low effort advertising.

<comment><AUTHOR> so what? any feedback or engagement is valuable

even yours made me feel better</comment></comment>


The Moat, the Millions and the $50 Timex Watch - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/magazine/the-moat-the-millions-and-the-50-timex-watch.html

<comment><USER2> Very interesting post and worth the time reading but don't judge me when I ask... did he have alligators in his moat?</comment>


Machine Learning Trick of the Day: Log Derivative Trick - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shakirm.com/2015/11/machine-learning-trick-of-the-day-5-log-derivative-trick/ <comment><AUTHOR> Great advice from one of the researchers at Google DeepMind.</comment>


GitHub is down - <AUTHOR> https://www.githubstatus.com/? <comment><USER2> I sometimes look forward to outages like this just so I can read the post- downtime-resolution blog post that almost always follow. I find reading about how companies deal with issues when shit hits the fan to be really interesting.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I almost always dial into any large scale events at my company - regardless if it concerns me directly - to listen how ppl critically evaluate data, triage errors, and determine how to mitigate the problem(s).

Whatever skill level I have in this area, I cannot nail down if it's from multiple "baptism by fire" situations, learned naturally via university courses in the scientific field, strategy video games (half joking), or other sources I cannot think of.

I've listened to some very impressive people handle serious crisis situations and I'm both in awe and curious how they achieved that level of deductive reasoning.

<comment><USER4> The same way anyone gets good at anything: practice. Knowledge of the system + experience in high pressure situations and you get pretty good at solving those problems over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although it's nice that Git is Git and we can all mostly still work, it still seems foolish to rely on a single point of failure like Github. I've been toying around with the idea of creating a tool that would map the Git api to work with two+ hosting services at the same time. The effect would be something like, run "$git push" and it pushes to Github, Bitbucket, and Gitlab. I can't imagine something like this would be too difficult and would eliminate having to twiddle your thumbs while you wait for things to come back up.

<comment><USER6> You mean like?

        git remote set-url --add --push origin firstname.lastname@example.com:Foo/bar.git
        git remote set-url --add --push origin firstname.lastname@example.com:Foo/bar.git

:-)

see: [https://git-scm.com/docs/git-remote#Documentation/git- remote...](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-remote#Documentation/git-remote.txt- emset-urlem)

<comment><USER5> Hah, today I learned! It's a great feeling when you don't have to reinvent a wheel, thanks.

Now I'm just annoyed that more teams I've been on haven't set this up!

<comment><USER7> Me too. That's awesome: I've just suggested it to our team. Thanks for sharing GP!

One serious question though: how do you deal with PRs when you do this? That's one area where it feels like things could be quite messy, especially if you have quite a few PRs going in throughout the day.

<comment><USER8> There have been various proposals over the years for how to integrate issues and reviews in the distributed git tree itself ([http://dist- bugs.branchable.com/software/](http://dist-bugs.branchable.com/software/)), but I don't think any of them have really gone anywhere, certainly not in terms of support by the hosted git vendors.

Having looked briefly into it now, git-dit does look promising in its approach. I'd be interested to hear from someone who had actually used it and bumped up against the limitations: [https://github.com/neithernut/git- dit/blob/master/doc/datamo...](https://github.com/neithernut/git- dit/blob/master/doc/datamodel.md)

<comment><USER9> There is git-appraise to fill that gap [1]. I am personally waiting for a federated "forge" for federating PRs across platforms, such as the one developed in [2]. Maybe via e-mail? [3].

[1]: [https://github.com/google/git-appraise](https://github.com/google/git- appraise)

[2]: [https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed](https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed)

[3]: [https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/23/Git-is-already- distribute...](https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/23/Git-is-already- distributed.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Github: the premier collaborative platform for FLOSS development, which itself is closed-source, made under a closed development process. Based on a _distributed_ CVS, it has become a massive SPOF. As if that wasn't strange enough, it was acquired by _Microsoft_. Was that the victory of FLOSS or the defeat? How can you tell?

WTF is going on?

Mood: "Am I going crazy, or is it the world around me?" ~ [https://fishbone.bandcamp.com/track/drunk- skitzo](https://fishbone.bandcamp.com/track/drunk-skitzo)

<comment><USER11> This falls under very specific genre of Hacker News comment that has always struck me as profoundly uninteresting.

Github built something that inarguably made development better.

\- They host some huge number (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? millions?) of repositories for free.

\- They built Github Pages for people to ship websites and host those for free.

\- They built an intuitive flow for managing issues and pull requests, which is included with every repository for free.

\- They integrate freely and openly with all sorts of third-party services, some of which compete directly with them. That's quite uncommon for a for- profit software platform of their size.

\- They have given back immeasurably to the programming community, to the open source community, and to developers including sponsoring conferences, donating office space for events, etc.

\- Their developers widely share their (i.e. done at/for Github) work and contribute upstream.

There is some argument that all of the above are self-serving for Github, which is proven false if you talk to a single developer at Github.

Do they adhere to every idealistic principle of FLOSS? No. But, honestly, who gives a crap?

So, to answer your question of WTF is going on: real, positive progress.

<comment><USER12> * This falls under very specific genre of Hacker News comment that has always struck me as profoundly uninteresting. *

Not sure why you had to lead with an irrelevant comment like that as the rest of your comment has interesting counter arguments.

I think Github did make development easier, but the fact that it's close source and now owned by Microsoft gives me an uneasy feeling.

With that being said, the only thing that does make it ok is the fact that Git is decentralized.

If Github was an svn host I definitely wouldn't have been ok with it or hosted anything FOSS on it.

<comment><USER13> > Git is decentralized. If Github was an svn host I definitely wouldn't have > been ok with it or hosted anything FOSS on it.

The most sticky part of Github is the social network that lives in issues, pull requests, and repository permissions. This is all entirely centralized, and it is scary how heavily the community relies on it.

So in practice, results in just as closed of a system as SVN. And it doesn't matter if you're "ok with it". GH is where all the people and projects are. If you want to participate, you have no choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good that git is a distributed VCS. At least our master branch history is available on our local PCs, and we can freely work. Yupi.

<comment><USER15> Do you do PRs? or have CI/CD pipelines hooked with GitHub?

<comment><USER16> not being able to submit or review PRs for a day is much less impact than not being able to checkout for a day.

<comment><USER15> I guess it depends on the definition of done of each team.

We normally can't complete tasks until they are code reviewed, so checking out locally would be the analogous of working offline in a CVCS

<comment><USER17> You can finish the first task as much as you can, then start on the next one...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is the perfect time to take a break. Kick back, have a coffee, contemplate your life choices. That commit can wait, that PR (i was about to merge) can wait too. It's not the end of the world.

<comment><USER19> Why not just keep working? That next commit will work just fine without a central server.

<comment><USER20> At some point there has to be centralization. We are deploying one product, not N products for N commits. If I can't push, I can't have CI build my branch, and I can't submit a PR for review.

<comment><USER21> But you could continue working and only have to apply minor patches forward if you later find your starting point needed to be fixed.

You don't have to wait for CI, just create a new branch and continue your work as though CI passed, and your PR was accepted. If that comes true you don't need to worry much, just rebase and continue.

On the other hand if you find out you needed to make changes - do those on the branch you made those changes, and finish your PR/CI cycle. Then go to the new branch you continued work on and rebase, and continue.

Is there something I am missing?

<comment><USER22> Heaven forbid we find a reason to take a break

<comment><USER23> In the old days at least we had compiling. Not so much anymore.

<comment><USER24> npm install

<comment><USER25> And when you need to delete your node_modules folder for the upteenth time, it's a nice 5 minute break.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You've got to wonder what the regex that caused _this_ downtime is going to be

</comment><comment><USER27> It's funny I thought pi-hole was somehow blocking github, but dig returned good responses.

      dig raw.githubusercontent.com +noall +answer                         0 < 12:54:48

      ; <<>> DiG 9.14.3 <<>> raw.githubusercontent.com +noall +answer
      ;; global options: +cmd
      raw.githubusercontent.com. 6 IN CNAME github.map.fastly.net.
      github.map.fastly.net. 19 IN A 220.127.116.11

Naturally the first thing I did was check here and nothing was posted. After 20-minutes of TSing I thought it was DNSSec screwing up as after disabling it everything works.

And now I come back here and see this.. :D

<comment><USER28> Thankfully, like virtually all major tech companies, neither GITHUB.COM nor GITHUBUSERCONTENT.COM are DNSSEC-signed, nor are they ever likely to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just came here to post this. I was reading through the css-modules docs[1] and am now stuck. I can't see anything other than the main README. Anyone know of a mirror?

[1]: [https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules](https://github.com/css- modules/css-modules)

<comment><USER30> Here you go: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190701222409/https://github.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190701222409/https://github.com/css- modules/css-modules)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Kinda irritating when a binary you need is only hosted on github (...together with the files to build from source).

<comment><USER32> Even worse if libraries / packages are only hosted on Github. Then the main ecosystem of a language dependent on those packages can grind to a full stop from there.

I'm looking at all of you CocoaPods, SwiftPM, npm, Cargo, vgo.

<comment><USER33> Insanity. Having an emergency mirror on standby is not hard when it's critical infrastructure. Surely npm/Cargo/etc.. could do this.

<comment><USER34> I think I'll set this up now [https://github.com/local-npm/local- npm](https://github.com/local-npm/local-npm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm just wrapping up the work to migrate my company away from Gitlab to Github and this happens. I did it because I figured Github _has_ to have better reliability / uptime than Gitlab. Someone joked that as soon as the migration is done Github will have some major downtime.

 _sigh_

<comment><USER36> I highly recommend running at least a local, self-hosted git mirror at any tech company, just in these cases. Gitolite + cgit are extremely low maintenance, especially if you host them next to your other production services.

Not to mention, if you get the self-hosted route you can use Gerrit, which is still miles better for code review than GitHub, Gitlab, bitbucket and co.

<comment> grey-area You don't even need gitolite, if you're going the self-hosted route:

apt install git-all

is enough to host your own git server. Put it behind a firewall to limit access and use standard linux users with ssh keys for access control if you don't need anything fancy. For small companies I'm not sure you need anything else. Of course if you need different levels of access etc then you'll need more sophisticated tools, but many people won't.

Code review I do using local tools (the editor) face to face, again not sure you need an online service for that unless you're a larger company with lots of developers coordinating (in which case it becomes pretty essential).

<comment><USER36> > Code review I do using local tools (the editor) face to face, again not sure > you need an online service for that unless you're a larger company with lots > of developers coordinating (in which case it becomes pretty essential).

I mostly like online code review services because they offer an audit trail and semantic history that's easier to navigate than email. And of course, to let CI automation check tests, coverage and lint. Not because I don't trust my coworkers, but because otherwise I would forget to run tests and lint myself.

<comment> grey-area Lots of different ways to do it, and of course github and online code review is tremendously useful to people, particularly on large projects with lots of collaborators, and where a history of reviews is required.

For lots of small projects though, it's perhaps not as necessary as people think. I run tests and linting locally on save and don't really use the code review/CI features of online hosts much. That won't suit everyone of course, but it is one possible path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Github goes down on Monday around 9am pacific time - must be totally random.

<comment><USER38> The funny thing about this is the idea that west coast engineers actually start work at or before 9am

<comment><USER39> I'm rarely in before 9AM. The 10 minute standup at 10:30 AM is the only daily requirement for most staff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Brings into perspective how essential git is for my workflow - I am waiting for `scp` to transfer my files from my laptop to work computer and can't push anything into the CI/CD pipeline.

<comment><USER41> For what it's worth, the "D" in "Distributed Version Control System" is useful here. You can `git init --bare foo` on your work computer, `git remote add workcomp username@hostname:path/to/foo` on your laptop, and `git push workcomp master` to push everything over using pure Git. (And the first steps only have to happen once for these two machines.)

(This creates a bare repo on your work computer, meaning there's no associated working directory -- you'd probably want to add that same repo as a remote from whichever existing repository on your work computer you have. The bare repo, in this scenario, is just a means of passing commits from your laptop to your work computer in a Git semantically-meaningful way.)

<comment><USER42> Your comment is probably going to inspire a lot of people to start self hosting remote repos during the downtime today.

As with most things, it'll start great, but a lot of those people will be in tears in a few weeks.

Great power; great responsibility.

<comment><USER41> True! It's best to consider that kind of repo as a downstream fork, with all the responsibilities of upstreaming changes once the canonical repository comes back up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I feel like this whole year has served as one big reminder of how fragile the internet really is...

<comment><USER44> It's only fragile when you centralize all of the information in giant websites. It didn't use to be like that. And now there are a ton of decentralization technologies that we should be taking advantage of, but almost everyone ignores them.

For example [https://medium.com/@alexberegszaszi/mango-git-completely- dec...](https://medium.com/@alexberegszaszi/mango-git-completely- decentralised-7aef8bcbcfe6)

<comment><USER43> Absolutely. I'm (cautiously) optimistic that some good can come from all this downtime in that sense.

<comment><USER45> It certainly helps make the argument not to move some stuff to the cloud, there is still a case for on premise as always the answer is "it depends".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Over the past 2 or so weeks, I've been getting 500 errors from GitHub quite regularly. A page will take a while to load, then finally fail with an octocat error page. Reloading the page usually succeeds with the correct page, so it seems to be some sort of intermittent issue. In the years I've used GitHub, I can't remember this ever happening – I wonder if this incident is related? Has their user base expanded a lot lately and they're having difficulty scaling their system to meet demand? I know that I have been noticing a seeming increase in activity and new users as GitHub becomes more and more mainstream, I wonder what their growth looks like.

<comment><USER47> GitHub has a really bad track-record on reliability.

I worked on our devops systems for a while. Every `git clone` had to have multiple retries, and even then there were multi-minute outages multiple times a month that caused things to turn red and caused distrust in our CI pipeline.

I tried hard to get my company to not rely on github as part of our CI process (as others in these comments indicate) but that's an expensive proposition for many - similar to relying on other third-party cdns like dockerhub, npmjs.org, etc.

<comment><USER45> Bitbucket isn't really any better, they just surf the line of "right, that's it I'll just run Gitea on a local server, I've had enough" and convenience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Took this opportunity to set up my own Git server on a VPS I have. It was actually extremely simple to set up the server, limit the git account (ssh only) to only using git-shell, and adding gitweb with basic auth in an nginx setup with letsencrypt, HTTP/2, and FastCGI. Took maybe 20 minutes, and most of it was looking up the necessary commands.

That being said, I am, and probably will still be a massive GitHub user, because I value its community aspect. But I also now have unlimited, truly- private Git hosting for peanuts (cheap DigitalOcean server), which is always nice.

<comment><USER49> You can also use gitea, which is setup very quickly as uses almost no resources

<comment><USER48> I definitely considered it, but it struck as more of a "host your own Github," where really all I needed was "host your own Git," which of course comes out- of-the-box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Time to start going back to using a decentralized git archive, like git-ssb.

[https://github.com/noffle/git-ssb-intro](https://github.com/noffle/git-ssb- intro)

</comment><comment><USER51> It's a hassle, for sure. If this incident cost you time, I would advocate for you to invest a brief amount of time to hedge against GH. The next downtime may not be as brief.

These steps will cost you < 15 minutes but you could end up with significant savings.

1\. make an account on gitlab

2\. create a new repo

3\. configure it to mirror your existing GH repo. The mirror will periodically pull from GH without any interaction from you, so you always have another option.

To be clear, I don't have any opinions about the operations of Github vs Gitlab. I have no idea which has superior procedures or equipment to avoid downtime. But I am sure that this small effort to diversify is worthwhile.

EDIT: wowsers downvotes for practical advice? Downvoters, please chime in on how my advice could be improved.

<comment><USER52> How will this save you from outages like this one?

The problem is usually not that people loose access to their code (you usually have a local cache), it's that you can't open or review PRs, and that you can't trigger CI builds.

Using _both_ GitHub and GitLab simultaniously for more advanced workflows is a big hassle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Its up n running for me now, everything works. Location Sweden.

</comment><comment><USER6> see also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20498983)

</comment><comment><USER54> Damn. Thought I was going nuts when I couldn't browse certain repos. Everything I checked said GitHub was up

<comment><USER55> There was a certain repo I was trying to access and I was concerned the content had been taken down. I pulled up the repo in Google Search cache, copied the git URL, and cloned it from my terminal. That worked just fine, only the webpage was completely down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Skimming this thread I found only two important takeaways, are there any more?

1) It's really, really, easy to setup a second mirror that you can switch your CI/CD processes to in the event of downtime in order to avoid being affected

2) Unless you don't vendor your builds and some of your third party dependencies rely on Github as their sole distribution mechanism in which case you are SOL

</comment><comment><USER57> The incident says it was resolved but I still can't get to my profile page.

<comment><USER58> Could be that the fix has been deployed but it takes time to propagate thru.

<comment><USER59> Then it hasn't been resolved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I wonder if all of these downtimes are related to the summer holiday season...

<comment><USER42> They're probably still moving stuff to Azure after the acquisition. If my memory serves, there was an uptick in outages ~6 months after the buyout.

<comment><USER61> 6 months after an IPO is often the conclusion of a typical employee lockout period on shares, which can also be a time of more frequent team members leaving.

I wonder what the retention incentive period was for Github employees; it's often a year, and the Github acquisition was mid-2019...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> That explains a sudden access error when I tried to open an issue in a repo.

</comment><comment><USER63> Can we talk about how many services have had outages recently now?

<comment><USER17> We can talk about the Poisson distribution, yes :-) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> push/pull seems to be working for me. Getting 500 server error while trying to browse repositories on the website

<comment><USER20> Push and pull doesn't work for me. For a second I thought this was my company's subtle way of terminating my employment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Working now.

<comment><USER66> Definitely isn't.

<comment><USER67> Seems to be working for me.

<comment><USER68> As of this post it was working as of 1 minute ago.

Is this going to be a PR stunt like hotmail - they're going to say the fix was migrating to Azure or upgraded from Linux to Windows 10.

<comment><USER69> Can people stop with the "it's working" or "it's not" \- because there is intermittent / unevenly distributed failures. Still have some pages not loading for me.

<comment><USER70> It's what makes these posts cute. Thanks to multi-region and load balancing it will work for some and be broken for others

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Very nice page. Some one knows a open source project similat to this githubstatus page?

</comment><comment><USER72> 3 hours later still down. That's a pretty long outage by most standards. Ouch.

</comment><comment><USER73> Yup, I can not push my commit.

</comment><comment><USER53> Is my project lost now?

</comment><comment><USER74> This is why I run my own internal development repository, so I don't have to worry about online failures.

</comment><comment><USER75> It gives me the chuckles every time I hear Github or Gitlab goes down.

Because one of the main points of Git was to provide a "distributed" version control system.

Meaning that you are probably using it wrong if your entire company completely halts to a stop just because Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket are down.

Maybe what we need is a service that automatically consolidates them for you so your repos are always online?

<comment><USER76> Do you think Github is nothing more than a 'central git' repo? Have you even used the site in the last few years?

<comment><USER77> > Have you even used the site

That's a variant of "did you even read the article", which the guidelines ask you not to do (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). That's partly because it's a putdown, but mostly because there's no information in it. Readers who know less than you do are here to learn, so a better version of this comment would share some of what you know.

<comment><USER76> I disagree, and it was definitely not intended to be a put down. It's a question, because it appears the OP was speaking of GitHub as it was, not as it is. I don't question their intelligence or ability to read. But whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Gitpocalypse

</comment><comment><USER79> git is distributed, so no worries

</comment><comment><USER80> Just when it was time for beergarden. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER81> Did Microsoft switch GitHub to AGI as part of the OpenAI deal?

<comment><USER82> Q: Can it automatically reject bad code or would that be impossible because of the halting problem?

<comment><USER83> it could automatically reject bad-looking code perhaps

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Nobody brought up radicle yet? HN what's up?

There you go: fully IPFS based version control and collaboration. [https://radicle.xyz](https://radicle.xyz)

<comment><USER85> I thought Radicle was cool too, but as I understand it (in its current state), it has a much "larger" SPOF in that changes can only be submitted when the single authoritative repo is online.

<comment><USER84> how so? If everything is stored in IPSS, then it should _always_ be online. The IPFS daemon is local, so you can commit things without any network connection. Am I misunderstanding what IPFS is?

<comment><USER85> "Currently the owner of the project must be online in order to receive any proposed RSM updates from a contributor. Once received and processed, these updates will be written to IPFS by the project owner, and made available to all users who follow that project." \-- [http://radicle.xyz/docs/#faq](http://radicle.xyz/docs/#faq)

<comment><USER85> What the hell? I get downvoted for linking an authoritative answer to the question I was asked? I'm so god damn sick of participating here in good faith and getting wordlessly crapped on for it. The answer supports _exactly_ what I said, and I provided a link.

Pretty obvious someone didn't like one of my other comments and then proceeded to downvote the others they could since I commented in multiple threads at the same time. Why is this nonsense allowed? It would be easy to detect.

<comment><USER86> If you are sick of participating, don't, and your problem is solved.

Also, if you've been here long enough to get sick of anything you should have learned that dumb downvotes happen, they mostly get reversed over time, and nothing good comes of reacting to them at all, much less throwing a expletive- laden fit about them.

<comment><USER85> Such great advice, had never thought of that. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Which MBAs Make More: Consultants or Small-Business Owners? - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2016/06/which-mbas-make-more-consultants-or-small-business-owners <comment><USER2> I personally don't find the analysis relevant. The assumption is that after taking on massive debt to finance their MBA, the graduates have a few spare hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire a business (the article is not about starting a business from scratch).

I really doubt than anyone having the dollars to do that need this article, however it will mislead the rest.

It is also worth noting that all the figures relating to the acquired business are purely hypothetical and not data driven. Moreover businesses having this level of predictability are usually not the most affordable.

The thing is MBAs do not train people to be entrepreneurs, it trains prople to administrate a business already having positive cashflow and having access to some sort of leverage (debt, significant cash, etc...).

Unless you are already in business and feel you need a MBA to complete your skillset and move from a 200 people company to a 2000 people one, a MBA should be done to work for / with a big firm. The only dichotomy is whether you buy this firm or not. The fact is rven in the case where you already own a company, it is still about managing a big firm.

I'm not sure that trying to do otherwise is the smartest use of one's money.

The article is not phony, but my reproach is that the discussion is of limited practical use. It's like asking : which former basketball players make more: sport consultants, or small clubs owners ? Then you click and find out that 1) what they call consultants are TV consultants paid by big firms, 2) the so called small clubs need to be based in Dubai. 3) it only applies to NBA players in the first place, exactly those who need free-internet advice the less.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you're disagreeing with what the authors are saying.

They are not suggesting that the money comes from the recent MBA grad. They're suggesting a typical private equity approach where new company debt and outside money are used to buy out the current owners. Then cash flow repays debt, investors, then finally the person who put the deal together who will earn 20% of profits going forward.

This type of management (as you said, running an existing company instead of starting one from scratch) seems exactly like what an MBA prepares someone for, much more than it prepares them to launch new ventures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This exercise is poor because it's totally unrealistic. I work with a lot of investors who buy "a $1.5 million EBITDA company for 4x paying $6 million and using 50% debt financing". But they are organizers/firms that split carry among the firm. AFAIK, if you're not working for a PE fund, this type of investment structure is only possible if you execute what's called a Search Fund[0]. I personally know a Kellogg MBA who did this, but it was after 2 years of working at a PE firm. The verdict is still out whether he'll make any meaningful return from it. The other person I know who attempted it (from Stanford) gave up after a year because it was too hard to get investment. In other words, the assumptions that any MBA (typically a 26 year old with 2-3 years of real work experience) even has access to this are fairly unfounded and not typical. What is more feasible, is that MBA grads go to PE funds and are part of a deal team. Even then, those opportunities are scarce and require you to spend another ~6-7 years getting to Principal to earn any meaningful amount of compensation ($500k+ year).

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

<comment><USER5> Search funds aren't all that uncommon among top-tier MBA students and graduates. There are a couple going on among my wife's MBA classmates. As a tech entrepreneur, I'm a little skeptical about whether their search will prove fruitful, but they don't seem to have huge problems raising capital.

Also, don't forget part-time and executive MBA programs. Students in these tend to skew older (early 30s for part-time programs, mid-40s for executive ones), with 10/20 years of work experience in a relevant industry and deep networks that often include access to capital.

<comment><USER4> > Also, don't forget part-time and executive MBA programs. Students in these > tend to skew older (early 30s for part-time programs, mid-40s for executive > ones), with 10/20 years of work experience in a relevant industry and deep > networks that often include access to capital.

Spot on. I should have clarified... I assumed MBA the author was talking about was the "2 year program for candidates with 3-4 years experience". MBAs (exec MBA, MSx, etc) that require more experience, you're way more likely to see search funds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's nice to see this analysis actually consider growth and expected value of money rather than simply comparing raw averages.

However, it neglects to consider the ceiling of income. For a "typical post MBA job," sure income might increase for a few years, and even triple as the article says. But eventually, there is a ceiling. In finance for example, the funnel gets progressively narrower toward the top. At first 50% of associates might be promoted to VP, then 25% of VPs might be promoted to MD. But there are very few C level positions, so only the top few MDs will ever be promoted further. Most MDs will eventually reach max compensation, then wait around for 10 years in the hopes of being promoted to C level. If that never happens, maybe they eventually grow impatient and leave to start their own firm. But at that point they're in the same position as the "small business owner," but ten years behind and with a limited skillset.

Whereas for those who start a business after MBA, income might start slowly, but there is no ceiling. The business could turn into cloudflare (in the case of Matthew Prince, to use an HBS example) with a massive valuation that clearly beats any income earned by his wage slave peers. Or, the business might fail, in which case the MBA can either start another business, or jump into the same corporate ladder he originally avoided.

Also, this article assumes that a "small business" takes investment. In this case, there is very little risk to the personal salary of the MBA, since he will have investor money to pay himself a salary close to market value of his peers, but with much higher upside.

I've never understood the appeal of jumping immediately onto the corporate ladder when you're young, limiting your upside and constraining your options. It seems much more sensible to take the risk of your own business, with a much higher upside, and a downside that allows you to either start another one or join the corporate ladder anyway. If you're good enough to raise investment, there really is very little personal risk.

<comment><USER7> You've described my thinking exactly - the only difference is that when I started my software development business ([http://www.atlascode.com](http://www.atlascode.com)) in my early 20s I didn't have an MBA.

All of my college friends jumped on to their respective corporate ladders straight out of college. They out earned me from day one. In fact, the first two to three years of being in business got me in to about £30k of debt which was used to fund the startup. In hindsight this was a small price to pay for the lessons I was taught. At the time it took a huge amount of mental strength to stay the course - my friends all seemed to have more money, more time and infinitely less stressful lives.

Ten years later the business is in very good shape. I'm definitely amongst the top earners compared to my peers but that's not as important as the flexibility owning the business offers me. Amongst other things I get to:

* Call the strategic shots - hire people I want to work with, work with the management team to define our company strategy and vision

* Launch new software products and pitch new custom software clients - both things I enjoy and I'm good at. There's nothing more satisfying than getting a new software product to profitability or landing a new £500k software development contract

* Work in the office or from home as I see fit. In fact, there have been times when I've worked from another country altogether for weeks at a time because I can

I wouldn't give up my business to go work as a consultant for another company for anything at this stage. Having said that, if things went south and I was left without any other option but to take a job I would hope that my decade of experience would be of huge value.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious: do you extend the work from home option to your employees?

<comment><USER7> Yes.

One guy works full time from at home because he prefers it and the project is setup in a way that we can accommodate him working at home.

Other people tend to work from home on a case by case basis. So if they need to be at home for any reason they can dial in - we're not precious about people being in the office all the time.

Having said that, the team largely prefer to be in the office, especially as they all live locally. If anybody else requested to work from home full time I suspect we'd create a company policy which was overarching rather than working on a person by person basis. Interestingly one of our strategic issues at the moment is finding enough office space to home all the new hires we've taken on recently. So allowing/requesting that more staff work from home might be a solution to that problem.

<comment><USER9> One company I worked for required everyone to work from home at least one day a month as part of the disaster recovery plan. It was neat that we could be fully remote. Made stuff like snow easy to deal with.

<comment><USER7> That's a very good idea and one I'll look to implement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a genuinely fascinating concept, one that I've never considered before. I've always fantasized about running my own business, but thought the only way to do that is to start a company of my own. The idea of "Entreprenruship through Acquisition" sounds like a very practical way for someone to marry the Entrepreneurship concept with a practical, middle-class lifestyle.

Are there any recommended guides/books/MOOCs that one can go through, in order to learn more about this?

<comment><USER11> Read up on private equity and leveraged buyouts. Small businesses usually aren't massively expensive to acquire. It's something I've been looking at as well. Most countries also have cheap debt available for entrepreneurs interested in acquiring businesses (i.e. some government agency will give you match funding, or something similar).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A few notes on this article:

* It seems a bit crazy to me to have a newly minted MBA jump into a CEO role. Of course, this is not unprecedented with the search fund model ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_fund](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_fund)) but those are MBA grads from top 5 schools (and mostly just Stanford MBA grads)--very different from your average MBA grad * The top 5 MBA grad can expect to make on the order of $20-50M over the span of a career with a Mck/Bain/BCG role. Yes there is a limited number of people who make it to the top, but tbh that is much more due to people wanting to leave for other career paths than it is a weeding out.

<comment><USER13> Keep in mind that there is a distribution in the quality/experience of MBA students even in the top 5 schools. A large percentage of them went to very good undergrad schools, got reasonably prestigious (at least from the outside) jobs after graduating, then decided to go for their MBA in their mid-20s. It makes for an impressive resume, but one still wouldn't put them in a CEO role right out of their MBA.

An even smaller group are the students who did truly impressive things pre- MBA. People who joined a PE firm out of undergrad and were very quickly on the partner track. Or people who started a successful company pre-MBA and didn't really need to go back to school, but wanted to. There are usually a handful of these folks in every class. These are the ones where it makes sense they got a C-level role at a company right out of their MBA. Again, it wasn't the MBA that got them the role, but rather what they did before they got in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've discussed this topic with people in the past and I've heard one option is to find a family owned business that does not have a clear successor. In that scenario you can sometimes find a healthy, well-run business that is owned by people who need an exit strategy and are open to selling so they can retire.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone know what kinds of small businesses this article, and the previous ones they've linked to, are referring to? I imagine running a donut shop is a very different beast from running a bespoke software development house or a plumbing parts company. Are they referring to all 3 kinds?

<comment><USER16> The wikipedia article on search funds says they are typically service or light manufacturing outside of high tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A major difference in lifestyle (and I guess also financial implications) not mentioned here or the companion article [1] is that many search funds end up buying companies in less-than-happening locations, whereas MBB have offices in major cities. So for a search fund you have to either be willing to go live in the rust belt for 5+ years or accept that your chances if finding a business in/near a big city are lower.

[1] [https://hbr.org/2016/03/why-more-mbas-should-buy-small- busin...](https://hbr.org/2016/03/why-more-mbas-should-buy-small-businesses)

</comment><comment><USER18> It's one of those many developments that make one reconsider the question of "Why does the firm exist?"

[http://www.economist.com/node/17730360](http://www.economist.com/node/17730360)</comment>


The best books on Wagner - <AUTHOR> https://fivebooks.com/best-books/wagner/ <comment><USER2> Somewhat off-topic, but I had not discovered this site before. This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for to jumpstart my reading list. (I finished school a few years ago, and I'm finally past forced-reading burnout and ready to start diving deep in books again.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Little known fact: in his heyday and for a few decades after, Wagner was the 3rd most written about person in Western Civilization after Jesus and Napoleon.

One thing that faded away in time is the sheer intensity and cult-of- personality that surrounded his fame.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have always been fascinated by Nietzsche's relationship with Wagner. What began as a hero worship for N. ended in bitter disappointment, largely because he was disappointed in Wagner's "reversion" to Christianity and his Anti- Semitism. I highly recommend reading "The Case of Wagner" if you get the chance.

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

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25012?msg=welcome_stranger](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25012?msg=welcome_stranger)

<comment><USER5> was there any philo-semitism in europe of the 1800s? christianity and anti- semitism go hand in hand, which is why the definition of zionism had to be reversed in the early 20th century.

you can be a christian zionist now (which is what the nazis were), can you really be a christian philo-semite? but then of course christian now means neosecular humanist.

nietzsche saw the structural problems in christianity, but he lacked the social insight into why other people depended on it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ISzf2pryI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ISzf2pryI)

(because nobody likes feeling guilty)

he tried to work the problem from the wrong end, controlling what people do and how they think quickly turns into socialism, fascism, communism. easing the burden of their guilt after the fact is a much more convenient solution, it's pragmatic and simple. children don't really learn what they are being taught, they learn to teach it.

machiavelli solved both fascism and marxism 300 years before either had to become a thing, the less said about the more unsavory aspects of the enlightenment the better. i deeply suspect most influential thinkers of the previous centuries had ulterior personal motives, some rather sinister when it came to the mobilization of the furies and passions of human nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stephen Fry has a documentary on his relationship with Wagner on Netflix. Well worth a look if you're interested in Wagner.

</comment><comment><USER7> How many hours of reading does this amount to?</comment>


A patent granted to Apple may allow iPhone cameras to be disabled by IR - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/30/apple-iphone-camera-disable-remote-sensors-patent <comment><AUTHOR> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4473585](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4473585) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4458701](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4458701)

But at that time, 4 years ago, these didn't get any momentum here for discussion.</comment>


Rise of the full-stack marketer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-startups/1308a8f17137

<comment><USER2> "too many startups building great products that people never find out about."

I'm going to call bullshit on that. If your product stinks, all the marketing in the world won't save it. I challenge you to name one _great_ product out of Silicon Valley that languishes in obscurity.

If a startup has a great product, they need a sales force _actively_ prospecting, qualifying, and closing win-win sales. "Inbound marketing won't do it, social media won't do it, search won't do it, advertising won't do it. Revenue is for closers.</comment>


Why Peter Thiel invested in a company like Facebook  ...? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Why-does-Peter-Thiel-invested-in-a-company-like-Facebook-when-he-thinks-competition-is-for-losers-and-one-must-work-on-something-no-one-is-working-on?srid=dclw&share=1 <comment><USER2> because it was gaining huge traction duh</comment>


NYTimes hand codes their HTML  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21askthetimes.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

<comment><USER2> And so do all professional Web designers. It's not a big deal.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. I don't understand. How else is it possible to write HTML? (without obscene disgusting things like Frontpage or Dreamweaver of course)

<comment><USER4> There are "smart" content management systems like Movable Type that let you type into a text area using "bold" and "italic" buttons like Word. When you submit, it automatically converts it to HTML.

The NYTimes designers, apparently, type everything out by hand and inject the HTML directly.

<comment><USER5> That article says nothing of the sort - it says that the designers and IAs (who are presumably the people who build the site "templates") hand code their markup, but it makes no claims about the content producers who are actually posting up stories on a day-to-day basis. They certainly use a CMS, but there's no indication of whether they author in HTML, use some kind of WYSIWYG interface or use some other form of markup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm still in University taking a design degree, and most of the students, who want to get started on building websites, don't ask the teachers to learn HTML or any other languages — instead they ask: 'Can you teach Dreamweaver?'

The same happens with other areas, they ask specifically for the software, not the subject. It's the WYSIWYG generation.

<comment><USER2> That attitude should make it easy for smart employers to weed them out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "At any given time though, my design group is working on roughly a dozen or more projects of nontrivial size, while simultaneously watching for urgent problems cropping up across a site of significant volume and breadth. That keeps us very busy. So as a matter of resources — having enough designers to take care of everything — it's almost impossible for us to implement every change or improvement we'd like to see happen."

sounds like they need to hire 5-10 more people who just focus on new things.

<comment><USER8> And they'll do that with the mountains of cash they get from their thriving newspaper business...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So should you.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure what they mean by "hand coding". Certainly the journalists type their articles into a form, press "submit", it goes into persistence, and then eventually it's turned into generated HTML through PHP or something. That's how pretty much everything works. Nobody "hand codes" html. You "hand code" PHP.

To me, "hand coded html" suggests that they, uh, get MS Doc files from journalists and re-type the html in between DIV tags.

</comment><comment><USER11> yeah. Khoi Vinh is a pro and so is his staff. NYTimes is a whole department unto itself. any all web company/department is going to do everything all hand coded.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd be more surprised if they didn't do this. (I was going to make a snarky comment about the programming.reddit auto-submit-to-YCNews bot, but...)

<comment><USER13> I haven't heard of this bot. But that sounds kind of lame

<comment><USER12> i kind of doubt it's real, but it sure seems like it is sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Given the quality of the NYTimes web site, I am not surprised that they do.</comment>


Amazon to collect sales tax nationwide starting April 1st - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/24/the-holiday-is-over-amazon-will-collect-sales-taxes-nationwide-on-april-1.html <comment><USER2> It's incredible how things like collecting sales tax is up for discussion with some US states. If you don't collect VAT anywhere in Europe you get severely punished by authorities. They take their 20% cut from every sale very seriously.

<comment><USER3> It's .. complicated. It's not so much whether tax should be collected, it's where and who by.

I can only speak for Michigan, the only state I've lived in, but it goes something like;

* Tax on interstate purchases (where the buyer and vendor are physically in different states) is owed in the state the buyer is physically in.

* Tax is not (was not?) collected at the point of sale.

* Buyer should declare (significant?) purchases on their (state) tax returns.

So the theory is that if I go into a shop and purchase something for $100, I pay $106 at the point of sale. If I purchase the same item from an out-of- state vendor online, I pay $100 at the point of sale, and owe the outstanding $6 on my state taxes.

As you can imagine, this is near-impossible to audit (hands up anyone who's ever declared those purchases?). There's been resistance to change nominally because taxes are very difficult to calculate (the same purchase can be covered by state, county and municipal taxes - it's not just a list of 50 numbers), but realistically because online vendors have enjoyed making it Someone Else's problem, with the lower prices also working in their favour (on significant, 4-digit purchases, whether the vendor had a presence in Michigan would factor into which vendor I chose).

<comment><USER4> > this is near-impossible to audit

This is only hard to audit because the Michigan tax authorities are criminally incompetent (or just criminal full stop).

Subpoena Amazon (and jet.com, ebuyer, newegg) sales delivered to Michigan addresses, compare address list with the list of addresses that self-declared sales tax for out-of-state purchases, send automatic back tax and penalty notice to all all addresses which didn't. None of these steps are hard, it will increase compliance millionfold and bring it hundreds of millions in revenue.

<comment><USER5> My understanding of why this is all so tricky.. the Constitution specially gives only the federal govetnment the right to regulate interstate commerce. So Michigan could not force the records from Amazon, the federal government would need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So crush the competition by being able to underprice for years by not paying sales tax, then once you've won, get credit for being a good corporate citizen by playing nice again.

</comment><comment><USER7> State sales tax is a pain in the ass. I do some work for a place that only has a physical presence in the state of Washington, so collects sales tax for online sales to Washington residents.

Online sales tax in Washington is based on the buyer's location, not the seller's location. There are currently 25 different sales tax rates in effect here. So for each sale to a Washington resident we have to determine which of those 25 rates applies.

5 digit zip code is not sufficient to determine the tax rate for a location. A given zip code region can overlap different tax regions that have different rates. There is one zip code that includes 5 different sales tax rates, and several that include 4. A zip+4 code _is_ sufficient, but (1) many people do not know their zip+4, and (2) I don't think there is any guarantee that a zip+4 won't cross a tax region boundary.

The way you are _supposed_ to handle this is to determine the rate based on the street address. You can download from a Washington state government website[1] 39 files (one per county) that contain lists of streets and address ranges and tell which tax location each falls under. A typical record from one of these files looks like this:

      100,198,E,CASECO LN,WA,98366,4700,Q22017,1802,N,Kitsap PTBA,

That particular record says that it covers addresses in the range [100, 198], on the even address side of the street named "Caseco LN", in the state of WA, and those addresses have zip code 98366-4700, the record is valid for quarter 2 of 2017, the location code is 1802, those addresses have Regional Sound Transit indicator N, and in the Kitsap PTBA (Public Transit Benefit Area). The empty field on the end is the name of the Community Empowerment Zone. The important part for tax purposes is the location code (1802), for those are the codes that identify tax regions.

If you use that you've got to deal with all the different ways people might write their street address. For instance, if there is a "Martin Luther King Blvd", you will find people who write it as "MLK Blvd", and probably some who write it as "MLKing Blvd", and some who will suffix it with "St" or "Ave" instead of "Blvd".

What we do is simplify this a bit, and just go by 5 digit zip code. The rate we collect is the rate of the highest rate location that overlaps that zip code. That way we are sure to never under collect (and more importantly, never under pay to the state).

Our only physical presence is in Washington, so we only have to do this for Washington. I cannot imagine how painful it would be if we had to do this for several states, let alone if we had to do it for 50 states.

[1] [http://dor.wa.gov/content/FindTaxesAndRates/SalesAndUseTaxRa...](http://dor.wa.gov/content/FindTaxesAndRates/SalesAndUseTaxRates/stdownloads.aspx)

<comment><USER8> This exactly is why I am glad the US Constitution forbids states from charging interstate taxes, and why I oppose all of the efforts by congress to allow states to collect interstate sales taxes.

My State 1 tax, for the entire state, and outside an few industry specific taxes (hotels, rental cars ) there is only 1 sales tax to collect. We do not have sales taxes at the city or county level those are forbidden at the state level.

makes it so much simpler

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This doesn't say if they will collect taxes for Merchant fulfilled orders, and I suspect by default they still won't. Their current process for collecting taxes requires the merchant to fill out a long detailed form of all the state and local taxes for everywhere you want to collect tax. It's ridiculous because they already know this information and are just making it difficult so less merchant's collect taxes. Last time I tried if you saved the form when not 100% complete it would silently delete all your work, so good luck if you need to look up a single thing and come back to it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm always suspicious of things happening on April 1st.

Regarding Amazon collecting taxes, they started doing it in my state earlier this year, and I've found that I hardly buy anything from Amazon anymore.

<comment><USER11> >I'm always suspicious of things happening on April 1st.

It's not like that is the first day of a new fiscal quarter...

And for those who remember that far back, Gmail was launched on the 1st of April.

<comment><USER12> A lot of fake news is propagated on April 1st each year, particularly in the tech industry, so there is justifiable reason to view April 1st announcements with a bit of skepticism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I expect that Amazon will now start lobbying for a federal law to enforce this on all retailers, as I have shifted a lot of dollars from Amazon to B&H because Amazon now collects CA tax.

</comment><comment><USER14> TL;DR: "Tax-free shopping will be over as of next month in Hawaii, Idaho, Maine and New Mexico, the four remaining holdouts."

</comment><comment><USER15> Thank you. I'd love a TL;DR for every news article please ;)

<comment><USER16> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953907) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER15> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> April fools?

</comment><comment><USER18> Lol: "Amazon's decision to collect and remit sales tax to the state of Maine is an important first step in leveling the playing field,"

<comment><USER19> Why? This came across as quite reasonable.</comment></comment>


3 Types of Star Wars Animations on iOS - <AUTHOR> https://yalantis.com/blog/uidynamics-uikit-or-opengl-3-types-of-ios-animations-for-the-star-wars/ <comment><USER2> This component implements transition animation to crumble view-controller into tiny pieces. UIDynamics, UIKit or OpenGL?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great article, thanks</comment></comment>


Q1 2018 Funding Announcement - <AUTHOR> https://clojuriststogether.org/news/q1-2018-funding-announcement/ <comment><USER2> I'd encourage Clojure fans to contribute monthly, even in the smallest amount.

A healthy ecosystem has a compound effect (like a feedback loop), which can result in a greater abundance of Clojure jobs.

Thankfully Clojure doesn't need to be 'saved' (it's a timeless idea!), but well I often read complaints around its job market and open source ecosystem.

As an example, say you get some VC funding. Can you absolutely trust Clojure(Script) and its tooling? How well will non-senior hires perform? I for one would be tempted to go for something with more traction like Elixir + Reason.

I adore Clojure and all that, but in the end details matter, especially under budget/time constraints.

Of course, this is a (perceived) situation we can change.

<comment><USER3> > Can you absolutely trust Clojure(Script) and its tooling

Totally. The closure compiler, despite it's age, is the best Javascript optimizer/uglifier out there. Nothing else comes close. There are several top notch, maintained frameworks as well (re-frame/om)

<comment><USER4> By closure compiler, do you mean [https://github.com/google/closure- compiler](https://github.com/google/closure-compiler) ? Because I don't think it's related to Clojure in any way.

<comment><USER5> That's the secret sauce that ClojureScript relies upon for tree shaking, dead code elimination and other optimizations. The Closure library is also used for building blocks of the CLJS runtime.

[https://www.clojurescript.org/about/closure](https://www.clojurescript.org/about/closure)

<comment><USER4> Sure, but it can be used on all things JavaScript. I guess I'm just confused why it'd be brought up as specific tooling for ClojureScript.

<comment><USER6> That's actually not true. The Closure compiler has certain restrictions on the Js it accepts for advanced mode compilation, so you can't throw just anything at it.

The advantage is best-in-class dead code elimination, which is also why Closure was chosen; to distill the CLojurescript standard library into just the parts needed for a web page requires good DCE. Recently, other Js projects like Rollup and Webpack have gotten good DCE, but when Clojurescript was started, there were no other serious contenders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a big fan (and user) of Clojure.

However, I feel 150$/h is quite a bit for something that was done for free previously.

Taking the 3 months of figwheel, we're talking no less than 60 days * 1.2k/d = 72k$.

It's probably just a (slightly above?) average consulting salary in the US/Western Europe but everywhere else that's really a lot. Heck, even some friends of mine working as developers in Germany or France don't earn that in a year, even after adjusting for taxes and social security.

Being a (Clojure) consultant myself, I know the mathematics and I charge the same order of magnitude but I don't go around telling people this because I feel that might have negative consequences. (Most of my friends don't read HN, hence the contradiction in the last sentence)

<comment><USER5> What do you estimate is the going rate for senior Clojure tooling developers in China or India with comparable productivity and credibility as Figwheel's author?

<comment><USER7> Just to be clear, I don't think he deserves less than that when working.

I'm saying that I think he'd be probably happy to be paid half of it and continue his project. Similarly, seen from the donour point of view, there will probably be many that think: "I earn 30% of that per hour, why should I donate for such egregious salaries?"

Now, to answer your question:

I have no idea, the way you phrase it, it certainly sounds as if consulting salaries are the same?!

If so, I believe you but I believe the percentage of companies willing to pay 150 per hour for a local is much higher in Western Europe and US than in the BRICs or Eastern Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow this is such a great idea for funding. But I wonder if this would work with other language communities because the Clojure community, from my understanding, tends to concentrate around the same tools.

Anyone know of any other language communities with similar foundations?

<comment><USER9> I wish Rust Together was a thing, and for that to result in better HTTP/2 server and client support in Rust.

<comment><USER10> Good news! We don't need a Rust Together for this: Boyant is sponsoring all that work. An initial version shipped a month ago: [https://crates.io/crates/h2](https://crates.io/crates/h2)

<comment><USER9> Oh, nice!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great picks for the first funding round. Both these tools are invaluable.</comment>