Show HN: Divjoy – React Codebase and UI Generator - <AUTHOR> https://divjoy.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, my goal with Divjoy is to make it ridiculously easy to start a new React project. You just select all the things you want in your codebase (UI kit, React framework, auth provider, analytics, form handling, etc), pick a template, then export it as a complete codebase that you can keep building on. All the UI logic like routing and auth flows just works. It also has a built- in editor which I think is pretty nifty. You can view the entire component hierarchy right in the tool and drag in pre-built sections from the component library. I'm planning on building out a large library of components across all the major UI kits (Bootstrap, Material UI, etc) and adding support for Next.js soon.

This was by the far the most difficult project I've ever built. Would love to hear your thoughts and happy to answer questions.

<comment><USER2> I love the idea and I'll use it !!! One question: apart Framework can we have a 'Not needed' option for all other features? What if I want authentication with no styling at all..... Thanks a lot and keep up !!,

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm definitely considering that. Basically just wanted to wait and see if anyone asked for it. Out of curiosity, is that because you'd like to use a different UI kit or do you generally write styles from scratch?

<comment><USER3> I think a lot of people prefer to write styles from scratch. At least I haven't seen these UI kits being used much around me. I tried using one a couple of times and while it's great for getting something on the screen quickly, it turned into hell when I wanted to customize the look. Also it emitted embarassingly large bundles.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, having styled-components (not a UI framework) included in the boilerplate would be pretty awesome for something like this.

<comment><USER5> I was just going to ask that. I'm not big on using UI kits and prefer to use styled components. I like the idea of implementing Next.js

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's awesome, well done. Really nice that it exports to codesandbox as well so you don't even need to download anything. Would love to see support for TypeScript as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I figured people would want to be able to quickly check out the code and play around with it rather than wait for npm install :)

<comment><USER7> Definitely nice to be quick and easy to jump into, but I really love typescript for longevity of a project

<comment><AUTHOR> Out of curiosity, would you pay $10-20 to export with typescript?

<comment><USER8> I definitely would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is amazing. Creating a site from scratch takes a lot of time, WYSIWYG website builders are not very customizable. You are in the exact sweet spot I look for as a developer. Seriously great work !

<comment><USER10> hey joshi! What kind of website are you thinking of building? Would love to hear about why WYSIWYG website builders break down for certain use cases. We're thinking of using WYSIWYG builders interally

<comment><USER11> Classic 80/20 rule. I've used several of these in the past, and they always work great until you need that 1 thing that they don't support out of the box and then you have to spend half a day figuring out the JS hackery the builder uses so you can work around it to implement the one thing you need in it's subpar code editor that's hidden away in a submenu somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great work, and great name! Surprised, but glad to see Bulma as the main UI option. Thanks for using it ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for making such as awesome CSS Framework! Planning to keep growing the library of pre-built section built on Bulma, so hopefully it can become a great resource for the Bulma community (at least those that use React).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This so cool.

Can you also do Gatsbyjs ? Building static sites is the most productive thing these days - especially for building landing pages and corporate websites.

I would pay for something like this (with a whole lot of themes)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking a lot about Gatsby and how best to integrate with their way of doing things and their new themes system. Super excited about the potential there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We recently started using another scaffold generator from [http://scaffoldhub.io](http://scaffoldhub.io). It's similar to this but geared more for apps than for marketing sites. It allows you to build out a complete data model and backend. It's got a lot more features but they add complexity to the code that might not be needed for everyone.

<comment><USER15> That's the proper thing to call it: scaffolding or boilerplate. "Codebase generator" sounds like an excuse to charge for the output it produces. Instead of _that 's just scaffolding_ I can imagine _well, yeah, we used a codebase generator, that 's just smart, isn't it? Should we do everything manually?_ Divjoy looks pretty cool but I think I'll avoid it out of principle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, is the main issue you have with Divjoy that it uses the term "codebase generator" or was there something about how it works that you didn't like? To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of "codebase generator" either. Open to changing it if it seems weird or meaningless to people.

<comment><USER15> That was just my reaction to it. I think it sounds catchy. I would just leave it and see how it works. I'm not the target audience because stock create- react-app and create-next-app (and rails new) are more boilerplate than I like for starting a project, though I'll look at custom boilerplate for inspiration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok gotcha, appreciate the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's been great seeing the early alpha to what it's become!

Divjoy is like a super powered create-react-app. great way to start off a project. being able to quickly add prebuilt components and essentially "eject" them makes customizing super easy.

the UI is intuitive and love the animating side drawer for the component library.

and :cheer: to exporting to codesandbox!

<comment><USER17> As an early alpha user as well, I'm also impressed at how quickly it's coming along. Great job

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really thought this was a facetious jab at the modern web dev landscape until I started clicking around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe a little of both haha? I mean it is ridiculous how many services you need to bring together for a basic web app. On the other hand, I like that the React ecosystem is composed of a lot of services that each do one thing really well. So not sure a big monolithic framework is the answer. So this was kind of my attempt at a solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This tool is an absolute joy to use. At my nine to five, I work on a library that often times feels clunky and heavy. To use a tool as simple, powerful, and beautiful as this one truly does bring me joy. Thanks for putting the time into this! It's the perfect intersection of drag-n-drop and from scratch.

If you've got some preferred channel where I can drop you a couple dollars in support of this project, let me know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thank you! And I really appreciate the offer to support the project. The plan is to roll out some premium integrations and themes in the coming months and see how that works out as a revenue model. Not against setting up a Paypal or Patreon, but would love to see if this can be productized (yet still super generous with what you can do for free). Anything come to mind as something extra you'd pay for?

<comment><USER19> I think you're spot on with that revenue model. I would certainly be willing to pay a couple of bucks for a premium suite of templates and components, or integrations with less mainstream technologies.

One idea I'd really love is simple Git integration. If I want to download my code and work on it outside of the GUI, it seems cumbersome to return to the GUI for simpler tasks (e.g. let me double click this string instead of remembering which parent component has it). If I could sync to Git, you'd have all of my money!

As for a word of unsolicited advice: Don't be afraid to monetize! Plenty of people (and corporations) use and pay for tools like e.g. Figma which don't even produce code on this level. What you have right now is, in my opinion, more than generous for a free service.

Cheers, best of luck!

<comment><USER20> To the author: Be careful going down the saas root. The path is filled with feature requests with promises of small monthly payments without lockin.

Great for a focused simple product but perhaps not so great for this kind of a tool. Ultimately your customers want something to create as much of the app/site as possible. As you approach this ideal complixity increases making your application more brittle. When the ecosystem changes your tool may not be able to respond to the new reality.

Your better off using this tool to create value for your own customers. Or selling the source code rather than chasing the 9 dollars a month customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very cool project.

Looking at the code I really like code that comes out of this. Very easy to read / change.

I would like to see authentication done with SQL as an option. Admittedly that would be more work than firebase, but it would be a nice second opinion that is more portable / not tied to Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great to hear you find the code east to read and change. To clarify, would you want something like a rest API + node server that talks to an SQL database? The plan is to provide more self-hosted options for code export, going with 3rd party services like Firebase was just easier to add for this MVP.

<comment><USER21> >a rest API + node server that talks to an SQL database

Yes that is what I was thinking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks for clarifying. Definitely on the todo list, although still figuring out how soon I need to figure out the whole data layer (the big missing piece right now) VS focusing on expanding the component library across all the UI kits. Lots to do..

<comment><USER21> Yeah it looks like a great project with endless directions to expand.

I think it would be nice for that drop down for authentication to just offer one more choice. For me there's sort of an "oh, just google" moment when there is just one built in authentication.

That's not to take away anything from the project as it is, it's pretty great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that's good feedback. Considering Auth0 next. Any other ones I should consider?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is awesome, great work! One piece of feedback is that currently all of the components seem around designing static components. I'd love to see support for lists, dropdowns, etc, and ideally with the accompanying connect code to wire up a store with the renderer

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Martin, thanks for checking it out! Yeah, I'm eager to get a lot more dynamic components in there (lists, dashboards, social media feeds, dropdown menus, etc). Going to make that a focus over the next few weeks. These components will probably make it in before I have the data part figured out, but long-term want to find an elegant way to let the user pick from multiple data strategies (graphql, rest, etc) and just magically wire it up to the components.

<comment><USER23> +1 for adding all these UI dynamic components (menus, social, nested comments, etc)...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This looks absolutely awesome. I had been toying with a similar idea in my head for a while, but I never even started building anything, and now it looks like I won't need to!

It had seemed to me that due to how web development has evolved in recent years, improving compositionality greatly by adopting functional programming concepts, designing something like this could be done relatively elegantly if you are just able to find the right abstractions. Seems to me that you have been able to do so, given what you support and are planning to support, though I can imagine it is an ongoing engineering challenge.

Kudos, thanks and good luck! I will definitely be trying this out, though I hope you decide to support typescript at some point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it's super hard to find the right abstraction between UI and code! Lots of feedback sessions and iteration to get where I am and still very far from where I want it to be. Glad you're liking it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is great ! Just works out of the box...really good work. Waiting for bootstrap version

<comment><USER25> Even the code sandbox integration is great, I dont even need to download the code. Good focus on what devs want...have you thought of integrating this with tools like VS Code ? More non web based product ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I love the idea of doing some kind of VS Code plugin, but not sure where it will fall on the priority list. Any thoughts as to what a VS code integration might look like?

<comment><USER20> This is why you may want to open source. There are so many cool features but very little time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tried it out and it works fantastically. I'd love to see more components especially with Bootstrap. Do you need any help with its development cause I would love to work on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, my goal over the next month is to 5x the size of the component library, as well as start adding some more dynamic components like full dashboards, activity feeds, user settings pages, etc. Bootstrap is definitely coming. If you select it as an option you can enter your email. Just testing where the demand is. So far Boostrap and Material UI are about neck and neck. Feel free to shoot me an email at email@example.com if you want to get involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This looks amazing. Going to give it a try for my next project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Would love to hear any feedback once you give it a spin.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, this reminds me of RealWorld on Github.

I wonder if you could use that to build your templates since it's open source :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I'm a big fan of that project! Definitely took some inspiration from that early on when I was thinking about how doable this was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks amazing! Any plans on a vuejs implementation? Also would be awesome if we can change bootstrap scss variables such as primary color. Thank you for the amazing product

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! So you can actually tweak SCSS variables like primary color in the tool. Just click the style button at the top when you have editor open. I'll have this for Bootstrap as well when it's added. Any kind of Vue implementation is probably a ways down the road, since the plan is to build some nice UI abstractions around React concepts (like Suspense). Harder to do that well if I'm building for multiple frameworks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is amazing, I can't believe it works as well as it does. Very well done! Reminds me a bit of mobirise.com.

I'm curious to hear about your future plans for monetization? Premium blocks? Concurrent sites creation limit?

I can also see that right now the project is cached in the browser session. Any plans to have import/export of project files in order to better manage several projects at once? Or a desktop version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will likely try out premium themes and blocks. Maybe extra export options.

Accounts and multi-project support is definitely coming at some point. Right now you can technically import/export by clicking export project in the top dropdown menu (copies entire project json to your clipboard), save that, later import it using the import option. Not the most user friendly but it works.

Haven't really thought about desktop to be honest! Will keep an eye on feedback and see how much people want that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is amazing - good job - I like the interface and it looks pretty useful, going to give it a better try later :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate it! Please let me know if anything is confusing when you give it a try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is great. Looking forward to giving it a spin! Would by nice if I could spin this up from the terminal

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm that's a cool idea actually. Will think on that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> A really cool idea. I will definitely use this for spinning up for the next project I am going to work on.

</comment><comment><USER34> Impressive, how long did it take a single developer to make something like this?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was pretty exploratory at first so hard to say. Initially started out as me wondering if a drag and drop tree editor would be a decent way for beginners to learn React. Played around with a lot of different ideas and it kind of evolved from there. Maybe about 6 months full-time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I love this. So easy to use and intuitive. Really creative. Great job!!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to hear that! Feel free to reach out anytime if you run into issues or have ideas on how it could be better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hey there should be a collapse/expand button for component And thanks for creating this. This is so far the best dev product I have seen in a while

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, could you clarify what you mean by collapse/expand button for components? Currently, there is a +- button on each component that is a bit like collapse/expand. Technically it's controlling whether the component's inner structure is displayed inline in the tree or whether you just see the instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This looks great, would be awesome if possible to customize and add plugins/other integrations one self back to the mothership

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, would love to hear what kind of plugins or integrations you'd want. I'll be adding them pretty quickly over the next few months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This sounds awesome! Does it work with server side rendering or is that coming with the next.js integratiom you have planned?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey David, I don't export anything that helps with server-side rendering the CRA app. In theory, I could do that if people want it, but my feeling is people that want SSR should probably just use Next.js once we support it. Coming soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is awesome! Can't wait to try it out

</comment><comment><USER40> it's almost like no code, but it is code

<comment><AUTHOR> Did I just get my new tagline?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is awesome - literally took me just a few minutes to get something going. Great work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wooo! That's great to hear :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I love the idea! please add support to vue.js too. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER43> Very cool project, I'm excited to see where you take this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Would love to hear any thoughts if you give it a try. Critical feedback is most welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks awesome, are there going to be more choices coming?

<comment><AUTHOR> For sure, listening to feedback and seeing what people want right now. Anything you want in particular?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Would be awesome if it supported Semantic UI

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. Will consider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I made a project, I messed around with the components, and I exported it. There weren't any tests or docs. That's very disappointing.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is helpful feedback. Right now it exports the normal CRA readme. Plan is to soon replace that with a dynamically generated doc that goes over your chosen stack as well as some details like the light wrappers we export around routing and auth. Is that what you had in mind? In terms of docs, anything else you'd like to see?

<comment><USER45> _Is that what you had in mind?_

That's exactly what I would have liked to see, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This must have been ALOT of work.

</comment><comment><USER47> my 2 cats after 10 sec of checking :

feature request :

\- add for UI kit : ant.design & reactSemantic.UI please :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions! They are on my radar :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is a great idea!

</comment><comment><USER49> Antd support pls

</comment><comment><USER50> Why not just use angular cli and be done with it?

</comment><comment><USER51> nice work

</comment><comment><USER52> Would love to see Vue version of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I started out trying to make it framework agnostic, but decided to really try to nail React first and then see about supporting other frameworks. Appreciate the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> support builder!

<comment><AUTHOR> What's builder?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Nice job Gabe! Next week's hook: const myApp = useDivjoy('material-ui', '@reach/router')

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Matt!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I don't like this much. I'm using React as a UI engine for IoT devices, where the interchange is defined with protocol buffers.

Yes, just protocol buffers .. which generate templates for React to slurp up and render.

Doing this the "Web-first" way, means I have to sign up to produce code? This is where I object.

Please people, push things into the smaller end of the stack! Its the natural order of things...

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure I'm following you.. also it doesn't have signup. You can use the entire app and export a codebase without signing up.

<comment><USER55> Ah, well I missed that in my hatred for React things, but okay, fair point. Sorry for bloviating.</comment></comment></comment>


SEO Company CEO Contracts Murderers to Kill Competition, Client Exposes All - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@theplasticsurgeon/david-phillips-nkp-murderer-hn-66f19d89a341 <comment><USER2> I had a nasty bout with an SEO marketer a few years ago. He had taken content from my website and other assets of mine without permission or advance request. I was willing to overlook it as an inevitable cost of doing business.

But when he started to steal my customer reviews word for word and posting them as fake reviews, I became irate. I guess I am OK with someone stealing from me but I felt the reviews were my customer's property, not mine. When I confronted him he started spamming my business and then wrote detailed fake blog posts about how I was criminal hacker that now works covertly for the FBI. My name and photoshopped images were posted on gay websites for bondage sex. I Googled very poorly for a while, especially my images. I lost many many nights of sleep over this and I probably lost a contract over it.

I eventually found where he lived and fortunately he owned his own home. I threatened to sue him and take his home. He removed all the libelous posts shortly after that.

After all had been settled, a few months later he wrote me asking if I wanted to partner with him on a project, demonstrating a pathological lack of awareness. Apparently tormenting me had just been another fun day at the office and not a memorable event. I ignored him and never heard back.

My personal experience does make me wonder if the subject in the parent article was motivated to _kill_ his competitors just for profit. Or did he and his competitors have had a nasty on-going personal war that just kept escalating. Not that I would ever justify attempted murder. Just saying...

edits: grammar, clarity.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, why didn't you report these facts to the authorities? Fear of wasting time, or of retaliation, or something else?

<comment><USER4> Not everyone is rich.

<comment><USER3> I was talking about reporting a criminal case, not suing. With criminal cases it's the State which pays for everything, I think?

<comment><USER5> In my experience, having had two former employees of my mom's shop and a strong arm robber arrested, it came down to me handing the police work to the detectives. The other complaints we filed, just to name one, another employee stealing inventory from mom's shop in Manhattan and selling it to a vintage shop in Brooklyn went nowhere because we didn't have surveillance in the store showing she stole it despite there being surveillance in the other shop showing she sold it. Or the time I caught a kid red handed with my bike, and the cops wouldn't do anything because I didn't have a bill of sale despite my ability to describe the bike and it's serial number. They gave me the kid's address and said if I demanded my bike back and he gave it to me, I could keep it. The kid was running a bicycle chop shop in his garage.

So yeah, if you want the cops to close a case, you need to help them and that costs money. Unless you get lucky and everything is obvious and the case closes itself. Or in case of a murder. They tend to actually put resources into solving murders. Or anything where they can reasonably seize loot. But property theft or damage doesn't really register.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >... does very little to enhance our web presence in the first place and then never does anything further to improve our results. Complaints are met with excuses. In other words, ... ... a company that makes false promises and delivers little value.

SEO agencies in a nutshell.

Disclaimer: I'm a SEO.

<comment><USER7> digital snake-oil, idiots will always fall for it.

<comment><USER6> well, sometimes it's even a more or less sophisticated scam (blaming it on idiots is too short sighted)

a simple blueprint of the most common seo scam:

1) sell them something external that does not create additional work for the client and assign value to it i.e.: links, linkbuilding services, tools, ...

2) disable feedack loops (it takes x month until you see an impact, introduce "magic numbers" seo tools)

3) wait & take money (a.k.a. deplete ressources that the client might use for otherwise improvement)

4) trigger value creating project i.e.: better targeted title tags, sitemap.xml, responsive, webperformance, ...

5) see immidiate benefits

6) assign impact to 1)

7) addiction / lock-in cycle completed

<comment><USER8> Except some of those things are legit. It can in fact take multiple months to see real movement in the SERPs. Value is added by fixing tagging and such.

There are a lot of snake oil salesmen just like in and industry, but some of these things don't belong on that list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Coming from a post-Soviet period, I am surprised a bit that this doesn't happen more often. Company owners would be killed seemingly without much worry if they crossed anyone powerful.

I was doing homework one night and felt the house shake, I thought it was an earthquake. It turns out a bomb went off in a 5 story apartment building nearby. Someone was trying to kill a banker so they left a bomb by their door.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I'm surprised how celebrities and CEOs of big corporations live so long... In spite of the bodyguards.

It's hard to appreciate the sheer number of people that exist in the world... Surely there are enough crazy people to populate an entire city.

Is it possible that intelligence is inversely correlated with insanity? I thought it was the opposite.

<comment><USER11> There's only about 8k people who are 1 in 1k crazy and 1 in 1k capable, assuming independent traits.

If you restrict that to even 1 in 20 violent, then you're talking 400 people world wide.

Factor out kids, elderly, etc and you're talking 200 really scary motherfuckers. Figure 75% are employed by governments, and you're talking 50 rogue badasses -- which seems vaguely in line with the number of really dangerous terrorists, paramilitaries, etc.

My guess is that the number of people that are both interested and capable of the things you propose are busy making tons of cash on drugs, terrorist violence elsewhere, etc.

<comment><USER12> Can you explain how you came up with these numbers? Intuitively I have always thought they were low, due to the small incidence of terrorist attacks, but I am curious to where you come up with your base numbers.

<comment><USER11> I made them up.

But they're reasonable bounds -- the number of terrorists are very low, we know this for a fact. So we should suspect that the contributing traits are relatively rare. And if we want to talk about people who really _scare_ us, then it should be people who are real outliers.

An NFL player is a one in a few hundred thousand, and an NFL star is around one in a million. So if we're looking for the Tom Brady of terrorists, it would make sense that we don't want a fraction substantially higher than the number of Tom Brady's in football players.

So I cut off a segment of the population that would have the traits required and estimated how large it was -- 99.9th percentile capable, 99.9th percentile crazy, 95th percentile violent. (Intuitively -- if the smartest and craziest kid in your high school were the same kid (1 in 1000 each trait), then you picked the most violent in 20 of those kids.)

This turns out to be ~400 people, which seems ballpark right. I'd certainly expect the answer to be in the 120-1,200 person range.

As long as your estimates aren't _too_ far off and you aren't systemically wrong (eg, always rounding down), estimating is usually a reasonably accurate method to get a feel for the scale of something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't know which is worse, the story topic or Medium's floating "open in app" desperate plea.

<comment><USER14> What is worse?

        [ ] Medium's floating "open in app" desperate plea
        [x] Someone hiring a killer to kill his competitor

My pleasure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Read the article!

"Victim-1 and PHILLIPS were former business partners and are currently business competitors."

It's not like he's offing SEO competitors at random. He knew and worked with the victim personally.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminiscent of laser eye surgeon Mockovak putting a hit on his business partner and fellow laser eye surgeon King. [0]

[0] [http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Renton-laser-eye- surg...](http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Renton-laser-eye-surgeon- sentenced-in-1225540.php)

</comment><comment><USER17> So the government caught this guy in a Sting. What would even motivate such an operation? I have heard of Traps being laid out for potential pedophiles, drug addicts etc. Buy why would they go after this kind of criminal preemptively?

<comment><USER18> FTA: "The investigation revealed that PHILLIPS engaged another individual, who has since become a cooperating defendant ("CD-1"), to commit a murder of an identified victim ("Victim-1")"

As I read it, the potential hitman became a defendant after Phillips attempted to hire him. The potential hitman wasn't LE or on LE's side before that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was very suspicious when I read the article. It didn't seem to link to any government websites or newspapers, but I did find a story about the activity in the LA Times [0].

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ceo-murder- for-h...](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-ceo-murder-for- hire-20170605-story.html)

<comment><USER20> It links to court document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Today one would think Tor and Bitcoin to be involved.

But no - classic meeting with the killer and handing over a (faked) image of the victim.

</comment><comment><USER21> The scariest part here is that surgeons are concerned with being "marketing experts". Single payer.

</comment><comment><USER22> Non closable pop-up window.

</comment><comment><USER23> Surely he knew the photograph was fake, and just engaged in this transaction to send a message to his competition.

<comment><USER24> I'm sure Homeland Security can gin up a convincing-looking murder scene photo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> SEO is dirtier than I thought.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure we can blame an entire industry because of one sociopath.

<comment><USER27> >SEO >industry

Snakeoil is more like it.</comment></comment></comment>


Jesse Noller's Gittip account is now the #2 receiving account - <AUTHOR> https://www.gittip.com/jnoller/

<comment><AUTHOR> Jesse Noller tweeted that he was receiving anonymous threats and e-mails regarding the PyCon drama. Regardless of which way you lean on the matter, this might be a good cause to remind him that people do appreciate his work, no matter how bad the trolls want to punish him.</comment>


Voice Controlled Lights with a Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://adrienball.fr/2018/06/17/voice-controlled-lights/ <comment><USER2> We have seen lots of projects doing this, you should make more clear in what way yours is better/different.</comment>


He says he invented email. Dispute him at your own risk - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/02/13/says-invented-email-dispute-him-your-own-risk/wGQn4o6erpIJEs7kk13UyJ/story.html <comment><USER2> I don't get the fascination with who came up with what first, really. I'm not prepared to take credit for any of my ideas, I have no clue where most of it originates; and I don't give a damn about other people's claim to fame either. What is important is the ideas, not the messengers.</comment>


Forty percent of the Bay Area wants to leave, says new poll - <AUTHOR> http://sf.curbed.com/2017/3/31/15140036/bay-area-leaving-poll-san-francisco <comment><USER2> I saw this the other day -- seems like it's not just the Bay Area, though :)

Nearly half of Illinois residents want to leave the state, survey finds:

[http://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2016/10/11/nearly- ha...](http://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/news/2016/10/11/nearly-half-of- illinois-residents-want-to-leave.html)

Here's Why 41% of Millennials want to leave the U.S:

[https://transferwise.com/us/blog/why-41-percent- millenials-w...](https://transferwise.com/us/blog/why-41-percent-millenials- want-to-leave-the-us)

<comment><USER3> In short, 40-50% of people want to leave their current situation, but can't really.

There was a similar trend in the first half of the 20th century, IIRC, because of the similar economic situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And while I have nothing in particular against the Bay Area, I would encourage people to think very deeply about the very awesome and simple alternatives to living in the Bay:

Why would you want to live in a crowded, VERY expensive, a bit smoggy, overly regulated city with a long daily commute-

when you could live in a cheaper, less crowded, friendlier city (or country) with no commute (work online if possible), less smog, etc?

It may seem like a pipedream, but it really is possible with some planning, a bit of luck, and persistent motivation.

I made the move from Boston to Singapore with no job or long term visa. It worked out just fine. I get sun every day, there's no crime, and since I don't live downtown, my expenses are pennies!

<comment><USER5> I like Singapore too, but it's also one of the densest cities in the world, with the highest cost of living. In fact, I don't think even Singaporeans would describe their city as being _" cheaper, less crowded and friendlier."_

[https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2017/03/29/singapore- retain...](https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2017/03/29/singapore-retains- title-as-worlds-most-expensive-city-for-fourth-consecutive-year/)

<comment><USER4> No worries, thanks for the article!

I would say that if you are trying to recreate an American lifestyle with a car, house, designer shopping, dining out, etc. Yes, Singapore is the most expensive city in the world.

But there is extremely little crime here (to the point where Singaporeans are a bit lacking in caution like a galapagos iguana in my opinion).

HDBs are absurdly cheap for how nice they are. I pay $500 a month to live here.

And while the downtown core and Tampines are very crowded, traffic is decently efficient during a variety of commuting methods.

And my bike rides through Lim Chu Kang are practically deserted :)

<comment><USER6> I too had heard from a friend working there that Singapore was somewhat expensive. Are the pay levels commensurate with costs, for software people?

Also: How long have you been living there, and have you experienced that yearly smoke from burning of forests in Malaysia and Indonesia? My friend said that is an issue, and I've read about that in other places too, also that it happens in Chiang Mai, Thailand and nearby areas too.

How do you handle it, if it is an issue?

<comment><USER4> The pay is actually shockingly all over the place, in my opinion. The reason for this is that income tax is virtually non existent, so thats 30% less that they need to pay you compared to the US.

Then when you factor in the CPF, which is a mandatory contribution to a retirement fund that employers make for their employees, that's another 10% pay cut or so off the typical market rate.

Then there is a local talent pool for ~enterprise technology~ (c++ and java, mysql) that are quite underpaid.

Mobile dev jobs pay well but there isn't much equity to go around.

The only people making real money here are the bankers, lawyers, and doctors. Tech is still a side show in my opinion. Think New York in the 80s.

Still you will be just fine if you live like "us locals", avoiding the obvious scams that are reproducing Western life here, like Marina Bay Sands, Sentosa, LV, buying a Mercedes :)

The smog is a pretty big problem 1 month out of the year! It's wise to wear a mask and stay indoors, in my opinion.

I've researched the problem- it's a political one that probably won't be solved. Indonesians have the right land and climate for growing palm, which is used in palm oil soap from Dove, which Westerners buy mindlessly.

The farmers burn their land in a type of old school crop rotation, and a bunch of Singaporean and Indonesian companies pay them for their crop. So there is pretty strong demand and multiple levels.

I think it's a nuissance but not the end of the world. It's probably not even as serious as say, nuclear problems in Japan, smog in LA, seasonal depression in Boston and Seattle. It's just that it's quirky and in the news.

When I moved here, I realized how many things were relentlessly sensationalized in the American news by Americans so that they would feel better about living in America with all of its interestingly American problems :)

<comment><USER7> More dangerous than any nuclear problems in Japan probably. But yes, probably on par with the others you mentioned. Varies a bit from year to year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of this Onion article from years back: [http://www.theonion.com/article/84-million-new-yorkers- sudde...](http://www.theonion.com/article/84-million-new-yorkers-suddenly- realize-new-york-c-18003)

>With audible murmurs of "This is no way to live," "What the hell am I doing here—I hate it here," and "Fuck this place. Fuck this horrible place," all 8.4 million citizens in each of the five boroughs packed up their belongings and told reporters they would rather blow their brains out with a shotgun than spend another waking moment in this festering cesspool of filth and scum and sadness.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nicely summed up by a coworker: "I just turned 30 and I still live in a dining room."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because we decided to move.

The reason is very simple: our kid got into bad middle school on the other side of the town, we do not have money for private, so we are moving out....

<comment><USER10> I'm concerned about this too. Do you mind sharing which town you were in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to tell people to move to Toronto instead. I don't anymore. There's a housing bubble, cost of living is rising, and tech salaries are up, but not enough.

If my condo hits a valuation high enough (ie- the bubble doesn't pop for another two years) my wife and I plan to sell and get the hell out of here.

<comment><USER12> Yeah the housing market really needs to cool off, it's getting pretty concerning.

<comment><USER12> (Which is why I rent.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "considering leaving in the next few years" as stated in the poll is not the "want to leave" used for the headline (and even further from the "likely to leave" needed to justify the claim of a likely exodus.)

</comment><comment><USER14> They should move to Silicon Slopes (Utah) -- One of the largest and fastest growing tech sectors, minutes from Ski Resorts galore, tons of land to expand. We have tons of 1Gig fiber providers... AND WE can definitely use a lot more progressive-leaning people in this state, to shake up the political landscape a bit.

<comment><USER15> I'm always slightly worried as an atheist minority (brown) of considering Utah. I come from Canada and never really see racial tensions like there are in the US. Would you say it's not as big of a deal as the media makes it out to be?

1GB fiber providers is hella enticing.

<comment><USER14> I think it's possible utah could move in next 40-50 years from mormon stronghold to atheist/agnostic one actually. -- There's a lot of people leaving the church... because of the CES Letter, and recent church political movements. -- 80% of ex-mormons end up agnostic or atheistic--because they've believed in mormonism as being the 'one true church' or a restored version of christianity and that ALL other sects are wrong, so if your restored christianity is wrong, so too must christianity as a whole be wrong..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Out of interest, for those who have been in the Bay Area for a while, when was the best time to live there?

<comment><USER17> 2006-2010. 2008/2009 was great - everything was super cheap, and no traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Had to double-check that this wasn't dated April 1.

</comment><comment><USER19> In other news, 60% wants other 40% to leave :)

</comment><comment><USER20> I should send the article for every Bay Area tech recruiter that asks me if I am willing to relocate to the Bay Area.

How many people need to leave the area before the companies themselves follow due to lack of workers?

<comment><USER21> They will never lack workers, but maybe a certain type of worker.</comment></comment>


Tinder CEO quits amidst Twitter storm over marriage and North Korea claims - <AUTHOR> http://www.thememo.com/2015/08/13/tinder-ceo-quits-amidst-twitter-storm-over-married-users-north-korea-claims/

<comment><USER2> CEO for scumbag company appears to also be a scumbag. News at 11.

</comment><comment><USER3> They swiped away their CEO. :P</comment>


Silex, hackable website builder - <AUTHOR> http://www.silex.me <comment><USER2> Wish this company had Googled their name before going down this path:

[http://silex.sensiolabs.org/](http://silex.sensiolabs.org/)</comment>


The Definitive Guide to Bash Command Line History - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-bash-command-line-history/

<comment><USER2> Yawn. Not definitive. Nothing that reading bash(1) wouldn't tell you. And bash(1) at least covers the useful !^ and !$ which this doesn't.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't?

[http://www.catonmat.net/download/bash-history-cheat- sheet.tx...](http://www.catonmat.net/download/bash-history-cheat-sheet.txt)

It does!

I couldn't include an example of each word designator combination in the article. That's why I added a cheat sheet listing all of them.

<comment><USER2> No, it doesn't. The cheatsheet doesn't allow !^ and !$ to be constructed. The closest would be !!:^ and !!:$.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> meat-eater Nice guide. Will save me a lot of typing.

</comment><comment><USER4> excellent reference. Thanks.</comment>


Udacity's First Courses: Programming a Robotic Car - <AUTHOR> http://www.udacity.com/cs#373

<comment><USER2> Classes start 20 Feb.

Note that the Stanford/Coursera classes scheduled for the middle of January have never started. After the initial big push for AI/DB/ML classes last fall, the two platforms and one independent company pioneering this generation of online classes have split. Now there are three or four platforms (Stanford, Knowlabs, Coursera, Udacity) and at least four companies involved, including the initial university sponsor.

On the plus side, there are also professors from at least three more universities promising to participate. And I really look forward to more experiences like the AI and ML classes I enjoyed. Thrun and Ng did great work. (I liked Norvig's ad hoc tutorials better than his class lecturing; now I want to dress like him, though.)

Finally I do have to wonder if the latest rounds of classes will ever kick off. Two weeks late with total radio silence from a startup project usually means that nothing but vapor will ever emit.

<comment><USER3> Know Labs and Udacity are the same thing.

<comment><USER4> It would be great if they can coordinate their classes with Coursera. I signed up for algo-class.org, but now I see that Udacity will also have similar class.

Edit: I completed ML (Coursera) and AI Intro (Udacity) classes and I have to admit that execution of Coursera was way better. Not sure how things will be for algo classes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm looking forward to this course! For people who want to get their feet wet, check out David Singleton's awesome blog post: <http://blog.davidsingleton.org/nnrccar>

After reading that post, I made one of my own using Lego: <http://slowping.com/2012/self-driving-lego-mindstorms-robot/>

There is also a Nova documentary called "Great Robot Race" on the DARPA challenge to get the inspiration going: <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/>

</comment><comment><USER6> If this isn't vapourware (see WildUtah's comment) then this could be really, really interesting. I'm hoping something comes out of it, because it's a fantastic field!

</comment><comment><USER7> Somebody knows how they plan to make money? The whole idea is fantastic, I just hope they find a way to make it affordable in the future.</comment>


Where Flux Went Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://technologyadvice.github.io/where-flux-went-wrong/ <comment><USER2> Tried to avoid a click-baity title but this was the best I could come up with. With the popularity of Redux I wanted to touch on one of the not-as-often talked about benefits it offers over traditional Flux.</comment>


Uber can tell whether you are drunk by the way you hold your phone - <AUTHOR> https://www.yahoo.com/news/uber-tell-drunk-way-hold-103219165.html <comment><USER2> I wonder if they'd take this as an opportunity to apply extra surge pricing?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering if it is going to accidentally discriminate against people with disabilities whose phone coordination isn't within the "normal" mean.</comment></comment>


Wireless mice you can buy - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/?p=1673096 <comment><USER2> I'm hooked on Logitech "MX Anywhere 2S" mice. They are smaller and fit my hand better. The Logitech "ecosystem" is really nice:

\- One USB "nub" serves up to 6 devices - mice and keyboards. The newest nubs are really low profile (barely stick out of the laptop).

\- The mouse works on glass even - my desk top is glass.

\- I can just leave a keyboard and mouse at the clients and take my laptop home or to my office where I have mice+keyboard sets ready to go. Its kinda like a docking station for the keyboard and mouse.

\- Easy to delete and add new devices; the USB nubs are generic so I can use them with any Logitech device. I keep a few Logitech mice and a few nubs in my brief case.

Note: The original MX Anywhere wasn't very durable. I had to replace them every 7-12 months. I haven't had any failure with MX2's. I'm a windows developer - lots of mouse movement.</comment>


Ask HN: Unique usernames in educational software - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a web based educational tool (university level, non-IT students) and I'm wondering how others have handled this.
Students belong to a group, which roughly equates to a class, and I'd like to keep usernames unique in each group, but allow duplicates with other users in other groups. ie group+user is unique.
Questions:
1. Is this a stupid idea? Should I just stick to the standard 'you have to think of a username no one else has thought of'?
2. How would you implement the logon screen - Three boxes (username, group and password) or combine group and username (eg group.username)? <comment><USER2> This is the sort of idea that tends to end badly. Given that this is an educational tool, just make the user's graduation year a mandatory part of their username. jsmith is probably not unique, but jsmith2012 is more likely to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

I tend to agree. The more I think about it, the more problems I can see. Having to have a username unique can be a pain, but it's something we've become accustomed to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If people are automatically going to organize themselves into small groups, you don't have a disambiguation problem. Make the email address unique, not the username.</comment>


The Bootstrapper's Guide to Internet Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/the-bootstrappers-guide-to-internet-startups

<comment><USER2> This article touched somewhat on the biggest problems I have with (bad) entrepreneurs these days:

1)Thinking their idea is god

2)Thinking they are gods

The first point was touched upon with the quote "My idea is so good I need you to sign an NDA just so I can tell you", but the second point, however, I feel is even more obnoxious. These entrepreneurs think they are the next Steve Jobs, and act like it without the actual results.

To prove how true this is, search craigslist jobs for "equity" in any city and see what types of results you get. With most postings, you'll find a "creative" guy who doesn't know anything about the technical side, but he has a "great idea". He's looking for a programmer who will take a minority stake in equity in lieu of pay, because hey, the company will be worth billions someday, right? It's entrepreneurs like this that give us all a bad name.

<comment><USER3> The fact that they don't realize that the perception of someone who does this is "less than credible" is enough in itself to conclude that they aren't near as qualified as they claim.</comment></comment>


Google considers ranking sites on facts, not popularity - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/news/236681-google-truth-algorithm-search/

<comment><USER2> Neither this article, nor any of the ones it links to provide any Google sources or statements from Google staff. Oh, the irony.</comment>


Ask HN: What printer do you use? - <AUTHOR> Currently having one of those "I'm about to throw this thing out the window" moments with my current printer. What printer works for you, is reliable, joins the network easily, and has a customer-friendly ink refill policy? <comment><USER2> Cost to print 5,000 B&W pages on my HP inkjet: $300 ($12 per 200-page generic ink refill).

Cost to print 5,000 B&W pages on my Brother laser: $25 ($12.50 per 2600-page generic toner).

Inkjets make no sense if you can put up the extra $50-100 up front for a laser printer. B&W is at least 10x cheaper, color is at least 5x cheaper, per page.

I have a Brother HL-2270DW for B&W printing, and an HP M251nw for color. Both are wireless, easy to set up.

Bonuses: Print 5 reams of paper before you need to swap a toner cartridge, instead of 3+ ink cartridges per ream. If you don't print anything for a few weeks, you won't need to throw out a dried out cartridge to use the printer again.

<comment><USER3> > Cost to print 5,000 B&W pages on my Brother laser: $25 ($12.50 per 2600-page > generic toner).

I found an unused HP P2015dn at a family member's office. It came loaded with an aftermarket cartridge. I also found a new-in-box HP toner. Pages printed with the genuine HP part are much sharper. Maybe some generic cartridges are better than others... ?

The paper doesn't feed from the drawer anymore, but it feeds fine from the fold-down tray. It's got a wired network connection too, which works pretty well, except I can't print auto-duplex (manual-duplex only) over the network unless I'm printing from Chrome's printing dialogue (wth?).

      Total pages printed: 	60387
      Duplex pages printed: 	4279
      Pages mispicked in printer: 	783
      Pages jammed in printer: 	29
      PCL6 pages printed: 	48916
      PS pages printed: 	505
      PCL pages printed: 	12937

edit: rephrased my statement about generic cartridges

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> * Brother HL-5140 b/w laser printer. Purchased new in November 2004 and has been a trouble free workhorse the whole time I've owned it.

According to the printer's status sheet it's printed 7298 pages so far and jammed just nine times.

The printer is still running on its original fuser and drum units and it's on its second toner cartridge. I think it cost me GBP150.00.

It's connected directly to my Windows 10 workstation via USB and is "shared". Fairly certain I could get some sort of WiFi arrangement rigged up, but this PC is rarely switched off.

* Canon MG5500

Got this as a freebie. I use it now and again as a scanner and to print high quality Hubble pics onto high quality printer paper. It's set up over WiFi which was ridiculously easy to do. It even scans over WiFi which gave me a certain sense of _wow that 's clever_ even though it shouldn't have :)

In parting, I'd say that the economics of a half decent laser printer are a bit of a no-brainer if its mostly b/w printing you do.

[edit] Forgot to mention that both printers happily talk to Fedora.

<comment><USER5> I have a brother HL-L2320D (laser, love it). It doesn't have wireless and that was a conscious choice at the time, as an old Raspberry PI got put to work as the print server.

If you find something without networking it isn't hard to find a way to add it on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't print that often, and very, very rarely do I need to print in colour if so, so I have the Samsung ML-1660. A few years old, but the line of products I would definitely recommend. There are colour versions too.

</comment><comment><USER7> I bought a Canon imageCLASS D530 in mid-2014 for $68 new, incl. shipping (and it's a bit of a beast). B&W laser, color scanning, it's wired but no problem for me. The "starter" toner cart that came with it is just now starting to die, but if you take them out and give them a good shaking you can usually get another 100+ pages out of them. Canon-brand toner carts are stupid expensive, but third-party ones are everywhere, and they're $25 or under. I'm unsure which brand to go with, as this is the first time I've needed one, but I'm leaning towards Newegg's house brand (Rosewill, $18). It's either that or an "Arthur Imaging" branded one on Amazon for $25 (great reviews, that is if you take those seriously anymore)

</comment><comment><USER8> HP M252dw has been the most reliable home option for me. I run a small press and have printed tens of thousands of pages in a span of about six months and all it needed was new ink. Colors look great, text is crisp. You can print to it via email which is really handy

</comment><comment><USER9> Depending on how sensitive your documents are, you can just upload them to Staples, they print it, and you pick it up.

I have an inkjet at home, hardly use it.

When I want something to look nice, down to the ink on the paper, I use Staples.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have an old HP 4050N LaserJet. It was old when I got, and I've had it ten years. It is a fantastic printer! Runs for years on a single toner cartridge. Prints fast, always works.

</comment><comment><USER11> To kinda hijack this thread (but not really): I see Brother printers coming highly recommended again and again, both here and on Reddit, but for some reason they don't seem to be as prominent on the public mindshare as HP or Dell or such major companies. Is it because the other companies can afford higher marketing budgets, or is there some catch?

</comment><comment><USER12> I bought a Canon imageCLASS MF227dw and it has been awesome. Laser printer,wireless,scans multiple pages to PDF and a lot more.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MWDYDOC/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MWDYDOC/)

</comment><comment><USER13> HP LaserJet All in one purchased in 2014. For my $, laser is the way to go. They are economical on a cost per page basis and they last a long time. I purchase a Canon laser printer but returned it after spending two hours attempting (unsuccessfully) to get it set up to print.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm using an HP m401dn for about a year and a half that I am very satisfied with. Laptops running Linux and android phones have been able to print to it with no configuration. And while I admit to not doing a huge amount of printing I have yet to buy more toner for it.

</comment><comment><USER15> HP Officejet 4630. It doesn't get a lot of use, so I'm using an IFTTT recipe to print a test page on the first of each month. Trying to avoid having the ink dry out. I've printed maybe 20 pages over the past 10 months.

</comment><comment><USER16> None! Can you not change things so you don't need to print anymore?

</comment><comment><USER17> Canon MX895 all in one inkjet with WiFi. I only print contracts I have to sign so it's OK but cost per page seems to be too high for everyday usage.

</comment><comment><USER18> Got a Xerox Phaser 3020. Wireless Setup is a little wonky, but it has worked so far for the year I've had it and the print quality is good.

</comment><comment><USER19> Brother HL-3170CDW color LED printer. Bought within the last year.

<comment><USER20> How good is the color printing quality?

<comment><USER19> Honestly, I would say fair to awful. Some of the "awful" is due to driver issues, I'm sure. I've seen an image come out too red looking, but it wouldn't reproduce with the same image. I've been pleasantly surprised by _some_ of the results, but not so pleasantly by others. To land a verdict in, I would have to try something on proper glossy paper.

Anyway, to me, it's really a pointless question; if you want good color, take your files to a pro printing shop. You're not going to get good color at home.

Printing photographs (e.g.) at home is a silly waste of money.

Firstly, it requires ink, not toner. (Rules out a LED or laser printer like this). Toner is colored plastic powder: the three colors don't blend properly. On a given pixel, more of one toner is going to end up on top, and even though it's melted by heat, it's not going to produce the right effect, like when drops of liquid ink blend together.

Ink requires an inkjet, and an inkjet is a silly thing to own. The ink is used up quickly and is expensive. You have to print quite regularly otherwise they dry up and clog. If you try to refill the cartridges yourself (e.g. open holes in them and syringe in the ink), you risk introducing particles of impurities which will clog the heads, and then the unit is kaput.

After all that, the cheap inkjets that people buy for home use don't compare to big, professional printing units. You will end up pay more per image than if you send out for it.

I have this printer for printing documents and the occasional image (perhaps embedded in a document). Color adds a nice dimension to docs, and doesn't have to be correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Canon MF8500C aftermarket cartridges are dirt cheap</comment>


AV1: A new general-purpose video codec - TD-Linux https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/av1/demo1.shtml <comment><USER2> The post doesn't mention hardware or silicon implementations. That's a key requirement for modern market adoption: if a mobile device can't hardware- decode it (which saves precious power!), that's going to be a significant blocker.

I know Google provided a free hardware decode block for VP8, and I assume also for VP9 (since there appears to have been some, though not universal, hardware acceleration for that according the the Wikipedia article). I'm hoping they'll soon (or already) have the same for VP1.

I see Apple, Nvidia, Intel, Allegro, AMD, and a bunch of other silicon vendors are also members of the Alliance for Open Media, so I expect to see hardware acceleration within the next 2-3 years. I'll be impressed if it's earlier.

Edit: maybe hardware acceleration earlier. If the standard was released recently with the collaboration of the silicon industry, it's likely the current in-design/early-production silicon already has an implementation of the important parts of the codec, so we can expect consumer products with at least partial acceleration within 6 months.

<comment><USER3> Adoption is forced by pirated stuff. If scene groups start to use it, people will want to play it. And those groups don't care if you can play whole movies on your phone. Because thats not what a phone is mainly for.

<comment><USER4> The scene cares _a lot_ about codec support.

You can tell that they do if you read the scene standards.

They care much much more about this than most people do. Even a lot of people that work with video professionally don't care as much about codecs and codec support as these guys do.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)#Video_standar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_\(warez\)#Video_standards)

So no, I don't believe that "real" scene groups would start using a new codec unless it was widely supported. The scene standards, then, would not include such codecs. Failure to follow scene standards will have your releases nuked in the scene.

As for the torrent sites, if someone puts up videos using codecs that cause the videos to stutter or plain fail to play then the torrent users will learn to associate whoever encoded those videos with videos that don't work and they will avoid torrents with that person or group name in them.

<comment><USER5> I remember when MP4 was the standard yet the scene used AVI and MKV. I get the impression that they care more about their own idiosyncratic notions of technical superiority than compatibility (hey, kinda like HN).

<comment><USER4> Note that avi, mkv and mp4 are all container formats.

avi and mkv can contain nearly any audio and video streams regardless of codec. mp4 can contain only a specific set of audio and video streams determined by a limited set of codecs.

You can trivially copy the audio and video streams directly over into an mp4 container provided that the codecs used are supported by mp4. As long as the codecs were supported also by the device you were looking to watch it on then you'd be able to watch it. So the codecs are the most important bit.

If I remember correctly, aac + h264 was commonly used for audio and video respectively, both of which are supported by mp4.

Of course it would still be an annoying extra step for someone who needed the file to be mp4, but at least being able to simply copy the streams is fast and cheap compared to streams that need to be transcoded. Transcoding could take painfully much time and could also easily further degrade the quality of the streams.

An important thing to note about mp4 is that in some configurations, metadata that is needed for playback is placed at the end of the file. This means you can't playback this sort of file directly until you had downloaded the whole file completely. Often there would be a separate sample file that you could download to have a look at the quality anyway but still, it is one reason that you might want to go with avi or mkv instead as I don't think those containers suffer from that problem at all. So if you download mkv and preview it early in let's say VLC and you know from the nfo that they are using mp4-compatible codecs then you can both always have preview to ensure quality is good (or even that it is at all the movie you are looking for), and then after you've downloaded it you can copy the streams over in an mp4 container quickly and then consume the movie on your mp4 media device.

<comment><USER3> AC3 mostly.

<comment><USER4> Yes, sorry. Fortunately ac3 is supported by mp4 as well.

<comment><USER3> not "officially". anyway mkv is by far the superior container.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am always blown away when reading about codecs. Video compression seems to be the perfect intersection of math, programming, and psychology.

<comment><USER7> And money. This is what happens when a lot of money is thrown at a problem.

<comment><USER8> For the record. Yes, a lot of money was spent developing this codec. However, a lot of creativity and risk-taking was involved as well.

It was far from clear 15 years ago when xiph released Theora (aka vp3, ancestor of av1) that going up against mighty MPEG, with their enormous war chest from a decade of royalties, and dozens of patents (and the money to defend them) that success in the end was even possible much less assured.

It's really a wonderful story of the triumph of open source philosophy over the IP licensing model.

<comment><USER9> While none of this is false, it's a bit of a misdirection to imply that the 'mighty MPEG' was a monolithic actor preventing this course of action from taking place. In fact, the individual collaborators that MPEG (or ITU) brought to the table were the same sorts of hardware companies, software companies, universities, research institutes, and media companies that are surprisingly familiar among AV1's contributors, and MPEG's licensing scheme -- the patent pool being its primary innovation -- was a way to seek mutually assured use of each other's work.

The story here isn't that the Big Evil companies behind the MPEG codecs were beaten by the Good companies behind the Alliance for Open Media -- the story is that the pool of companies is kinda-sorta the same or comparable, with plenty of them playing both sides, a fact not lost on the founder of MPEG [1][2].

[1] [http://blog.chiariglione.org/2018/01/28/](http://blog.chiariglione.org/2018/01/28/) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261313](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261313)

<comment><USER10> > it's a bit of a misdirection to imply that the 'mighty MPEG' was a > monolithic actor preventing this course of action from taking place. In > fact, the individual collaborators

True but if we are comparing models for getting stuff invented collaboratively (open source vs. licensed IP) then this hardly misdirection. Indeed the fact that the same sort of actors found it possible/useful/necessary to go down the open route makes TD-Linux's point all the more interesting.

This is _important_ because when policymakers talk among themselves they often just assume that IP and such are necessary for fostering innovation.

<comment><USER11> > This is important because when policymakers talk among themselves they often > just assume that IP and such are necessary for fostering innovation

Would AV1 have been possible in 1993 when MPEG-1 came out? How would you have bankrolled the standard at the time?

<comment><USER12> > Would AV1 have been possible in 1993 when MPEG-1 came out?

No. There weren't enough transistors in the world. I'm not being silly. Something like Av1 happens now because Moore/Dennard allow it to.

<comment><USER9> It seemed to me like they meant the question politically, not technically, as in, would AOMedia have been possible?

I think it's widely understood that the technical innovations in sixth- generation codecs like AV1 were simply not computationally feasible on circa ~1993 devices, so I highly doubt that's what was meant. Therefore I'm not sure how transistor density relates to funding models for DSP innovation.

<comment><USER12> The answers aren't entirely separable. Hardware capable of any kind of video wasn't accessible to the larger community and it sure as hell wasn't _affordable_.

When Xiph.Org started (1994), even audio required high-end hardware. Yes, sound cards were available for PCs, but big enough hard disks were not.

When only the elites have access, the standards are made by elites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That was a pretty nice write up about it. I don't know very much about video encoding, and usually when I've tried reading about it I very quickly am out of my depth, but this bit seemed pretty reader friendly to a not-even-close- to-an-expert like myself. How did it read for those who actually know about video encoding?

<comment><USER14> I'm no video codec expert either, but the author of this article, "Monty" Montgomery, has a real gift for technical explanation. '

Here's a video he created a few years ago, taking apart some popular misconceptions about how digital audio works: [https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml](https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml)

<comment><USER15> >> Monty" Montgomery, has a real gift for technical explanation.

He does. I love his posts. Some say you don't really understand something until you can explain it to someone else. By that metric he's probably in the top 5 codec folks in the world today.

<comment><USER16> Some take it further and go "I want to really know this newfangled X stuff, gonna teach a class on it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Site seems to be down. Google cache link: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/av1/demo1.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER18> This made me realise how much I enjoyed and have missed the Daala blog updates :)

Any idea how many more articles are planned, so that can adjust my expectations a bit?

<comment><USER12> The next two will be on the Constrained Directional Enhancement Filter and the Daala Entropy Coder, which AV1 adopted as it EC system. Beyond that, there will be several more though I've not yet planned out a specific order.

<comment><USER18> Thanks, looking forward to them!

Can we somehow convince you to part-time more technical blogs and videos? Like others here said, you have a knack for writing really accessible technical articles without them feeling dumbed down.

I don't know if you're just more into doing the hands-on work of developing the codec (I can imagine that's exciting), or if it's a question of technically not being hired to do that.

In the latter case, maybe "The People" could vote with their wallet to convince the higher-ups otherwise?

Like, Ubuntu lets us decide what we want them to spend our donations on. If we had that with xiph.org and it had a section that said "more technical blogs!", or maybe even something like patreon a set-up where you can pledge to automated repeat donations for each blog entries, wouldn't be surprised if there were enough nerds willing to send donations specifically to justify to the managers that you may spend more time on outreach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What does this mean for hardware accellerated decoding?

Intel implemented VP9/h265 decoding in its processors just recently.

<comment><USER20> Considering Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia, Apple, and other hardware companies are all members of the Alliance for Open Media - which is the consortium behind AV1 - I'd expect that work to support it in hardware is already well underway.

[https://aomedia.org](https://aomedia.org)

<comment><USER21> Ah...

So we have to buy new processors.

<comment><USER22> FPGAs can't come soon enough.

<comment><USER23> FPGAs will never be able to compete on size, cost, or performance/watt compared to optimized dedicated silicon. You're not going to find an FPGA capable of being programmed to encode video on a mobile device.

<comment><USER24> On the performance/watt scale they sit between dedicated silicon and general cpus, right? If so, they could be useful as a stop-gap to keep older devices relevant longer as new standards are released that didn't make it into the silicon yet.

<comment><USER25> in theory yes, but in practicality, there are two points that make it probably impractical.

First, the reprogrammability of FPGAs means lots of unused gates and less density, or wasted space. with flash technology nowadays, it doesn't waste as much power, but the footprint is just so large it's not worth it.

Second, a lot of the things that make custom silicon fast can be found in GPUs, such as ALU, MAC, FFT, FIR, SIMD and other DSP slices. Sure, there is a whole additional layer of optimization that can be done with custom silicon, but the computational powerhouses already exist. It's mostly (not all) a matter of reprogramming the memory movements from block to block, delegating certain operations to the CPU and general optimization. Most new codec algorithms can probably done pretty well with GPUs on phones these days.

And unfortunately, cell phone companies aren't interested in keeping older HW relevant :( Other industries might, though. My friend said lots of military radar projects he worked on used FPGAs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How much more effective is this than HEVC/x265 (especially at 4K HDR) resolutions?

<comment><USER27> Bitmovin's comparison: [https://bitmovin.com/av1-multi-codec-dash- dataset/](https://bitmovin.com/av1-multi-codec-dash-dataset/)

MSU's comparison: [http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video- New...](http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/Online-Video- News/AV1-Beats-VP9-and-HEVC-on-Quality-if-Youve-Got-Time-says-Moscow- State-122945.aspx)

x265 complained about the recent MSU test: [http://www.x265.org/x265-incorrectly-represented- msus-2017-c...](http://www.x265.org/x265-incorrectly-represented- msus-2017-codec-comparison/)

But equally x265 likes to refer to MSU comparisons when the results make x265 look good: [http://www.x265.org/](http://www.x265.org/)

An x265 post referencing another paper which says HEVC outperforms AV1. The post insinuates AV1 might not be royalty-free. Reads like an attempt to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt: [http://www.x265.org/excited-av1-closing- doors/](http://www.x265.org/excited-av1-closing-doors/)

<comment><USER28> MSU actually in the meantime updated their description. According to them they used a more recent version – see the Facebook comment thread below the streamingmedia.com link you shared.

But indeed it's a little bit ironic for someone advocating for HEVC to be concerned about patent royalties and licensing.

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the heads up. I didn't see those Facebook comments because Firefox's tracking protection blocked it (which in general is what I want). The x265 team really should add an update to their blog post to explain that MSU corrected the version number error.

<comment><USER29> Instead of 7th version older, their one was 6th?

x264 or x265 was basically never tuned for PSNR or SSIM what ever metrics. Basically the 30-40% AV1 claimed to be better in those value. And in that case, the x265 developer isn't wrong, it is very much the picture, not the values that matters.

VMAF should hopefully bring much more useful numbers. But we will have to see and put some time in since it is very new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> AV1 is a poor name for a video codec because it is too easy to visually confuse with AVI.

<comment><USER31> At least it's not a container - you won't have *.av1 filenames.

<comment><USER32> I very frequently deal with .h264 files, containing just a raw h264 bitstream. Granted, that's more of a special case, because I deal with video encoding and decoding a lot through work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Everyone here is asking about hardware encoding/decoding, which is obviously important.

My question is, at what level do these encoders work at? Are they basically specialized SIMD instructions, or are they fully featured chips that take raw data as input and produce byte streams in the format of the protocol? Or somewhere in between?

<comment><USER34> In between, but more like the latter conceptually. It'll be a collection of bulk data processing blocks that are glued together by software. Generally, you want to implement the large bulk operations in HW, with SW handling all the option parsing and control logic.

<comment><USER10> And this opens up the question of how easy it is to re-target exiting hardware to new techniques.

For example, if I understand the Chroma-from-Luma prediction; then the maths involved is just 2-d linear regression (once for U vs. L once for V vs L.). That's a pretty generic task. Even when with the domain-specialisation that it is done over pixels in an encoding block, we are still talking about concepts common to all codecs.

So maybe there existing acceleration hardware can already do it. But even if it can, the require primitive needs to be exposed to software if new protocols are to benefit from it. So my question (and maybe Boxxed's too) is whether the hardware interface is low-level enough for such adaptability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > AV1 leapfrogs the performance of VP9 and HEVC

Does anyone have any evidence of this claim?

<comment><USER36> For decoders. Encoder now is very very slow.

<comment><USER37> So not a good format for live streaming then?

<comment><USER38> The project is still underway, but I think decoding is more important than encoding, especially with live streams. Given a Twitch stream, for example, the encoding is only done by one peer while the decoding is done by thousands or (as of recent) millions.

<comment><USER18> Counter-argument: encoding is the bottleneck in live-streaming

<comment><USER38> Please do elaborate.

<comment><USER23> It can take an enormous amount of compute power to encode 4k video at 1:1 speed with these more complex codecs. Multiply for multiple bitrates and resolutions. If you can't encode at 1:1, you add significant delays to 'live' streaming, thus making it not 'live'.

Case in point, a 40 second 1080p clip would take over 8 hours to encode on an i7-4800 - that's less than 2 frames per _minute_. You need a lot of horsepower to cut that down to 40s / 60 FPS.

[1] [https://bitmovin.com/bitmovin-supports-av1-encoding-vod- live...](https://bitmovin.com/bitmovin-supports-av1-encoding-vod-live-joins- alliance-open-media/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone know when h264 goes patent-free? It's truly ubiquitous, and it first came out in around 2003. It'll be very exciting when it becomes totally libre.

<comment><USER29> That is actually a good question. Mp3 is now patents free as well.

<comment><USER39> And both standards are "good enough" for most use cases and are supported by an overwhelming majority of hardware devices. Once h264 goes off patent, the interest in more advanced formats will dwindle.

<comment><USER29> It will be good enough, for things like Gif replacement. For Video though I think we still have long way to go.

<comment><USER29> Or once all the AVC patents expire, what additional tools, like new encoding and tools from Open Sources like Daala we could add to, to form a new baseline codec for the web, that is truly Patents free.

The current AV1 is only royalty free.

When will all AAC patents expire? It is over 20 years since AAC introduction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is Daala development abandoned now?

<comment><USER40> They said a while ago they will be using Daala as a developmental testbed.

<comment><USER12> Yes. We still have internal investment is many pieces of Daala that didn't get adopted in AV1. I don't know the liklihood that Daala will rise again as a standalone codec project... possible, wouldn't bet on it.

<comment><USER36> That's a pity, it was very promising, but if I remember correctly it hit some major blockers that weren't solved yet?

<comment><USER41> See also my previous statement on the subject: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14599601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14599601)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Additional background testing and perspective can be found in the following sponsored industry article - note BitMovin and Harmonic are both discussing this at the ongoing NAB conference in Las Vegas - [http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?Arti...](http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=124245&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+StreamingMediaMagazine- FeaturedArticles+%28StreamingMedia.com%3A+Featured+Articles%29)

</comment><comment><USER43> Where's the demo? It's not unreasonable to expect to see an actual video if the article is about a next generation video.

<comment><USER44> How would we play it? The only decoders that exist are experiments or tests, and they are not currently optimised enough for mainstream use.

<comment><USER35> Also a webassembly decoder could probably do short clips.

<comment><USER44> No one has yet written a good performant decoder for native, let alone Wasm.

I don't dispute that it is theoretically possible - of course it is, people are making this codec for actual use, and I'm looking forward to it - <AUTHOR> that it doesn't seem doable right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Congratulations Chris!

</comment><comment><USER46> Are you hiring?

</comment><comment><USER47> Mandatory xkcd comic strip ;-) [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

</comment><comment><USER48> > The AV1 format is and will always be royalty-free

Not sure how they can make this statement.

VP8 was patent encumbered all over the place and eventually required licensing from MPEG-LA. Surely AV1 would be infringing on at least some of HEVC's expansive patent pool. Unless of course Google is willing to indemnify user's against patent infringement lawsuit. Which would be really big news.

<comment><USER49> From wikipedia:

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1), is an open, royalty-free video coding format designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It is being developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium of firms from the semiconductor industry, video on demand providers, and web browser developers, founded in 2015.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1)

<comment><USER50> Guessing (maybe generously?) at OP's meaning, claims were made in the past about VP8 being royalty free etc, and that turned out to be wrong. It's not clear how much we can trust them this time around.

[http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/-76781.aspx](http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/News/-76781.aspx)

[http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/an-analysis-of-webm-and- its-p...](http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/an-analysis-of-webm-and-its-patent- risk/)

[http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/patent-clouds-remain- over...](http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/patent-clouds-remain-over- vp8-google.html)

[http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/next-patent- infringement-...](http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/next-patent-infringement- trial-over.html)

<comment><USER36> All of those are quite old sources, and patent claims were refuted. Is there anything newer?

<comment><USER50> [https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-and-mpeg-la-settle- long...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-and-mpeg-la-settle-long-running- vp8h-264-patent-dispute/)

So far as I can see, that's the final state. Google ended up having to get a license from the MPEG-LA VP8 patent pool.

<comment><USER51> from your link:

> _Google 's Serge Lachapelle notes that today's agreement is "not an > acknowledgment" that VP8 infringes on any of the patents claimed by MPEG LA_

[https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg0663...](https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg06631.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> You know I just watched an old (and much degraded) VHS of a TV broadcast of the 80s superman. I missed zero HD 4K whatever.

Something about the medium and the message here.

<comment><USER53> I could survive just fine without glasses. That doesn't make it noble to do so.</comment></comment>


MS Paint IDE - <AUTHOR> https://ms-paint-i.de/ <comment><USER2> Paint is good for editing config files and simple projects, but for more advanced programming GIMP is better. It is extensible and offers a vast range of plug-ins for making things easier.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I'm not a fan of using it with Java, and I prefer the Paint.NET IDE.

<comment><USER4> Paint 3D would be the clear winner for enterprise-grade software.

<comment><USER5> An entire new dimension of capabilities, yeah. Why compose behavior in 2 dimensions when the world exists in 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> even the webpage is using AngularDart. This is a person that goes out of their way to make interesting choices.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Sometimes a 99% accuracy parsing". Well I'm sold.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is breathtakingly stupid, and I absolutely love it

</comment><comment><USER9> We had this. It was called Flash and it was glorious.

<comment><USER10> Right? gotoAndPlay as a function still holds a special place in my heart. It was a damned great environment for building interactive games!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is...something.

</comment><comment><USER12> Finally, a graphical programming environment that is as fast as programming with text files.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Superiority

> It's not Eclipse.

Shots fired.

</comment><comment><USER14> Outstanding work. Will the VIM plugin come out soon? But this really improves productivity already. I have setup several hot keys to shortcuts to MS Paint IDE that save me from having to use the mouse and keep my hands on the keyboard. Great time saver.

</comment><comment><USER15> Truly wonderful in its awfulness.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not sold by this IDE, like most other products from MS. :-(

No matter how many fancy features it boasts to have, if it is not open source, I won't consider it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like a slightly more practical version of this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414796](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414796)

</comment><comment><USER18> I see fabulous opportunities to get creative in the code comments area.

Does this version compile TIFF?

What about compiling an animated GIF, I have a few ideas to abuse that feature...

</comment><comment><USER19> I think Adobe Illustrator would be an excellent IDE. I think Adobe gave up on the coding business too soon after ColdFusion didn't work out so well.

<comment> james-skemp Having developed in ColdFusion approximately a decade ago, before the product we used (and I as a developer) switched to .NET, I did a quick search.

It looks like it's still being developed at least. All this time later I still liked how easy it was to cfdump anything (at least there's LINQPad supports it for .NET) and how nice FusionReactor was for troubleshooting issues.

We used a bit of closed-source software but FR could be configured to sit between all db calls, which helped us point out some rather inefficient queries the CMS was doing.

Every now and again I see a .cfm in the URL and wouldn't mind working (briefly) with the language again.

EDIT: Still looking around at ColdFusion, I think really the price is what resulted in it's lack of adoption. Typical Adobe pricing that's focused on enterprise usage.

<comment><USER20> Check this out: [https://github.com/lucee/Lucee](https://github.com/lucee/Lucee)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does it support coding in Comic Sans?

</comment><comment><USER22> This is... a thing??

<comment><USER23> I suppose your one of those "plain text should be used as an interface everywhere" developers, eh?

Did you even try using images? It's not like it's hard like learning VIM or something.

<comment><USER24> This!

Using images instead of text files saved my life! Not dealing with version control saves so much time and improves my productivity to other spheres.

<comment><USER8> Main_finalfinalfinal.png

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can't tell if this is a joke or not

<comment><USER26> It's both I think

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Finally Windows got ready to programming.</comment>


California rejects SB 50, a push for denser development near transit - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/business/economy/sb50-california-housing.html <comment><USER2> Californian (Bay Are) here.

Denser development near transit sounds fantastic - it's just the kind of Jane Jacobs future I hope we can build for ourselves.

However, I strongly disliked SB50 - and other measures like it - because they _consider American-style busing to be transit_.

Buses in the United States, _for the most part_ , are throwaway, afterthought breadcrumbs that planners and political leaders cram in to soften the blow of overwhelmingly automobile-centric transit design.

This results in poorly scheduled, infrequent, usually empty buses bonking their way around infrastructure that has no place for them. There are exceptions, of course, some of which exist here in the Bay Area, but for the most part in the United States, busing is the lame, pathetic stand-in for _real transit investment_ \- like subways and commuter trains.

What does that mean for a policy like SB50 ? It means that any old bus stop, which is completely dysfunctional and derelict, counts as "transit" around which to build denser housing. This could be _anywhere_. I don't want denser housing built anywhere some planning afterthought put a bus stop that nobody uses. Further, I don't want to continue to enable busing to exist as a viable policy option - because it isn't.

<comment><USER3> > It means that any old bus stop, which is completely dysfunctional and > derelict, counts as "transit" around which to build denser housing.

I don't know where you're getting your information. Let's look at the actual text of SB50[1], which is fairly clear: it has to be within one-quarter mile radius of a stop on a high-quality bus corridor, which is defined as:

"High-quality bus corridor" means a corridor with fixed route bus service that meets all of the following criteria: (1) It has average service intervals for each line and in each direction of no more than 10 minutes during the three peak hours between 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., inclusive, and the three peak hours between 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., inclusive, on Monday through Friday. (2) It has average service intervals for each line and in each direction of no more than 20 minutes during the hours of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., inclusive, on Monday through Friday. (3) It has average service intervals for each line and in each direction of no more than 30 minutes during the hours of 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., inclusive, on Saturday and Sunday. (4) It has met the criteria specified in paragraphs (1) to (3), inclusive, for the five years preceding the date that a development proponent submits an application for approval of a residential development.

[1] [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB50)

<comment><USER4> You don't know where the op gets his information from... But then you agree? He says he didn't like sb50 because it treats busses as transit. You then basically agree and point out that the density had to be within a certain distance of bus stations... Busses are not the best mass transit

<comment><USER3> Well, OP talked about empty buses and bus stops that nobody uses, and claimed this bill would result in housing development there.

That is misinformation, because the actual bill only applies to strictly defined high-quality bus stops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://archive.md/VRvXh](http://archive.md/VRvXh)</comment>