San Francisco Bubble - <AUTHOR> http://blog.larrold.com/2016/01/29/san-francisco-bubble/ <comment><USER2> This is why the free market is so great.

1\. Everything too expensive? Good, don't live here, eventually enough people will leave to drive all of the costs back to other market norms.

2\. Dumb startups? Good, they will fail, people won't be able to afford to live here and they'll leave.

3\. People are spoiled? Uber is cheaper and more convenient in some cases than taking the local transportation. When people stop taking public transportation because it's fundamentally broken (ps - it's awful in SF) then it will force government organizations to re-think their planning.

4\. Bad engineers? Yup, I've met some of them. They'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out.

I too think it's weird here, but since I do enjoy my life in the Bay area enough, I'm happy to wait for the market to correct to normalcy. The people who are here just to chase the "me too's" will soon be forgotten.

EDIT: I should probably clarify my overall sentiment. People who come to SF and complain that this situation is less than ideal have the freedom to simply choose not to play. The cost of living is driven by the simple laws of supply and demand. Speak with your wallets, not with your mouths.

<comment><USER3> Part of the fallacy of this is the implication that you need "good" engineers for most startups. I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow.

Very few things require genuinely novel pieces of code to work. Yes, lots of value can be captured using code, but you could totally start something like airbnb with a lot of manual labor clicking in a GUI.

Djikstra said "Beware premature optimization" and that's quite true. I think automation should be used when things hurt to bad to do manually anymore. For some people, that's any task which must be performed twice and then you write a script. For others it might be years manually updating excel for bookkeeping every night. One can go real far manually updating excel...

<comment><USER4> >I think, frankly, that many startups need a website with a google form + some excel sheets to get started and if the thing takes off they can hire someone who can use google to bang on stackoverflow.

I agree, but this is mostly true because there's so much low-hanging fruit out there. If you look at the current successful startups like Uber and Airbnb, they're really trivial applications. That doesn't mean they can't create huge amounts of value by "trivially" repackaging services and connecting people.

Once the low-hanging fruit is developed during the next 10 years or so we can finally start focusing on actual high-tech engineering startups.

<comment><USER5> Tens of thousands of man hours have gone into making them seem trivial, and the fact that they seem so to you is a testament to their design.

<comment><USER6> Well the fact that they've hammered on them for years doesn't mean they're not trivial, it just means they've spent a lot of time on them. And I think we've got to differentiate between _the app_ being [non-]trivial and the infrastructure behind it supporting the massive load being [non-]trivial.

<comment><USER7> Uber and Airbnb are most definitely not trivial. Anybody who has ever worked on a remotely complex two sided marketplace project can tell you that. The UI/UX alone is incredibly hard yo nail down. The fact that they made you think that they're trivial really shows that they are doing a lot of things right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Engineers are particularly spoiled. They can take an arbitrary sabbatical from work..." <\---> (on the about page) "...Currently a principal engineer at AppNexus on sabbatical..." ???

<comment><USER9> Ignoring the hypocritical nature of this statement, I take offense in this generalization in particular.

If you're an engineer with a family here in SV, you cannot take a sabbatical. In most cases you need to get a job in a week or the rent will drive you to bankruptcy.

<comment><USER10> Oh come on with the hyperbole, if you didn't spend so much money on a nice area and expensive stuff you could afford it easily.

I don't get people who are so smart and yet simultaneously so stupid that they think spending $100,000 a year is normal.

Wake up, you're rich, you're just too stupid to realize you could be living at a much cheaper level.

<comment><USER11> Hey, you know that the vast majority of businesses are not very friendly to remote work, and moving away from these areas frequently means a pay cut or sometimes inability to find work?

I'm not defending this at all, as I think it's stupid, but they are not "rich". They are frankly just less screwed than other middle class folks.

<comment><USER10> The median _household_ income in the US is $51,939 (2013).

You seriously think having double or probably triple from just one salary isn't rich?

And where exactly are all your caterers and cleaners and gardeners and nannies and baristas and tavern workers and shop people living and buying their food with their minimum wage in the bay area? Obviously they aren't remote working.

Perspective is a bitch.

<comment><USER12> SF has the highest CPI and rent index in the entire U.S., so comparing it with median salary of the U.S. is non-sequitur.

...Especially when talking about _perspective_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Money has been close to free for years. As the interest rate ticks up everything will change. It's already starting to. More expensive borrowing, less leverage, and better places to put dollars than venture.

The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myself am director level engineering talent—and I get offers for such all the time—and yet I don't even remotely consider myself an engineer. Because I can make a website? Because I know a little python, ruby and node? Come on. I've never written anything that lives in a real production environment and you want to hire me as your director of engineering? Are you mad?

<comment><USER14> In Canada, you get sued if you call yourself an engineer when you're not part of an order of engineers.

Even if you're a bona fide engineer, but not enrolled in the order, calling yourself one opens the floodgates of hell where spaghetti coders do the same and get hired by retarded HR departments to take the lead on some mission- critical software.

I like this. I am a self-learned developer. When my peers call themselves engineers, I spit my coffee.

<comment><USER15> I wish it were a protected word in the states, maybe an Engineering association sitting over it. Would help with things like H1B flooding

<comment><USER14> As an experienced Canadian developer who is seeking a work visa to work in the US, it is actually extremely difficult to get one.

It seems as though the US prioritizes shit-developers/wannabe-engineers over experienced Canadian developers. Which kind of makes sense, in that you feed your own before feeding your neighbour.

So I really doubt that H1B flooding is a thing. Open to debate though.

<comment><USER16> It's difficult for people like you specifically because of the H1B flooding.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies- game-h-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies- game-h-1b-visa-program-leaving-smaller-ones-in-the-cold.html)

 _" Many of the visas are given out through a lottery, and a small number of giant global outsourcing companies had flooded the system with applications, significantly increasing their chances of success. While he had one application in last year's lottery and lost, one of the outsourcing companies applied for at least 14,000."_

A quick fix would be to award H1B based on salary instead of lottery.

<comment><USER14> Yes that makes sense. I stand corrected. Thanks for the info!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Everything is too expensive. I'm from New York...

I take issue with this one. It's entirely possible to live frugally while living IN San Francisco. I moved here about 7 months ago and expected it to be incredibly expensive but it hasn't been the case (beyond rent).

The author mentions $15 crappy local IPAs but I've actually never found a beer for this price. There is no shortage of $7 craft beers you can buy at a brewery or bar, no shortage of Trader Joe's with the same prices as, say, Charlottesville VA.

I've found that other than rent, the prices are comparable to other places. If you get a salad delivered on postmates or uber eats or something then that's what you're paying for. That isn't SF.

I think a lot of people are living a lifestyle where they have no problem paying for stuff like a delivered salad when they can walk next door, or uber instead of taking the bus, but lots of people are walking and grocery shopping and not paying those prices.

<comment><USER18> $7 beer? Frugal? In Berlin a beer costs $1 from the shop and maybe $2-3 from a bar.

<comment><USER19> Im thinkning of moving to München, this might be another reason too. A Heiniken 33cl beer in Stockholm costs around 12 USD if you are at a nightclub, otherwise around 10 USD.

<comment><USER20> > otherwise around 10 USD

wat? it's 1.5$ actually

[http://www.systembolaget.se/dryck/ol/heineken-153603](http://www.systembolaget.se/dryck/ol/heineken-153603)

<comment><USER19> Sorry, I meant at a pub or a bar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can we stop the whole "engineers make a lot of money" spiel? Most engineers make between 120 - 160k in SF, where the median household income is 104k. They don't make more than product managers, project managers or even many BART operators. See [http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay- area](http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries/bay-area) if you don't believe me. Sure, they make a bit more than average, but if that's the standard of "a lot of money", you have a totally skewed view of how capitalism works and the wealth gap in the US. Very few engineers are members of the capitalist class, commonly referred to as the 1% that own 40% of the country's assets. Making 50% more than the median is not a lot. Making 500% more is a lot.

<comment><USER22> I think a lot of engineers make more money then the value they provide. Last year I worked for 3 different places. I worked at one startup, and one large company on a new product in a new market. Both products were purely speculative plays They did make money, but not enough to support the staff. My pay was not based on how much value I provided, but how much value I could have provided if the products took off (they didn't, thus the 3rd job).

All i'm saying is you should look at other markets that have been propped up by speculation... and see what happens when the market corrects. Most of the time they over-correct before finding a new better more stable price.

<comment><USER23> Your pay was based on how much value you provided plus a risk premium for working on something highly speculative that would cause you to work at 3 different places in a year and take a hit on your résumé.

You have to understand risk in order to understand that you were not overpaid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "They can take an arbitrary sabbatical from work, they cannot be told no or reprimanded, and they make so much money that they can just take random breaks from employment to chill."

I have yet to hear a convincing argument why this is a bad thing.

<comment><USER24> Honestly?

It isn't sustainable and its not a productive use of capital.

This lifestyle is going to implode when the economy stumbles.

<comment><USER23> Yea, no.

JM Keynes said eons ago that with increases in efficiency we will eventually be able to get to a 15-hour work week. So, a particular industry in a particular area was able to get to an approximation of that, and the counter- argument is that this is not a productive use of capital?

Besides, TFA complains that all these people are working on silly startups, which is presumably not a productive use of capital either. You can't have it both ways.

<comment><USER25> > a particular industry in a particular area was able to get to an > approximation of that

On the backs of whom? How much are those Uber drivers, grocery deliverers, and artisanal salad chefs making?

It is good that one group of people is moving forward, we just have to be careful that we aren't doing it at the expense of other groups. The impression I get is that in the US today, it's not just that some people are getting richer, many others are getting poorer.

<comment><USER23> I'm confused. At least in this subthread we are discussing just the sabbatical part here, not the general economic inequality. Are you saying that someone who has enough money to take a sabbatical is doing it on the backs of uber drivers and grocery deliverers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "There are thousands of dumb startups" This.

Most of the blame is cast on the big companies (Twitter, Facebook etc) but the reality is that there are hundreds of smaller companies choosing SF and the valley in general.

And again I say, until companies allow people to work from _wherever_ this will be fueled more.

Finding talent is getting ever more difficult already, if you expand your search area to the entire country/world there's a better chance you'd find people no?

<comment><USER26> _" There are thousands of dumb startups"_

This is a feature not a bug. The whole VC model the Bay Area thrives on is based on the premise of hitting on only a small percentage of successful startups and you never know what's going to be a hit. Many successful startups have pivoted out of "stupid" ideas. I'm sure at one point "Blogging 140 characters at a time" was considered a stupid idea.

<comment><USER9> "Blogging 140 characters at a time" was considered a stupid idea.

I struggle with this _all the time_

I try to put myself in the shoes of VCs hearing AirBNB, Uber, Twitter and other pitches. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't give them money. (and then, I would post on HN saying "How I missed AirBNB. Including email threads with the founders and beating myself up).

This is indeed the premise of VCs but even with that in mind, some startups being funded are just ridiculous.

<comment><USER27> It's worth remembering that at the time it wasn't "blogging 140 characters at a time" it was "SMS blogging" which is a much easier idea to pitch in that the use case is more obvious (being on the go) and the character limit isn't arbitrary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have to say that I didn't really understand the perspective the writer was coming from. It kind of felt like he just wanted to finger wag at SF.

> Everything is too expensive.

Just normal supply and demand economics. This happens all the time all over the world when lots of high earning people suddenly move to an area.

> There are thousands of dumb startups.

Yup. And most of them will die. And some of them will become AirBnB. The problem is, it's extremely difficult to predict which is which. That's just the nature of searching for "the next big thing". I'd rather live in a world where there are lots of dumb companies so that the few exceptional ones have a chance to get started.

> People are spoiled.

No, people in SF value their time, as it's the only resource you can't get more of. I absolutely understand why someone with the money would have groceries deliver for them. It's more efficient. The locally sourced and organic thing does feel a bit silly though, although I would say that's a fad you see everywhere.

> There cannot be these many quality engineers.

I'm sure there are some bad engineers there. But SF has a massive pool for exceptional talent, and while I'm sure not every engineer is extremely high quality, I have no doubt that a substantial amount of top tier programmers are in SF. If the majority of programmers weren't making meaningful contributions to their companies, I don't think you would see them being compensated the way they are.

<comment><USER29> >> I absolutely understand why someone with the money would have groceries deliver for them.

There is s difference between lazy, spoiled and pretentious. Rich people have existed for a very long time. Few have ever had groceries delivered. The hire personal shoppers, housekeepers, chefs, maids to buy their food. This getting groceries delivered is a passing fad, an affectation for people looking to cultivate an image of themselves. Having more money than time is nothing new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> tldr: Guy comes to SF, figures it all out in a weekend, sees things that I've never seen living here like 'dozens of co-working facilities in 10 blocks'. Here's my take: The concentration of wealth here still pales to NYC area, Google, Apple, Facebook alone are giant money funnels from the whole world into this area, and there are more funnels being built every day. Not saying it will or should go up in a straight line, but personally I'd bet on the trend.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it was a three day period in the middle of the week.

<comment><USER26> Well that's plenty of time to make sweeping generalizations. Carry on.

<comment><USER31> Sweeping and evidently spot on as well. Carry on!

<comment><USER32> What's the evidence that it's spot on?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A couple quick notes from a longtime (20 year) San Franciscan:

 _Everything is too expensive_

Things are expensive, yes, but more so in neighborhoods with high concentrations of new residents, namely SOMA and most of the Mission. You can get an IPA at nearly any of the bars in my neighborhood for $4, and coffee for $2.

 _There are thousands of dumb startups_

I agree 100%. I've had the (figurative) banana hammock recruiter call me, too, and it's shocking to me how many people are repeating the mistakes of the 90's boom.

 _People are spoiled_

Don't confuse a small yet vocal minority with the City as a whole. There are still plenty of starving artists, passionate musicians and dedicated activists; they just live in different neighborhoods than they did 5 or 10 years ago.

 _There cannot be these many quality engineers_

Again, I agree 100%. During the 90's dotcom boom I worked with a web developer who literally didn't know how to write HTML; all his code was copied from other parts of the project. It's not surprising that it's happening again this time around, but as mbesto wrote, they'll eventually leave too when the system weeds them out.

All in all, most of these are things long-time San Franciscans dislike about our city, too. What's left to be seen is whether or not enough of the people who made San Francisco a desirable place to live can afford to live here once the tech market cools off.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is probably the worst item I've ever seen rise to #1 on Hacker News. It's poorly written, is based completely on a weekend worth of anecdotes and makes several claims that seem impossible ($15 IPAs).

</comment><comment><USER35> Re: There cannot be these many quality engineers.

I've seen grads come out of boot camps that are better programmers than people who have been programming for years. They might lack the knowledge, but they've got good sense and hustle, and at the end of the day, I'd take that over a stubborn engineer who looks like they're gonna age into a Dilbert comic.

<comment><USER15> I mean, if I am developing an app for millions of users - I would hope there is at least 1 engineer on the team that understands O(n) vs O(n^2).

If the app is for 10 users or for the other 75% of employees, may be less important...

<comment><USER28> I taught at a bootcamp for a while and always covered big O. It's pretty important for interviewing. Bootcamp kids know more CS than you might think...

<comment><USER36> It sounds like prep school for _interview exam_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Not withstanding everything else, I've lived in this town for years, and always found it easy to find a reasonably priced beer.

<comment><USER38> Yup. It's still shockingly easy to find good beer at a reasonable price in the SFBA. Same for food if you know where to go.

The only thing that's really hard to avoid spending way too much money on is housing.

<comment><USER39> > The only thing that's really hard to avoid spending way too much money on is > housing.

Live in a van down by the river, or a cargo truck in a Google parking lot.

<comment><USER40> TruckBNB

Next billion dollar startup

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Kind of a weird swipe at bootcamps comparing them to devry. The top bootcamps produce junior engineers better than the average undergrad with more work experience (although in a different field such as mechanical engineering or accounting). Many have STEM degrees from places like Berkeley, Stanford, UMich, UW, UCLA, Harvard, etc. I'd prefer to have their weirdness to the vanilla CS undergrad anyday, and their unique perspectives add meaningful contributions to a team.

<comment><USER42> The only guy I've ever worked with whom I knew to have trained at DeVry was a great sysadmin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> We have been hearing and reading similarly titled articles for the last couple years. This, however, is the most stupid one in my opinion.

What the author describe is a lavish (according to him) standard of living, judged startups to be dumb by their name/description (but they got investor money). He concludes that we are in a bubble.

Here are the metrics that matter:

* Are current startups generating enough money to pay salaries.

* Are current startups raising enough funds to make ends meet.

* Are there new startups funded.

* Is the number of exits/IPOs higher to create new millionaires.

* Is the number of failed startups higher to create new unemployed engineers and free capacity.

If someone is interested to know these numbers, maybe finance me for a couple months of research and get the right facts.

<comment><USER44> I think you forgot another important metric:

* Are the startups that are hiring taking up enough of the talent compared to large established companies with billions in the bank such that if there were a bubble, and it were to pop, it would actually make an impact on the hiring environment.

I'd love to see some hard data on the % of people employed by the "startup ecosystem" vs. large established giants like Google, FB, Apple, Adobe, MS, Amazon, etc. These companies have MASSIVE hiring needs and will likely continue to for some time. Should interest rates cause lots of startups to die, I have a hard time believing it would result in a similar situation to the last dotcom bust. Salaries might be depressed for a while, but these giants would still be fighting each other to swoop up the talent.

I'd seriously love to see some hard data on how much of an economic impact it would have in the Bay Area housing market and the public markets in general if all of the funded startups were to go _poof_ overnight. My current bet is "not much in the scope of things."

<comment><USER45> Hiring is definitely a good indicator of the bubble bursting because hiring indicates that startups are getting funding and they turn around and hire people. When the funding dries up, these same startups tighten the belt, the hiring drops and then the layoffs start.

A good indicator of a bubble in SF/SV startups is measuring the IT job market using local Craiglist and Dice job postings since startups heavily use them.

I used both websites on & off since the late 90s to find contract & permanent full-time jobs. Back then at the height of the dot-coms, the Dice home page showed 120,000+ jobs, right after the crash (2001-2003) that number fell to around 20,000-30,000. Now it's around 80,000.

On Craigslist, at the dot com height, the Software section for the Bay Area ([https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof)) had so many job postings per day that the list of postings for that day would spill over to the next page (there are 100 listings per page). A year & a half ago (late 2014) there was a good amount of postings and I got a frenzy of replies when I contacted them. Now, there's only a handful of postings per day.

<comment><USER44> I guess I'm making a clear distinction between "startup" (ie. no clear business model or path to profitability yet) vs. "established tech giant."

The latter has such massive hiring needs in comparison that even if funding dried up (which they do not need since they have lots of profit and are already oftentimes publicly traded), I don't think it would slow down the market THAT much.

<comment><USER46> Yahoo and AOL aren't hiring these days.

"To big too fail" isn't a thing.

<comment><USER45> > Yahoo and AOL aren't hiring these days If I may ask..how do you know this? > And can you provide some detail?

Bottom line is - hiring (or lack of) is a leading indicator of a company's financial health. A company that doesn't have any open jobs for a sustained length of time (3-6 months to a year) is in belt tightening mode - which comes right before layoffs or worse, closing shop.

Btw - Yahoo is already doing layoffs or 'downsizing'. If Yahoo wasn't hiring during the past 3-6 months, that definitely was an indicator of this.

Yahoo Downsizes In Latin America, Closes Mexico And Argentina Operations [http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/yahoo-downsizes-in-latin- am...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/yahoo-downsizes-in-latin-america- closes-mexico-and-argentina-operations/)

Here are some news sites that track layoffs. I recommend keeping a close eye on things.

[http://techcrunch.com/tag/layoffs/](http://techcrunch.com/tag/layoffs/)

[https://twitter.com/search?q=layoff%20OR%20layoffs%20OR%20%2...](https://twitter.com/search?q=layoff%20OR%20layoffs%20OR%20%22laid%20off%22&src=typd)

Or better yet, keep an eye on the Dice jobs number which is prominently displayed on the Dice.com home page.

As of today, January 29, 2016 that number is 84,201. My take is that if this number goes below 60,000 then the bubble is bursting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Looks like this week is "Maybe Startups Aren't Inherently Great" week on Hacker News. :p

That being said, the number of startups in San Francisco is fine as long as there is corrective balance. At the least, startups which are failing will die faster due to rent alone.

<comment><USER48> Valid point. Maybe rent is a control factor. Otherwise they'd just hang on forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's a gold rush. Nothing new. Fun to watch once you have the context to understand what is happening.

<comment><USER50> Except in a gold rush everyone is trying to get a piece of a real, actual resource.

What are folks flocking to? A unique combination of deep VC pockets and gullibility that can only be found in the SF geological record?

No, this looks more like a regular ol bubble to me... The flywheel is spinning up, driven by run of the mill irrational exuberance and a belief that everyone in the bay area is just smarter than everyone else. Anyone on wall street in 2007 should find that eerily familiar...

<comment><USER51> Gold isn't particularly real, as resources go. It doesn't have that many practical uses.

That's what makes gold rush economics similar to bubble economics: Everyone decides to chase after a nebulous source of value.

San Francisco has always been the Gold Rush City.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I can see where this guy is coming from. Though he's obviously exaggerating things by a mile.

SF is pretty ridiculous in a lot of ways. But I would take an SF as ridiculous as if everything he said were exactly true over one where there weren't any truth to it. Through all that froth does come actual creativity and innovation. The banana hammock delivery disrupters will fizzle in due time. The people who got inspired by all the energy and potential and decided to build a VR product that revolutionizes medicine will survive. I'd rather see a lot of false positives than risk a couple of false negatives. And besides, it makes for an endless supply of entertaining stories for people aren't from here.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've never lived in SF, but I've talked to companies out there over the years. Then I look at a cost of living calculator and rent prices and quickly write it off.

The place sounds like a magnet for talent, no doubt. But the flip side of that is, everyone going to SF leaves other locations talent-starved and willing to be _very_ accommodating.

</comment><comment><USER53> The guy makes some good points, and there does seem to be a lot of questionable startups, but it's not like they're tapping into public funds. Somewhere, somehow, some angel investor thought that it was a good team and a good idea and they were happy to part with their money. It's better that we live in a more optimistic world than one where every crazy idea is a bad idea.

However, how is taking Uber to work every day 'spoiled'? I bet the guys owns a car where he is from and spends significantly more on monthly transportation than I do. For $4 more than a bus, I get point to point pick up and drop off, and save about 40 minutes of my time (which I can use to go work out in the mornings).

And some others have figured out that it makes sense to spend $20 on grocery delivery rather than spending 90 minutes doing it yourself if you're working 60-80 hours per week and make more than $20/hour. To be sure, a lot of people work long and hard. They make certain sacrifices but just because they are not the same sacrifices that the author would make it doesn't mean they're bad.

<comment><USER54> > For $4 more than a bus

Depending on where you live, Uber/Lyft can be a _lot_ more expensive than a bus.

In Dallas, a monthly public transport pass costs $80. This comes with unlimited uses of the buses and trains for an entire month. Let's say you work twenty days (four weeks) a month, with a trip each way. That amortizes to $2 a trip, less if you also use your pass for personal trips on weekends.

Lyft costs me about $11 on average to get me between home and work. If I were to take Lyft to and from work every day for a month, again assuming twenty working days a month, I'd be paying about $440 a month. That's not $4 more; it's $9 more. That's 5.5 _times_ how much I'd be paying for public transport. Again, that's not counting using it for personal trips on weekends (here, the minimum is $5.70, including the trust & safety fee).

If Uber/Lyft is only $4 more than a bus in SF, then buses are way expensive there.

<comment><USER55> Agreed that it definitely depends on where you live. I don't, but could, take an Uber/Lyft for my commute everyday and it would cost about $5-$7, whereas a ride on SF public transit would take $2.25 and + 10-20 extra minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> In Austrian business cycle theory, this phenomenon is known as _malinvestment_ , see [https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Malinvestment](https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Malinvestment), there are some historical bubble examples there.

The general idea, as I understand it, is that if someone invests and makes a ton of money, then other investors come in trying to do something similar to make a lot of money too, only what they are investing in is no good. But all the money creates a temporary illusion of an economic boom, which is what has been happening in the S.F. Bay area for some time now.

I'm old enough to remember the .com bust quite well. At the time the "irrational exuberance" (as Greenspan/Shiller dubbed it) made perfect sense, and the ideas were fundamentally sound, the problem was that investors did not understand that it would take another 10-15 years to get to ubiquitous Internet, and the impatient ones got burned when the bubble burst.

</comment><comment><USER57> According to the about page, the author is an engineer at a startup and is on sabbatical. That feels weird given the criticisms leveled in the piece.

FWIW I live in New York and prefer it massively to SV, but I mean....

</comment><comment><USER58> LOL, you can tell this article touches on something sensitive from the reaction to it on HackerNews. Its a pretty accurate description of SF, I just doubt NY is any different.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hmm.. Here's Rosamunde's beer list plenty of $6 IPAs..

[https://www.beermenus.com/places/1609-rosamunde-sausage- gril...](https://www.beermenus.com/places/1609-rosamunde-sausage-grill- mission)

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm surprised he didn't have the $16 artisanal salad delivered to him by one of the 37 delivery services.

This is pretty much the only place i know of where people are okay with paying $30+ total for a salad and think it's normal

<comment><USER60> I've lived here since 2005 and have yet to see a $30 salad.

<comment><USER59> I said "$30 total" (IE salad + delivery).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Written exactly like someone who visited SF from NYC for a few days. The pen is dripping with poison and vitriol.

</comment><comment><USER62> I've tried to have this conversation with many people on that coast, and there was even a panel at TechCrunch about it.

"Do you make your startup people eat more ramen, or do you provide more funding?"

As costs keep going up, people STILL think they have to move to SF to get funding or find talent. Yet there is plenty of talent or ideas in other places but the money doesn't move, the dumb part is the VC dollar will go farther in other places.

So who's job is it to prompt the move? The idea makers or the money providers?

</comment><comment><USER63> Does anybody know of any major open source contributor that lives in SF?

I used to be active in the Python/Django community earlier and am getting involved in the JS-React-Redux community. Not only do most people live outside SF, they live in a remote place that you wouldn't have heard about.

Software, good software is creative and creativity needs serendipity. The pressure to meet the next funding round criteria or to get an Uber through the traffic hearing my next track not making eye contact with my uber-pooler isn't the best frame of mind conducive to creativity.

I'm sure a lot of top CEOs and the top guys in select areas have a great social circle - smartest people who they eat/hangout with, which is very good. But there are also a lot of me-toos, for whom just living in SF is the thing they are achieving that feed their egos.

</comment><comment><USER64> interesting op is on a sabbatical himself

> Currently a principal engineer at AppNexus on sabbatical, I am trying to > have a new post every day.

</comment><comment><USER65> Who cares? If you're not part of the scene there, why does it matter to you? If those people weren't in "silly" startups, they'd probably end up in silly corporate roles. Or even worse, they'd be unemployed and be another strain on the current system.

There are a lot of ideas you may find silly but others find interesting enough to spend their working hours to make a success. If you only focus on finances, tons of them will fail. If you look at the experience they'll have doing it, I'm sure some of them will find it was a success.

I've worked at a couple startups and I've worked at some big corporations. There are bad coders everywhere. There are bad ideas everywhere. There are also a lot of jealous people who apparently get bent out of shape because people who are not the best engineer ever are making more money than them and getting to take time off arbitrarily.

Instead of focusing on how much you think their startup is stupid, or how they shouldn't get time off because they're not as good as you (based on who knows what), why not just focus on what you have, what you do, and what you like? Stop living against them and live for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER66> nothing against the author but it seems like he is painting a very wide brush with something he's seen for 3? days.

i certainly have never taken ubers everyday to work even though i could probably(?) afford to do so. seems like an expensive daily habit though.

i actually live in the city where it's not some huge loft in fidi/downtown. good for anyone who can get their groceries sent up to their room but i'm not sure how close to the norm that is. tech workers are all across the board in terms of how they live, how much they get paid and how willing they are to fetch their own groceries.

i live on the first floor of a older apartment complex, but i have to walk down a hill to fetch my groceries. i do sometimes use one of the gazillion food delivery services to eat dinner though.

anyways i would say this is similar to someone who goes to ny, visits the financial district in manhattan for 3 days and then proclaims, "everyone in ny is rich! of course they can afford all that housing! they're so stuck up! why are the cabbies so rude? why are new yorkers so rude?"

</comment><comment><USER45> I think a good indication of a bubble is measuring the IT job market using Craiglist and Dice job postings.

I'd like to ask you all about what you've experienced & seen on Craiglist and Dice that would give you an idea on how good or bad the IT job market in San Francisco (and the Bay Area in general) is or was. I hear conflicting stories of qualified people not able to find jobs after a year of searching (like the SOAP architect below) and on the flip side, of companies not able to find people (the so-called 'IT talent shortage').

I used both websites on & off since the late 90s to find contract & permanent full-time jobs. Back then at the height of the dot-coms, the Dice home page showed 120,000+ jobs, right after the crash (2001-2003) that number fell to around 20,000-30,000. Now it's around 80,000.

On Craigslist, at the dot com height, the Software section for the Bay Area ([https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof](https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof)) had so many job postings per day that the list of postings for that day would spill over to the next page (there are 100 listings per page). A year & a half ago (late 2014) there was a good amount of postings and I got a frenzy of replies when I contacted them. Now, there's only a handful of postings per day.

I think it'd be good to get an idea of SF/SV IT job market's fluctuation over the years by compiling these data points. I did a Google search for charts with these data points but couldn't find any. If any of you used these two sites anytime from the late 90s to today and remember the # of postings for that specific date or time period, please post. Ideally, month to month data with high interest on data points from 1999-2003 (dot-com bubble) and 2006 to today (credit bubble).

</comment><comment><USER67> The talent issue is particularly acute.

If you're mature and hardworking, I have no problem with you taking PTO whenever you need it or not committing to hard deadlines. But those are earned privileges based on trust and a history of delivering.

It is so hard to hire software engineers and there are tons of them. Bootcamps are not the answer. It is not a quantity problem, it is a quality problem.

</comment><comment><USER68> The problem is that you never know which one of the "silly" startups will succeed. ¿How about a startup disrupting the "large" market of air-mattress renting to complete strangers?.... mmmm... Let's toss a breakfast in... That's is, let's call it: "Air Bed and breakfast"... it is silly?

</comment><comment><USER69> I don't think an engineer being able to take sabbatical or paid well is something to label engineers as spoiled. As long as work ethic is there, this is actually what an employee in any profession should get.

That people are paid here well is a result of the huge imbalance of wealth in the world is another discussion topic.

</comment><comment><USER70> > People are spoiled. A friend of mine takes an uber to and from work every > day, and apparently that is fairly common.

Hard to take any of this seriously. Lots of people regularly taxi to work in large cities and I cannot imagine how it's indicative of a bubble. Author seems too emotional about such an assertion.

</comment><comment><USER71> No one wants to "throw this out there" but I will.

SV has been overpriced for decades and it is only the importation of CHEAP h1b labor that has allowed the growth to continue.

You know something is a miss when you build ever and ever more future slums being 4+ story apartment buildings resulting in h1bs stuffed 12+ into an apartment paying $3K+ or even more for a 1BR apartment.

Americans won't live like that. Or so I hope.

If you didn't have h1bs then the jobs most likely would have gone to cheaper parts of the country as the wage costs would have started to rise to levels such that the products couldn't be developed here.

Works for me.

We have (or had) a choice of allowing IT to be offshored "like everything else" or wreck Silicon Valley making it into a (future) slum.

We made the wrong choice.

</comment><comment><USER72> It still shocks me that Europe hasn't yet built a response to SF. Sure, London's a tech hub, but not anywhere close to SF.

Eastern europe has a lot of talented engineers, but lacks capital and know-how on building an international business, places are cheap to live in and so on.

<comment><USER73> They're too risk-averse. In SV, it's ok to fail. In Europe, it's not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> The most ironic thing about this article is that it sounds like he's complaining about tall the niceties of living in SF but he himself works at an ad tech company and is currently on sabbatical and wants to write a new blog entry once a day. WTF???

</comment><comment><USER75> I don't necessary disagree with any of the claims, but it has a very "Old Man Yells at Cloud" sound to it: [http://i.imgur.com/91sn32Q.jpg?fb](http://i.imgur.com/91sn32Q.jpg?fb)

</comment><comment><USER76> One of the best and most underrated thing about all these crappy startups? It gives a lot of people the opportunity to learn valuable skills on someone else's dime. Those that are good engineers in crappy startups eventually migrate to the unicorns. The shitty startups may not go anywhere, but they allow a lot of young people to accumulate skills that they can take with them to companies that actually need that talent.

Without the shitty startups acting as free training wheels, the unicorns would have a much harder time finding quality talent.

</comment><comment><USER77> Regarding dumb startups - I can't wait for the coming collapse. There are lots of talented developers/designers working on dumb startups, which makes it very difficult for me to find good people to work with.

</comment><comment><USER78> There might be a bubble, but extremely limited anecdata isn't enough to prove it.

Who cares if people are spending money to get shit done for them that they don't want to personally do (laundry, groceries). As long as they can pay for it and are utilizing hours to what they actually want to do in life I don't see the harm.

And expensive food exists in most major cities.

There might be some truth to the title, but the article lacked the data to support any of it. I'm flabbergasted that it got upvoted on the frontpage of HN.

</comment><comment><USER79> While I agree with the sentiment, the attitude of the post is appalling.

> This reminds me of the first dot com bubble where people with degrees from > devry were joining companies and making big salaries

Why do you care about where people got their degrees from? What does that have to do with commanding a high salary or not? If the people seem to be overpaid for what they do, fine. But that has nothing to do with their degrees. Or even their abilities.

</comment><comment><USER80> Well all we need is to look at historical facts to understand what is going on in SF: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mansions_of_the_Gods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mansions_of_the_Gods)

Seriously though, this movie does touch many aspects related to gentrification and what happens when supply stays the same but demands spikes sharply ... chuckles all around.

</comment><comment><USER81> There are lots of dumb startups. But a handful of these dumb startups are going to turn into big, meaningful companies that change some aspect of people's lives, hopefully in a positive way (at a minimum they will offer employment). Because of that, it's worth putting up with these "dumb" ones because 0.1% of them will pay off the other ones.

Companies evolve, and some don't stay dumb forever.

<comment><USER82> meaningful way? Something like Facebook has certainly changed things, but whether or not the change is meaningful remains up for debate. Most of these 'changes' just make our lives slightly more convenient or seem a bit more futuristic, but these are illusions.

Change that is categorically meaningful involves things like a cure for cancer, a new source of energy, etc..etc.. If we are to judge whether this startup trend has changed peoples lives in a meaningful way, we should look for changes that are categorically meaningful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Ugh, don't feed the troll.

<comment><USER83> Glancing through the comments, it looks like the troll has succeeded. SF bashing has begun.

You don't have to move here, so chill out, people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> I think the problem is that many of the business models of these startups is basically taking VC money and shuffling it around.

I've been to many startup competitions in the last couple of years and most of the winners have no business model.

For instance, last year, the winner was a startup that was "Twitter with 255 character limit". It think it was awarded $20,000

</comment><comment><USER85> I agree, things are probably too good to be true right now. I really don't think it's fair to blame engineers though. My only advice to people working in this industry is to save your money -- be sure to be keeping your money in an emergency fund of some kind incase something happens. That's my best practical advice.

</comment><comment><USER86> > people with degrees from devry were joining companies and making big > salaries

one of the best engineers I've ever worked with has a degree from DeVry. I know many great engineers who don't have CS or engineering degrees. And I know plenty of dummies with lots of letters after their name.

</comment><comment><USER87> > People are spoiled

I recall when I was in SF in 1999, limo after limo pulling up to what was a pretty ordinary club. I didn't really care how people pissed their money away, but it seemed so bizarre and so detached from reality. I was glad to get out of there.

</comment><comment><USER88> Part of the whole venture capital startup game is diversification if investment. VC's expect a lot of their startups to fail (angel investors too), while a few grow and maybe if they are lucky one of them takes off.

</comment><comment><USER89> > A company to "disrupt the banana hammock ordering process" cannot possibly > do well yet someone invested money into it and it is paying employees.

Is this actually a real company and if so can someone post a link?

<comment><USER90> I didn't even know that "banana hammocks" were a thing. Maybe whoever runs bananahammockworld.com reads HN....

[http://www.bananahammockworld.com/banana-hammocks-for- men/](http://www.bananahammockworld.com/banana-hammocks-for-men/)

<comment><USER91> Should carry a NSFW warning. I had no idea what a banana hammock was, I thought it was an actual hammock.

<comment><USER92> I thought it was somehow tied into the hipster-foodie thing, like you'd get charged $15 for a 50 cent banana if it was delivered to you by some precariously employed scooter driver swaddled up like the baby Jesus.

Perhaps it's my unadventurous lifestyle, but I have never found myself in a situation where I so urgently needed a posing pouch that 'Uberising' the industry would have helped me out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> Replace San Francisco with London and your article is still valid.

</comment><comment><USER94> When you compare that to Detroit trouble, you will see that bubble is not that bad after all. All those overrated engineers will have connections and confidence.

</comment><comment><USER95> I would rather have too many startups then not enough - I am from Detroit and we would love a more entrepreneurial environment and more investment capital.

</comment><comment><USER96> So its a bubble. What do you do about it? Move?

<comment><USER97> That's what I did in early summer of 2008. I moved away from Mountain View because everything felt over-priced and unsustainable. So I voted with my feet. Hello from Chicago. :-)

<comment><USER44> Typing this from MV right now having moved from Chicago in 2013. Really wishing I'd moved out here in summer of 2008 as it would likely mean I'd be able to afford much more home than I can right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> >Every food item has to be locally sourced and organic, which seems more important than taste and quality.

Ummm... that's the point?

</comment><comment><USER99> Next up on TechCrunch, "The 'Bubble' Bubble: What It Means To You When It Pops"

</comment><comment><USER100> > People are spoiled.

I'll extend that statement to any of us living the western lifestyle!

</comment><comment><USER71> The jobs are all going to h1bs working 168 hours a week for $300.

</comment><comment><USER101> Yes, there are a lot of dumb startups but I'm still not convinced this is a bad thing. Why does every 24-year old have to be changing the world?

Imagine you have a 2x2 matrix where the x-axis is positive value added to the world and the y-axis magnitude of impact. You want your job to be in the top right corner, high impact, high value added to the world but there's two ways to get there. You could do something that has high value but low impact like working at a non-profit in DC helping with excel spreadsheets or whatever, you're delivering value to the world but making a very small impact. The other approach is that you could learn how to build a large scalable system for delivering a solution to millions of people first. Maybe you're making the 100th best photo sharing app and it will never add large value to the world, but you're learning how to deliver impactful solutions you just need to figure out how to deliver real value. I'm not sure why there's a bias against the second approach. I lived in DC for five years and most of my friends are doing less interesting things than my friends in SF. Someone who gets experience at a startup that builds interesting technology but never takes off could be the next CTO of a political campaign for all you know.

Also, it's a complete myth that San Francisco is expensive to live in. You can leave cheap or expensive in any city. SF has a culture where being poor is totally cool. Everyone gets it, you're in tech you're an entrepreneur etc... There's no pressure to go to nice restaurants for social status like there is in New York. I spend much less money in SF than I did living in DC just because of the lifestyle I'm living. Buying a house in SF is impossible due to the insane prices, but it's really not that bad living in an apartment here.

I don't think people are spoiled here, I think your perceptions are off. First, programming takes place entirely inside a persons head. Mental state is really important, and the 9-5 office job with a commute to and from the office every day doesn't work very well for engineering. I like to break up my day into two halves. The first half of the day and the second half of the day, this gives me two discrete time periods where I can do work and I like to take a bike ride in between because I can think about the problems, and then not have to go to the gym later in the day. When I was working for a company in DC there was no way I could have left at 2:00 to take an hour bike ride, even if that's how I work best. I think it's ridiculous to say that people working in their optimal workflows makes them spoiled.

And again, it takes probably 3 years to become a high-quality engineer. So I'm not sure what you would want coding bootcamp graduates to do after 3 months, get together and talk about how hopeless life is? I'm glad that people are getting into the industry, the only way you're going to get better is by getting real world experience. So what someone with 8-months experience isn't a great engineer yet? By continuing to get better over the next couple years he will become a better engineer and then be able to add significant value to the world, I'm not sure why you would want to discourage developers from perfecting their craft. This would be like heckling a Med School student for not being a great doctor yet.

<comment><USER102> > _Also, it 's a complete myth that San Francisco is expensive to live in._

Cool. Can you point me to where I can get an apartment in SF for less that $1k/month?

<comment><USER101> Bernal Heights, Portrero Hill, actually there's < $1,000 rooms all over the city, just look on craigslist.

Maybe not a single apartment to yourself, but definitely a room in a shared apartment.

There are a lot of cities btw where you can't get a single one-bedroom apartment for < $1,000

<comment><USER103> You can't just change the qualifications of his question and then go "I answered it!"

<comment><USER101> But if the question is getting a single one-bedroom apartment for < $1,000 a month I think that excludes a lot of cities. New York, DC etc... So it's not meaningful to say SF is a bubble because of a trait that exists in many cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> The jobs are taken by h1bs working 168 hours a week for $300.

</comment><comment><USER104> If you hate current day SF, you'll looooovvve NYC...

<comment><USER105> I moved from The Bay Area to NYC. Things I miss about The Bay Area include: meetups where the attendees are actually useful people you want to talk with, more similar developers (NYC developers tend to have +20 years on SF developers unless you're at a we-only-hire-22-year-olds startup), developers more plugged in to current trends instead of _just_ getting on board with what was introduced 5 years ago, in NYC every other company is in "adtech," in NYC the typical career path is startup/company -> create your own HFT startup, lack of winter (but I don't miss the lack of water), ....

<comment><USER104> What do you like about NYC? I spent a couple weeks there recently, to which I was really looking forward since I had never been there, and after about a week I loathed the noise, the garbage everywhere, and the lines at all the stores. Shortly thereafter, I caught the Norovirus from delivered food and I was knocked out physically and mentally for almost 2 weeks.

What did I like? Seeing a few famous landmarks, a couple of the restaurants, and my rental apartment had free NetFlix.

<comment><USER105> What I like: not needing a car (no car payment, no car insurance), any event (concert/meetup/parade/show/etc) is only 20-30 minutes away door-to-door and you don't need to park since you have no car, central park is okay (but it's no red rocks or la honda), you'd think having 6 million people within a 6 mile radius would make it easy to meet people but... not so much, housing prices are (supposedly) less than SF but it's still painful, tons of non-chain places to eat, my 300+ Mbps home Internet access for $80/month, can be at any airport in about 30 to 60 minutes (taxi to LGA or subway+airtrain to JFK or nj transit+airtrain to EWR), etc.

I've done the whole norovirus dance once too. It really does knock you out for a week or two. (I started feeling sick when walking around outside one morning, decided to take the subway back home, the first sickness struck while waiting for the train—I just had to throw up on the subway tracks. Pretty awful. Some nice bystanders gave me an unopened bottle of water they had with them which was nice.)

<comment><USER104> I found that there are a lot nice people in NYC that have to put up with a minority of absolute jerks that give the place a undeserved bad rep. This part is not much different from SF IMO.

<comment><USER105> Yeah, the weird thing about NYC is it's more heavily actor/waiter/bartender focused on the youth spectrum so everybody you meet is almost maximally different from everybody else. It causes a strange effect where people form overly homogenous groups when they do find people who are similar (crossfit cults, every actor has slept with every other actor, revolving doors of finance firms, etc).

In some ways it seems all the "regular" people get absorbed into other levels of success/purpose outside of technology here, so technology is left with a larger weirdo population than SF since there are many more non-techonlogy things to make regular people happy around here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> I feel like the best reply to this is:

"Well, yeah. So?"

</comment><comment><USER107> Didn't Arcade Fire say this years ago?

</comment><comment><USER108> A bit dramatized, but the concept is good.

</comment><comment><USER109> _local IPAs are $15_

Is that actually true?

<comment><USER110> Barring some kind of super-rare specialty (Russian River's Pliny the Younger, maybe), no.

<comment><USER111> Toronado has $5 pints of Pliny. So no, the author's totally off mark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> You should rename this thread California Bubble...

</comment><comment><USER113> Please be aware that moving to the bay area for any reason other than fun will be a serious life mistake.

If you move to the bay area in your 20s, by the time you're in your 40s you will have a specific knowledge of a fad language that is 20 years old. But even if you somehow keep up with new tech in your spare time, you will look 40 something and thus be nearly unemployable solely on those grounds.

And you simply will be unable to save any reasonable amount of money no mater how many beers you don't drink. Like anyone else in the states, your sole savings would be home equity which you won't have because you won't be able to buy any kind of home in the few years your age makes you employable.

If in doubt, for those still in SF, determine the savings of your co workers in their 20s and 30s (who are now near then end of their employability), and whether they rent or own (good luck finding a 50 something coworker to ask). Be aware that you do not leave the bay area rich, you leave it because you can't afford it. And be aware there are few middle aged and effectively no old people there. And beware that 45 is only half way to retirement age.

<comment><USER36> I'm in Canada and every time I consider prospects of getting into _United States_ , comments like this frighten me. More specifically the Valley area for its renowned reputation of tech-oriented culture, and make good earnings. Compared to what I see in, say, Toronto area with bad housing and a bunch of old .NET 2.0 I feel that it must be _better_ there.

What I find lacking in such comments, though, is some explanation on why and the suggested alternatives. Would you mind sharing why? Java/C# were _the hot things_ of 10-15 years ago and people still make a living out of it. It sounds like an argument for classic Red Queen problem where the only winning move is not to play.

<comment><USER114> There's a happy medium somewhere between the wasteland of legacy "enterprise" jobs (.NET 2.0 and such) and the nutzo SF/SV orbit.

I live in Southern California (LA/OC). It's not cheap by any measure but it's within the bounds of economic sanity compared to SF/SV. There are tons of very interesting tech jobs in cutting edge areas like computer vision, AI/ML, the latest web and DevOps tech, and a lot of hardware/EE stuff. There are many other places like this. Canada probably has a few too. Even NYC, which is more expensive than LA, is still "sane" compared to SF when you consider what you get. In NYC car ownership is very optional, which mitigates the high rents, while in SF you must own a car if you ever want to leave the peninsula.

I've turned down numerous offers in SF/SV because it just seems economically insane. The housing prices are clearly unsustainable and the OP's comment about it being a "serious life mistake" rings true. The craziness has also priced out much of the interesting culture that made SF compelling in the first place.

Edit: I keep hearing about the relentless ageism in SF/SV tech. I don't see so much of it elsewhere. Is it really that bad? If so it seems like a SF/SV thing and not necessarily true everywhere. In that case it might make some sense for young people to spend some time in SF/SV getting into the latest stuff and learning and then bail before 30.</comment></comment></comment>


Doko: using Core Location on the command-line - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/larsyencken/doko/

<comment><USER2> The code looks fine, but when do you need such a function? I can't think of a use case.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's two main types of use cases: (1) geotagging actions you take on your computer, like git commits, for later analysis; and (2) writing software which varies its behaviour depending on your location, perhaps triggering useful events.

<comment><USER2> Okay, I agree these actually are good use cases ;)

And thank you for contributing the module as open source.</comment></comment></comment>


Nom, the fast Rust parser combinators library, just reached 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.clever-cloud.com/blog/engineering/2015/11/16/nom-1-0/ <comment><USER2> Well done cc team!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Great resources to learn software deployment - <AUTHOR>

Dear gurus,
I have just developed a .NET desktop application and looking forward to allow people to download the application and install.
I am particularly worried that the software might (most likely) contain bugs, and I need push patches etc. I dont know how to do this.
Also I need to do piracy prevention using serial key/activation which I dont know how to begin with. I know this is not a popular opinion here, but I'd love to know how to do it.
All books in my local bookstores are about software development/testing/management. None on deployment. Searching with Google brings me to some short articles, but I prefer materials that I can seriously study and gain strong foundation of.
Please share good resources or advices related to deployment, and does not have to be limited to .NET platform.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Don't look to solve the piracy problem in an absolute fashion - meaning, don't think that you can prevent people from hacking out your security measures. They can and they will. Starting with this frame of mind will help you to spend far less time (and money) on a problem that you can't really control.

Some people actually recommend not worrying about piracy of your software: think about it for a minute. You're going to need distribution and marketing for your product. If it's a good product that will be useful to people, then pirates will spread 'the word' for you for free.

If you then ensure to update the product frequently, you have a chance of keeping pirates out of date - inconveniencing them, so to speak - and they will likely crack and re-release the new version (more marketing for you).

The frequent product updating also helps to reassure your potential and paying users that you are actively supporting your product. They need to see this to know that they're getting their money's worth. :)

As far as how to do patching, likely whatever installer utility you are using supports patching, so you should look into that some more.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not a .Net developer by trade, but I've done a (very) little bit.

Within the .Net installer builder (at least with newer versions of Visual Studio), when you build your installer, it has an option to supply the 'installer URL'. If you do this, your application will check for a product update (I believe) every launch, and prompt the user to download and install the update if available.

I don't think it's amazingly sophisticated, in that it just checks the URL for files containing meta data with newer version numbers, but that's probably all you need in regards to your first point.

As for piracy protection, I really wouldn't worry too much about it.</comment>


GDB 7.11 released - <AUTHOR> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2016-02/msg00010.html <comment><USER2> OK, for someone who's written a lot of C++ in Visual Studio but is now developing on Linux: is it worth learning GDB? It seems like it'll always have some mental overhead compared to a visual debugger, but on the other hand I was never crazy about using an IDE...

<comment><USER3> In my experience, the cgdb [1] wrapper makes gdb a viable option, by providing what I think is the sorely missing piece in vanilla gdb: a window continuously showing the code context.

It also uses vim-like bindings for going into "insert" mode ("i"), versus escaping out into code context navigation mode ("ESC").

I made a short 4 minute tutorial on how to use gdb/cgdb for debugging Golang, here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKLR6rrsBmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKLR6rrsBmI)

[1] [https://cgdb.github.io/](https://cgdb.github.io/)

<comment><USER4> There is also gdb's built in tui mode. You can activate it with gdb -tui or keyboard shortcut C-x C-a.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> somewhat offtopic, but has anyone used lldb lately, when I last used it I found it much worse than gdb but I expect it will at somepoint surpass gdb (like the rest of LLVM has done to GNU (if you're on x86_64))

</comment><comment><USER6> At Ticketmaster, I learned the first thing you write when you start on bare metal is a debugger. I worked on VAX, 68000 and 8051 bare metal.

The difference between an amateur operating system project and a professional one is writing a compiler.

<comment><USER7> Forth and HolyC have both.

<comment><USER8> You're replying to the guy that _wrote_ HolyC.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I know :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How do I use this on OS X 10.11?

<comment><USER10> You can build the gdb executable manually on OS X 10.11.

First, run this if you haven't already installed the Command Line Tools for Xcode:

      xcode-select --install

Then run these commands:

      curl -o gdb-7.11.tar.xz https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/gdb-7.11.tar.xz
      tar zxf gdb-7.11.tar.xz
      cd gdb-7.11
      ./configure
      make
      make install

This should place the executable at /usr/local/bin/gdb. The final step is to codesign it. Instructions: [http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/BuildingOnDarwin](http://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/BuildingOnDarwin)

<comment><USER11> `tar xfJ gdb-7.11.tar.xz` for .xz files

<comment><USER10> Good point. GNU tar requires using the correct option, -J, when extracting an xz-compressed tarball.

But OS X tar is bsdtar, which ignores -z and -J when extracting because it automatically recognizes compression and does the right thing. So it turns out both our suggestions happen to work on OS X.

<comment><USER12> nonsense, gnu tar unpacks anything with tar xf <file> just fine.

<comment><USER10> Oh, good point, I wasn't aware that GNU tar also supported automatic compression recognition. I should have tested it. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Excuse Me Sir, Your WebRTC Is Leaking - <AUTHOR> http://blog.golgi.io/excuse-me-sir-your-webrtc-is-leaking

<comment><USER2> Relevant Firefox bug: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959893](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959893)

My test: [https://diafygi.github.io/webrtc- ips/](https://diafygi.github.io/webrtc-ips/)

The main two issues are that a data connection doesn't require user consent (unlike video/audio) and the browser checks all network interfaces as connection candidates (so VPN users on Windows and Mac expose their real IPs). As I proposed in the bug, if we fix those two things, we would be a lot better off.

<comment><USER3> A quick heads-up:

      These requests do not show up in developer consoles and
      cannot be blocked by browser plugins

I'm using FF with a WebRTC-blocking plugin, and it does successfully block the proof-of-concept exploit (it's called "Happy Bonobo Disable WebRTC", an admittedly shady name, but there are surely others).

<comment><USER2> Yes, most of those plugins were made after this test was created. This one just sets "media.peerconnection.enabled" to false in Firefox's settings. However, it means you have to disable WebRTC entirely, not just the STUN requests.

Unfortunately, Chrome doesn't let you disable WebRTC at all unless you recompile with "-Denable_webrtc=0", and Chrome blocking plugins are easily bypassed (see some pull requests in my repo).

<comment><USER4> Even if you have the SafeScript and WebRTC extensions installed in Chrome? (no settings changed). That combo passed every online test I could find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I made a LAN scanner based on this in JS: [http://algorithm.dk/lanscan](http://algorithm.dk/lanscan)

<comment><USER6> Very cool. I ran this on my laptop connected to my school's WiFi network and found 65 alive hosts.

<comment><USER7> You need to be very careful about what you do on other people's computers. Make sure you get permission and are able to explain what you're doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Vulnerability doesn't seem like the correct word to describe this issue. It's more of an exposure of potentially sensitive information (your local IP address if you're using a VPN) as a result of WebRTC's protocol design.

<comment><USER9> I agree. For the vast majority of use cases, this doesn't seem to be an exceptionally big issue. Almost all major websites collect IP addresses and don't explicitly prompt the user that this is happening. It seems the OP is really highlighting the edge case for users who want quasi-absolute security.

<comment><USER10> Knowing the LAN IP behind any NAT is useful for silently launching behind-the- firewall cross-site attacks against the router web admin interface (or any other local services) via a browser, without having to blindly guess addresses. Someone posted a POC LAN scanner elsewhere in a thread here, too.

<comment><USER11> How many guesses would you need for typical NAT gateway LAN side IP?

I'd say two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like the problem that WebRTC wants to solve could be solved another way, by putting more of the discovery logic into the browser rather than the application. WebRTC wants to find peers on the local LAN, and communicate with them directly. Why not let the browser find peers, and then hand the WebRTC application a connection without exposing where that connection leads?

That said, long-term, I think networks need to stop treating non-routability alone as a firewall mechanism. Any information that this WebRTC mechanism reveals could also be exploited by any random client application, or in the case of http-based protocols, by anyone who can embed an iframe or submit a form. Consider how you'd design a network in which every device had a routable IP address, and go ahead and design it that way _anyway_ as a defense-in-depth measure. Use encrypted and authenticated protocols even on your "private" network.

<comment><USER13> The problem is that in order for WebRTC to work correctly for all use cases all local IPs must be sent to the remote client.

One example would be if you happened to use WebRTC with two peers on the same VPN.

<comment><USER14> We have added an initial solution for this issue in Chrome 42. Users can set the following preference:

"webrtc": { "multiple_routes_enabled": false },

For the location of the prefs file, see [http://www.chromium.org/administrators/configuring-other- pre...](http://www.chromium.org/administrators/configuring-other-preferences).

This forces all WebRTC connections to only use server-reflexive and relay ICE candidates, and only on the default IP route. While this may cause a QoS hit (two users behind NAT can no longer keep their traffic internal to the NAT), it does allow the issue mentioned here to be fully addressed without disabling WebRTC altogether.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much for your reply. I've been trying to enable the preference in Google Chrome Canary on Mac OSX. However, I haven't been able to successfully block the IP leak - I suspect because I haven't configured it correctly. I had to manually create the file "/Library/Google/Google Chrome Master Preferences" and add the setting you suggested. I then reinstalled Chrome Canary and tested but no effect. I also tried editing the user preferences file in ~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/Chrome\ Canary/Default/Preference but that seems to be overwritten by the browser. How should I be configuring this preference? Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting, maybe browsers should add a permission prompt like they do for web camera access before allowing a webrtc stun request?

<comment><USER15> Why would you want to disable STUN requests? Wouldn't they just return the public-facing IP that the server already knows about?

<comment><USER10> Did you even read the article and click the demo link? :) [https://diafygi.github.io/webrtc-ips/](https://diafygi.github.io/webrtc-ips/)

<comment><USER15> Yeah, but you don't even need a stun server for that. The browser itself provides the local IP addresses.

<comment><USER10> Oh, I thought it had to read them back from the STUN server negotiation because of javascript limitations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Flash has been able to do this for years: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft- thornburgh-rtmfp-flash-02#...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thornburgh- rtmfp-flash-02#section-5.3.3)

 _The "setPeerInfo" command is sent by the client to the server over the NetConnection control flow to inform the server of candidate socket addresses through which the client might be reachable. This list SHOULD include all directly connected interface addresses and proxy addresses except as provided below. The list MAY be empty. The list need not include the address of the server, even if the server is to act as an introducer for the client. The list SHOULD NOT include link-local or loopback addresses._

<comment><USER16> Flash can be blocked, or not installed. If you are running a modern Chrome or Firefox, there is no way to stop this from running. (edit: apparently you can now block WebRTC entirely in Firefox, but Chrome has to be recompiled)

<comment><USER17> I wish chrome had an advanced configuration interface similar to firefox's for this kind of thing... I'm actually surprised WebRTC doesn't at least prompt for access, similar to location, camera and similar requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is interesting and seems to indicate that there is a small edge case for people who want as much privacy as possible.

The larger topic for me is that webRTC has to make tradeoff for developers. And, I for one, love what it does. If you look at legacy comms development in the peer to peer space (e.g. Skype) the process was orders of magnitude more difficult than using a webRTC implementation. So, as a developer, sacrificing a prompt that grants an IP detection notice seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.

Also, I think webRTC is still in draft form and is still being modified in working sessions (although I'm not 100% sure of this). It would be great if Apple would get on board with webRTC for ios.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that WebRTC is very powerful and makes peer-to-peer communication from browsers easily accessible for developers. And I also love what it does. However, the issue raised in the post is seen from the point of view of the user. Convenience for the developer probably won't be a concern to a user who is concerned about IP leakage. Yes, the WebRTC API is still being standardised so perhaps this issue will be addressed in future

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> WebRTC can also be used for fingerprinting (apparently Chrome only) in a similar way as cookies. [1] has an explanation and test of it, as well some other fingerprinting methods.

[1] [https://www.browserleaks.com/webrtc#webrtc-device- id](https://www.browserleaks.com/webrtc#webrtc-device-id)

<comment><USER14> These ids work just like cookies; scoped to each user and origin. If you clear cookies, the ids are cleared as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The comments in the Chrome WebRTC extension say to use ScriptSafe along with WebRTC. If you do that it works great.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is known for years, unbelievable how many people still exploit this for page clicks.</comment>


Merchants using Facebook (among other places) to broker fake Amazon reviews - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-merchants-secretly-use-facebook-to-flood-amazon-with-fake-reviews/2018/04/23/5dad1e30-4392-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html <comment><AUTHOR> As a grad student and research assistant back in 2010, I remember talking about "web 3.0" and how filtering and vetting information was the new challenge for Internet mass consumers. Fake information and misinformation are as old as humanity, but it seems the digitally connected world is the best simulation to-date (especially for non-technologists). Fake news, fake reviews, fake research, fake nudes... the level of time, thoughtfulness and skill required to sort through it all (and create authentic knowledge) is no match for the convenience of just "knowing". We all (some of us willingly) plug into the simulation daily and revel in the perks of "knowing" while a handful of us decide what and how we should know.</comment>