What Really Happened with Vista - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-4ca7ffb5a1a <comment><USER2> From where I sat in Windows Security (I wrote much of the BitLocker UI) these are a couple of anecdotes:

I remember one of the base team architects laughing and bragging about how and why they killed managed code and banned it from the OS — the technical reasons where valid, but the attitude was toxic. I think most or all of the generation of architects that had come from DEC have now moved on, but they also took tribal knowledge with them. I wonder how much they were encouraged to find other things to do because of this type of attitude (which not all of them had btw)

Moving on

The Avalon team appeared to be drinking their own cool aid. They had charts on the wall showing their performance goals and progress. All the performance measurements on those charts were annotated as "estimated". I remember an internal alpha that had strong polynomial execution time based on the number of elements in the logical tree. It felt like the design was good, but that the correspondence of the implementation to the design was missing.

When Avalon was booted, we were told to write UI in a broken framework called DirectUI which had a convoluted history, an arrogant maintainer, and a weirdly mismatched documentation. Much was documented that wasn't implemented, the standard answer to missing features was "add it yourself", but if I pushed a code change to shell code (where it lived in the codebase) it would typically cause a forward integration from winsec to base to be rejected.

Good times

<comment><USER3> Very interesting! I feel like all the OS components are now written in DirectUI too. Did it turn out to be the way to go, or did it happen because it was shoved down everyone's throat?

<comment><USER4> AIUI, DUI was the standard toolkit for first-party Windows UI from XP through 8.0 (this includes the "Metro" shell components in that release like the Start screen). Starting with 8.1, new components have been written using the same XAML toolkit that's promoted for third-parties, but there's still lots of older DUI stuff in the OS, like File Explorer and the taskbar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an article as to why Longhorn failed. If you want to know why _Vista_ failed, here's two big reasons:

1\. In Vista, there was a completely new Antivirus framework that AV vendors had to use in order to support Vista. Good idea in theory, but because it was brand new (and because vendors had to write brand new code to support it), it had a fuckton of problems, mostly contributing to an _enormous_ performance degradation compared to XP. Like, horrendous. And since every laptop you could buy in the store had 3rd party AV because that's how OEMs make $$, whoops every laptop is absolute garbage out of the box.

2\. Windows Vista completely rewrote the USB stack, an _extremely_ complicated, timing-sensitive component (like, add a printf, break a device kind of sensitive), and about 80% of the way through, the lead architect who planned the rewrite left the company. Meanwhile, there were a _ton_ of devices which weren't actually correct wrt the USB spec, but just happened to work with the timings that WinXP solely by accident would exhibit. A friend of mine made a lot of money in bonuses by slogging through bug after bug in the USB stack trying to make it right for Vista SP1.

It's funny, because Vista shipped a ton of great features, that then got attributed to Win7 - it really set the foundation for the modern Windows OS until Win10 came out.

So, if you learn anything from the story of Windows Vista, it's this: Performance is not a Feature, but it sure can make all of your other features not matter at all

<comment><USER6> > It's funny, because Vista shipped a ton of great features, that then got > attributed to Win7

I have heard that some people at Microsoft consider Vista a kind of public Beta for Windows 7. Maybe not intentionally, but that is the way things worked out on the road from XP to 7.

And Windows 7 is, as far as Windows systems go, very nice. Very stable, decent performance on not-too-old hardware, I like the UI very much.

<comment><USER7> I have Windows 7 on a 4GB maxed out IBM laptop for personal use. Don't see a reason to go anywhere, as long as I can. Although, XP was also fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the outside world Vista just didn't look compelling.

Yet another Microsoft OS with a fresh set of incompatible hardware drivers.

There was no clear vision about what a modern OS should be. It felt bloated and clunky. Vista felt like it was trying to be everything to everyone and not really being anything much special to anyone.

By contrast, OSX seemed to know what it was, and provided a cohesive integrated whole in which things just worked. Most importantly, Apple somehow managed to generally provide just one way of doing things. For example configuring networking on OSX happens in network preferences. On Windows, to this day, configuration seems to be all over the place, a bit here, a bit there, and many different visual and UI styles for the configuration. Made even worse by add in software for configuration from hardware vendors. Even now with Windows 10 I dread having to resolve ANY sort of network issue - where to start - which rabbit hole will the required setting be down?

Windows had - and still has - problems that have never bee fully solved and they make the platform so unappealing. Shutdown of the Windows OS could never be relied on to actually happen without hanging for some reason. Hibernate mode when closing the laptop lid was equally unreliable. Constant application crashes. Multitasking that just wasn't - all the time the OS would become unresponsive due to the behaviour of some application, which leads to the next major issue was a seeming inability for Windows to actually force kill processes when instructed - that rarely worked. Even something as trivial as deleting a job from a printer queue - basically forget it.

After Vista, Windows 7 seemed to clean things up a bit before they got even worse, with Windows 8 just being an absolutely definitive statement that Microsoft did not know what Windows was or where to take it - I mean for goodness sake - removing access to control panel? Crazy.

The latest versions of Windows are better but no-one has had the courage to do what Windows really needs which is to get rid of the registry - that chewing- gum-in-the-hair-mixed-with-spaghetti central configuration settings black hole.

<comment><USER9> None of the usability problems you mention have to do with the registry, so I fail to see how getting rid of it would materially improve the windows experience.

The core problem with windows 10 for me is and remains the crappy driver situation. Drivers on windows are far less robust than on OS X, and OS and/or driver updates create many more problems. This isn't tied to any particular windows version, but W10 suffers from it more because updates happen with much less control over the when and where, which means drivers break in more awkward moments.

An example from my own workplace is that a lot of my coworkers have had their laptop keyboard break after a W7 update. Windows reboots to update, and ctrl- alt-del no longer works, not on the built-in keyboard and not on an external one, so you're locked out. The solution is connecting via remote desktop and logging in once, after which windows update picks back up and fixes the problem, but that's not always a convenient thing to do. I bet that microsoft doesn't even see that in their metrics, because to them it's just a remote desktop login, so they probably think those updates don't have any problems (after all, the update gets installed and people seem to go back about their business).

<comment><USER10> To be fair, drivers are a much more difficult problem for Microsoft because they don't control the hardware like Apple does. There are way more devices out there for Windows machines, and an insane number of combinations that have to work together without ever having been tested together.

<comment><USER9> That still doesn't explain why an external keyboard breaks. Keyboards are not exotic hardware, and they all work just fine when connected up to a mac.

<comment><USER11> If Windows Update was able to fix the problem after being reinitialized, then your original description sounds more like a Windows Update hiccup rather than an inherent driver issue.

<comment><USER12> Could be a permissions problem.

These days you can authorize Windows to log you in upon reboot so that Update the finish up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The first laptop I could afford was a used Toshiba Satellite that had Vista on it. A well off college student was having problems with it BSODing constantly, so she was selling it as "broken, maybe you can use it for spare parts?" For about $200. When I looked at the BSOD error and saw that it looked like a driver issue, I told her it was probably fixable she said she didn't care, she had already bought a MacBook to replace it. So I got it for $200. I immediately rolled it back to Windows XP and it worked perfectly fine ever since.

</comment><comment><USER14> I always had the impression that the biggest gripe with Vista were the incessant UAC dialogs asking you to approve every little thing (I think Apple even poked fun at it in one of their 'Hi, I'm a Mac' ads). And that this problem was actually a consequence of the (sensible) change from having all programs running with full privileges to limiting them and asking users for escalations only when needed - but since most existing programs were not prepared for this, they caused UAC dialogs left and right, where they could and should have been avoided. And understandably it took a while for all the 3rd party devs to catch up to this and change their code to fit well within this more restrictive security model. But the way I see it, this is much like pulling off a band-aid that's been on too long - it'll hurt no matter what, so best just get it over with. I imagine that if Windows 7 had been released instead of Vista and at the same time (and AFAIK it has pretty much exactly the same security model) then it would have born the brunt of all that negativity stemming from all those UAC dialogs. In other words, Vista had to take that bullet, in order for Windows 7 to go on the scene later as the hero.

<comment><USER15> It reeked of CYA to me- if something bad happened, well, you clicked OK in the dialog. Shouldn'ta done that. Except you couldn't do anything at the time without those dialogs constantly coming up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A clue that could tell the non-tech-savy audience that something was off with Vista was its laughable "wow" advertisement campaign: invariably depicting a starry-eyed person looking at an unseen and undescribed thing off-screen, and expressing "wow". No product features. No aesthetics. Basically just an industrial ad with a soundtrack. The only thing that was crystal-clear was the subtext: "we have no idea why we're selling this thing so we'll just say wow".

</comment><comment><USER17> Never understood the criticism towards Vista... during that time I made a switch from Linux (to Vista). It was quite slick & fast. Afterwards, when I moved to Win7, it was not that much different at all.

<comment><USER18> Later versions of Vista weren't dramatically different to 7. But the initial versions were hideous, and once you've had a failed launch people's perceptions tend to get stuck.

<comment><USER17> Isn't this the same for all Windows-es? I've never switched to next version until at least a first SP was released.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I thought was weird about Winodws Vista was the contacts folder. It had its own contacts application which didn't store the data hidden but directly in as vcards in this folder. The application got removed in Windows 7, like many other tools. But the folder is still there. I'm sure it is not the only one which isn't really being used anymore since then.

</comment><comment><USER20> The power hungry Vista forced millions to upgrade to newer devices with at least 1gb ram and faster processors.

<comment><USER21> ...and for a small handful to move to Ubuntu. Vista was the last Windows I used. Plenty others went OSX. The public sector stayed on XP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was one of the lucky ones with Vista in that by the time I'd upgraded to it, it was pretty stable.

Forgettable and boring yes, but plenty fast and stable on an old HP box that served as my workstation

</comment><comment><USER23> If I look at Vista and compare it to Apple's iterations through OSX, I see that Apple spread out the macro changes while MSFT tried to cram them all into one huge release.

Given the results, it seems that Apple had much better leadership/management and maturity in their team.

Apple's approach, while not perfect, clearly worked much better. I often wonder what it would be like if MSFT had taken that approach. I think the world would have been much better off for the last 15 years.

</comment><comment><USER24> If one talks about failed Windows versions my favorite is still Windows ME ...

<comment><USER25> My favorite is Bob...everyone wants to forget about Bob.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> _> In fact, the OS innovations in iOS were what made it so clear in retrospect how wrong-headed the overall world view driving this work was._

What were those OS innovations in iOS?

<comment><USER27> Initially, the strict limits it placed on its own software and third-party apps. The first iPhone had pretty meagre hardware but still managed smooth 60fps scrolling, one-to-one interaction with your touches, and hitting the home button _immediately_ stopped whatever you were doing and took you home.

Those things didn't come around by accident. It's because the OS was ruthless in cutting off applications from hardware resources, because its compositor was designed for basically moving a textured quad around the screen with very little latency on a mobile GPU, and because its main animation system ran in a high priority thread way above your applications.

All these little things are what made it feel "magical" to use the first iPhone, to have your finger perfectly tracked when pinching and panning on a mobile computer in the palm of your hand. It can't be overstated how important it is for a human to get an instant visual response to their touch, and how highly iOS prioritised this exact thing.

<comment><USER28> Symbian had them first.

<comment><USER27> Not sure I understand your comment.

Symbian had 60fps one-to-one correspondence with your touch on a multi-touch surface in a handheld computer? It had a high priority animation thread that continued to run even if your application crashed? I was never a Symbian developer, but I don't recall any pre-iPhone Symbian devices performing in this way.

The examples I gave were all about driving the physics-based movement of an OpenGL based UI compositor on a very rudimentary mobile GPU. It's putting your finger on the screen and getting an instant response from the underlying visuals, and having that response tracked perfectly across the surface of the screen.

The innovations in iOS (e.g., resuming an app by showing a screenshot of it's last use while it came to the foreground) were all in favour of increased perception of responsiveness and actual increased responsiveness. Not just about maintaining battery efficiency.

<comment><USER28> N95 was the first mobile with an hardware GPU, until then OpenGL ES was software emulated.

The Series 90 was the very first touch driven device with hardware GPU, one year earlier than iOS got released to the world.

<comment><USER27> I still fail to understand your point. I'm trying to educate myself on the N95 but videos of its interaction bear no resemblance to the first iPhone OS.

Putting a touch interface OS on a hardware GPU is not the same as the specific developments I am talking about. The graphics compositor (CoreAnimation / CALayer architecture on iOS), physics-driven animation and one-to-one correspondence with your touch at 60fps was what made the platform unique on its release.

Edit: this is the best video I can find of a 2007 Nokia device with touch interaction: [https://youtu.be/YrS1PGj27VI?t=1m4s](https://youtu.be/YrS1PGj27VI?t=1m4s) — the interaction is incredibly high latency and not at all one-to-one like an iPhone. Absolutely none of the innovations I mentioned are present on the Nokia (or if they are, they are not being used to facilitate human interaction with the device in this video).

<comment><USER28> I also mentioned Series 90, aka Nokia 7710.

Although I do concede that if it wasn't for iPhone's success, OpenGL ES would probably never had taken off, as Symbian was one of the very few mobile OSes that had some flagship devices with hardware support for it.

<comment><USER27> Thank you for the specific device (Nokia 7710). I've looked at some videos and I can explain more clearly what I mean.

In the following video [https://youtu.be/CUUnnf_gX1s?t=46s](https://youtu.be/CUUnnf_gX1s?t=46s) you'll see that when the button is tapped, the screen "tears" when the device re-renders its display. I doubt this OS was using the GPU to render and composite its components to the display. It seems more like it is software rendering the UI then passing the entire buffer to the GPU for display.

Notice also that the scrolling on the device is line-by-line rather than per- pixel. It's done to minimise screen redraws but it is exactly the opposite of what made the first iPhone so pleasant to use. The only one-to-one interaction in the Nokia 7710 video is the little sliders being moved by the stylus, but they too flicker when redrawing.

My point wasn't really about whether a phone supported OpenGL. I was pointing out the software design of the graphical compositor used to render and animate the UI, and how every small decision was made in favour of prioritising an immediate reaction to human input.

The only reason I mentioned the iPhone's meagre mobile GPU was to emphasise how iOS was able to produce such low-latency and smooth performance from very low powered hardware.

<comment><USER29> _Notice also that the scrolling on the device is line-by-line rather than per- pixel. It 's done to minimise screen redraws but it is exactly the opposite of what made the first iPhone so pleasant to use._

Yep—smooth scrolling was a famous obsession of Steve Jobs that was emphasized in just about every Apple product where it was feasible, the idea borrowed from one of the fated PARC demos. Little things like this go a long way in building a sense of symbiosis between user and device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> TL;DR- Microsoft old guard saw that C++, html, hierarchical file systems were stupid. They were right. They thought of some excellent solutions but were 1) ignoring what MS knows today about open source etc 2) wrong on the cost and difficulty by a factor 10 3) surprised by swift technology changes

If the "new" Microsoft had materialized sooner and (e.g) successfully shipped .NET core in 2005 _before_ betting on WinFS/Avalon then perhaps in 2017 we wouldn't be taping our backends together with javascript.

<comment><USER31> this is a really misleading summary of the post.

<comment><USER30> Ok I started writing TL;DR and then wrote an opinion instead of an abbreviation - granted (too late to remove TL;DR)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Didnt they demo it with flash...</comment>


The Most Important Tax Break Is the One That Nobody Talks About - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/the-most-important-tax-break-is-the-one-that-nobody-talks-about/265308/ <comment><USER2> Taxing discourages an activity while subsidizing encourages it. Do we really want to discourage investing in companies? Seems very short sighted. Also, I thought capital gains were at a lower rate because profits have already been taxed at the corporate level. I might be able to get on board with a capital gains rate increase if we abolished corporate income taxes. The government should only get one bite at the proverbial apple.</comment>


Anonymous threatens Justice Department over hacktivist death - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/26/tech/anonymous-threat/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

<comment><USER2> I am sick of hearing about Anonymous and its vigilantism. We have courts and a justice system for a reason: to place retaliatory force under objective controls (laws) so that the rights of individuals are not violated. Their tactics are both dangerous to freedom and to justice.

In addition, while a few of the things they're against are actually bad things, not all of the causes they fight are just. And their illegal methods serve mainly to hurt the good fights (such as the fight against Scientology) rather than help.

<comment><USER3> >I am sick of hearing about Anonymous and its vigilantism. We have courts and a justice system for a reason

So much irony. You didn't watch the video did you?

<comment><USER2> I have a right to disagree. I have a right to put what I want on a web server, at my own expense, without fear of DoS attacks or website defacement.

If anarchy rules, any person group can do those things without fear of reprisal. That's basically what Anonymous does, and that's why they have to be stopped.

<comment><USER4> Anarchy doesn't have to mean chaos. The government and individuals could easily defend themselves from anonymous attacks if they utilized proper information security.

<comment><USER2> _Anarchy doesn't have to mean chaos._

anarchy |ˈanərkē|

noun

* a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority: he must ensure public order in a country threatened with anarchy.

* absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.

[New Oxford American Dictionary, Dictionary.app, OS X 10.7]

If you want to convince me that this definition is wrong, show me why it's not a valid concept to hold, given the facts of reality.

<comment><USER4> There is a distinction between the commonly held meaning of anarchy (as chaos) and the political philosophy (which is why there are 2 asterisks).

Anarchism the political ideology believe that order doesn't not _have_ to come from a centralized state via force. Rather it can happen organically... since the vast majority of humans desire order. We all value security, eatting, etc.

The difference is that order is maintained not via coercion by a central authority but by individuals, communities or markets (depending on the various branches of anarchy).

This book explores the concept very well and is heavily cited in philosophy circles:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia>

One of his arguments is that a sort of minimal state will eventually begin to appear in an anarchist society (minarchy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did anyone grab a mirror or better screenshot of the page?

UPDATE: Google Cached it: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sV8dPXf...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sV8dPXftnTcJ:www.ussc.gov/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, CNN, the opposite of Hacker News. What an ignorant comment:

 _The "warhead" names appeared as links, most leading to 404 error messages of pages not found, but some leading to pages of raw programming code._

</comment><comment><USER7> "Swartz was facing up to 50+ years in prison and a $4 million fine". 50 years from now, people will relate this saying that he was facing death penalty

</comment><comment><USER8> "Reform or we'll release this incriminating stuff."

Clearly, the better way to get them to reform is to release the incriminating material and have a scandal about it. If it's really bad enough to be worth this headline, it'll do a lot more good when it's not a threat. Of course, that means it's probably irrelevant and/or useless.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm sure the mainstream news outlets were _begging_ for a more status-quo- friendly angle to take on the Swartz story, and this just gives it to them. If Anonymous takes the spotlight, all the discussion about prosecutorial overreach could come crashing down, and (to extend the metaphor) at best we'll be back to preaching to the choir while the congregation starts throwing stones.</comment>


Do you think you're a good Swift Developer? Take the quiz - <AUTHOR> http://iosblog.co.uk/quiz/ <comment><USER2> This page should work with an adblocker turned on. Fail.</comment>


An ingenious vintage German cycle map (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.systemed.net/post/10 <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of this sort of everyday practical data visualization! To anyone who hasn't already seen this feature: when you select walking or biking directions on Google Maps, it renders a line in the sidebar to show you elevation change over the route. You can mouse over positions on that line, (or over the route line on the map) and it will render an indicator on the other line.

In this example, the elevation trace reveals a very steep section on Gregory Canyon Rd, between Baseline Rd and Flagstaff Rd:

[https://i.imgur.com/NWiRmdK.png](https://i.imgur.com/NWiRmdK.png)

<comment><USER3> Meh. Not to be a debbie downer, but that's the most basic courtesy you can offer to cyclists, and even that isn't telling half the story. In central Europe anyway, Google Maps is unusable for creating cycling tracks or directions.

There are much better alternatives, such as komoot or Strava or GPSies (I'm not affiliated.)

As important as (and sometimes more important than) the profile in a section is the _gradient_. The Google map doesn't tell me if there's going to be a 10% or 20% piece, and I can't glean it from the curve, because depending on the length of the track, the relations change.

Additionally, it's very important to know what kind of road you're on, and what kind of surface that road has. The thing only Google could do here, and doesn't, is to tell me how busy (with cars) the roads are and offer me a way around busy roads. Komoot at least shows me the type of road or street and its surface.

See this: [https://imgur.com/a/j20XOmi](https://imgur.com/a/j20XOmi) (from komoot.)

the hill in the middle looks scary, but the line along its ridge tells me the gradient isn't steep. Yellow is 8% (it tells you on hover). It tells me what percentage (and where) the road is a bike road, or larger road, etc.

Strava on the other hand has heat maps: [https://www.strava.com/heatmap](https://www.strava.com/heatmap) which tell you where local cyclists like to go. One caveat is that it shows you where local _road cyclists_ and _mountain bikers_ like to go. Those folks can have vastly different understanding of what viable road conditions are from each other, and from you.

Unfortunately, planning cycling tracks is still a chore, and getting it wrong can be dangerous or at least unpleasant. The market is there, but it's nowhere near as huge as for cars.

<comment><USER4> (I'm the author of the 2014 article posted here - really pleasant surprise to see it surface on HN.)

Fully agree with your comments. It's not just Google that can tell you about busy roads, though - in some countries that's available as open data.

I run [https://cycle.travel/map](https://cycle.travel/map) , which uses open traffic data (in the US, UK and a couple of other places) to influence its OpenStreetMap-based bike routing. So, for example, in the Home Counties (broadly the London commuter belt) the A-class roads are generally busy and unrideable, whereas A-class roads in the Scottish Highlands are often (not always) beautifully quiet. cycle.travel will happily route along the latter but not the former.

The Strava approach is interesting, but Strava users are biased towards athletic cyclists who generally have a higher tolerance for busy roads. For tourers and other leisure riders I'm less convinced that the presence of other cyclists is a good signifier of pleasant cycling. (In London, for example, Strava shows the Euston Road as a busy cycling thoroughfare, which I'd never dream of riding.)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for chiming in! cycle.travel/map is really good! I like how responsive the interface is, and its routing algorithm seems on par with other ones I've tried. Do you take into account traffic info for Germany? I couldn't find good open sources for that.

Yeah, Strava tends to overestimate the rideability of bigger roads. Keep in mind that a lot of groups use Strava, and it's easier to ride a busy road when you're in a group. In Germany, for example, you even have a different legal status on the road. I would love it if I could somehow filter the global Strava data, but they don't make their data available; not that I would expect them to.

<comment><USER4> No, I've not found national traffic data for Germany, unfortunately. I think it exists for one or two areas (NRW maybe?) but certainly not nationally, and the proprietary sources tend to be prohibitively expensive. I'm intrigued as to whether it might be possible to count cars in imagery as a possible alternative...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious to see an SF version, though I wonder how you would sufficiently render such a dense and hilly city in this perspective.

<comment><USER6> There's a widely-available "San Francisco Bike Map and Walking Guide"

[http://www.rufusguides.com/sanfran.html](http://www.rufusguides.com/sanfran.html)

and SFBC has a (large!) vector PDF version on their site

[https://www.sfbike.org/download/map.pdf](https://www.sfbike.org/download/map.pdf)

This map uses shading to indicate how steep the gradient of each individual city block is, but interestingly the shading doesn't show the _direction_ of that gradient, so you don't immediately know whether it will be uphill or downhill. But the map also includes contour lines, so if you look closely, you can figure it out from the contours even if you're unfamiliar with the neighborhood.

On the other hand, if you're generally familiar with the neighborhood, the shading might be helpful by itself because you might have an intuition about when you're going to be going uphill and when you're going to be going downhill.

I agree that replicating the cool visualization method from the linked article might be tricky in San Francisco for the exact reasons you mention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have family living in a vilage shown in the snapshot of the map. It's deep black forest so, while I think displaying the steepness is a neat idea, there, you just know that over the mountain is steep, and if you want to avoid it, you stay in the valley :)

<comment><USER8> hehe. I'm from there too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> ohhhhh.... I'd want that in my osmand for the biking and hiking modes... :)

<comment><USER10> OsmAnd has something that's similar: [https://snag.gy/z5l4WZ.jpg](https://snag.gy/z5l4WZ.jpg)

Steps to reproduce:

1\. Calculate a route

2\. Click the blue navigation icon at the bottom (it should show the from, to, car/cycling/walking, distance, settings button, etc.)

3\. Press on the distance or time.

Optionally, see the "Analyse on map" button.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I love that feature! I found out about it some weeks ago, on the very last leg of a brutal two day hike where I could really have used it XD</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon's Mechanical Turk Used for Fraudulent Activities - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazons_mechanical_turk_used_for_fraud.php

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting problem. However self interest helps to reveal the problem. Google has successfully banned rings of cheap labour used to generate ad-sense income.

We had a conversation at work about how it would be much harder to stop people using distributed methods like this to attack people. By, for example, soaking up all your competitors' Ad Word budgets for the month with rogue clicks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can image ugly things with distributed methods like this. A problem in this case is that it is difficult to draw the line between what is still legal and what not. Paying people to add your web-page to delicious is probably not illegal. Although it kind of fakes interest for a web-site that may not exist, it is only a kind of indirect spamming with little effect on single users - probably even less harmful than many SEO techniques. As you said, interesting topic.

<comment><USER2> It probably breaches the terms of service which wouldn't make it illegal but it would be a civil offence. They could probably sue you for damages or loss of income (due to loss of legitimate traffic) or some such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Unethical but I don't think fraudulent.

This is an example people gaming the system, and IMHO through legal channels. If search engines and social bookmarks integrate this content the burden is on them to filter it.

Please don't take my comments to imply that I condone spamming, but in this case I think a different resolution to the problem is in order.

jer

PS: I don't know what that resolution is. :)</comment>


20-Somethings take on $50 billion counterfeit-drug biz - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/10/20somethings-ta.html

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... Using cellphones to connect the people who produce drugs with the people taking them, the Dartmouth-schooled duo's big goal is to reduce the amount of counterfeit pharmaceuticals in the world by 25 percent ..."_

A huge problem in the Pharma industry is identification and verification of consumer drugs. I wonder why the industry itself cannot find solutions like this.

<comment><USER2> They're typically so far removed from the illegal activity it's hard to track, regulate, detect, or enforce. The drugs pass so many hands from maker to consumer.</comment></comment>


Over half of all men in Iceland would take birth control pills if available - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ruv.is%2Ffrett%2Fmeirihluti-karla-reidubuinn-ad-taka-pilluna <comment><USER2> Nice, women won't be the only one able to fuck up their hormones now.

It seems that STDs are on the rise since AIDS became "just another std" and lost its fear factor. Let's see how the male "pill" will affect these stats.

[http://www.ashasexualhealth.org/cdc-data-shows-std-rates- con...](http://www.ashasexualhealth.org/cdc-data-shows-std-rates-continue- rise/)</comment>


NIH funding for researchers isn't color blind - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/08/blacks-lose-out-on-nih-funding.ars <comment><USER2> Lot of holes in this, which is why it isn't very interesting until future studies come up comparing normal applications against more thoroughly blinded applications.

For example, why is the bias against Asian applications almost gone when correcting for Asian-Americans? Why no bias against Hispanics? Are these anti- black NIH bureaucrats racist _only_ when it comes to blacks?

And the other version I read said that the supposed bias was only in the first review step, and once you looked at black candidates who made it to the second step, the bias completely disappeared.</comment>


Is the hack culture exclusive to tech start-ups? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/e224f6cef5d4

<comment><USER2> Of course it's not only exclusive to tech startups...the word 'hack' has been commonly used to describe any Macguyver-esque resourcefulness for quite some time now.

I think non-tech corporations would benefit tremendously from more idea brainstorming 'hackathon' events -- which wouldn't exactly favor the upper echelons of management in their rigid roles (within even more rigid management structures). The whole point of any type of hackathon is to come up with disruptive results, which shake up product lines or the heart of the product itself, among other things.

I believe corporations can achieve this by keeping management smaller and more flexible, with the goal of being more open-minded towards new or radical ideas. Only then can these ideas be implemented, and rapidly so.</comment>


Sam Altman: sad about the lack of VR/AR companies in YC S16 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sama/status/713897296186847239 <comment><USER2> It's interesting how people who are a direct cause of something can't see their own hand in matters.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure what's causing this, but surprised YC wants to invest money in this space.

1\. Tons of very deep pocketed competition.

2\. Outside of gaming, which is albeit a pretty large space, there does not seem to be immediate broad uptake of this tech.

<comment><USER4> My impression is that YC dog foods its own advice and doesn't make competition a high order bit. I don't think it makes immediacy one either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, I hope he does consider those of us who did apply :) (even though I consider it a very, very long shot).

I saw several comments on the twitter feed saying that, so I'm not the only one.</comment>


Tab completion in OpenBSD's ksh - <AUTHOR> https://deftly.net/posts/2017-05-01-openbsd-ksh-tab-complete.html <comment><USER2> Is there much benefit from pledging a shell?

I thought a fork/exec (seems like a core requirement for a shell) didn't inherit the pledge from the parent?

      > promise: exec
      > Allows a process to call execve(2). Coupled with the proc promise,
      > this allows a process to fork and execute another program. The new
      > program starts running without pledge active and hopefully makes
      > a new pledge()
      > -- openbsd pledge(2) manpage

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, it's a shell. Shells need to execute other programs, but the shell itself doesn't need to open sockets, or use random ioctl calls, or other privileged things.

<comment><USER3> Hey, sockets in bash are a feature ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where did the author get the idea that fish is 200k SLOC? They're wildly mis- counting.

Yes, `cloc` on a fresh checkout of fish-shell says there's 200k lines, but most of that isn't fish-shell source. Fully half of that is from PCRE. And if I run `cloc` on just the `src` directory I get 39k lines.

<comment><USER5> No matter how many of these lines you label as "fish" and "not-fish", they somehow all end up in "/usr/bin/fish".

<comment><USER6> Well, not necessarily. The linker will strip out any symbols that aren't actually used, which may indeed be a non-inconsequential chunk of fish's bundled dependencies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A brand new kind of [nearly] POSIX compliant shell can be found here, in a little project called "Linux on the Web" (requires Chrome): [https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com](https://linuxontheweb.appspot.com)

The main JS file that implements it is currently showing less than 6k lines (which doesn't include the lexer/tokenizer, in another file, and adds another couple thousand).

I have seen silly toys in websites that have superficial resemblances to *nix shells, but this one seriously borders on 100% standards compliance. Most users will want to run this command upon system "bootup":

$ import fs

... which loads in a lot of typical filesystem related commands like cp, mv, rm, and less. The command to edit files is:

$ edit file_name.txt

... which you can throw a '-c' flag in order to create a new, empty file at the same time. Alt+s to save edits, Ctrl+x to exit. Several nano key bindings apply.

You can do something like this to see the gui in action:

$ import gui && desk

Then you are on the desktop. You can do an Alt+t to open the terminal while there. This is a decent video to start out with: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tl8I8YcH7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tl8I8YcH7g)

A couple other recent videos can then be found from there.</comment>


Elixir School - <AUTHOR> https://elixirschool.com/en/ <comment><USER2> Can anyone actually explain to me the _exact_ differences between Elixir and Erlang?

What does Elixir offer me that Erlang does not on a LANGUAGE level?

<comment><USER3> The ecosystem is miles ahead. I started with Erlang and I've never thought the syntax of Elixir was any better, but the developer experience of getting a basic web-app up and running using Phoenix compared to say cowboy or yaws is 10x better</comment></comment>


What Is Smart Learning and How to Apply It to Become a Better Learner - <AUTHOR> https://universeofmemory.com/smart-learning-better-learner/ <comment><AUTHOR> It might surprise you, but I am not one of those people who will tell you that learning leads to nothing but wisdom. On the contrary, a stupid learning approach can turn out to be a monumental waste of time. That's why regardless of your area of interest, be it languages or medicine; it's crucial to master the art of smart learning.

It will allow you to get the best of both worlds - productivity and the science of memory. This way, you can rest assured that every minute you spend learning is a minute that makes you smarter.</comment>


Mental fatigue caused by prolonged cognitive load and sympathetic hyperactivity - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3113724/ <comment><USER2> For me this is a point in favor of anti-multitasking techniques such as Pomodoro that force you both to focus and to take clearly delineated breaks. That has the cumulative effect of sparing cognitive load and using your precious cognitive resources on the things that need it most.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (2011) Mental fatigue caused by prolonged cognitive load associated with sympathetic hyperactivity</comment>


Crop circle 'inspired by most beautiful formula in mathematics' appears - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7760079/Crop-circle-inspired-by-most-beautiful-formula-in-mathematics-appears-in-Wiltshire.html

<comment><USER2> It must be a lot of work to make these, wonder why the creators don't want credit.

<comment><USER3> They're typically doing it as art, and the mystery and wingnut reaction is all a part of that. Then there's the prosecution for criminal damage :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eulers_identity></comment>


7 Facts That Show Why PAM Is the Next Hot Technology to Prevent Insider Threats - <AUTHOR> https://www.onionid.com/blog/7-facts-show-pam-next-hot-technology-prevent-insider-threats/ <comment><USER2> Wait. They have an authentication product, and they called it PAM?</comment>


EDBC is Emacs-Lisp-based data access technology - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/redraiment/edbc

<comment><USER2> At first I thought this was some bizarre reinvention of sql-mode, but looking more closely it looks more like an ODBC/JDBC for Emacs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep! Actually, the name "EDBC" is from "JDBC" as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> i like the cute embedding approach (let users write sql directly in an sexpr and then transform it to sql in a macro) but i am wondering if there are any corner cases that break. for example, in postgres, names are quoted using (if i remember correctly) double quotes, while strings are single quotes. would that cause problems?

[edit: swapped double and single, sorry]

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right! Hence, during the process in edbc.el, it would wrap the string with quote('), and replace every quote in the string to two quotes('', not double quotes).

<comment><USER3> no, you're misunderstanding me (i think?). what you describe escapes strings - it sounds correct, but it is not what i am asking about.

for example, when using postgres you might want (for some crazy reason) to have a table called "select". you can do that with:

select * from "select";

where the "select" is _not_ a string, but a quoted name. without the quotes it would be a syntax error (as select is a reserved word). how would that work in edbc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I got it... It will be problem currently. I'll put it in TODO list. Thanks! ^_^

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So basically this enables to use Elisp as a query language (from emacs, of course). How is this better than the sql-mode? It's a genuine question, I would like to have a concrete example of why I would use it over sql.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, EFBC is from another project, Emacs-cgi, which use to create CGI script. Hence, it's run on server only. At first, it's only works with Sqlite, and Add MySQL support yesterday, so I created a new project for it.

<comment><USER4> Oh I see, so you can use emacs to build server apps. That's clever, but then again, is there a special advantage in running the app from emacs?

<comment><USER5> Side note, but elnode: <https://github.com/nicferrier/elnode>

which is used to power <http://www.teamchat.net/>

I think the move to program "real" applications in Emacs is smart. It encourages improvements in Emacs Lisp itself, and it leverages the skills we already have in programming Emacs.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inside the Startup-Generating Secrets of Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/10/y-combinator-start-up-think-tank

<comment><USER2> The first paragraph pretty much nails why I'm getting really sick of the startup / SV culture. "The Art of Ass-Kicking." These don't sound like people I'm interested in talking to or working with.

<comment><USER3> Dismissing people based on a few basic demographics (age, location, education, skill set) doesn't really make you someone interesting to talk or work with either... =)

<comment><USER2> I'm mostly dismissing you because of the annoying title and subtitle of your blog.

<comment><USER4> Huh? "The Art of Ass-Kicking" is a righteous name. I think your opinion regarding this is an outlier.

In fact, your strong reaction to it proves it's a potent name.

<comment><USER5> I think he's pushing against it because it's a lot of hype and buzz, and frankly sounds like it was written by either an advertiser or (even worse) a politician.

I think it's natural for a certain kind of hacker to steer clear of such indicators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Randall has written a very interesting and painfully accurate book on the full YC experience. If you have questions about our YC experience, feel free to ask.

And for more info on the book - check out his site: <http://randallstross.com/thelaunchpad/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Makes YC sounds fairly easy to get into, as long as you have energetic founders from good schools. I'm currently trying to find out what the Kalvin's had achieved before applying.

Good read tho. Thanks.

<comment><USER7> Despite the sound of it, YC is harder to get into than Harvard. This is both statistically true based on acceptance and based on quality of applicant.

<comment><USER8> If it's easier to apply to YC than to Harvard, acceptance rates don't necessarily mean much.

(I suspect it's true that YC is harder to get into than Harvard, but I don't know how to measure that difficulty. Perhaps start by asking what % of people who get into YC would get into Harvard, and vice versa?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sounds like a special kind of hell. I don't think I'd fit at all.</comment>


London, it's over, and it's not me, it's you - <AUTHOR> https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/london-its-over-and-its-not-me-its-you <comment><USER2> Good god, what a bitchy article - and quite sad to see that most of the response here is equally whiny.

London is one of the world's top cities. That presents some substantial upsides, in terms of things like night-life, art, business activity, employment, diversity of the population, and, least tangible but most important, the general vibe of frenetic activity and constant renewal and change that a place like this has.

It also presents substantial downsides, in terms of things like cost of living, noise, pollution, transport congestion, and of course, the general vibe of frenetic activity and constant stress and change.

If you choose to move away from London, fine, go forth and be happy in New Whatevershire in the county of Who Cares... but don't write epic rants about how London's no longer to your taste and therefore it's somehow London's fault.

This irks me even more than anti-gentrification obsessives, who seem to believe that because a family has lived somewhere for a couple generations they should be somehow insulated from the consequences of rapid change and economic growth impacting a whole country.

Life is change. Change impacts everything, including your environment. If a place changes in such a way that you don't like it anymore, you're free to move somewhere else. Do so, and even write a blog post explaining why you moved, if you feel so inclined, but please bottle up the "my viewpoint is the only important viewpoint, and all change I don't like is bad" crap and keep it to yourself.

<comment><USER3> Yes places change and become world cities. However the problem is the people that made it interesting gave the culture, night-life and art can no longer live there or have a reasonable existance.

You kind of at that point end up with really coorporate art and culture as everything has to be high value and you notice the quality really starts to suffer.

Also the people who attend these things find they cannot live there either and it all dies.

<comment><USER4> Exactly.

Also, when it is cheaper to rent in Barcelona and commute to London, you know something is wrong [1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617319](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617319)

<comment><USER5> At the time, it was extremely cheap to fly between the two cities (~40USD roundtrip). I just checked the same airline, same airports and the cheapest, midweek flights are about 200USD roundtrip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apt timing. I'm in the process of bailing out of London and heading about 200 miles west.

Honestly I earn a shit ton of cash but I can't actually find anywhere that I can actually face putting the cash down on. I looked at a new development 3 bedroom flat last week for £419k that was made of the cheapest possible construction and you could hear your neighbours farting through the walls. The view was another new development block, some office buildings, the M4 flyover and a ton of haze in the atmosphere.

So I'm bailing out west a long way. Half the salary but there is less disparity in quality of life and property prices.

<comment><USER7> Yep.

Particularly notable for me in the article:

" Because of this, London is becoming like Washington DC in the USA, where I used to live. DC is dived with poverty at one end serving the wealth at the other, and the wealth doesn't hang around. DC is a place where people go to further their careers before moving on to settle down because it's too expensive to stay."

I bailed out of Washington, DC 11 months ago. Got so sick of trying to grind out a basic quality of life.

I ended up moving to "flyover country", and I love it. Trees, fresh air, good jobs, and a house in a great neighborhood. The people are nice, and I have this crazy thing that some people refer to as liquid assets, others call it disposable income. It's nice.

My brother, who remained behind in DC with his family, has a house that is less than half the square footage of my modestly sized country house. It's cramped, even by urban standards, and majorly in need of repairs. It is also a duplex, and the neighbors sharing the structure are rather snooty and unfriendly. He paid over $500K US for it. Did I mention the schools are so bad he'll have to send his son to private school?

Yeah, I'll take the affordable cities any day over that crap. Unlike my brother, my house isn't making decisions for me, like "can one of us stay home with the new baby instead of putting her in daycare?" (His mortgage had a firm answer of no to their bank account.)

<comment><USER8> I'm living and working in DC now, and this is so true. If I worked here for the next three decades, I could barely afford a one bedroom condo. A family and a house are out of the question. I love the work I do here, but I could easily learn to love other work in a cheaper state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's hard to convey how bad the housing situation is in London to people that have not lived there. Starting income is much lower than Silicon Valley (a very, very good pay for your first job is around ~40,000 pounds/year), housing costs are insanely high, and public transport is crazy expensive.

It's possible to live there as a young person with multiple room-mates, living far away from the city center, but as you get older and want things like privacy or, god forbid, enough space to live with a family, it becomes completely unaffordable. The city center has gotten so expensive that even bankers and russian millionaires cannot live there - it basically exists now to cater to Middle Eastern billionaires: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-17/russians-q...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-17/russians- quit-london-luxury-homes-as-only-super-rich-stay)

London is an awesome city, I'm glad I lived there during my undergrad, but there's no way I could go back there as a 30 year old. The city will constantly be appealing to the young, who don't mind squeezing with three other people into a small apartment in zone 4, or the extremely rich, but for everyone else, move far, far away and you'll be a lot happier, even with everything (and, it's really a lot) that London has to offer.

<comment><USER10> just to compare, what a salary of a 30yo working in tech would be?

<comment><USER11> Probably £55 - £80k a year, depending on how 'hot' the stack you're on is and how willing you are to work for hedge funds / banks.

<comment><USER12> Multiply by ~1.2-1.5 for contracting rates (but then good luck getting a mortgage)

<comment><USER13> This is me. £150K p/a, > 3 years of accounts but banks can't understand low salary and high dividends so won't give me a decent mortgage. Plus my credit rating is fucked from moving to a different rental place each year. I'm looking at auctions instead.

I've heard a rumour Halifax _might_ give mortgages to contractors based on a pro-rated day rate...

<comment><USER14> I've also heard this.

There are also specialist contractor brokers, and I got a mortgage approval for a decent amount through one of them last year, they offered me way more than I could afford.

HSBC don't understand contractors completely but they have offered me a reasonable amount of lending (I make about half what you do, but then I choose to live elsewhere). HSBC seem to have about the best rates at the moment.

<comment><USER13> Thanks i had thought about a loan but didn't follow up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've left London. I went to Canada, Quebec. If I come back I'll go up North.

I'll never work in a "world city" again. It's a waste of time. Over time I grew to hate London and I have zero regrets about leaving. My biggest fear is having to go back.

<comment><USER16> It's not as much of a world city as London or New York but we quite like Berlin (moved there from cities smaller, more expensive and with worse career prospect).

It's not for everyone but if you're in tech or media it can be quite attractive.

<comment><USER15> Germany is different because of the way they make land available for people to build. The UK is all about only letting big builders put up housing and taking a huge cut. This keeps prices nice and high so people have to borrow their lifetime income. This way the maximum economic rent is extracted from workers.

The UK is totally anti-worker. It's a rentier paradise run for the benefit of The City.

Click on Germany and the UK on this and see:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/global- hou...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/global-house-prices)

Ask yourself with 3/4 of new money created via domestic mortgage lending where would UK "growth" be without pulling forward "earnings" through debt?

<comment><USER17> Wow. This looks a lot like a political issue, why do people put up with this?

<comment><USER18> It might be the same reason that explains why poor Americans oppose taxing the rich. The population in general don't have a good idea about the big picture trends that affect them. They accept higher house prices and think that they need to get into the game asap rather than try to change the rules of the game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Average Monthly Rent in Europe [http://i.imgur.com/RKfucgp.gif](http://i.imgur.com/RKfucgp.gif)

Average % Income Spent on Rent in Europe [http://i.imgur.com/himm8Ur.gif](http://i.imgur.com/himm8Ur.gif)

The reason the UK is so high is because London literally drags the whole country up to the top of the ranking (not necessarily good) - Ireland would have vaguely similar rents to the UK discounting London and these two images help show that London is a bit rent mad.

<comment><USER3> Whilst London is quite apart from the rest of the UK. It isn't the only place in the UK with disproprtionately high rents. Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, anywhere with a bouyant jobs market you pay over the odds for compared to Europe.

Granted not as high as London, but as a % of income not dissimilar at the end of the month.

<comment><USER20> If you compare _local_ earnings to house prices, London is, in fact is only #2, behind Oxford.[1] The problem with Oxford and Cambridge (as well as a place like Reading) is that they are still within commutable distance from London (Oxford and Reading slightly more so than Cambridge), which means you get people who earn well even for London standards who live in those cities and commute, in turn making those places more expensive. Some of the other cities, like Edinburgh, Manchester (in parts) and Aberdeen (oil) are certainly pricey as well, but they are not nearly as expensive as the South of England.

[1]: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/house- prices/114...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/house- prices/11436459/Welcome-to-Britains-most-unaffordable-spot-its-not- London.html)

<comment><USER21> Oxford is indeed pretty bad. I have to live ~20 miles from the centre, and even then it's not cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> He's got some good points. I lived in London for a long time, but never bought because it just seemed so insane.

When you're young it just about works, though: you want to have friends around, so why not share a house with them? That way it's still expensive, but you have someone to hang out with. And your expenses as a single guy are not exactly high. You don't need a car as it's just you and your bag on the tube. You're drinking anyway, so it's either tube or cab. What you care about is seeing loads of other young people, and London is great for that.

When you get a family, everything turns against living there. You can barely stand on most tube trains, so good luck getting the pram on board (and god help you if you need a wheelchair). You want to take the kid out of town? There's a traffic jam in every direction. Want to find a school for the kids? Good luck getting in the catchment. Some of them are actually less than a literal stone's throw. Private school? Sure, but school's have to pay rent too. It's not the teachers taking home all those fees.

IMO the best compromise is one of the commuter towns. Some of them have fast trains. They are still expensive, and the train itself isn't cheap either. But you get a little more space, a decent selection of things parents want, and the schools are not bad. Even better, live in a commuter town but work remotely. Then you can network, see people now and again, but not have to get in the sardine can each morning.

<comment><USER23> You've clearly never experienced the traffic in Mumbai, Bangkok, or Moscow. London isn't exceptional.

<comment><USER22> Totally irrelevant. London traffic is bad. Who cares that it may be worse elsewhere?

<comment><USER23> Point being that it is a normal expectation for a large populous city anywhere and says nothing whatsoever about London (other than London may actually be doing quite well as far as traffic goes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's why I left too, pretty much.

On the + side, London and its surroundings has a zillion jobs, some of them interesting. Out in the provinces, the job market for devs tends to be for plodders.

<comment><USER14> I was going to be very sarcastic here but decided to improve my tone.

While a lot of the non-London jobs are of the plodding type, there are many that aren't, and there are areas of concentrated, cutting edge tech work outside of London. Cambridge, for example.

<comment><USER25> Property in Cambridge is also very expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is what happened with me a few years back. Was there nearly ten years. Five years in I would have laughed in your face at the idea of leaving, but the expense, the cramped conditions and crowded feel, the bad air... all eventually got to me.

I now live an hour and a half away by train. It's nice here. And I can still come to visit some of my friends in London quicker than they can visit each other.

<comment><USER26> This would be great, except if the rent doesn't get you, the train fare will. Coming from the U.S., I had to pick my jaw off the floor when I saw what they charge, it's obscene. Say what you will about U.S. public transportation, at least it's cheap. Here in the UK if you so much as glance sideways at a city bus, it'll be five-pounds-change.

<comment><USER27> Eh, all bus journeys in London cost exactly 1.50

<comment><USER28> The underground is £4.80 for a single fare in zones 1-3, £2.30 if you use the oyster; double for return ticket.

<comment><USER29> Yes, but rarely anyone pays that. Mostly because there's a daily cap of less than £10 (depending on which zones you traveled during the day).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Where to start?

>> "as someone whose salary is only five figured"

That's a pretty huge range from very poor to quite well off, without being more specific it's hard to judge any of the claims the author makes.

>> "I don't think I'm asking for much, I only want a secure family home with a garden, enough money saved for a good pension, access to fresh air, and some peace and quiet."

That's actually asking quite a lot from a city especially a huge capital city. Pretty hard to find peace and quiet in capital city - there's usually a lot going on. But to be fair in London you actually can find it in one of the many parks. Also, there aren't enough apartments/houses (hence high rents) yet you think asking for one with a garden isn't asking a lot.

>> "zone 4 paying out a minimum of £1200 pcm for a 1 bed flat"

Doesn't sound accurate to me. I've been looking at 1 bed flats recently in zone 2 and there are decent places going for £1300 so I'd expect zone 4 to be a lot less expensive.

<comment><USER14> >> That's a pretty huge range from very poor to quite well off, without being more specific it's hard to judge any of the claims the author makes.

Not really, unless you're _very_ high earning then getting what he wanted, a three+ bed house with a garden, and not so far away as to make life difficult for commuting, is very very expensive.

>> That's actually asking quite a lot from a city especially a huge capital city. Pretty hard to find peace and quiet in capital city - there's usually a lot going on. But to be fair in London you actually can find it in one of the many parks. Also, there aren't enough apartments/houses (hence high rents) yet you think asking for one with a garden isn't asking a lot.

That's exactly the point, in most of the country and most of the world it's not asking that much.

He's reached a state where the benefits of 'city' do not outweigh the compromises one has to make to live there.

If that balance is not something that's tipped for you (yet?) then cool. For many, many of us it has.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, but in one of the world's top cities, asking for a 3-bed house with garden and fresh air - wtf, why not ask for a hunting forest while you're at it?

Do you ask for a 3-bed house with garden in Manhattan? Do you think a 3-bed house with garden in downtown Tokyo is just a reasonable expectation for the average person? I'd love my 3-bed house with garden just off the Champs Elysés, too, why not. Perhaps one on the space station too.

London is one of the world's top cities. If you don't want to live there, fine - but don't bitch about how unfair it is that you can't get some kind of dream property in one of the most desirable places in the world, where tens if not hundreds of millions of people want to live in a space that only supports a fraction of that...

<comment><USER30> You have to be reasonable about commute times of course. What's reasonable is dependent on the city size, but a 1hr commute in either end of the work day is probably reasonable in big cities, in the biggest ones such as London, Paris or Tokyo you probably have to accept 2h (And if that isn't reasonable to you, you have to move. I could never do a 1.5 or 2h commute).

I can only assume that what he meant was that it wasn't reasonable to find a 3bedroom house with a small guarden _within reasonable commute distance_ and _reasonable budget_.

When moving in stockholm I looked for just this, (sub 1h commute, 3bedrooms) and had to make a heatmap for public transit times in order to find the good spots. Needed to be in the orange (40minute travel) to have <1h door-to-door with a 10minute walk to/from public transport. [http://commutemap.azurewebsites.net/](http://commutemap.azurewebsites.net/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Spent 3 days in London a while back and at one point I felt as though I was inhaling airborne bits of glass.

<comment><USER32> Air pollution in some parts of London is severe. Life-limiting -- people die because of it.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england- london-20664807](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-20664807)

> The paper, Air Pollution in London, produced by the Assembly's Health and > Environment Committee, reports 8.3% of deaths in Westminster are > attributable to man-made airborne particles.

> In Kensington and Chelsea it is 8.3% and in Tower Hamlets 8.1%.

> Bromley and Havering have the lowest proportion of pollution-related deaths > in London, both 6.3%, but are still above the England average of 5.6%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm from Portugal and have lived as a working adult in Lisbon, Barcelona and London. Even though I was earning more than the average salary in both Lisbon and Barcelona it would impossible to be able to buy decent property in the nice parts of these cities as they are as out of reach as the nice areas of London for normal people. I just bought a garden flat with a garage in zone 4 and my commute is so relaxed I can even code on the train. And, I don't need to worry about the lack of interesting and well paid jobs as I used to in Portugal and Spain. Personally I have done well by moving to London, and I know a lot of others with similar stories coming from countries with "low rent".

</comment><comment><USER34> What on earth is "pcm"? Do you apply pulse code modulation to money in the UK?

<comment><USER35> 'per calendar month' \- in the UK there's a bit of a tradition of quoting rental prices (and footballers' wages) per week, so it's best to specify which you mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can see London begining to hollow out at some point like it has before. Slums will begin to rise again (if some areas aren't already close to being that already).

Vast wealth will be left in pockets and as all the mid earners leave to try have a better life in the countryside and elsewhere the reason London was successful in the first place, the culture and those that create it will be in deficit. Then the rich will see they've paid over the top for property and they too will leave.

Then London will begin again. Like it has multiple times.

<comment><USER15> Are you sure? Looks like the last stage of failure post-empire to me. I guess China did come back, but it took a while...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I got bored of London, worked in SF for a while and enjoyed it there, but had no chance getting a visa.

I got back to London (could never really afford to live in the city centre) and then moved to Berlin and loved it. But, you can get too comfortable in some places, so I'm back in London again, but I miss Berlin.

Never go back though, if I had the chance I'd move on to somewhere new in Europe for sure. London's great though, more diversity than many, many places, and that's a huge reason to stay.

</comment><comment><USER29> As someone who lives in London, this is fake.

>> small flat in zone 4 paying out a minimum of £1200 pcm for a 1 bed flat,

Mate, I pay 1600 for a two bedroom big flat with an awesome view (zone 2). Prices didn't get that ridiculous yet.

>>> I was recently charged nine quid for two pints of ale and I took offence.

Fuck you, that's bullshit. If you actually paid that, you've been robbed.

>>>It is effectively out of service on weekends and bank holidays

Yeah, they need to do maintenance regularly, idiot. There's more than one way to get somewhere, you know? It's not like they close the city down.

TLDR this guy may have valid reasons to leave London and the article is well written, but a lot of "facts" are just plain made up or exaggerated.

EDIT

I misread as 9 quid for one pint. 9 for two pints is most definitely correct.

<comment><USER37> I don't agree with his negative attitude, but I don't think he's far off in terms of his facts:

\- I think nine pounds for two pints of ale is about right anywhere in London. Go somewhere a bit cool and it's easily over ten

\- I pay £1400 for a two bed in zone 2 which is cheap, I think the average is around £1600. I recently started looking at one beds in the same area and they are around £1200

<comment><USER29> \- nine pounds a pint is excessive. Even at Hawksmoor it's half that. Wetherspoons a third that. Simply not true.

\- yes, zone 2. He talks about zone 4.

<comment><USER11> He says 9 pounds for two pints. £4.50 a pint sounds about right for London.

<comment><USER29> Oh ouch, that was my incredibly dumb mistake. Thanks for pointing that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I went to University in London and lived there for 10 years. I loved the city to death. Back then in the mid-90s we thought property was over valued, but in truth a 2 bedroom flat at around 80k in zone 2/3 was affordable on a modest income. I liked the culture, the people and walking around the city which was always so alive.

Despite all that when I decided to get married and have a family I looked elsewhere. Perhaps ironically I settled in Vancouver which is suffering a lot of the same issues as London as so many others had the same idea.

Good article but it's really just a fact of life that if you live somewhere that many people want to live, you must compete with them for rental and real estate.

</comment><comment><USER39> Completely echo this article except I'm working on moving from 5 figure to 6 figures in order to get the life I want. I doubt the article writer can get 6 figures in Cupar.

<comment><USER33> That is what I and other people I know did - work up to a better salary.

If you don't mind living in an area without the Tube you can find some really nice leafy places with a great lifestyle.

Where I live now it doesn't even feel like a big city and I am 20 minutes by train to the center.

<comment><USER39> Yep, I couldn't agree more... I used to be slightly out of the M25 in a nice area but my partner wanted to move closer to her work and so (sadly) we in zone 6.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> And San Francisco is even more expensive...

This is just supply and demand - there are a lot of people who want to live in world cities like London, but a limited supply of housing.

<comment><USER15> Do you really know about this or is this just middle-school economics? Do you know about the London mkt?

Lots of the more expensive parts of London are empty at night. London is open season for money laundering through housing. Also do you know how money is created? How is it that people can suddenly pay $600k on a modest salary?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think this is the housing bubble correcting itself. Good.

<comment><USER15> Nope the UK establishment will double down on it again as the UK is using land to print money. Without this reality catches up with UK living standards.

It will crash but they won't just let it happen.

<comment><USER42> They can't let it happen. They are propping up the house of cards with more cards.

If the bubble pops, then Thatcher's children and children's children will be proper screwed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I recently visited London from the US and stayed at my aunt and uncles house on the south coast. Their old little house in is worth £600,000 which is insane (12X what they paid for it), simply because it's a hour or so by train to London! The price inflation of real estate anywhere near London is worse than SF. Compared to that in D/FW area my modern 2000sf house is $180,000.

<comment><USER7> The Brits won't know what you mean by D/FW.

(Dallas/Fort Worth metro area in Texas)

To be fair, Texas real-estate is super cheap because there's tons of land that doesn't have many trees on it. It makes building new housing stock super quick, easy, and cheap. But to your point, D/FW is an awesome part of the country. Plenty of culture, plenty to do, plenty of jobs. (I'd be lying if I said I like it better than Austin though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> omg... i am close to making this decision myself ! just sick and tired of the soaring house prices in london.

<comment><USER12> I'm not bothered about the house prices but the incessant apartmentisation of every bit of land (e.g. Thames Path, east of Greenwich) and general shitness of the city (e.g. Greenwich, weekend) has brought me to the same decision.

Depending on job and other situations, I'm hoping to be out of London this time next year - probably somewhere like Milton Keynes.

<comment><USER44> tbh the prices in Milton Keynes have gone up as well. (P.S i am looking for houses there too !)

<comment><USER12> Yeah but I can get a one bed flat there for less or the same as I'm paying for a studio now. Plus the environment is just a lot nicer (I was there last weekend walking down the canal and it was LOVELY.)

<comment><USER44> True... you get a lot for the price of a studio in London really. lol. I was there too ! although it was rainy in MK when i reached there. I liked the place too. Its not rich in heritage so to speak. But for a decent middle class living with family and kids I think its a nice place.

Also not to mention you could commute to Birmingham should you get a good offer from there.

<comment><USER12> I enjoyed* the Saturday afternoon rain as I walked back from the centre to Caldecotte Lake. Took my shoes a day to dry out. Most damp. (But still a lot nicer than London canal walks.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Strange article. I moved out of London to a house with a garden that would be affordable to a couple on the average salary [edit: to a couple both earning the average UK salary]. I am 20 miles as the crow flies from the centre of London.

<comment><USER46> As a matter of interest, what do you think an average salary is? It's a year old now, but the Guardian had an article detailing average UK salaries[1] and the median average household income for a couple in the UK is £44,200. That's not each, that's their total income. Do you _really_ think a couple earning that much can afford a house 20 miles from the center of London? That's barely outside of the M25.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes- how-...](http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes-how-salary- compare)

<comment><USER45> Average UK salary is £26K according to Google, so I just doubled that. So OK, I meant a couple who between them earn in total around £52K p.a. and can bring along a deposit of £50K (reduce the deposit by £3.50 for every £1 extra that they earn above £50K). That'll bring you to near enough £240K which is what I paid for a 2 bed house with a large garden.

Note the article is claiming you need to be on a six figure salary to live anywhere near London, which is a load of tosh.

<comment><USER46> _Average UK salary is £26K according to Google_

That's the mean average though, and it assumes a standard Bell curve distribution - it's completely wrong and obfuscates the truth horribly. There are _a lot_ more low income earners than high income earners. If you look at the Guardian article I linked to you'll see that ~70% of people in the UK earn less than £25k or less (all the adults in the seventh decile and below).

 _Note the article is claiming you need to be on a six figure salary to live anywhere near London, which is a load of tosh._

If you're not in a relationship where you can buy a house together I'd say you certainly need to be in at least the top 10% of earners (>£60,500). Sure, that's not a six-figure salary, but it indicates that the over-whelming majority of people _have_ been priced out of London, which is the spirit of the article.

<comment><USER47> No, it is not the mean average, it is the median. You are quoting the wrong statistics - you are including part-timers, but he is talking of the median full-time earnings, which are actually 27.2k on average nationwide according to the ASHE. The median full-time salary in Greater London is 32.8k, and still 29.9k in the outer South East.

Of course your broader point still stands - in London you can only own a house if you earn in the top deciles, or if you inherit a house or get gifted a deposit by parents/grandparents who got lucky in the house price boom. The latter is the default way.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The New Music Industry (A Band's View) - <AUTHOR> http://cobrapunchers.blogspot.com/2007/04/new-music-industry.html <comment><USER2> I only ever cringed at the idea of giving away music for free out of the fear that it would be stolen. I don't mean pirated, I mean I was afraid that a company would steal my copyright and claim it as their own.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very interesting, I think they are on the right track. I have many friends who are in indie bands, and it's true that a vast amount of their income is from concerts and merch sales. I think this even extends to big bands, but I don't know that first hand. CD sales are only good for the manufacturers and the labels.

The only problem that I see with what they said in the article, is that it is very difficult for a band with little/no outside exposure to generate enough traffic to their website to monetize ads. Most of my friends have severely neglected their own band websites in favor of their Myspace page, just because they don't get near as many hits there.

There has to be a better way. What do you guys think?

</comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome and very close to our philosophy.

-Zaid</comment>


Highlights From Yesterday's Secret "Welcome To AOL" Meeting - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/01/eh-oh-well/

<comment><USER2> I refreshed the article twice before I realised the image was intentionally made to look half loaded. A subtle dig at AOL no doubt :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this an "in-your-face" resignation letter?

<comment><USER4> I can't tell if this is _actual_ insubordination, or an AOL-approved PR move designed to emphasize that Techcrunch will still be pugnacious.

<comment><USER5> I doubt AOL told them to do this, beyond maybe a vague "have fun with the acquisition." But this isn't really insubordination. He revealed almost nothing about the actual meeting. He just made a bunch of jokes because it's fun and they're trying very hard to show that they're still the same old TechCrunch despite their new owner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't see the point of posting digs at someone who just handed you millions and millions of dollars. Nobody forced TC to sell.

<comment><USER7> It'd be AOL-sanctioned and the intention would be to quickly give readers the impression that the acquisition won't change TC. Of course, by doing this, TC have changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, playing with fire, though it's somewhat entertaining from this side.

Keep in mind, AOL has no problem firing people. They used to have tens of thousands of call center workers in the states. Now all those workers are gone and replaced with re-routed overseas calls.

</comment><comment><USER9> But what were the gifts? Restless mind wants to know.

</comment><comment><USER10> _The rest of the meeting, though, was designated as an "internal AOL meeting" and as such was strictly off the record. However, after giving that warning, the very next thing that Eun said was that we should all "keep doing what we do"._

 _Here then are the details of the meeting…_

This is very funny.

I wonder if he's actually putting himself in legal risk if he signed an employment contract and still did that.

<comment><USER11> There's no risk. Even if this isn't part of image maintenance, "AOL's TechCrunch fires writer for leaking orientation details" isn't really the headline I think anyone over there is looking for.

And even if AOL were that bone-headed (they aren't), Paul Carr could ride the wave of the ensuing press to any other gig he wanted.

<comment><USER8> But AOL management/HR _is_ that "bone-headed". When they closed their callcenters they gave no notice, everyone (1200+ people per center) showed up one day and they were all fired, even people who worked there for a decade or more.

<comment><USER11> AOL has had scant need for callcenters for quite awhile, so I'll go out on a limb and guess this was a few years ago. So yeah, pretty boneheaded.

Whenever it was, that may as well be a different company. Tim Armstrong's AOL, for example, offered buyouts to staff this year, and 1,100 took them up on it, before formal layoffs went down. So no more blindsiding, I think. Say what you want about AOL's clueless past (lol Randy Falco, etc) Armstrong is emphatically _not_ an idiot and he's starting to earn my respect in the impossible job of turning that ship.

Layoffs aside, remember that the TechCrunch acquisition has Armstrong's personal attention. Paul Carr isn't a mailroom clerk at a satellite office – he's a high profile component of a crown jewel that AOL has spent some real money to snag. That money was an investment in both people and reputation. Pissing away both over a little mischief that only furthers the public perception of the investment is just unfathomable. It would never get as far as AOL HR.

<comment><USER12> That money AOL invested..

goes to three people: MA, Heather, and one other person and no writers..

AOL overpaid for window dressing

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what the breakdown of the payout is. I'm sure Arrington got a nice chunk of cash/stock, what about the other writers, developers, ad sales people, etc...</comment>


Why Networking Is Overrated - <AUTHOR> http://insights.dice.com/2015/06/05/networking-overrated/

<comment><USER2> Being good at networking and being an expert in your field are not mutually exclusive.</comment>


The Coming Mental Health Crisis as Remote Working Surges - <AUTHOR> https://www.ozy.com/the-new-and-the-next/the-coming-mental-health-toll-on-remote-workers <comment><USER2> I know plenty of people whose mental health was damaged in the office by spending all day with people who don't care about each other. In the best case, they'll be cordial and professional. The worse cases are much worse. And they'll forget about you the minute you leave the company.

Personally, I'd prefer to spend my day at home and go out to meet actual friends and family after work.

Modern office work is not the default state of humanity, let's not pretend otherwise. I bet a lot of people would be happier with a modern version of farming their own land and spending time with friends and family.

</comment><comment><USER3> "The research was conducted by OFFICE SUPPLY COMPANY Viking"

<comment><USER4> Care to elaborate on why you think this is important to the discussion? I'll assume you mean to point out some kind of ill intent, but man, even at my most conspiratorial I'm coming up empty.

<comment><USER5> I'd say the source of any research is an interesting data point without assuming additional intent

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're a parent trying to work from home while simultaneously keeping one or multiple children occupied and/or working on their own schoolwork, the mental stress is magnified. And it's not going away any time soon.

</comment><comment><USER7> I suspect any mental health issues are far more likely to do with the virus, and lockdown.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm actually hosting a webinar today on this very topic if interested: [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/101595382524](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/101595382524)

</comment><comment><USER9> I feel like we have already been in a mental health crisis for at least the last few decades, or at least it has steadily declined amongst the general population</comment>