Facebook's Laughable Data Shows 'LOL' Isn't Funny Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-laughable-data-shows-lol-isnt-funny-anymore-1439238707?mod=LS1

<comment><USER2> Just anecdotally, many people I know never really used "LOL" unless we were being sarcastic. It always reminded me of the early/mid 90's when "The Internet!" started getting a lot of press and there were articles all over the place (in print, natch) about how to talk in "internet speak".

They'd list all of these abbreviations like "LOL" and "ROFL" among others that struck us, as likely dickish teenagers who considered ourselves savvy due to having used BBSes and IRS, like a signifier of "AOL-speak" used by the inexperienced noobs who learned about "The Internet!" from a magazine article.

Probably an unfair assessment and not really flattering considering we had only been using this stuff since the mid/late 1980s at best, but such is the folly of youth ;) Still, I never really lost that association of "LOL" with the annoyance I felt back at age 17 or 18 when "AOL kiddies" started showing up on IRC and MUDs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've found a significant number of older people think "LOL" is an abbreviation for "lots of love" or "lots of laughs" rather than "laughing out loud".

<comment><USER4> where does this come from? what's the origin of the "lots of love" meaning?

<comment><USER5> I think it was a prank for teaching people the wrong meaning. Besides this joke site is quite funny about it:

[http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Lol](http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Lol)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never used LOL. Most of all because it sounds sarcastic and I can think of better ways to sound sarcastic than using LOL. Since 20 years ago when I started communicating over the Internet I've been using the standard smiley, which is pretty old [1] and sometimes "haaaaahahahahahaha" to denote extreme laughter :-)

[1] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/mbj/Smiley/Jok...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/mbj/Smiley/Joke_Thread.html)

<comment><USER7> I never knew that people would consider ":-)" as laughing. For me it's just a smile, in the literal sense. And if I say something funny and you just smile I'd consider it a "that wasn't really funny, idiot" rather than a laugh. But good to know people think that way about that emoticon.

<comment><USER6> Well, in online conversations I don't really laugh as I don't find anything to be that funny. Actually judging by my online conversations on Facebook with those new emoticons, it seems to me that everybody online has lots of laughs, crawling over the floor, pissing themselves and I'm wondering what I'm missing, or what are those people smoking. But don't worry, as if I :-), that's not a pity laugh or sarcasm.

<comment><USER7> Nearly sounds sad, that you don't have much to laugh in online conversations. I sometimes nearly fall from the chair because I laugh so hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe "new internet people" or "normal people" don't even know "lol" anymore. Back in the days we spend our youth in IRC or bbs where these abbreviations were common. But nowadays people connect with people they already know in real life on facebook and talk with them like they would in real life. (to a certain degree ;-) )

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe partially in interesting/cause is haha is easier to type then lol (at least on qwerty with 2 hands).

<comment><USER10> You know, this is probably a big part of it. On a touchscreen 'haha' and 'hehe' are way easier.

<comment><USER11> I'm confident that this is not why I say 'haha'. 'LOL' or 'lol' sounds sarcastic or at-best ironic to me. Certain people I know still use it at the end of sentences, but I (without meaning to) find it childish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Years of watching The Simpsons wired my brain in a way that associates " _haha_ " with sarcasm[0].

I use " _hhhhh_ " instead, easy to type and makes a more "realistic" sound to me.

0.[https://youtu.be/rX7wtNOkuHo](https://youtu.be/rX7wtNOkuHo)

<comment><USER7> Depends on people's language I think. For me (German) "hhhh" sounds in my head like two dogs doing it, which might also be fun, but in a different way. But in fact there are many countries where they write "hhh" for laughing, so you're not alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The votes on this website says 20% use Lol. (which implies more older people read wsj)

</comment><comment><USER14> My wife and her Thai friends frequently use "555" (the Thai word for "5" being "ha"). It's a nice cross-over between the two languages, and of course quite easy to type.

<comment><USER15> xaxaxa

jajaja

huehuehue

Internet games teach you a lot of things :)

<comment><USER16> kekekeke

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At first I was surprised, but it's true. I saw a person writing "lol" a few days ago and it was really strange to read that nowadays. I thought that it is due to my increasing age, though. Didn't know the whole world stopped lolling.

</comment><comment><USER17> Anecdata:

My local friends and I have always just used "heh", but even 10–15 years ago, a bunch of my friends from Spanish-speaking cultures were using "j(a|e)+" or some approximate.

</comment><comment><USER18> > ITT: People reminiscing about the old days or explaining how they, too, say > haha.

</comment><comment><USER19> ha</comment>


Rust in Production (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.figma.com/blog/rust-in-production-at-figma/ <comment><USER2> Things that have changed:

\- NLL (non lexical lifetimes) are now in stable, so working with lifetimes and references is a bit easier

\- stack traces: failure is still around, it's got a fairly large group using it, it seems. I prefer the std error handling route most times.

\- async is hard: it's still pretty hard

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately failure and errorchain appear to not be cool anymore (ie I've noticed quite a few people are migrating away from failure just like they did from errorchain) and there doesn't appear to be any push from the Rust team as of yet.

I think it's a serious problem as your code base grows and I wish we had some more work on the RFC front.

<comment><USER2> Given the vanilla error handling is my favorite of the lot, I don't really consider it a bad thing that people are moving away from it.

There are some downsides, like the lack of stack traces, but it's a nice pattern. Does it have to be 'one size fits all'?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> quite smart approach of having a nodejs frontend doing what it's good at (async) calling the backend via simple subprocess/stdio communication. they could almost say they invented CGI :)

<comment><USER5> > calling the backend via simple subprocess/stdio communication

why is this faster/better than the frontend calling the backend through say, nginx proxy_pass or REST HTTP calls?

<comment> nevi-me I did this recently, where I compared going through FFI from Java to Rust, vs through gRPC. gRPC wasn't that much slower than FFI, and its benefit would be that I could have 2 services in the network.

FFI had overhead, but its performance profile was consistent, very little fluctuation in runtime.

<comment><USER5> Did you also test HTTP? Did you publish these results anywhere?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone know if the first con listed has improved with the introduction of non- lexical lifetimes?

<comment><USER7> I would say it has improved quite a bit, but they are still there. It varies quite a bit on what you are doing. At work we have a modest sized project, converted from C, being used and updated for about a year. I don't think it has had any significant lifetime battles; I don't think there are even explicit lifetimes in the source.

Data structures exercises will be a different story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rust seems like the right answer for a lot of things except writing servers. For that, Elixir with its Erlang VM seems like a better answer.

<comment><USER9> Are you aware of actix? What do you think of it?

<comment><USER8> I'm not aware, to be honest. I'm only now learning Elixir for a few weeks now and plan on taking up Rust next after building a small Elixir project.

What I found was: \- Elixir, has awesome support for concurrency and zero- downtime deployments. Runs on Erlang VM. Inspired by Ruby.

\- Rust - replacement C/C++ as the low-level programming language of the future for people who want to write pretty code.

<comment><USER9> > has awesome support for concurrency

so does rust.

> Rust - replacement C/C++ as the low-level programming language of the future > for people who want to write pretty code.

It's not just that, it also replaces say python or ruby on the serverside.

> write pretty code.

Yeah, no, it's for people who want to be productive in a low level language.

<comment><USER10> The erlang vm is explicitly designed for concurrency. I wrote the raft protocol in elixir in about 300 lines of code.

Rust is great, but it's pretty hard to argue that any language has more awesome support for concurrency than the beam languages.

<comment><USER9> Ok let's talk concrete implementation.

Rust: [https://github.com/pingcap/raft-rs](https://github.com/pingcap/raft-rs) LOC: 15417

Erlang: [https://github.com/rabbitmq/ra](https://github.com/rabbitmq/ra) LOC: 18012

Lines of code is not the only metric. I'm actually really curious about Erlang and Elixir but to be honest I do like type systems a lot. I also like the idea of idk...having one language for my os, db, front-end.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately I can't show you my code since it's closed. Just looking at the two codebases, about half of the erlang implementation is static typechecking hints, and I don't know if GitHub counts the documentation HTML as LOC.

As an example of convenient concurrency, in Erlang vm gives you process node id translation. What that means is that if you're sending a message between threads in two instances in a cluster of VMs, you can send your the mailbox address of your local thread and have it converted on transmit to the equivalent remote thread address on the remote machine. Literally one less thing you don't have to worry about, and clustering is a first class citizen in the language, no libraries necessary.

Basically, the dev process was, I wrote my raft implementation, tested it locally and extensively (including property tests) using multiple local threads, and did almost nothing (three lines of code to provide a mailbox Oracle) and had a solution that worked across the network.

If you're curious about BEAM languages, I wouldn't worry about type systems. If anything I think hypercorrectness in the languages leads to a false sense of comfort about the quality of your code that can get in the way of building resilient, designed to fail gracefully systems. Typechecking can catch errors early and save you dev and debug time, but static typechecking is probably enough for about 80% of those concerns.

Erlang languages come with static typechecking. It's kind of a pain in the butt out of the box. I don't know about erlang, but if you code in vscode, the elixir_ls plugin engages the static typechecking in such a transparent fashion that I've forgotten to install the makes-static-typechecker-easier library and it's caught code problems for my junior dev (who I haven't taught typechecking yet). Despite it being optional in the language, the vscode plugin makes it ever so ugly to not annotate types that my very minor obsessive tendencies lead me to annotate everything.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MacOS 10.14 Mojave: The Ars Technica Review - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/09/macos-10-14-mojave-the-ars-technica-review/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or will Dark Mode be most useful with OLED displays that have black blacks (that is, no power to the pixel, rather than power to a pixel that emits a black color)?</comment>


Shades and Hues – a game of color gradients - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/shades-and-hues-a-game-of-color-gradients <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys,

Creator of the game here. It was my first Android app that I published. Created the orignal game in C# .NET with just GDI+ Draw calls.

Android version was created by drawing to a canvas (native; Android Studio).

Currently working on a Xbox One version using UWP and Canvas/Shapes.</comment>


ASk HN the case for going all OpenID Vs. local accounts Vs. Both - <AUTHOR>

We are implementing a user system and wanted to base it entirely off OpenID. We will store some account details, but use OpenID for all authentication and such. We were curious how much pushback we will get from people that don't have OpenID or like have separate accounts for various things. Who want to sign up and make a password on our system. Should we allow both? Anyone with experience with either case? <comment><USER2> I think it depends on a number of things, among them being:

• is your target audience geeky? (that is, will the people coming to your site already know what OpenID is, or will you have to educate them on it?)

• how in-demand do you anticipate your service being? (that is, do you think it'll be _so_ compelling that people will overcome the hurdle of having to sign up for an OpenID / figure out which of their OpenID providers to use?)

• are there other services in the same vein that use OpenID? (that is, is there precedent?)

• is there an alternate form of ID (Twitter? Facebook?) that would make more sense for your anticipated userbase?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. We are a really geeky service. I think we can accept facebook and twitter as forms of openid as they implement the protocol. I think we are going to move forward with just openID and see what kind of demand or requests we get to create our own password system.</comment></comment>


Low Income - <AUTHOR>

If you are living the dream in SF working for a startup and making less than $60K annual salary you are in luck! You are considered low income. You should apply for assisted living (subsidized housing) through the department of Housing and Urban Development.<p>Reference: http://homeguides.sfgate.com/hud-guidelines-low-income-1911.html <comment><USER2> I wouldn't count on it in the near future: the waitlists for SF are currently full and not accepting new entries. See the bottom of: 1) <http://sfha.org/Public-Housing-Information.html>; and 2) <http://sfha.org/Information--Section-8.html>

In addition, Section 8 housing, which has a movable housing voucher and the most options, uses the lower 50%-of-median threshold ("very low income"). The housing that has the higher 80%-of-median limit is in public housing, which has fairly recently gone to that higher limit partly to improve finances (if you have higher income, you pay more rent, though it's still subsidized), and partly to encourage mixed-income communities rather than filling "the projects" with 100% extremely poor people, which has in the past been blamed for turning them into high-crime ghettoes. Nonetheless they still have a poor reputation as places to live, and tend not to be very successful attracting middle-class residents, even with the subsidy.

</comment><comment><USER3> And thru that program you can also purchase home in SF that are way below market rate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. I didn't know that.</comment></comment>


With Station F, Paris will have the world's biggest startup campus - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/05/with-station-f-paris-will-have-the-worlds-biggest-startup-campus/ <comment> pi-err Kudos to the team who made it happen. I'm French and happy this comes to life.

I still have the feeling this is more of a stunt to bring attention on Station F than on the startups themselves. Beyond the buzz, there is very little vision. It's a giant intensive farm in a denser, currently-under-redevelopment neighborhood.

In this super dense setting, they're piling up various talent for sort-of-low- cost rents, hoping to raise unicorns thanks to nearby campuses, increased VC flow in Paris and general attention towards startups. This strikes me as a formula thought out by people who have never actually been in a successful startup (Roxanne Varza has been successful at _talking about_ startups, never at actually building things).

One outcome is that all those points successfully connect together. Another, more probable outcome is that it will turn out impossible to keep focus, talent and purpose in a giant, open space (also probably soon to be under- maintained judging by French standards).

<comment><USER2> If I may add a bit of context: while Station F is indeed a project of Xavier Niel (Free/Illiad/Kima/42...), it is also a project with considerable public support.

Several french regions have their (semi-)publicly funded equivalent of Station F (Lille with Plaine Images & Euratechnologies, Nantes with La Cantine, ...) and while there is a considerable quantity of startups in Paris, there is no local de facto hub. I'd argue that Le Sentier area plays that role, but it's a neighborhood where lots of startup happen to be located. In the early 00s it was dubbed "Silicon Sentier".

Plaine Images & Euratechnologies have been built in former industrial complexes with the aim of redynamizing local ecosystem as a whole. Anne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor, hopes to do the same to the XIII arrondissement.

<comment><USER3> _Nantes with La Cantine_

When I was in Nantes this summer, I kept seeing subtle little details that made me think something interesting was going on. Compagnie La Machine (with its multi-story robotic spiders [http://www.lamachine.fr/](http://www.lamachine.fr/)) seems to be surrounded by a maker scene, and even perfectly ordinary magazine shops carried Open Silicium ([http://www.opensilicium.com/](http://www.opensilicium.com/)) a really nice embedded systems magazine that covers advanced hobbyist and professional concerns. This is a lot harder core and more specialized than the Linux Journal, for example, and when I've shown it off to US booksellers specializing in "maker"-related publications, they just about drooled.

Combine that with the French startups I saw at La French Touch in New York a couple of years ago, and some of the recent legislative changes the government was supposedly working on, and I kinda wanted to hang around and see what was up. I have a sneaking suspicion that the French have all the raw ingredients for an excellent startup scene, but that funding might still be something of a struggle.

<comment><USER2> Have a look at what Plaine Images is doing with their Imaginarium, coupled with their incubator & accelerator:

[http://www.plaine-images.fr/en/services-2/](http://www.plaine- images.fr/en/services-2/)

It's located in a former textile factory and combines both openspace/co- working spaces, private offices in varying sizes. It also has a strong focus on creative industries (gaming, VR, audio...). Several companies that have started there have an excellent track record and several world-class leaders are in talks with them.

If you mix public subsidies + good space design + integration in the socio- economical fabric + specialization on a vertical, you end up with very high potential and growth. That's exactly what's happening right now at Plaine Images, even though it's not very well known outside of Europe.

Funding is not that much of an issue, tbh. As I stated elsewhere in this thread, I raised little, but had I wanted more, London & Berlin are literally next door and many large european VCs are familiar with the french ecosystem. The business angels I chose have exactly that track record (early 90s-00s, create company in France, raise a few hundreds k€ in France, large rounds in the US, IPO on Nasdaq, get rich and become BA/VCs).

I'm not going to list the usual "french unicorns" such as Blablacar or Criteo, but see Devialet, a hw "startup": they have closed a 100M$ round with a Korean fund two weeks ago so access to capital definitely exist...

By the way, La Cantine unfortunately had a massive fire two weeks ago, so we will have to wait and see if the phenix rise from the literal ashes :'(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am very happy this is happening, but I remain pessimistic about this. I have been in Paris many times and even lived there for a bit. As far as cities go with job infrastructure, Paris is non functioning. The city itself is inherently flawed in job growth and management. There is a lack of variety in jobs. There ARE a variety of jobs, but the disparity between amount and desire is huge.

When I was in Paris the only people I met were those majoring in Finance, the amount of computer programmers or engineers at the universities were extremely low. Why? Because the jobs just aren't there. Paris is and has always been a hub for Money. People then majored and specialized in Money. It is where the Money is; Money is where the jobs would be.

Don't let the media blitz carry you away at the announcement of Station F, it is a media wave designed to tell people, 'look... we are diversifying our economy' as Berlin and London have also been attempting (rather... ineffectively for Germany). The media blitz is a way of telling individuals in France (and all of Europe actually) that this is where tech jobs can be found... so make the decision to major in tech.

What I imagine will happen is: many people from Eastern Europe (strong scattering of micro tech scenes without sufficient exposure) will flock to Station F to take advantage of it's proximity to all of the local funding that can be found in Paris. Paris is a place like London and New York where people park their money for expansion. Station F is just another place for these people to park their funds.

We could be seeing the beginning of a rocking station F, or, we could be seeing the beginning of a very large media hype designed to encourage diversifying the economy that will be the beginning of a very slow 'meh' Station F.

<comment><USER5> What you are saying makes me really sad. I live in Paris and I just graduated (CS). I am currently working as a java developer in a large company, the job is incredibly boring and I feel like I am not learning anything. Interesting jobs seems out of reach of a junior developer. I don't think Station F is going to improve things much. I am now thinking about moving somewhere else to find a better job.

<comment><USER6> There are good places ; if you aren't happy, move. Just don't pick a contractor job, and make sure you don't pick a job where people just expect you to move dirt around.

<comment><USER7> There are good places in Paris but they can be counted on your fingers. That's not enough jobs even if we only consider the population of 3lite 10x developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Station F is a well-meaning project that may succeed. The French government plays a large, interventionist role in the nation's economy, and infrastructure projects like this are one way it can express itself. I lived in Paris for over a decade, and I happen to disagree with both the hype and some of the criticisms in this thread.

While Paris is the economic center of France, it is _not_ where the money is. That would be London, NYC or Shanghai. Maybe Brexit will drive finance back to France, but France started driving them away with the early 80s nationalizations of Mitterand.

I think Station F could present a great, regional hub for EMEA. France and other European countries turn out amazingly talented technologists. But those same countries don't always provide an environment for them and their businesses to thrive. That is partially due to how people invest in Europe, partially due to how governments regulate, and finally to a discomfort with marketing in France itself.

There are holes in the European funding ladder moving from pre-seed to IPO that drive European entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley. Those holes are due to a lack of investors who are willing and able to identify opportunities at every stage and take a risk. Most European money is old, and it prefers real estate. If that money allots a percentage for VC, a lot of it will end up with Silicon Valley firms, because the top ones have unrivaled track records and the money does require a plane ticket to travel. And the SV VCs see all the best European entrepreneurs come through to pitch anyway.

The second problem is regulation, and something close to that which I don't quite have a word for. The best analogy would be to compare the Napoleonic code, which attempts to legislate for all contingencies from the beginning, with common-law systems, in which a body of precedent rulings and thought develop in response to the world. My impression of France is that it creates analytically rigorous and often misguided policies, and seeks to apply them to quickly evolving situations. I believe that thinking also infects many decision-makers who affect tech, who aren't responding and creating as quickly as they might in another cultural context.

Finally, tech needs hustlers and hype. New things must be sold. France has a history of inventing amazing technology before other countries, and not marketing it well (Minitel).

With luck, Niel's Station F will address and mitigate those risks.

</comment><comment><USER9> Renting a desk in an open office full of random people? Sounds like a horrible work environment.

<comment><USER10> I've been renting at a co-working space for the past few months, in the city I'm currently parked in (Fertilab in Springfield, OR). It's actually not so bad. Kinda like a coffee shop, only everyone else is also working. I'm historically very much opposed to open offices, but if there aren't phones ringing, and there's not a lot of "hey, can I ask you about X?" cross-talk, it's not so bad.

I've turned down jobs in the past because they were in open offices, and I might still do so today. I basically agree with you that it's a bad idea to work full-time in an open office. But, for a three days a week kinda work place, just for a change of pace and an excuse to take a walk out of my house, it's been really nice. I plan to start checking for co-working spaces when I first get to a new city. It gives me some much-needed variety in my work day, gets me communicating with other people in tech in the city I'm in, and provides some other benefits (some of those benefits: there are distractions but they're different than at home and at coffee shops, the internet is faster than my home internet or most coffee shop WiFi though this may not be true for everyone, quieter than coffee shops, not home so I can fixate on work and not whether dishes or laundry needs doing, etc.).

I'd like to visit Paris one of these days, maybe once my French is stronger. I could see signing up for this for a while.

<comment><USER11> I like the social part of talking to random people but in startupland there are much more wannabes that real entrepreneurs, so at the end the conversations are very naive. And with entrepreneurs I mean people who can build a real business not the next Facebook.

<comment><USER10> Yes, that's one of the negatives, probably. I kinda like where I am now, though, as most of the people working out of this space are not "startup entrepreneurs", they're small business owners. The Eugene location might be different, since there's more of a tech scene there, but the folks in this branch are pretty no-nonsense, just here to get some work done, not try to sell me on their poorly thought out, poorly researched, derivative ideas.

That said, I also spent some time at the ATX Hackerspace which did have a bunch of startuppy types, and it was mostly free of bullshit, too, because so much of the focus there was on the hacking and not the "I just need to raise $x million and this thing's gonna explode!" mindset. So, conversation in that space were about laser CNCs, 3D printing, and electric cars, rather than everybody trying to give their (too-long) elevator pitch to as many people as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For French entrepreneurs reading this: make it extremely easy and painless to start/run/shutdown a company in France.

I dream of being able to start a company by completing a form and sending a copy of my French ID. And all the rest (accountants/HR/law) would be handled by online third party services smoothly. Same should go for banking services associated with the company.

I think France has great potential but it needs simplification of processes. I'm not expecting the government to do it, hence my desparate call to other French entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER13> As someone who created a small business in France then did the same in the UK, I wholeheartedly agree.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot entrepreneurs can do, it's up to the authorities to be brave and reform the infamous "Greffe du Tribunal de Commerce". Simply changing your registered address required, last I checked : filling out a 10 page or so form, amended company formation documents, mandatory publishing of an expensive ad informing of the change in one of the government-sanctioned newspapers, and writing out a cheque (!) for 47.52€ or something.

This is insane. Emmanuel Macron, as an economy minister tried to dismantle this whole craziness but faced strong lobbying. Here's hoping he's more successful as a presidential candidate.

<comment><USER14> > Emmanuel Macron, as an economy minister tried to (...)

Besides that Emmanuel Macron absolutely made things worse for companies, it's the Politics Detox week on HN, so please refrain from talking politics: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404)

<comment><USER13> Sorry, I didn't catch that. However, you also just failed to follow your own advice :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I think that supporting startups is a good idea, creating a campus without a nearby network of rich investors is like sowing seeds in sand. I've been part of more than one startup in Europe and it is far more difficult to secure early-stage investment than in SF. Until Europe has an equivalent VC presence, SF will always have the edge. I hope that this campus will attract that sort of attention from investors but we have a long way to go.

<comment><USER16> The lack of VC funding might change the incentives for startups for the better.

Rather than build a startup to raise funding, they might build a startup to sell products.

<comment><USER15> There are plenty of SF startups (and full-sized companies like Twitter etc.) that never make a profit. But startups in SF that can make a profit will still win out over European equivalents since they're granted such huge runways to perfect their product before they're under pressure to go to market.

I agree that the incentive system for startups right now is broken, as so many are simply aiming for an IPO before they're exposed as jokes but there's an inherent advantage to being in SF for any type of fledgling tech business.

<comment><USER17> "perfect their product before they're under pressure to go to market."

This maybe the wrong way to think about it. Outside of hard-tech I see very few companies that are benefitted by building in a void.

Though your larger point still stands, once you have product market fit, the funding regime in SF gives an unfair advantage to companies that know how to use it for their particular domains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't imagine myself programming in such huge, open space full of people and distractions. Maybe it might work for sales, marketing or costumer support, but not for a type of work that requires concentration.

<comment><USER19> In 42, the school presented in the article too, is constant open-spaces full of people. It's noisy but students get the habit of working in that kind of environment and get in the flow even with distractions. Some other French IT schools, like Epitech or SupInfo are the same (or close to). Even if I agree that it's not ideal, it can work. Although, I assume that most of people are not used at all to this kind of environment.

<comment><USER18> Well, you can do programming with one hand tied to your back too, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal or encouraged practice. There are multiple papers proving that noisy environment impairs cognitive abilities, so it seems logical to me to avoid working in such places when concentration is required.

<comment><USER20> It depends on the type of work you're doing. If you're bit fiddling, then sure maybe you need an office or some noise cancelling headphones. If you're an application developer in a team, the communication benefits of sitting in an open plan group can overcome the cognitive issues (which aren't so bad since you're just gluing components together).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why would a startup with 1-5 people (as an example) even rent a place at all? I understand if you do any kind of hardware stuff, but for software companies it makes zero sense to me.

They could just as well be at home, saving that money and putting it in the startup instead?

<comment><USER22> I have friends who are in this case. They worked in their flat first to save money, it is true.

But they grew tired of working in their apartment and started to rent a place as soon as they had sufficient funds (after 2 years).

Their problems were:

* Lack of separation between worklife and the rest.

* Living and working with the same persons. They are really good friends but it was still hard apparently.

* Having to dedicate a big part of your apartment to the work (desks but also hardware, documents, etc.).

<comment><USER23> They don't need to all work in the same apartment though, they can work in their own.

<comment><USER22> In their case, they lived in the same apartment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nowhere on the Station F website was indicated the adress of the actual building, which is a glaring omission, for someone working near Paris and wondering where it is.

<comment><USER25> Just Google for it?

[https://goo.gl/maps/UBXAndEsCUP2](https://goo.gl/maps/UBXAndEsCUP2)

<comment><USER24> Thank you, I could not have done it on my own. /s

It's what I did in the end.

It was a critic against the website missing an important piece of information. And also a bit of a complaint since I spent five min looking for the address on the site before resigning myself to Google it, thinking that such piece of information could not have been omitted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It used to be called an "incubator" (see: [http://www.wilmotte.com/fr/projet/411/Station-F-Halle- Freyss...](http://www.wilmotte.com/fr/projet/411/Station-F-Halle-Freyssinet- Incubateur-de-start-ups)) now it's a "startup campus". This is probably more reasonable.

<comment><USER27> I guess when you say 'incubator' nowadays, most people would imagine something like Erlich Bachman's house from 'Silicon Valley'.

<comment> yoz-y I have been working in incubators for half of my professional life (in France) and I have never seen anything like Erlich's couch surfing sweatshop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Even though it just seems like a big open-space with less services included (people mentioning no free coffee), I would presume that more "startup oriented" services will be available. Paris has a super vibrant startup community and some small incubators are already in the city center, providing awesome followup.

</comment><comment><USER28> 3000 people in one room in an old train shed. With occasional shipping containers. This is is their idea of a startup campus?

Someone else mentioned [1] Nantes' La Cantine. That looks more usable; it's a big collection of little shops under one big roof. Looks like a repurposed mall. Repurposing an unused mall for this sort of thing might make sense. Rentable spaces of different sizes, good HVAC, power, and sprinklers, plenty of parking, not much heavy construction required.

[1] [http://jonathanwinandy.tumblr.com/post/3198051103/ouverture-...](http://jonathanwinandy.tumblr.com/post/3198051103/ouverture- de-la-cantine-num%C3%A9rique-de-nantes)

<comment><USER29> But that is in Nantes. Paris is (sadly) where business happens in France.

<comment><USER28> Well, just outside Paris. Many big companies moved to La Defense, which is just outside the city limits and allows skyscrapers. The result looks like this.[1]

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/la-defense-office-district- rebou...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/la-defense-office-district-rebounds-in- paris-1471348803)

(Alternate link to picture only: [https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- PK039_LADEFE_J...](https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- PK039_LADEFE_J_20160814185149.jpg))

<comment><USER30> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%20D%C3%A9fense](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%20D%C3%A9fense)

I've stayed there... it's not so bad, and not far from the center of Paris either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I hope they play "My Way" when it officially opens :D

<comment><USER32> if they do, it would be "Comme d'habitude" and not "My Way"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comme_d'habitude#.22My_Way.22](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comme_d'habitude#.22My_Way.22)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I always thought the things that prevented Startups in France would be more to do with employment laws - rules about weekend working, very hard to fire people, etc etc.

<comment><USER6> The real killer is late investment rounds ; employment laws are not really a problem in a tech startup afaik.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is 195 euros/desk their solution? Really? Its going to bring in 1000 startups somehow? And why do they keep bringing up facebook? Its not a start up and could care less about other start ups succeeding (rightfully so).

Weren't a bunch of high profile French actually leaving France because of HUGE taxes in france?

Any French here can answer this question?: for a start up making 5000 euros a month - how much would you pay in taxes?

<comment><USER2> Corporate tax is 30%

But corporate tax alone is not a good way to evaluate the opportunity of creating your company in France.

As a startup you are supposedly doing innovative stuff and R&D so you actually get tax credits[0]. Crédit Impôt Recherche &Crédit Impôt Innovation brings you up to 30% of your R&D investment.

As a startup in France you are eligible to the Jeune Entreprise Innovante status which basically means you pay nearly no social contributions on the salary of your R&D personnel (which is a huuuge amount: as a rule of thumb, total cost of 1 salesperson is roughly twice his/her net salary. Paying half of that for your engineers is...cool).

As a startup in France you also get grants from BPI (Banque Publique d'Investissement) and colateral for your private loans.

As a startup in some regions of France you can get local grants which can be a huge amount as well (and Paris is not one of them).

If you want to try to get into the French Tech Ecosystem, there is a program similar to Startup Chile, French Tech Ticket[1], but the grant is only 25k€

To give an anecdotal example, I raised south of 1M€ of private equity (which is obvious a very small amount by US or european standards), but I got almost as much public grants/tax credits/local help. My colleagues/competitors located in the Paris region got substantially less local help for the same amount of money raised and comparable market/R&D programs.

[0] [http://cache.media.enseignementsup- recherche.gouv.fr/file/CI...](http://cache.media.enseignementsup- recherche.gouv.fr/file/CIR/18/1/CIRanglais08_33181.pdf) [1] [http://www.frenchtechticket.com/](http://www.frenchtechticket.com/)

<comment><USER35>
      which basically means you pay nearly no social contributions

Doesn't that cut into the social security accounts of your engineering staff?

<comment><USER36> No ! You still have full (health -including dental-, unemployment, retirement) social security for the engineering staff.

<comment><USER35> merci

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > startup campus

> with companies like Facebook and TechShop opening offices there

Is Facebook still a startup?

<comment><USER38> Yeah I don't really know why, Facebook already have a brand new office in Paris near Bourse (former stock exchange).

<comment><USER39> So they can poach the best, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ju-st Great idea, but no free coffee? And do the desks include monitors?

</comment><comment><USER40> For those who are near Paris, there is a new HN meetup in january:

[https://hn.silexlabs.org](https://hn.silexlabs.org)

</comment><comment><USER41> Funny how quickly things change [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=halle+freyssinet&ia=web](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=halle+freyssinet&ia=web)

</comment><comment><USER42> is it actually a train station? that would be awesome for the commutes of people that will work there

</comment><comment><USER43> 'Startup campus' is a new marketing low.</comment>


Ask HN: how to be constantly motivated as a developer? - <AUTHOR>

I've been a software developer for almost 10 years now, and have worked for known big companies, as well as few years at startups. After a while at any company, I noticed that I grow frustrated and just recently I understood the actual reason for that: I need to be constantly learning. I like to learn new languages, new tools, put in place new processes, improve the development, improve the code, and investigate root cause of challenging production issues. It doesn't have to be about technology necessarily, but I need to be making progress, learning more about the world in general, in a way that I can apply this knowledge.
I've seen that, due to business needs or other reasons, I end up doing the same things for a long time and, although there are always chances of learning, they tend not to be very frequent or as much as I would need. In spite of that, I've always been a high performer even when demotivated. I do push myself at home to keep growing, but I need to be really motivated to go to work as well, as I know I can do better.
It seems that, if I can find a way of leveraging these skills and will to keep learning and improving myself, I would impact teams and companies much more than what I've been doing. I thought of joining startups or starting my own, but don't know if that solves the problem. And currently I am demotivated at a new job after only a few months, what makes me worried as this cannot go on like that forever.
Does any have any piece of advice? Has anyone gone through something similar? Any company or position that you'd suggest I take a look at? Is there any company that really values this kind of professional?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Work doesn't seem like play for you anymore.

> I do push myself at home to keep growing

1) You need some side projects. The word push is a key. The key here is the definition:

"Side projects allow programming without deadlines or restraints. Side projects allow programming in an exploratory way."

[http://rawsyntax.com/post/5982784556/importance-of-side- proj...](http://rawsyntax.com/post/5982784556/importance-of-side-projects)

2) Without knowing what you do in your free time, my advice is that you look outside what you do for a living to learn something. Think of it like diversification - you don't want to have all your stocks in technology - consider investing time in non-technology.

What would you do if you didn't have to work? What interested you when you were young and didn't have adult responsibilities? Combine that with volunteering if you can. As a stop-gap, volunteer your considerable technical skills for a non-profit who has a mission that you believe in. Or, organize a group of people to help accomplish something. Good luck!

3) Exercise!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great link on side projects - "It will remind you why programming is fun." :-)

I've been doing a lot of reading, but since a few weeks back I started working on a side project as a way of learning new technologies. Maybe I should diversify - I've been always interested in financing too.

Volunteering can give more purpose to life and is definitely a good suggestion. Thanks for the suggestions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thought from left field:

Have you considered starting a _cough_ lifestyle business, or less- controversially, working as a contractor for <20 hours/week?

The idea would be to earn a decent living from a part-time source, and spend the rest of your time learning new languages, tools, etc. In other words, disconnect your dreams from your job. If jobs aren't fulfilling you, change your definition of "job" to "something that pays the bills."

<comment><AUTHOR> That is not a bad idea, actually. It could be a way of having time for other things, which could even be an idea to start a company at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Join to Open Source/Free software community. Side projects and GitHub will become your saviors :)</comment>


Hacker's Guide to Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> http://karpathy.github.io/neuralnets/ <comment><USER2> The author of the linked post (Karpathy) recommends learning from Stanford's CS231n class (free) instead: [http://cs231n.stanford.edu/](http://cs231n.stanford.edu/).</comment>


Australian local council intercepted phone, email data to hunt litterbugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/349643,vic-council-intercepted-phone-emails-to-hunt-litterbugs.aspx

<comment><USER3> I like how under the guise of protecting us from terrorism they're now protecting us from the most evil of evil crimes. There was a mild outrage about 5 years ago in the UK when a few councils were caught using RIPA laws (what GCHQ is currently claiming to be protected by) for all sorts of fun things. Like dog poop [1], ice lolly bribes [2] and so on. I feel 100% safer knowing that surveillance is used to tackle all these huge crimes.

[1][http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7369543.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7369543.stm) [2][http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1053039/Council- use-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1053039/Council-use-anti- terror-laws-spy-binmen-accused-accepting-strawberry-pop-bribe-away-trade- waste.html)

<comment><USER4> Add to that UK police using terrorist powers to harass... sorry, stop and search kids who dare to be out in public. Oh, I also believe the police can use the terror excuse to search homes with out a proper warrant. Most people who are treated like this don't even know why. They just get quoted the act section number. Something like, "we are searching you / your home under section xyz." No mention of the terror laws.

This is exactly why we should be very careful about giving sweeping powers to authorities under the guise of "terror".

<comment><USER5> The UK did away with S44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 precisely because there was backlash against the mass use of groundless searches. What was especially galling is that the UK has pretty broad search powers anyway based on reasonable suspicion, so anyone choosing a S44 search was basically admitting they didn't expect to find anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is an upcoming referendum in Australia which seeks to take this level of government into the budget allocation process of the federal system. If this happens, all functions of local government have the characteristic of affecting federal taxing powers.

Therefore all actions and provisions by local government will have a characteristic that provides the authority to access metadata for all citizens on the single signature of the enquirers supervisor. The enquirer can be any paid employee of the council who has a working title.

Any license, fee, ambiguity on any bylaw compliance, planning decision and so on can, because it has a fiduciary component, lead to a legally performed metadata query on any citizen.

And the citizenry I have met are, I am afraid, oblivious to these matters.

<comment><USER7> I have literally not heard of a coming referendum at all, although in in the states and not necessarily current. Got any more details?

<comment><USER6> Sure. Here are some links to follow.

[http://www.gtcentre.unsw.edu.au/resources/referendums/2013-l...](http://www.gtcentre.unsw.edu.au/resources/referendums/2013-local- government-referendum-faqs)

[http://www.councilreferendum.com.au/](http://www.councilreferendum.com.au/)

[http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representati...](http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/About_the_House_News/Latest_News/CRLG-11122012)

As I've alluded to, the element of this that pertains to privacy is the incorporation into the Australian Constitution of Council fiduciary compliance. It has been law since 2007 in Australia that in any question impacting the federal taxing power authority conferred by the constitution, such queries can be made as a matter if course, as long as permission is obtained from a single signing supervisor.

<comment><USER8> Can you put some of that in plain English, and provide some references please?

 _It has been law since 2007 in Australia that in any question impacting the federal taxing power authority conferred by the constitution, such queries can be made as a matter if course, as long as permission is obtained from a single signing supervisor._

What exactly does "federal taxing power authority" mean, and under what possible interpretation does that mean that a body funded by the federal government suddenly gets the power to subpoena phone records and tap email?

There are plenty of other federally funded bodies at (AFAIK) don't have that power. Or maybe I'm wrong, and agencies like Screen Australia actually can do that?

(Not that I support this referendum, but that's for different reasons)

<comment><USER6> Protection of the public revenue is the clause in the telecommunications act 1997 that the Australian Tax Office and Job Centre investigators often rely on. Access to metadata does not require a warrant. In some cases, telcos can provide information to allowed agencies even without certification.

I'm fairly convinced that local governments will be motivated to protect their own revenue with methods that are specifically designed to protect the public revenue. Already we are seeing some councils using these methods. The number of accesses must be reported, and these reports form the basis of recent news stories on this subject. It remains to be seen whether there are any real constraints on the volume of queries when and if local governments are directly funded by the federal government.

By federal taxing powers I mean what is generally described in [1]

There is history in the relationship between the Federal and local governments. Reference the Whitlam governments attempt at bringing local government under federal control, which failed, and the Fraser government etc [2]

The COAG meetings provide the mechanism for state funding, through which local councils currently are funded. There is one local government representative present at COAG meetings [3][4]

Part 13 of the Telecommunications Act and access to metadata.[5].

The amendments relevant to warrants for access to content of stored electronic communications and the Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Act 2006 are in [6]

1\. [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_basis_of_taxat...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_basis_of_taxation_in_Australia).

2\. [http://sydney.edu.au/law/cru/documents/2013/CRU_Report_3_%20...](http://sydney.edu.au/law/cru/documents/2013/CRU_Report_3_%20Local_Government.pdf)

3\. [http://www.coag.gov.au/the_federal_financial_relations_frame...](http://www.coag.gov.au/the_federal_financial_relations_framework)

4\. [http://www.coag.gov.au/reform_agenda](http://www.coag.gov.au/reform_agenda)

5\. [http://www.pacificprivacy.com.au/Government%20Surveillance%2...](http://www.pacificprivacy.com.au/Government%20Surveillance%20in%20Australia%20v6.pdf)

6\. [http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2006A00040/3bf9cedc-87c1-4...](http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Details/C2006A00040/3bf9cedc-87c1-4c8c-895a-83cf7831b278)

<comment><USER9> I still don't really get what you're trying to say. Mentioning that a power is contained within a clause of the Telecommunications Act doesn't really mean much. All 594 subsections need to be read in conjunction with each other before an accurate interpretation can be made. I've had a quick read through and I can't really see how a broad enough construal of Part 13 is possible for anything you're saying to happen. It's going to turn on whether the government believes whether the High Court will interpret what you're describing as 'reasonable' even though the Act repeatedly emphasises that confidentiality should be paramount. We've got some silly people in power but they're not that dumb.

I do not understand how councils are not already part of the 'public revenue', maybe there is case law on this that I am unaware of?

The explanatory memorandum attached to the referendum explicitly states that the Federal government will have no legal influence over local councils. It also mentions that the referendum is for no other purpose than to grant the council money. As soon as any evidence of what you've described crops up they're going to get their asses handed to them in court as they're acting against their own explicit intention. I can't see the loophole you do at all.

I've spent the last 25 minutes or so going through the Telecommunications Act and it is an absolute shambles when read in context. As I said in another post, there are far simpler ways for the Commonwealth to claim a legal right to monitor us.

If the Australian government wanted to monitor our metadata, or conduct any other sort of surveillance for that matter, they'd probably just do it and then claim external affairs once they're caught. It's far simpler and more effective than to try to engineer a legal loophole like you're describing. It's cynical and it sucks but that's the way these things tend to go.

<comment><USER6> Councils already access metadata in accordance with the Telecommunications Act.[1]

I provided the links to the amended Telecommunications ( Interception ) Act 2006 as it describes the warrant system required for stored data or content. Not data in transit.

Those agencies that have a more direct linkage to federal funding, for example, the ATO on the input side, and Social Security, for example, Jobcentres on the output side, are those bodies that probe metadata the most it would appear, under the provisions in the Act regarding defrauding the public finances without suspicion of criminality or otherwise, though such a suspicion is in itself also a justification.

While the funding provided to local councils via the states is also public funding, direct funding by the Commonwealth has as its aim efficiency of course, but also control and competitive negotiation between councils. The single representative present at the COAG meetings can only be partly effective at representation given the competition between the states. One size doesn't fit all, and there is a case to be made for greater efficiencies by having direct negotiation with the Commonwealth, and for greater formalisation over things like standards of delivery and varieties of services.

With these advantages also comes responsibility, in things like reporting and budget control. Just as happens with the states that have an interest in maximising funding, and where effectively punitive financial penalties are extracted in future COGM rounds because of either malperformance or political difference, I contend that the pressure upon councils to protect their funding will only increase, as it has with the states, which face competitive constraints. Some will win and some will lose, but maintaining maximum levels is something that we expect in any case.

This is a significant constitutional change I think. Local councils, when directly accountable to the Commonwealth, and as providers of services financed from general Commonwealth revenue, will I think behave more broadly alike in their attitude to income and expenditure, and use the methods already allowed them, and already employed by certain other councils. The linkage between council revenues and the revenues considered exactly in the Telecommunications Act are more direct perceptually.

I think Australians should be cautious about this, and so do some of Australia's politicians as well. [2]

1\. [http://powerhouse.theglobalmail.org/the-australian- governmen...](http://powerhouse.theglobalmail.org/the-australian-government- snoop-patrol-once-every-two-minutes-247-anyones-data/#!prettyPhoto)

2\. [http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/green...](http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/greens- plan-to-strengthen-australias-privacy-online/4762002)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> And while Snowden and Manning had security clearances and Official Secrets Laws holding them accountable for mis-using the data they had access too, I wonder if anyone's even asking who at the local council level has access to this sort of data, and what policies/procedures/systems/agreements/accountability is in place here? Who wants to bet there's nothing stopping the local dog catcher or garbage collection manager from requesting whatever they can plausably justify - <USER2> downloading it onto a usb drive and walking out of the office with it?

<comment><USER11> It might be a way to make civil service more attractive to stalkers.

If I were anybody's ex-wife with a messy divorce and/or a restraining order, I'd be _very_ opposed to all this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm calling BS on this. To me it looks like the council sees an illegally posted advertisement with a phone number on it, then seeks the name and address of the owner of that phone number.

It looks like the journalist is then reaching to connect this with that new "metadata" word they've been hearing so much about.

</comment><comment><USER13> It sounds like spin.

>"Retrieving a telephone subscriber's name and address for an investigation into an offence is an important tool," she said.

That was the reply from the spokeswoman and the article provides no accusations of any further "data interception" behavior.

If I didn't know better, I'd say this article is trying to characterize caller id/the phonebook as "intercepting data", sure, it's technically accurate, but the words "caller id" are a lot less scary.

<comment><USER14> I remember a friend was up in arms a couple years ago about their phone number being exposed on Facebook. When I pointed out that's exactly what the phone book had done for decades, he suddenly didn't care much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, how is it even possible for local councils to do this? Given how dodgy local councils appear to be ... wow. How monumentally fucked up.

<comment><USER16> Absolutely. The only way any authority should ever be able to wiretap or get phone / internet records is with a warrant signed by a judge because there is a reasonable suspicion that the individual has committed a crime.

Even then this should only be available for law enforcement, not local fucking councils!

How did we get into this mess?

<comment><USER17> The article is really unclear, but to me it sounds like they were doing reverse phone lookups.

Illegal advertising - get the details of the number on the poster.

Unregistered pets - maybe they have an 'if found please call ...' tag on the pet, but no pet registration.

People dumping stuff illegally - if you were dumping general household/office waste, you'd probably have letters or bills with your address on it already, but I can think of scenarios where they might only have your email address to go on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is part of the problem really; feature creep. Very quickly you're just scrounging around looking for crimes to charge people with.

<comment><USER19> I believe the term is mission creep: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_creep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_creep)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems to be the source, it has a little bit more information: [http://www.wyndhamweekly.com.au/story/1628329/experts- slam-w...](http://www.wyndhamweekly.com.au/story/1628329/experts-slam-wyndham- councils-data-snooping/?cs=1553)

</comment><comment><USER20> I am speechless. As an Australian (from Queensland though) I am absolutely shocked because I know from repeated experience as do many that local councils are staffed and run by usually highly incompetent people. How is it a council is able to access such information in the first place? Someone needs to demand some answers.

Would hate for those criminals breaking the law with their unregistered pets considering it costs like maximum $80 per year to register a pet...

</comment><comment><USER21> 'If you build it, they will come' works for both baseball diamonds and surveillance systems, it seems.</comment>


One Year of Airbnb - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/realestate/our-year-of-living-airbnb.html?hpw&rref=realestate&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0 <comment><USER3> > _We later came to recognize the cold, commercial experience offered by this > host and others of his ilk, with multiple listings of impersonally furnished > places and a willingness to let non-reviewed guests stay, was something we > wished to avoid._

I'm not sure what would constitute a warm and personal experience. They want to have the place all to themselves, but are put off by ... what exactly? A lack family photos? Or more "morbid" art that they also ended up hating?

> _Our rear-facing prewar one-bedroom, where the couch sagged and the shower > was in the kitchen, was as silent as a padded cell. Here, the heat blasted > unbidden, from which we escaped by opening the windows to winter's coldest > month. That first night, on the way to the corner store to get some food, we > dodged mice scurrying between bags of trash. Back in the kitchen, Elaine > fired up the stove by the bath towels, but when the pasta from the corner > store hit the boiling water, a few little worms floated to the top. I > skipped dinner that night._

This adds color to their story, but doesn't say much about AirBNB - <USER2> the windows to deal with winter heat and seeing rodents in the street is pretty standard for New York. What _isn 't_ standard is having an apartment that's "silent as a padded cell" \- as far as I'm concerned, that should be listed as an amenity.

<comment><USER4> > I'm not sure what would constitute a warm and personal experience. They want > to have the place all to themselves, but are put off by ... what exactly? A > lack family photos? Or more "morbid" art that they also ended up hating?

It's not about having the place all to themselves.

Having stayed in a handful of Airbnbs, I've found the distribution pretty bimodal too.

There's a cold uncomfortableness to the commercial room run purely for business. Pardon my mildly overdramatic digression, but they feel like prison cells.

Especially in contrast to the familiarity and personal touch when staying with a host that actually lives there, wants to have a conversation, and cares about people. While they may appreciate the extra income, I really believe these hosts share their rooms for the greater community experience.

<comment><USER5> There are things that are built cheaply that look fine in photographs. Some things aren't cheap but it is still clear they weren't purchased by someone who intended to use them.

Airbnb photographs don't reflect noise, the hardness of a mattress, and they often hide windows. Hotel reviewers are harsh, and these sorts of problems show up quick. I would venture to guess that the person to person nature of Airbnb, much like Linkedin, mean less honest reviews. Enough bad reviewers and hosts will exclude you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad to have read this, as I've had the same notion of living locally during world tours.

I am curious about a couple of things...

All of these experiences were in New York. How would it have been different in Athens, Tokyo, or Sydney, in terms of misrepresentation?

Also, using average apartment cost to gauge the amount to spend on the AirBnb unit is probably not apples-to-apples (for similar reasons that a regular full time salary is likely going to be significantly less than a contractor rates for the same position). I would have used hotel rates instead, which would have been much higher than $100/night in New York. It might be that had they stayed in higher priced lodging, they'd have had a better experience.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure how much higher; when we first came here to visit, before moving, we stayed at Hotel Marakkech on the UWS - a great place, and looking at their booking page, their rates for all of January are under a hundred dollars (with the exception of New Year Eve's weekend, of course.)

To be fair, the rooms are much smaller than a typical AirBNB, and it doesn't come with a kitchen.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if you can even compare areas like that. There's enough of a difference between Sydney CBD and North Ryde that comparing them is difficult (even though hotel prices can be the same).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this what they call "native advertising"?

<comment><USER9> It raises similar thoughts with me... mostly I guess because I don't think I've read such a positive AirBnB write-up before, especially around them responsibly handling landlord screw ups

<comment><USER10> same here. too good to be true. airbnb crisis?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone who has lived a similar lifestyle for a while I have strong indications that Airbnb has made this much harder. People have become reluctant to rent out for one to three, or even six, months and prices have gone up significantly. Especially in international or dynamic cities, which are generally the ones you want to stay a bit longer in.

<comment><USER12> Consumers are willing to pay way more to rent a room (or a car) for a day than 1/365th of what they are willing/able to pay for a full year.

Airbnb makes that matchmaking easier (on both parties), and in exchange takes a 9-15% cut.

Property owners who used to be forced to choose between offering 1-year lease or trying to piece together some mid-term rentals (and suffer vacancies in- between) now have an additional choice: take ~85% of the much higher daily rate people are willing to pay.

I agree it's perhaps made that specific pattern of consumption more expensive, but IMO, it's done that by making the overall market more efficient.

<comment> a-dub It's nice to have efficient markets that effectively price things... however I think that perhaps it's not the worst thing in the world to accept market inefficiencies in trade for the opportunity to not live in a shitty society.

My general sense is that merging the vacation/short term rental market with the long term home rental market puts serious upward pressure on the latter, thereby increasing scarcity of opportunity for middle income people in urban locales.

IMO, anything that puts downward pressure on the derivative of social mobility over time is ultimately putting upward pressure on the shittiness of society as a whole and really makes life pretty unpleasant regardless of socioeconomic class.

I'll take an inefficient housing market any day over that.

<comment><USER13> The root of the problem is a lack of city housing stock caused by suburban sprawl in the last century, and NIMBYism in this one. Blaming a rental service for that is silly.

<comment> a-dub Sure, cities are fashionable again. There's a generational shift and demand is high. Construction is slow. Growth in some places is opposed, by both people and governments. All of this results in limited supply.

So I guess we agree that supply is limited.

But I ask you this: If supply is critically limited, then how on earth is it silly to complain about a "rental service" that mainstreams alternative uses of housing stock where the net effect is even more reduction of supply.

Alternate means of doing business are interesting, and new structures in society are also interesting. People can and should experiment. But if they're experimenting in areas that are already problematic and are doing so in ways that obviously make the problems worse... I'm going to heap blame on them whether you think it's silly or not.

<comment><USER12> I would think that a system that more efficiently allocates a scarce resource is good.

That some people were previously benefiting from the existing inefficiency is a bug, not a feature, IMO.

<comment><USER14> It's only more efficient if you tautologically define efficent allocation to be whatever the market decides. Remember, we're talking about an effect that pushes occupancy down, meaning the same amount of scarce resources are being used to satisfy _fewer_ people's needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Frustrated with the stock of apartments in our price range, I started > contacting hosts of more expensive places, up to triple our budget.

I really admire the "hacking" of leveraging what you have (some money + a great story) to get what you want when you can't afford it in dollars.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is this a sponsored content? It's too nice to Airbnb!

<comment><USER4> I found it realistic. There are a few critiques of the experience as well.

> We later came to recognize the cold, commercial experience offered by this > host and others of his ilk, with multiple listings of impersonally furnished > places and a willingness to let non-reviewed guests stay, was something we > wished to avoid.

> The central heating had apparently been broken for years and the weather > forecast predicted a blizzard.

> Our rear-facing prewar one-bedroom, where the couch sagged and the shower > was in the kitchen, was as silent as a padded cell.

<comment><USER3> The silence is a critique? A New York apartment where you can't hear neighbors or street noise is something to be cherished.

<comment><USER4> I mean in Manhattan, sure -- but there are plenty of quiet neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The eerily silent room was in Gowanus.

<comment><USER3> Nope; that was the UES/East Harlem location that they found the day after leaving the Gowanus one.

It's confusing and poorly written, because they compare both to Hamsterdam :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm currently doing this in NYC with my brothers; it's been rather stressful living week to week. I've just started phone interviews with a few companies and it's quite irritating to schedule something only to arrive at an room with poor internet; or to move across town the night before.

</comment><comment><USER17> I didn't learn much about AirB&B, but the insight into living in New York was interesting.

</comment><comment><USER18> Posted 9 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10634015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10634015)

<comment><USER19> From the FAQ:

> _Are reposts ok?_

> _If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill > reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> TL; DR: For one year, a late-30's academic and his artist spouse document the use of Airbnb, as a tool to facilitate law-abiding, temporary living, in varied New York City neighborhoods.

Airbnb comes out looking responsive, to lack of care from certain hosts. Impressions of neighborhoods vary, as you would expect, sometimes from simply finding contaminated pasta. After gaining a few positive reviews on Airbnb, they successfully negotiate their way into spaces above their price range, while avoiding "red flags", like unmentioned fifth-floor walk-ups.

Great article, lots of tie-ins to various cultural history of the neighborhoods.

<comment><USER21> I've been using AirBnb to live all over for the last 2.5 years. Not 100% has been AirBnB but enough that I mostly think AirBnB as a company could use a lot of improvement (edited from something more derogatory)

Of the 16+ places I've stayed at 5 of them have lied about their facilities where as of the 20 or so hotels I've stayed at only 1 lied about their facilities and they fixed the issue.

But, on AirBnB there's no way to really deal with the issue. Most landlords don't have some other place so you show up, suitcase in tow, what can you do except deal with lies? It's not like you can easily find another place in a few minutes. At best you have to sit there with your cellphone and try to find a nearby hotel and stay there several days until you find a new place. As far as I'm concerned the AirBnB refund guarantee is mostly useless.

I don't feel free to leave a bad review because the next landlord might not rent to me if they see I've left other bad reviews. Why should they take the risk of renting to someone that leaves bad reviews?

AirBnB provides almost no way to deal with these issues. There are zero repercussions for lies on the facilities and unless you actually rent the place there is no way to contact AirBnB. So for example, once I got used to the lies I started asking the landlords for specifics before I rented. Example: Two places claimed they had "free parking on premises" but when questioned, one said I could park in the street but they didn't actually have any parking on premises. Another said unless I had neighborhood sticker I'd have to park 3-5 blocks away.

There was nothing I could. I can't report them to AirBnB unless I actually rent

As far as other lies. One claimed they had Wifi. Turned out they were stealing it from a neighbor and it was only accessible from small area in the corner of the living room. Another said the apartment was a 1bedroom but it turned out to be studio. The difference? A 1bedroom has a door so I can shut out the refrigerator sounds, a studio does not so I had filtered out studios. One claimed they had free parking on premises. When got there I was told it was often blocked and I'd have to park on the street. Car was broken into there BTW. Another claimed free parking on premises. Turned out he was on vacation and left is car in the space so no parking. Another no lies I suppose but it wasn't ready to rent. No curtains on the windows and buildings all looking directly into it. Also it claimed air conditioning which was true but in a hot august in LA with it running on high it took til 4am to cool the place down.

<comment><USER22> "I don't feel free to leave a bad review because the next landlord might not rent to me if they see I've left other bad reviews".

A hack to deal with this: leave praise in the review, but end it with 'and I'll be sure to tell all my friends'.

That used to be code in hotel guestbooks that all the preceding praise should be inverted. (I think that's the codephrase - someone correct me if it's wrong please!) Not sure if it's used in AirBnb, but hey, why not start the tradition now...

<comment><USER3> I've never heard of this before; I don't know how many hosts would pick up on it.

Also, I think I've left that comment before in various places, and I certainly didn't intend it to mean that I hated it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PDFium: Chrome's PDF rendering engine is now open-source - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/ <comment><USER3> I found it interesting that it seems to use Antigrain by Maxim Shemanarev in [https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/+/master/core/src/fxg...](https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/+/master/core/src/fxge/agg/agg23/agg_array.h) (Chrome uses Skia). Unfortunately the author of Antigrain died: [http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/3154635/rip-maxim- sheman...](http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/3154635/rip-maxim-shemanarev) It's nice to see the fascinating Antigrain code to be used for PDF viewing every day!

<comment><USER4> Did not know about this. As an agg user this made me sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is good news because it renders PDFs a lot faster and better than pdf.js that Firefox uses. Also, I would have to install this binary blob to get Chromium to render PDFs. It seems Chromium could easily adopt this, but I'm not sure about Firefox.

<comment><USER6> Well, it wouldn't make sense for Firefox to adopt this:

1\. It is tied to v8 (PDFs can run JS, this PDF viewer uses v8 do so - <USER2> CJS_Context::RunScript etc), so it would mean bundling 2 JS engines, with all the security downsides of that.

2\. This is written in C++. You can sandbox C++ in various ways, but that would still increase the surface area of the browser, compared to pdf.js which only uses things normal web content would use.

3\. pdf.js is not just meant to render pdfs, it's also a useful project to push forward the web platform. Areas where pdf.js was slow turned out to be things that were worth optimizing anyhow. This doesn't benefit people viewing pdfs directly, of course, but it's still an interesting aspect of the project.

<comment><USER7> Well, Chrome could make this viewer not increase the surface area of the browser just by changing it to a NaCl plugin. After all, it already exposes the ability to run native code inside NaCl to the web. ;p

I like the concept of pdf.js, but it's still significantly slower, and thus provides a worse experience to the user, than native viewers.

<comment><USER8> i dont know, on recent computers, more often than not i dont really see a diff between pdf.js and others as a user.

it seems to only be an issue on really heavy pdfs, which are pretty rare

<comment><USER9> Think mobile.

<comment><USER10> On mobile (Android) both Fx and Chrome start downloading pdfs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's really interesting to see that there are foxit employees on the list of committers. I assume that means that it was initially a fork of the foxit PDF reader?

<comment><USER12> Foxit isn't open-source, so I don't think it would be legal to release a derivative under the BSD license (IANAL).

<comment><USER13> It's perfectly legal for Foxit to license their own software to Google to be released under the terms of the BSD license. This would be with Foxit's consent, of course.

<comment><USER14> Right, and probably some money changing hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why did they close down something like Google Reader and Not Google Code Hosting? Do anyone actually use it?

I wish they could either make Google Code decent or simply kill it and use GitHub instead.

Is this a new implementation? Of did Foxit release it as Open Source?

<comment><USER16> It shows that the original code was Foxit's so would that mean that Foxit released the code or did Google purchase code rights and then decided to open source? Anyways, why would they host it on Google code?

<comment><USER15> That is the point. If Foxit opened it up then they deserve some credit. Otherwise the web is going to publish this as another Google PR without acknowledging their work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought Chromium's PDF engine was based on Foxit; did they change that?

EDIT: I see there are Foxit employees in the commit list. Well, that explains that!

Anyway this is great news. Kudos Google.

By the way, for those confused, the source is not on svn like Google Code fails to communicate but on [https://pdfium.googlesource.com/](https://pdfium.googlesource.com/).

</comment><comment><USER18> This is great because it is now the best open-source PDF rendering library. GhostScript, Poppler, XPdf, pdf.js -- they all sort of work alright, but are pathetic compared to FoxIt, on which this source code is based. What we now have with this source is a high performance highly compliant clean codebase of C++ PDF rendering code. Excellent news. Expect lots of future PDF innovations to be based on this.

<comment><USER19> I've had by far the best performance with Sumatra, which is open source but unfortunately Windows-only. I try Chrome's PDF reader once every few months, hoping it'll improve, but I always disable it when I see it's still disappointingly sluggish.

<comment><USER20> Sumatra just uses muPDF, FWIW.

<comment> johnx123-up Not really true. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7788074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7788074)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's interesting that this came, seemingly out of the blue, a little after it was made widely known (from the mozhacks article [1]) that Opera developers were working towards integrating pdf.js into their Chromium fork.

[1] [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/how-fast-is-pdf- js/](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/how-fast-is-pdf-js/)

<comment><USER20> And Opera announced their move to the Chromium Content API and WebKit around a fortnight before Blink was announced.

And note that isn't the first time there's been Opera interest in pdf.js — I spent the majority of summer 2012 working on trying to get pdf.js running well in Presto, as was relatively well known around pdf.js contributors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It looks like they did it in a hurry (on the next day) just after [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/how-fast-is-pdf- js/](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/how-fast-is-pdf-js/) was published? Competition FTW!

</comment><comment><USER23> In case the authors are lurking here, what are the main differences between this and poppler?

<comment><USER24> While the main poppler developers, who IIRC are three guys from Spain, have made a heroic effort, poppler is really not that good. Poppler was created by ripping out code from Xpdf and making it into a library.

If you look at the code, it is not really well architected. Here is a file I found a problem in - [http://cgit.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/tree/poppler/Tex...](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/tree/poppler/TextOutputDev.cc) . Take a look at that file and judge for yourself if it follows "Code Complete" type suggestions.

One reason I looked in that file is poppler does not deal well at all with many map PDFs like [http://web.mta.info/nyct/maps/busqns.pdf](http://web.mta.info/nyct/maps/busqns.pdf) or some others I have on my hard drive. They take forever to load.

Some PDFs have caused the applications using poppler to crash, although some of those have been patched. It's not as bad as it used to be, but still. My patch to speed up the bus map PDFs was not accepted. Then there are features like being able to enter data into PDFs and such. Compare and contrast Adobe's official Acrobat app for Linux and a PDF reader based on poppler like evince.

So the answer is a standard one - code architecture, bugs and features. The answer would be to take the PDFs that Adobe Acrobat handles but which poppler doesn't in terms of bugs and features, and see how pdfium handles them.

Of course, it's possible pdfium will handle those but fail on an entirely different class of PDFs and their pdfium specific bugs.

The PDF standard is a fairly large one. What features does pdfium handle which poppler doesn't? What percentages of PDFs crash the viewing application, or don't render correctly compared to poppler? And so forth.

I should also add that poppler usually depends on cairo for vector graphics. So once in a while the fail for a pdf is on cairo, not poppler. I have seen some of those fixed, some not.

<comment><USER25> I compared the speed (plain text extraction) of xpdf, poppler and mupdf on 100k PDFs. mupdf is in 95% cases the fastest, then comes xpdf and then poppler (the latter two crashed on a few files). SumatraPDF viewer went from poppler- only to two engines (poppler & mupdf) to mupdf+patches. At the moment from my experience SumatraPDF has the fastest and most reliable PDF engine, that is open source. So it will be interesting how this Chrome PDF open source engine (based on Foxit?) performs outside of Chrome as standalone library/commandline tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I believe this is the source of the PPAPI plugin, and not something built into Chrome.

Anyway, this is great news for Chromium, as the PDF plugin can now be shipped to distro repos.

<comment><USER27> Chrome's PDF Viewer _is_ a plugin. You can see it by opening chrome://plugins/.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For some one using PDF.js (which works great both on Chrome & Firefox) for my company's enterprise app - does this matter much ?

<comment><USER29> Unlikely, given that this is native code, and pdf.js is web-app friendly js.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sadly no tests, no documentation (except the documentation from FoxIt). Not even source code documentation.

</comment><comment><USER31> So it seems the SDK has the basic plumbing to make a commandline tool out of it: [https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/+/master/fpdfsdk/src/...](https://pdfium.googlesource.com/pdfium/+/master/fpdfsdk/src/fpdfview.cpp)

Anyone interested?

</comment><comment><USER32> Just glanced the source code, and, isn't it bad to "#include "../../../sth.h""? Wouldn't it be better to set the include path while compiling and just "#include "sth.h""?

<comment><USER33> Not really, having an explicit path seems more useful and clearer to me. Easier to read the code and find the file. Things like "gf" in vim will definitely work on it to open it up too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> In typical corporate code-dump style, no README and no clear instructions on how to build or what form the output takes. I installed gyp to try it and get a variety of errors depending on what I try (the furthest I got was complaints about v8.gyp being missing; does this have to build within the Chromium source tree?). Does any Google insider want to explain their internal build practices so a mere mortal can try to compile this code?

<comment><USER22> Per [https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/issues/detail?id=1](https://code.google.com/p/pdfium/issues/detail?id=1) : "Looks like the standalone build system is not yet present."

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> So, apparently _somebody_ still uses Google Code.¨

edit: .... just not for the actual code.

</comment><comment><USER36> Seriously, releasing on Google Code Project Hosting instead of GitHub? Even CodePlex is better than that.

</comment><comment><USER37> Isn't it annoying to see code.google.com as the medium of sharing code? I've got so used to Github that google code seems like an old 20th century thing..</comment>