Toronto is poised to become a producer of tech startups - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/12/toronto-is-poised-to-become-the-next-great-producer-of-tech-startups/ <comment><USER2> Not if Toronto keeps hemorrhaging talent. I graduated from the University of Toronto last year and can only name 2 of my classmates who are actually working in Toronto now. The rest are in SF, Seattle, and NYC - including many people who have family in Toronto, like me. All of my friends who were seriously working on a startup have moved it to the Bay Area.

Many of us would love to move back to Toronto 'eventually', for family reasons and because it's a great city overall, but for now the money and opportunities in the States are too good. In SF I'm making 2-3x what I'd make in Toronto and get to work on a globally-relevant system. And 80% of my social network is here now, too.

<comment><USER3> do you get a green card easier as a canadian than people from europe for example? I'm from germany and know many people who would like to work in the states, but it's really a big problem to get the green card. It takes companies much effort and money to get you in the states for more than 3 months.

<comment><USER4> You have to immigrate like all the other immigrants, but since you are German, the permanent resident quota is barely used for your nationality. The USA creates a quota system for green cards and then splits them up on a nationality basis. India, China and the Philippines have a long lineup for visas.

The USA creates a quota/lineup system on a per country basis.

You have 3 basic options:

1\. Work at a European office for a year, transfer on an L visa, apply for a green card once your in the USA.

2\. Apply for an H1-B around march/april, see if you made the lottery, get your visa in october, apply for a green card once your in the usa.

3\. Work at a European office for X years, apply for a green card outside of the USA, starting immediately while your working there, wait until you get a green card, move to the USA. It took about a 1 year to 1.5 years for a former coworker to do it this way.

O-1 & E visas are too special case to think about for the most part. And there is always getting married to a US citizen.

<comment><USER5> #3 is an interesting option that I hadn't heard of until now. Would this option be available to remote workers? Or is it reserved only for those working with companies that have a physical office in their country as well as the US?

<comment><USER4> Actually you don't have to be working for the company at all for #3. I think he wasn't working for the company until his green card came through.

Basically it's like applying for a green card normally, except your out of the country and you get the visa with "consular processing". I'm not sure if you can work remotely for the company or not while the green card process is happening.

I think most employers don't want to do it although because your not working for them while it's processing. With a dual intent visa you can work for the company while the green card is processing and your in the US office.

This outlines it: [http://www.path2usa.com/employment-based-green- card](http://www.path2usa.com/employment-based-green-card)

*Note: I know technically employers apply for you, not you yourself independently. It's just easier to write it that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Eeh ... as a Torontonian developer I don't buy it. Most of the good graduates we have move to Bay Area or Seattle. If you want your career to progress meaningfully you pretty much have to move to the states.

Maybe this might change in the future but the story on the ground is very different.

Also nitpick - we are the fourth most populous city in North America, and only _Mexico City_ , New York and Los Angeles have a larger population. As of mid last year, Toronto contains more people than _Chicago_.

<comment><USER7> > Also nitpick - we are the fourth most populous city in North America, and > only Mexico City, New York and Los Angeles have a larger population. As of > mid last year, Toronto contains more people than Chicago.

Ugh, this is a pet peeve of mine. The city limits are drawn in such a way that Toronto _technically_ edges out Chicago. Torontonians seem to feel this is a meaningful point of pride.

Get real. The metro Toronto area is 7 million people. The metro Chicago area is nearly 10 million.

<comment><USER8> Huh? Get real? The 10 million "Greater Chicago Area" you're referring to is 10,857 miles. The 6 million Toronto area you're referring to is only 2,751 miles. That's almost 4 times the size but only 1.6 times the population.

I think the sizes are in reality pretty close and figuring out which is bigger seems very nuanced depending on where you draw the lines. That being said I'll go along with you and say Chicago is probably bigger for the most part _right now_. Chicago definitely feels like a bigger city when you're downtown anyways.

The numbers you're using for comparison though? C'mon, who's being prideful?

[http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blogs-and-comment/so-is- toro...](http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blogs-and-comment/so-is-toronto- really-bigger-than-chicago-its-complicated/)

<comment><USER7> You can include the entire "extended" golden horseshoe area (all the way to K/W and Peterborough) and you've still got only 8.7 million people in 12,185 square miles [1]. By the way, I was already using the golden horseshoe area already (Hamilton, etc.) since I used _seven_ million, not _six_.

There are simply more people in the Chicago area. By a decent margin. There's nothing wrong with that. I think this is a thing for Torontonians because of the perpetual inferiority complex we Canadians [2] have with respect to the U.S. :)

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

[2] I am from Toronto, so it's weird to accuse me of being prideful? I'm guessing you think I'm somehow "defending" Chicago? My point is that having more city in your city is nothing to be proud (or ashamed) about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So this article is about people like me. I went to school in Toronto and stayed. In the > 5 years since:

\- I joined a seed stage startup

\- That startup raised a series A ($N millions in total financing)

\- Was then acquired by a Fortune 500 company, which has kept the business as a separate unit for > 1 year

\- I was a party to the deal :)

I have found salaries to be competitive when total cost of living adjustments are made (even despite the currency value). Importantly, the labour market here values skills over credentials - so there's a distinct pragmatism in the air.

So as far as _startups_ go - not the publicly traded and pre-series-G-mega-SF- corps - I think there's a vibrant opportunity and reality.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Toronto is already home to a number of successful venture-backed businesses, such as Shopify, KIK, ..."

Fact check time. Shopify's headquarters is in Ottawa. Kik is in Waterloo.

<comment><USER11> Don't know about KIK, but Shopify has a large development office in Toronto near King and Spadina.

<comment><USER12> They also just invested in a huge space (King Portland Centre) that won't be built until 2019.

<comment><USER13> Huge is putting it mildly. This is a pretty major campus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Odd they didn't mention Amazon Toronto or IBM. Amazon has 300+ SDEs here (myself included), room for 800 developers in the new office that just opened. Not sure how big IBM is, but I've heard it's fairly big operation here.

It's not that Amazon is a startup itself (what, 100k+ employees worldwide doesn't count?) but that when you have a big company like that you often see people leave to make startups. Young guys spend a couple years being mentored and becoming great developers, then leave to go pursue their passions.

I have two former managers that are both very senior people in local Toronto startups, plus a number of friends who've left to hit up the start-up scene both as founders and early hires.

<comment><USER15> How is the pay at Amazon Toronto and what are the projects like?

I work in tech (not Amazon) and live in Seattle, and given the reputation I don't think I'd really want to work for them in this city given the other options we have here.

But if they paid top-notch salary and had great work, I'd seriously consider it as an option when moving back to Toronto. The employment options seem quite limited and I have a hard time justifying a move home if I end up working on less interesting technology and make less than half of what I do here. I'm afraid of my only options moving home being a massive pay cut, boring work, a terrible commute, and being priced out of real estate anywhere appealing in the city. :(

RE: IBM, if I recall most/all of their engineering is in Markham, they don't treat their employees particularly well, and the pay is so-so (though maybe market rates given Toronto).

<comment><USER14> Re: pay- It's less than in Seattle, it's "competitive" for Toronto (ie: few companies pay this much, but then few companies need to here). Never heard of anyone leaving for better money unless they were headed for Seattle or the Bay.

Re: projects- there's lots going on in Toronto. Depends what you're interested in.

Toronto: housing is overpriced. Just a fact of the city. No one under 30 is ever going to own a house in the city, but there's lots of decent condos going up. Find a place on the subway or Go lines and your commute is pretty painless. And the Amazon office is 200m from Union station, don't need to go outside. That was nice in the winter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I moved to Toronto from Seattle.

If you value street fashion, nightlife, music, no driving, etc then the bay area isn't very appealing. I wouldn't move back west until I'm married with kids.

I'm 22, rent a huge apt with two friends for ~$900/m each, live on the main subway line (15 min to work). I couldn't spend more than $4k/m if I tried (bought a roomba, tom ford shades, eat steak and berries).

Some toronto companies I admire:

\- [https://www.wealthsimple.com/](https://www.wealthsimple.com/) \- [http://www.uken.com/](http://www.uken.com/) \- [https://shoeboxapp.com/](https://shoeboxapp.com/) \- [https://www.opencare.com/](https://www.opencare.com/) \- [https://tophat.com/](https://tophat.com/) \- [https://www.pagerduty.com/](https://www.pagerduty.com/) \- [http://www.eventmobi.com/](http://www.eventmobi.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I worked in the SF Bay Area for ~4 years. After wanting to re-visit life in Canada for personal reasons, I ended up in Toronto last year. With no expectations, but some sense of understanding that Toronto is Canada's best tech hub, I made a move and worked at an early stage tech consultancy. A lot of smart and talented people from local schools (e.g. Waterloo/UofT). But like most have mentioned, you still see a huge migration of that talent going to US-based tech hubs as the opportunities are more favourable (career-wise and financially).

After a year (and luckily meeting my significant other) we've decided to explore opportunities in the Bay Area again, and will be moving back this summer.

There really isn't anything quite like the SF scene at the moment for tech startups.

This article is great in championing what the city can aspire to, but there is a lot of room left to become a contender.

Can't wait to see what Toronto's tech scene will evolve to in the next 5-10 years. Hopefully in time for when I want to settle down again in Canada.

</comment><comment><USER18> Waterloo has been investing heavily in improving their public transit infrastructure in recent years:

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

[http://rapidtransit.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/projectinformatio...](http://rapidtransit.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/projectinformation/transithub.asp)

Once it is completed, I think this will make Waterloo and Toronto feel a lot closer together. Note that the 'transit hub' mentioned above is a 2 minute walk from communitech ([https://www.communitech.ca/](https://www.communitech.ca/)), Google, Shopify, D2L etc.

<comment><USER19> Those are local projects (Waterloo/Kitchener/Cambridge), right? Are they actually planning on improving the very slow and intermittent rail connection to Toronto?

<comment><USER18> Yes, these are local projects, but with the amount of chaos they're creating with construction, I'm willing to believe that once it's finished they'll make much more frequent trips to Toronto. I believe there would be demand for it as the King/Victoria area is changing rapidly. Google just took over a building that was an old derelict factory with broken windows 2 years ago. This building is within feet of the proposed transit station. Lots of new apartment buildings going up in the area. The communitech hub has also been getting much more busy in the last few years.

<comment><USER19> OK, so they might have a few more frequent trips, but the train itself still takes an hour and a half. And even if you assume this horrendous construction makes traveling within the KW region magically fast, you're still talking a 1 hour 45 minutes commute, each way.

I think Toronto will still be pretty far away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ultimately if Toronto wants to be the best they will pay the best (adjusted for cost of living). They're best bet is that the bay cost of living becomes so unbearable that they can be competitive in take-home dollars.

As it is, the money for developers is in the bay by a _huge_ margin.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, the pay here in Toronto is much lower, even when you account for cost of living vs. San Fran.

One consideration that offsets that is medical insurance. If your health care is not fully covered by your employer.

I ran some numbers once and the "rent difference" was roughly $3k (typical 1 - 2 bedroom apartment at $4k vs. The roughly $1k I spend) and the platinum medical looking like roughly $500/mo

Add in a car, ($0 in Toronto, $1000 in The bay w/ parking, insurance, gas & the vehicle)

All said and done, $55k appears to make the cost of living difference "break- even"

If I'm on roughly $100k in Toronto, $155k would be even. Now that doesn't adjust for exchange rate, so you might get ~20% play there. Maybe the $135k median I've read about is roughly on target in terms of total food cost, etc...)

I think there'd be some cachet to having a "big five" employer on your resume, so a year or two in one of the mega-shops would add value to future earnings if you started looking elsewhere, or a handful of other unicorn-class names might have a similar impact.

All in all, I'm not convinced that taking a San Fran gig would necessarily feel like streets paved with gold and scooping up baskets of money (which grows on trees), so much as it'd be a nice, sunny, ultra-nerdy town in the heart of movin' & shakin'

Incidentally, if anyone would like to disabuse me of any errors in my napkin math, I would welcome it. I'd love to get a more realistic idea of the difference.

<comment><USER22> > Add in a car, ($0 in Toronto, $1000 in The bay w/ parking, insurance, gas & > the vehicle)

My observation is that's great to not have a car in SF, I prefer not to. But it's impossible not to have a car in Toronto.

Why is it $0 in Toronto?

<comment><USER21> Great to hear you can go without a car in SF I'm a 20 minute walk to work in Toronto with a large grocery store across the street from home. Basically everything can be done on foot. Add in a bike and a nice transit system and no-car is pretty easy here.

Are you in SF? Does $4k for a 1 bed+den seem to be in the ballpark?

<comment><USER23> Rents can vary widely but I think $3000 is probably a more reasonable estimate. The transit estimates also seem too high - I spend almost nothing because I can walk to work and take a Lyft Line for $5 or a bus for $2.25 if I need to. Many people bike. Overall it would be fairly easy to only spend a few hundred a month on transit for many people if your apartment isn't too isolated.

<comment><USER24> You cannot get a 1BR+den for $3000 in SF. It'll be just over $4k since it'll be similar square footage to a 2BR but discounted for not having the proper second bedroom.

<comment><USER23> I pay less than $3000 actually and see similar listings

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think if any city/region wants to be a future Silicon Valley (given the rents, why would you?), first focus on being the next Seattle/Austin/Portland. You can't beat NY in terms of having access to capital, but then NY (and LA) is its own world with its own dominant industry, so I'm not sure if it's comparable as to SAP in terms of "the next SV" talk. But you can do what those three cities have and have access to affordable (if increasing) housing, good business environments, and the standard of living that would draw in potential tech folks.

Maybe I should replace Portland with Boulder, in which case it'd be SAB. (Or with Denver but that's just SAD.)

<comment><USER26> Boulder Austin Denver Atlanta Seattle Salt-Lake?

Really stretching my US geography to get anything close to a decent acronym

<comment><USER25> I think Boulder/Denver should be regarded as one market. SLC is definitely hot for tech, but is it for startups? Atlanta I'm not too sure of.

<comment><USER26> I was just aiming for BADASS I am afraid.

Salt lake only came to mind thanks to salt stack. Atlanta - well, as I said, limited geo knowledge. Ironic really

<comment><USER25> Swap Boston in for Boulder, and you've got your acronym.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Waterloo is far better then Toronto in terms of startups and tech talent. Toronto is riding our coat tails :)

Worth mentioning that Waterloo has the world's largest startup incubator/accelerator (physical space wise) via Velocity.

<comment><USER21> and Sudbury has the world's largest nickel... [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Nickel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Nickel)

It doesn't really follow that they're going to be more successful because of it. World's largest is a bit irrelevant in this case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If only. The draw of SV on young Canadian talent is just too large. Some of the smartest people I know hail from that region and most of them ended up working in SV.

Sad, but it's not happening unless Canada will find a way to balance out the enormous difference in pay between working in Toronto (or any other major Canadian city) versus the Valley.

<comment><USER29> Would have to agree there. The salaries in Toronto are far, far lower than a comparable on the US West Coast. If you can get a public sector job at a university though, you might be laughing. Although, public sector jobs will suck the creativity right out of your veins like a vampire..

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I almost spat my glass of wine out my nose when I read "Delightfully efficient transport"

The GTA has some of the worst sprawl and traffic problems in North America, and its transit system has been neglected since the 80s and the politicians are only starting to get their heads out of their asses on this in the last few years.

<comment><USER31> Seriously, the 401 is horrific. I've spent a great deal of time in all of the major Canadian cities(offices), and the traffic situation is the same. I don't know what the deal is with Canada, but they REALLY need to clean up their transit.

<comment><USER32> The Bay Area has no place to criticize anyplace else for bad transit infrastructure. Toronto's infrastructure has issues, but it beats most US cities.

<comment><USER30> Not sure I agree. Having spent plenty of time in the Bay Area for work I'd say that yes it's "transit" infrastructure is garbage on account of it being suburban sprawl. But Toronto's highway network is worse, and in reality the bulk of tech employment in Toronto is out in the suburban sprawl of Markham, etc. where the transit system does you no good.

There are more jobs now downtown than there was 10 years ago for sure, with companies like Amazon having moving in there. But the transit system itself has fallen on hard times. Taking the King streetcar is a disaster, the subway is highly unpleasant at peak hours, and in any case housing is unaffordable in the downtown core so many transit trips are an hour long. The system has aged.

The Eglinton Crosstown will make a huge difference for sure. Would have helped me a lot as I lived in one of the last affordable neighbouroods in Toronto (Oakwood & Vaughan). But my employment has moved to Waterloo, and I'm living rural now, and the quality of life is much better for me :-)

I hope Toronto can get its infrastructure issues sorted. But I don't think it compares well to the Bay Area. Or to NYC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This article is poorly fact-checked:

"Queens College" is, I'm guessing, referring to Queen's University in Kingston (since the attendance number cited also matches), which is over 150 miles away from Toronto. I'm surprised the author didn't include the 25,000 students at McMaster and the 20,000 students at the University of Guelph which are both much closer than either Waterloo or Queen's. And if the author is going to include the University of Waterloo, why not also include Wilfrid Laurier University which is also in Waterloo? It is totally nonsensical. Kitchener- Waterloo is very distinct from Toronto and its various suburbs.

The support provided by the government does not begin to make up for the lack of support provided by local angel investors/VCs. It is much easier to go through the government grant process and get funding for a startup that way than it is to get Angel or VC money in Toronto.

BlackBerry has been dying a slow death for over 4 years at this point. Whatever talent they once had has (hopefully, for their sake) long since moved on. If the author's claims of a diaspora injecting additional talent into the local startup scene are true, we should already be seeing it. I don't.

Shopify's HQ is in Ottawa. They are sucking up a lot of the local CS talent in Ottawa since they are a big fish in a small pond. They aren't going to move their HQ ~200 miles to Toronto any time soon, even if it means avoiding -40 degree winters.

<comment><USER34> > even if it means avoiding -40 degree winters.

Oh come on, winter in Ottawa isn't that bad. I can't recall many days that were below -30 when I was living there.

Although I hear Toronto barely has snow in the winter time, must be heaven not to have to shovel your driveway.

<comment><USER35> Oh, come on. I had to shovel my driveway at least twice this past winter.

(I was able to bike to work throughout most of the winter, even if some of the rides were abbreviated because I can use the GO train as well.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Who is going to move to Toronto to join the tech scene? If given the choice who is going to choose Toronto over Bay Area or Seattle?

Without it having a massive draw it won't even register compared to Bay Area or even Seattle.

<comment><USER37> If someone made me choose between the Bay Area and Toronto, I would pick Toronto. Every day of the week. Toronto's great.

Sure, it's like the planet Hoth for a third of the year. But in every other way it's a more liveable city. The public transport in the core of the city exists and works, rather than being a cobbled-together mishmash of uncoordinated systems of which 2 out of 3 seem to be broken at any time.

The rent is a shit ton cheaper, the people are much nicer, the food is more varied, the city is _gorgeous_ in summer, it's big enough to have serious amenities, small enough to be walkable and the people who look like lumberjacks probably _are_.

I live in NYC, because I prefer it to SF as well. As an Australian citizen I find it significantly easier to work in the USA than in Canada. But if Toronto's scene were on a rough scale with NYC's and if the immigration thing could be sorted, I'd be tempted to move.

<comment><USER38> > _and the people who look like lumberjacks probably are._

As someone who grew up in a forestry town in Northern Ontario...Toronto is a world away, and much more similar to the Bay Area than where I grew up.

<comment><USER37> Oh, for sure.

But there's Brooklyn hipsters, and SF hipsters, and Toronto hipsters, and then there are actual forestry workers who come into town.

<comment><USER39> No they don't. Toronto is two plane rides away for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo are both healthy, vibrant startup hubs, but are distinct regions IMO. They are 120km apart and it takes ~90min to drive from Communitech to MARS [https://goo.gl/maps/vRJqc7JsNcp](https://goo.gl/maps/vRJqc7JsNcp).

Both positively influence each other, compete for resources. Waterloo has some more affordable suburban housing, and less vibrant city/'downtown'. Toronto is more expensive, is bigger and better in many respects.

Vancouver and Montreal are also decent startup ecosystems. I've been writing a researching Canadian cities/startup ecosystems for a book. Lots of stats and resources here if you're really into this topic: [https://github.com/DeBraid/ham-innov-essay](https://github.com/DeBraid/ham- innov-essay)

<comment><USER41> There's also Victoria BC. A smaller city, but that makes the tech and startup scene more important locally: by some measures, tech is now the biggest "industry" in the area, beating tourism. Plus, it's got the best weather in Canada.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> My money is on Canada!

Look, our culture, the geo-political environment, the general tolerance level of an average Canadian, all of these play a factor and when given a choice, people would easily Canada as their home base.

This is where you want to start a family and grow your kids. The tech scene has always been miniature compared to SF or NYC, but the high caliber of talent and expertise is the same if not greater than those cities.

The more reports like this come out, I believe the more of the current Canadian Diaspora living and working in the US will be swayed to move back here, bringing their talent, their money and their valley connections with them.

This country is already winning with it's social policies and adopting multiculturalism, anything else is really icing on the cake. The tech sector picking up is icing on the cake. Choosing to live here is a no-brainer for anyone given the choice.

<comment><USER43> Too bad it's so cold.

<comment><USER42> No colder than Chicago or New York, and on most days, it's no hotter or colder than the Bay Area. really.

<comment><USER44> I strongly disagree. I grew up in Toronto. Moved to New Jersey at 17, San Francisco at 21 and NYC four years ago at age 32.

Toronto's weather is definitely the worst of the four, no question.

<comment><USER45> Those places must have great weather, because Toronto is mostly sun and climate is moderated by the lake

<comment><USER46> 2 years ago we had the polar vortex where the groundwater froze and when it cracked sounded like someone kicking tour front door open.

I doubt there was a polar vortex in the bay area.

<comment><USER45> That's just a good storm. The normal day-to-day weather is very nice and usually sunny. Of course we have winter, but it is mild with the occasional extreme storm. I guess it just depends on how much you like the cold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The main complaint I have heard from Toronto entrepreneurs is the difficulty of raising capital. You pretty much have to get on a plane to raise a series A, apparently.

<comment><USER48> and you have to do that once... big deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Canada has lost engineering talent to the US for 149 years...

In the old days (pre WW2) you just hopped in a car and moved down. Well over a 1 million Canadian born people live in the states including about 70,000 illegals..

That said there are about 200,000 immigrants coming to Canada per year many who have stem backgrounds. Quebec has an open immigration policy for French programmers moving to Quebec. And for all those of you comparing salaries - low salaries are generally good for startups..

WEF ranks canada 4 in the world for human talent [http://reports.weforum.org/human-capital- report-2015/report-...](http://reports.weforum.org/human-capital- report-2015/report-highlights/)

</comment><comment><USER50> Depends on the salaries they offer, doesn't it?

<comment><USER51> I don't know how to upvote this subject enough. All these places wanting to compete with Silicon Valley do not compete on the salary they are willing to pay software development.

London has this problem. I'm sure anthropologists could study it and say it has something to do with where software engineers sit in the pack hierarchy in each community. Whatever it impacts the ability of businesses to execute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I agree with the article, it really does feel like something special is happening in the city. I work at TWG, a software dev agency in Toronto and we've worked closely with many of these startups and are pretty well connected to the startup culture. Happy to answer any questions you might have about our local scene!

</comment><comment><USER53> Toronto is indeed up and coming like every major city, as tech continues to become more essential and dominant. My company, Fiix (www.fiix.io), is an example of a company based out of Toronto, that actually just got backed by YC. Ideally we'd love to stay in Toronto, but the valley continually entices us and a lot of startups to eventually transition there because of their abundance of top talent. The main reason we are in Toronto is because our current market consists of only Torontonians. As we look to expand our services, staying in Toronto might become very difficult. I think once Toronto has a huge surplus of tech talent, then it will be very interesting... Maybe a first mover advantage works in the valley's favor here ;)

</comment><comment><USER31> Toronto can't even handle getting the current population on time to work. Their highway congestion is horrendous. I can't imagine it transitioning to a major tech startup center.

</comment><comment><USER54> The article mentions government grants, does anyone know of a small software shop that has been able to get one? We looked into it at one point and its next to impossible. Our advisor told us we had to modify the product in weird ways to maybe get a grant some years later. In other words getting a grant was nice for the media outlets to report but in reality impossible for a small startup...

</comment><comment><USER55> How many times have we heard that City X has poised to become "next tech capital" ? Austin, San Antonio, London and which not.

Building a specialization is far more complex. It might seem unrelated but I think the SF's historical openness for all sort of "weird" people have played a big role in its emergence as Tech capital. It would take years for nay city to beat it.

</comment><comment><USER56> About 6 months back - we and five other startups were invited by federal government with a pitch that operate in canada & win North American market. They toured us to almost every happening startup place in the city of Toronto, Montreal and Waterloo. Only thing that we couldn't do because of our tight schedule was meet the talent and figure out for ourselves.

</comment><comment><USER57> Doing an employee transfer to Canada is like playing a lotterey.

My past employers had documents returned to them 4 times in a row for: 1. assumed type (s vs z); 2. unclear signature; 3. ESDC called them, but they missed the call; 4. person's passport was about to expire. The regulations never mentioned anything about this.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'd love to see some comments on what it's like raising money in Toronto. Is there a local investor ecosystem? Do companies raise a series A led by a Toronto firm? Do they fly to NYC or SF and hope to find investors who don't want them to move?

</comment><comment><USER59> They mention KIK as a Toronto company. Isn't KIK in Waterloo ninety miles away? That is a pretty elastic definition of greater Toronto isn't it?

<comment><USER60> Yep Kik is in Waterloo, and Waterloo is actually 70 miles away.

I've lived in both cities and I have never heard anyone refer to Waterloo being in the GTA. They are both very distinct cities, and even on good days it takes about 90 minutes to drive between them, and it is even worse during rush hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> California is really unliveable if Toronto is able to keep and capture talent now. Honestly it has to be really bad living in Silicon Valley at this point.

<comment><USER25> Isn't Toronto very similar to NY, except with worse traffic?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I can't count the number of times I've seen the "[INSERT CITY NAME HERE] is poised to become the new Silicon Valley!" headline.

</comment><comment><USER63> I moved to Victoria, BC from the states. There is zero chance anything in Canada can compete with SF for quite some time until a few things change.

I actually get asked this question quite a bit being here. I have many long and drawn out thoughts having lived in SF and now Victoria, but I'll try to condense them.

First, if any place in Canada will start a tech boom, it isn't Toronto. It's not Vancouver. It's Victoria. Why? Victoria is close to SF, where the VC money is. The life and cost of living in Victoria is dramatically better than either Toronto (high cost, terrible weather) or Vancouver (high cost). And tech is already one of the bigger industries in Victoria. Victoria has the added bonus of already having a vibrant start-up scene, albeit mostly local and under 20 people and on the very young side.

Second, even with the above, Victoria (which I consider the most likely, so that means even less for other cities) is highly unlikely to get any major traction for a few reasons.

1\. Canada is very conservative with money. Canadian banks, angels and VCs are all pretty conservative. They are not like SF VCs and do not want to make 10 bets to get one win. Canadian startups typically have to bootstrap well beyond what any in the states would ever have to do. Sometimes this is ok, but for the most part it shows that Canadian startup scene doesn't quite understand risk and reward well. And, the majority of VCs are still out east in Canada, though they are even worse in this regard because they simply don't get the modern internet. In Toronto the tech industry was telephony and devices and it seems that most of the VCs are so old school they still think this way. Canadian VCs need to modernize their thinking quickly.

2\. SF VCs are not forward thinkers. At all. SF VCs continually say to Canadian companies "you need to move to SF", which of course in 2016 is complete and utter bullshit. Most VCs are actually not inventive or progressive. Instead, they are followers of a few stronger VCs. And by a few, I mean a tiny minority. Being followers, they have playbooks and patterns they follow. It's basically scripts. SF based VCs want to invest in SF based companies. This is a 1990s model that doesn't matter in 2016 and, much like Canadian VCs, SF VCs need to update their thinking and look beyond this. They might not feel they have to because there are so many people willing to live and work in SF, but SF based VCs, the progressive ones, look for good ideas and good teams. Location is not important. SF based VCs should adapt to the brave new world and expand from a single geo.

3\. Salaries. Canadian salaries in tech are low. So low that many that live close to the states and are young would simply move to the states. Now, this sometimes works out, sometimes it doesn't. It works in places like Toronto and Vancouver when the cost of living is awful (worse than SF when you factor in housing with salary, IMO). It doesn't work when it's places like Victoria (at the moment). This could actually change if salaries go up, ironically, though it's unlikely for quite some time.

4\. Cargo Culture. Most techies in Victoria view SF as the mecca of tech. I mean, it is, but not the way they idolize it. Smart and stupid have no geo lock and many in Victoria/Canada have a bit of a complex when SF comes up. Canadians need to stop looking at SF for inspiration and instead build the local community up, make it a vibrant scene of their own and own it all. Forget what SF is doing. Don't chase trends and build things of value.

<comment><USER64> great summary. two things to add: 1) with commodities prices falling, some less risk adverse canadian investors(read mining) might change the situation with vcs, and 2) silicon valley would be way to big for canada, canada only needs about 10% of it

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I bet $500 USD it doesn't become bigger than the bay area in the next 10 years.

<comment><USER13> Good. The last thing needed here is a town full of jackasses creating the next unicorns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Toronto actually recently passed Chicago in population.

</comment><comment><USER67> The deafening silence of polite Canadians up in here. I love it in Toronto. YC:HN has taught me a lot so I hope you allow me to share the reasons why Toronto is a phenomenal city in which to be a Hacker.

I've been a sysadmin for 16 years. My experience, is that Toronto is extremely liberal and militantly tolerant. A bigoted insult upon someone on public transit or in the streets will not go without being criticized by the public. Even if you cast it in french.

We are proud of welcoming and integrating people.

[https://nulogy.com/who-we-are/careers/](https://nulogy.com/who-we- are/careers/) \- Here are my company's core values. I think they're uniquely Canadian, in a way. Empathy is pretty much #1. Our HQ is downtown. I've never been happier and further from burnout as the ops manager at this gig.

Check out our local music scene [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IWZWo6IByM#t=53m44s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IWZWo6IByM#t=53m44s) techno [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPZvNqNFaU8#t=50s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPZvNqNFaU8#t=50s) hip hop [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uev2J_cBHjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uev2J_cBHjQ) rock

Lots of people want to live here, evident by rising rents :(.

The OP highlights an up and coming tech sector.

Kitchener-Waterloo (KW)... Yeah... The University of Waterloo has a great funnel system for cooperative intern students in Ontario. They put a lot of effort towards a kind of Mittelstand model. I'm nonplussed. Better self taught hackers are drawn to the urban core after failing out of post secondary.

RIM was a thing, once. Now it's a joke. I heard someone throw shade about RIM's big brother nature the other day.

I've coded puppet & chef for over 200+ startups. Startups are huge here and the culture is very social and enjoyable! Meetups are big! I regularly run into other new hackers in unrelated social settings. It's fun that way.

Uber is big. Dispensaries are big. Nightclubs are great. You can get food of any origin.

Cycling is huge here. Incorporating cycling into your transportation means living downtown is affordable, if you plan.

OH! Speaking of incorporating, in a business sense, it's trivial. You can do it in 30 minutes at city hall.

Toronto, in my experience, has been the most exciting, happy and loving city to call home. I'm truly in love with this city. It's safe, fun and full of opportunity. I love walking down the street and hearing eighteen different languages in one hour. I love seeing any world famous artists who would drop by Canada.

Anybody who's seriously interested in the Toronto scene should drop by [http://techmasters.chat/](http://techmasters.chat/) and talk to us. The tech scene is on fire here! It's so exciting! ...and very welcoming!

</comment><comment><USER68> Seconded on risk aversion. Toronto is just not sexy. When you go to pitch a client in a top tier city and you are from one, the client assumes that if you can survive in SF/NY/DC/LON etc, that they should hear you out.

In Toronto, it's like you can't type 'hello world," without some cringeworthy reporter going on about how it's by a sparky _canadian_ startup taking on the big bad world with their local blend of quirky charm and _moxie_.

I'm sure that's warm and fuzzy to people who live on grant money, but to the rest of the world it means "derivative and subsidized."

Toronto is a good place for dev shops, but innovation needs to be in places where it is valued by people who actually pay for it. If you are doing enterprise dev, it's great.

But nobody here is going to Mars, except maybe a scrappy group of girl engineers who take no guff, and are writing codes with a critical take on whether colonizing other planets is problematic in the face of our own colonial history and need for healing and reparations...

<comment><USER69> I'm not sure what happened in that last paragraph, can you elaborate?

<comment><USER68> What precisely could benefit from clarification?

<comment><USER70> You're obviously referring to something very specific, while being vague enough that people that are not 'in' on it don't understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> That's gonna be quite a feat with absurd real estate prices, a weak dollar, and lower salaries than the US even before you take into account the weak dollar.

</comment><comment><USER72> I thought that was supposed to be Austin? Silicone valley of the prairie or something.

<comment><USER73> This kind of thing is said all the time of different places :)

<comment><USER74> I still haven't seen any of the places that are described as being the "next Silicon Valley" actually become a huge tech hub organically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> 20 bucks says it won't.

<comment><USER76> 20 USD or 20 CAD?

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Bullshit.</comment>


Manual on Jacquard Hand Loom Weaver (Frame Loom) (2007) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20181024211324/http://textilescommittee.nic.in/writereaddata/files/Jacquard%20Handloom%20Weaver.pdf <comment><USER2> Before Lena: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine#/media/File:A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine#/media/File:A_la_mémoire_de_J.M._Jacquard.jpg)

Note the broken window!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Posting an archive.org link since the original is a "sarkaari"* website (which typically has a guaranteed downtime - instead of uptime)

*govt</comment>


Americans are having sex less often, new study shows - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/11065.html <comment><USER2> Overworked + internet. It's not that mysterious!

<comment><USER3> You forgot living in the information and stress age, where everything is a crisis, or Trump's fault (or to his credit). We have no life to ourselves anymore, sex is like drinking, for many it serves to soothe the stress of just getting by, for others it serves to reinforce our deflated ego's, and for the rest of us, it is a low priority thing we can afford to, pardon the phrase, blow off...</comment></comment>


SSH vs. OpenVPN for Tunneling - <AUTHOR> http://blog.backslasher.net/ssh-openvpn-tunneling.html <comment><USER2> I used to maintain an ipsec VPN for road warrior type scenarios, but I've found that mostly I just wanted to get a remote desktop on a computer within the network.

So I've stopped mucking around with VPN and just published Apache Guacamole HTML5 VNC/RDP tunnels. No plugins, no clients except a modern web browser and good security with certbot+auto redirect to https+simple auth to keep badguys away from possible exploits in the guacamole login form. Configs can be as simple as the NoAuth plugin, all the way to full integration with eg. AD. I've implemented this at a number of businesses, and it does what almost everyone in the organization wants. It also supports things like printing (to a pdf that comes thru the browser as a download) and file transfer. Super easy to set up and is much more responsive than VNC or RDP thru ssh.

The times when I actually want full IP access to a network from my laptop are so rare that it seemed silly to maintain IPSec.

What need do others have for full-connectivity VPNs? Not site-to-site VPNs of course, but these ad-hoc on the road type ones.

Honest question

<comment><USER3> I recently wrote about my home VPN setup in a previous HN thread [1]. But to answer your question, the additional use-cases I have are:

1\. I connect to my home file server from all of my devices. This allows me to access my singular master file system from everywhere, which includes all of my documents and data. For example, I can reach my Keepass database from all devices without any need for clumsy synchronization or a third-party "cloud" provider.

2\. I view my security camera streams by reaching my on-premises NVR from anywhere.

3\. I can print to home from anywhere.

4\. My entire media library is available from anywhere.

5\. I can reach my family's home intranet web-app from all of my devices (e.g., my phone), natively.

It's true that all of this _could_ be done in a remote desktop window, but it would be less smooth and less convenient. E.g., using Keepass in a remote desktop window wouldn't be as convenient as running it locally (with the kdbx loaded from the file server).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15586997)

<comment><USER4> What protocol do you use to access your Keepass database from your mobile device?

Are you always connected to your VPN on your mobile device? How much network traffic overhead does it add?

<comment><USER5> Plus, what's the performance impact on your smartphone? Battery life, available resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow a little googling on this subject led me to sshuttle, which I've never heard of before but looks awesome, will try it out on Monday:

[http://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage.html](http://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage.html)

Basically "vpn over ssh" (not really, but close enough).

<comment><USER7> What's the difference between that and [https://github.com/darkk/redsocks](https://github.com/darkk/redsocks) ?

Edit: why the downvote? I thought I asked a legit question...?

<comment><USER8> You can skip sshuttle's magic and do exactly the same thing manually with "ssh -D" \+ "iptables -j REDIRECT" \+ redsocks, but that's a lot moving parts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This has been known forever. Stream-based packet tunneling absolutely does outperform packet wrapping in good network conditions, for the simple reason that small packets can be combined by the transport layer and avoid the overhead.

The problem is that in the presence of any packet loss at all, every packet lost causes a stall of the _whole tunnel_ until it gets retransmitted, which even in the best case recovery conditions requires two (three? I forget my SACK details) round trips. If one side is using traditional TCP retransmit timers it can be much, much longer.

<comment><USER10> I've been using a VPN over TCP ssh for a year. The end point is across the world. I get excellent bandwidth and no stalls. Latency is less than anticipated. The thoretical arguments against TCP/TCP do not match my experience.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, real world network paths, especially inter-data-center ones, generally do operate at exactly zero packet loss. Until they don't, alas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> `ip link set qlen 1000 dev tun0` (so it matches the eth0 queue, instead of being an order of magnitude smaller) on both ends of the tunnel, and you get 90% of direct connection speed from openvpn:

      $ iperf3 -c 10.1.0.2
      Connecting to host 10.1.0.2, port 5201
      [  4] local 10.1.0.1 port 38274 connected to 10.1.0.2 port 5201
      [ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr  Cwnd
      [  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  3.12 MBytes  26.1 Mbits/sec    0    802 KBytes
      [  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  22.3 MBytes   187 Mbits/sec    0   2.24 MBytes
      [  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  21.4 MBytes   179 Mbits/sec    0   2.45 MBytes
      [  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  23.3 MBytes   196 Mbits/sec    0   2.39 MBytes
      [  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  23.4 MBytes   196 Mbits/sec    0   2.58 MBytes
      [  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  21.5 MBytes   180 Mbits/sec    0   2.70 MBytes
      [  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  23.5 MBytes   197 Mbits/sec    0   2.68 MBytes
      [  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  22.6 MBytes   189 Mbits/sec    0   2.78 MBytes
      [  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  22.4 MBytes   188 Mbits/sec    0   2.45 MBytes
      [  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  23.5 MBytes   197 Mbits/sec    0   2.69 MBytes
      - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
      [ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
      [  4]   0.00-10.00  sec   207 MBytes   174 Mbits/sec    0             sender
      [  4]   0.00-10.00  sec   207 MBytes   174 Mbits/sec                  receiver

      iperf Done.

</comment><comment><USER12> Using SSH Tunnels is not TCP over TCP.

You have a TCP connection between local app and SSH client, then a second TCP connection between SSH client and SSH server, and a third TCP connection between SSH server and remote app.

There is no TCP over TCP when you use SSH tunnels. Lost packets between SSH client and SSH server do not cause retransmits on either application side.

<comment><USER13> That's what I thought too, that there is just a byte stream being tunneled between SSH server and client and not a TCP packet stream.

Btw I use unix sockets on client and server to avoid the local connection TCP overhead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There should be some catch in the setup. Maybe the CPUs he used are old and don't support hardware AES acceleration?

I just run iperf3 over OpenVPN / UDP with AES-256-GCM between two servers in the same DC (but different rooms, through their public network, 1gE links) and got an average of 750MBits/sec. I don't have any special setting.

<comment><USER15> Out of curiosity -- what's your SSH tunneling rate in the same setup?

<comment><USER14> Just tested. Ssh has indeed better performance, at around 870Mbit/sec.

But the gap in my -anecdotal- testing is much smaller than OP's and maybe predictable due to the differences (as OP described) on how OpenVPN and ssh work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's really not an apples to apples comparison. For my teammates on the development team, yes an SSH tunnel is going to be easier for our needs due to the reduced overhead. But if I want to give my customer support team access to private web services in our production cluster, a VPN is the perfect solution.

At FarmLogs, each of our Kube clusters has a bastion VPN host that puts you inside the VPC and handles DNS to Route53 (and the VPC) so <service>.farmlogs "just works"

We use Foxpass to handle this with LDAP bridged to Google Apps so when an employee joins or leaves their VPN access is immediately updated.

</comment><comment><USER17> A huge advantage of vpn tunnels is that they stay up indefinitely. I've had openvpn links stay up for months. With ssh, you're lucky to get a few days. I've tried scripts and even autossh, and ssh has never been as reliable as openvpn or tinc.

<comment><USER18> Now I wonder if there's a way to combine mosh's automatic reconnecting with ssh tunneling somehow...

<comment><USER5> That's latency related. Mosh uses UDP only, sshuttle uses TCP only.

AutoSSH plus some firewall scripts to ensure data only travels through the VPN would suffice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-c I found that OpenVPN benefited greatly from setting larger tunnel MTUs and then allowing the IP packets to be fragmented. I think it's encrypting per- packet which is somewhat inefficient.

</comment><comment><USER19> A very intelligent write up with one small, possibly fatal flaw.

When you are comparing one thing to another and writing up your pearls of wisdom for the masses you need to control _every_ variable (within reason).

I can't see a LAN based test acting as a baseline.

<comment><USER20> > you need to control every variable

Why? I plunk down a lot of stuff on my blog, not everything is up to that pretty high standard you mention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One thing I hate about OpenVPN is the ridiculous configuration. I'm a big fan of tinc[0] personally, although you have to use 1.1pre releases to get half decent encryption, it's configuration is wonderful.

[0] [https://www.tinc-vpn.org/](https://www.tinc-vpn.org/)

<comment><USER22> tinc 1.1pre seems pretty good, but I do worry about the legacy fallback for encryption; There doesn't seem to be any way to e.g. --force-experimental to prevent encryption falling back to the old RSA mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> SSH tunnel as proxy is easier and simpler to use if you have a VPS.

Setup the tunnel: ssh -D 8080 firstname.lastname@example.com

Change your system proxy settings: Socks proxy, 127.0.0.1, 8080

Done!

<comment><USER24> Yup, even works using putty.exe on Windows ([http://www.foxhop.net/ssh- tunnel](http://www.foxhop.net/ssh-tunnel))

<comment><USER25> And with PAC JavaScript files one can redirect only specific hosts to ssh or redirect to different ssh connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [Zerotier]([https://zerotier.com](https://zerotier.com)) is far nicer than all of them, clients (Win, macOS, GNU\Linux, OpenWrt, iOS, Android, NAS) are open- source and the hosted service allows up to 100 devices on one of unlimited networks for free. Because it emulates the ethernet layer, there is no client side configuration required and it can be used for non-IP packets (ex. DHCP). By enabling the default route permission on the client it can also be used as a gateway to the internet through a remote host on the network. All communications are e2e AES-256 with certificate-based access for private networks. Oh, and they also run a public earth network with unlimited members billed as "the global LAN party." It's a really convenient service, and the performance is good enough to be used between private clouds.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I'm really tempted to use this, but I'm a little nervous about relying on a company for this, especially because it doesn't look like they should be profitable on their current offerings.

<comment><USER27> Correct me if wrong, but I think that aside from their web based portal, everything else is open source. So you could control everything via API.

So if they ever did go out of business, you could host it yourself and I'm sure by then an open source web portal would emerge to take the main site's place. (Not to mention that they'd probably just release the web app if they were going out of business).

Hope it never comes to that though, I'd imagine their main bread and butter would be larger enterprise licenses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> 1\. Doesn't look like there were runs of iperf over UDP and TCP, with simulated buffer sizes, so hard to know what the network connection is even capable of.

2\. Also, how reliable is the network connection? Maybe it fluctuates every minute in usable bandwidth due to congestion or jitter. VMs are subject to noisy neighbor issues.

3\. It looks like the ciphers are different, which could of course affect throughput greatly if one is not hardware accelerated or if its CPU bound. Worth checking CPU and other system resource usage for differences.

4\. You could try OpenVPN with encryption and/or compression disabled entirely in UDP mode for best possible performance IIRC. This, at least, you would expect to beat an SSH tunnel.

<comment><USER29>
      > 2. It looks like the cipher "AWS128-CTR" is being used for
      > SSH, I'm not even sure what that is. I'd look at CPU and
      > other system resource usage for differences.

My guess is just a typo, for AES128-CTR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Worth looking at ZeroTier (commercial - actually running a hardware IndieGoGo right now) and WireGuard (IPSec - 'The Next Generation' / 'Voyager' or whichever you thought was best) as modern options.

<comment><USER31> I like that Wireguard is slowly sneaking into common use. Its performance seems promising. [https://www.wireguard.com/performance/](https://www.wireguard.com/performance/)

<comment><USER30> I believe it is headed for Linux kernel mainline soon-ish.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596963)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you are a road warrior (or you want to bypass security filters at work) you can securely proxy Firefox web and DNS traffic over a VPN using just SSH.

All you need is an SSH server running at home or in the "cloud".

I documented this a few years back:

[http://www.foxhop.net/ssh-tunnel](http://www.foxhop.net/ssh-tunnel)

This is also a great way to access resources on the remote network, for example your router/modem setup page or Jenkins, or whatever else is running on that remote Network.

</comment><comment><USER32> spiped would also be interesting to compare. Ridiculously easy to set up, and made by cperciva.

</comment><comment><USER33> Didn't see any mention of MTU in the post. If the defaults were sub-optimal for OpenVPN, that alone would account for the reduced throughput.

</comment><comment><USER34> I recently had to set up a 3 computer SSH tunnel and wrote about it, maybe people will find it interesting:

[https://vadosware.io/post/ssh-tunneling-using-an- intermediar...](https://vadosware.io/post/ssh-tunneling-using-an-intermediary- computer/)

I first tried to setup OpenVPN and only wanted to use the the SSH tunnel for DNS purposes (I couldn't use normal DDNS tools), but in the end, I ended up running a SOCKS proxy over the tunnel and it was stunningly effective, enough that watching Netflix despite intercontinental round trips.

</comment><comment><USER35> Any love for Softether vpn here? I use it every day to connect gome and it just woeks. Always. It encapsulates ssh I think

</comment><comment><USER36> >"As long as you only need one TCP port forwarded, SSH is a much faster choice, because it has less overhead than SSH."

OpenVPN is way more robust solution for tunneling though.

I've found that UDP tunnels work sometimes better in when there is considerable packet loss and high latency (poor radio links).

</comment><comment><USER37> IPSec on Linux has better performance than OpenVPN due to multi core support. That said setting up VPN tends to be time consuming and error prone. But what if the ssh connection drops, what restarts the tunnel then? IPSec has restart mechanism for when the net drops which it will do.

</comment><comment><USER38> I use both actually, where the best tool is applicable.

Some commenters have mentioned StrongSwan (or OpenSwan which is more known to me).

I've actually seen OpenSwan perform better than Cisco VPN tunnels. And I love pointing that out to our networking guys since we pay nothing for OpenSwan.

</comment><comment><USER39> What's the fastest option when you do need UDP?

Generally I just use SSH, but for gaming i've resorted to 160bit OpenVPN.

Incidentally setting up a OpenVPN server on dd-wrt is a rather hellish experience.

</comment><comment><USER40> The overhead of layer 2/3 packet headers in OpenVPN did not cause such a huge slowdown, its much more likely that OpenVPN was operating in TCP mode, and thus subject to the tcp-in-tcp[1] problem with tunnel internal tcp sessions. Even an extraordinarily slow machine by modern standards can manage 100mbit openVPN without much of an issue.

EDIT: did not see UDP results. There is still something else going on here, thats still much too slow for openVPN (without tweaking).

[1] [http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp- tcp.html](http://sites.inka.de/bigred/devel/tcp-tcp.html)

<comment><USER41> Reading TFA both TCP and UDP OpenVPN modes were tested. UDP was about three times faster than TCP, but SSH was three times faster than that.

Possibly the SSH encryption could have been more optimal for their use case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> There is a very simple test: fast.com. I tried fast.com over sshuttle and OpenVPN and OpenVPN was faster while sshuttle kind of collapsed.

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder why nobody has mentioned StrongSwan (IPSec+IKEv2) or ShadowSocks, which are both performant and very secure.

<comment><USER44> Shadowsocks is not very secure at all. Static keys and naive crypto. But that doesn't matter much since its primary use is for obfuscation.

<comment><USER45> I would love to read more about Shadowsocks security, if you have a link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> How do you redirect DNS over SSH though?

<comment><USER5> Sshuttle [1] takes care of that see --dns and --help and the documentation. You might also wanna disable IPv6 --disable-ipv6

Its basically a script which takes care of ssh, the routing, and firewalling. Its crossplatform, should work on Windows/Linux/macOS and perhaps more.

[1] [https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle](https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle)

[2] [https://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/](https://sshuttle.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)

<comment><USER47> Just a clarification ...

[https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle](https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle) is the original, now abandoned, sshuttle. Development was taken over by:

[https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle](https://github.com/sshuttle/sshuttle)

... which is the current, maintained version that you should track.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> They're different beasts with different use-cases.

I rely on both, and like having both options around.

</comment><comment><USER49> I use [https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle](https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle) but it's often too slow. I am wonder if their exist any go/rust equivalent of this project.

</comment><comment><USER50> Cool Keep it up.</comment>


The Unix PC 3B1 system font, for modern computers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brandon-rhodes/unixpc-font-bdf <comment><USER2> This warms my crusty heart. The first Unix machine I ever used was a 3B1. Great keyboard! IIRC, it only had a 10 megabyte drive, yet managed to have a pretty complete development and text-processing environment (i.e. cc/etc and troff/etc). I really wanted to use GCC on it, but was never able to get enough of the code on the machine at the same time to get it compiled there.

<comment><USER3> [https://loomcom.com/3b2/emulator.html](https://loomcom.com/3b2/emulator.html)

<comment><USER4> FWIW: A 3b1 (a tiny 68010 based Unix PC) is very different than a 3b2 (custom WE32000 processor Unix box).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Masswerk has a great writeup[0] about how to render these fonts correct you need to take into account phosphor decay times and dot stretching.

[0] [https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2019/dec-crt- typography](https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2019/dec-crt-typography)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am reminded that green-screen text causes eye strain, especially with modern brightness levels, and the slightly electric green vs the old phosphor green.

I spent many, many hours in the computer lab with someone who used white text on a blue background, and adopted light grey on blue for myself. A color scheme that some word processors also adopted.

Neither of us, nor Corel nor Microsoft, succeeded in converting the world to white on blue. I have bigger fish to fry now, but try it out sometime when you're tired of staring at the screen.

<comment><USER7> > green-screen text causes eye strain,

You have any data to back that up? My favorite color scheme is green-on-black, followed by white-on-green. I find white and blue backgrounds the worst for eye strain. Low brightness with high contrast seems to be another important factor to reduce strain.

<comment><USER6> What do you suppose would motivate someone who just looked at an image to start talking about eye strain? Maybe the pain behind their eyes started them thinking about the last time they had this problem?

Actual green screen phosphors are much lower saturation (and brightness) than the green on black image on that github page. That particular green would be more at home on a Hemp Festival advertisement. It's - to me - an interesting example of how terminal emulators are definitely emulators.

This would be pretty close to what a brand new 'green screen' might look like, and older ones would be faded: [https://cf.ydcdn.net/latest/images/computer/_OPAL1.GIF](https://cf.ydcdn.net/latest/images/computer/_OPAL1.GIF)

A reasonable overview of saturated colors: [https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-avoid- bright-s...](https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-avoid-bright- saturated-background-colors/)

Pure white on a bright (saturated) blue background is probably the worst color pairing you can get. I agree. But I'm not talking about saturated blue, or pure white. I'm talking about light (pale, if you like that word better) blue and off-white (in the ballpark of "easier on the eyes", but that's not quite right).

This is Wordperfect's blue, which is a bit darker than we used (probably closer to YAST2's color scheme):

[https://discourse-cloud-file-uploads.s3.dualstack.us- west-2....](https://discourse-cloud-file-uploads.s3.dualstack.us- west-2.amazonaws.com/boingboing/original/3X/6/f/6f9f09bdba548af220df7f3761d845174ddaca0d.gif)

<comment><USER8> FYI, that UX Movement article misrepresents the few studies that it actually cites and offers no evidence for its claim regarding saturation causing eye strain. I know this because someone complained at me recently about a design, linked to that article, and I actually bothered to read the couple of studies it _did_ cite.

Where the UX Movement article says "saturation and brightness have a more significant impact [than hue on arousal]", one of the studies it cites clearly states that brightness had _no_ impact on arousal. This obvious mistake calls into doubt (for me, at least) whether the author has _any_ objective basis for their claims.

On the other hand, this study which actually looks at colour preferences of people experiencing eye strain [0] appears to show (Figure 1) that people experiencing eye strain don't select away from green, which seems to refute fairly strongly your claim that green text causes eye strain for everybody. This study references several other studies on the effects of colour overlays so it is probably a good resource for additional research.

[0] [https://insights.ovid.com/optometry-vision- science/opvis/201...](https://insights.ovid.com/optometry-vision- science/opvis/2012/07/000/chromatic-aberration-accommodation- color/16/00006324)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome. I have a version of an old 8x8 IBM font compiled into a pixel font renderer package I built for Go: [https://github.com/pbnjay/pixfont](https://github.com/pbnjay/pixfont)

This would be a fun addition, I had started a BDF parser I need to finish...

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know if this is the same font that was used in the AT&T 3B2? My memory of that era can be a little... cloudy.

<comment><USER4> The 3b2 didn't have a built-in screen. You'd typically use a serial terminal with them, of which there were a near infinite many to choose from in the era.

One combination that was popular would be to pair up a DMD-5620 bitblit serial terminal with the 3B2.

There's already an emulator for the DMD-5620, written by the same guy that has written an emulator for the WE2000/3b2 setup.

[https://loomcom.com/3b2/dmd5620_emulator.html](https://loomcom.com/3b2/dmd5620_emulator.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would be nice if someone converted this to TTF.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like Monoid

</comment><comment><USER13> Such nostalgia!

</comment><comment><USER14> Steve job spent quite a bit on font and Apple did. It made a difference.</comment>


Will climate change destroy democracy? - <AUTHOR> https://theweek.com/articles/839648/climate-change-destroy-democracy <comment><USER2> It is easy to dream of enlightened autocracy as an alternative to strongman autoracy. But we must remember that however democracy looks impotent and chaotic it is suprisingly resilent system.</comment>


Ask HN: Are all developers sith by nature? - <AUTHOR> May the 4th be with you, my friends! We, developers, are creative individuals. My 20+ years experince says that one can not be a developer without being at least a little creative. But being creative is all about passion. And passion is the center of sith philosophy. So, we all are sith by nature? Even if we do not strive for power, we employ the dark side all the way. <comment><USER2> Lots of developers aren't "passionate", at least about software development. ([https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/30/not-a-passionate- pro...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/11/30/not-a-passionate-programmer/))

And there's a good argument to be made that you _shouldn 't_ be passionate about software development: [http://www.virtuouscode.com/2014/02/10/the- passion-gospel/](http://www.virtuouscode.com/2014/02/10/the-passion-gospel/)

Creativity is not "all about passion". It's a skill you can apply with or without passion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Creativity without passion is just making. You put pieces together, add some glue, and it just works. Being creative means to be able to find untrivial solutions.

<comment><USER2> What does finding untrivial solutions have to do with passion?

<comment><AUTHOR> Take two programmeers, a passionate one and non-passionate about his job and give them the same complex task that can not be solved without invention. I did this experiment a dozen of times over my subordinates and non-passionate ones always fail. 100%. So I do not hire people that just do their job any more.

<comment><USER2> There's a difference between caring about your job and being passionate. I recommend reading Avdi Grimm's [http://www.virtuouscode.com/2014/02/10/the- passion-gospel/](http://www.virtuouscode.com/2014/02/10/the-passion-gospel/), it's really good.

<comment><AUTHOR> All of them did care about their job equally. To care - is to do your best, to be passionate is to do more than you can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Passion to me is when you come back to some activity weither you plan to or not, e.g. you think about a programming problem out of the blue while in the shower or walking the dog. The things you are passionate about are always there in the back of your mind, presenting themselves when they wish. So passion is an attitude or state of mind regarding an activity.

Creativity on the other hand is when you come up in an idea or a solution to a problem. When you let out the stream of thoughts regarding a given topic, unfiltered by rational thinking. So creativity is the process of getting rid of your prejudices and looking a topic from different angles.

I guess they are both very different kind of concepts.

Creativity can be a passion, see artists, musicians. But also the most un- creative activity, e.g. sorting stamps, can be a passion.</comment>


Google shamed by Apple in race to HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/16/google_html5_effort_stinks/

<comment><USER2> Just to doublecheck, I got out my shamemometer, and it was at 8.6 for Apple, but at 8.7 for Google! The Register really nailed it with this one.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is this tabloid crap? Why are we sharing this? This doesn't add anything to anyone's knowledge, and it's just outright ridiculous.

Shamed? Really? Because everyone had only a single goal, HTML5, and Google was a couple steps behind?

It's like saying taking 2nd place in the Olympics is shameful.

</comment><comment><USER4> I do have a couple issues with the Android browser on a phone, but overall I am pleased with it, and I've never thought it was too slow. The most obvious problem is that switching tabs takes too long. Also, lack of SVG rendering. (This happens to be preventing it from passing the Acid3 Test.)

<http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=1376></comment>


Ask HN: How to increase your chances as a freelancer to get paid projects? - <AUTHOR>

Now and then I do freelancing projectS only to find myself competing with ridiculously low bids by certain agencies, 20-30 of them on sites like elance. This decreases the chances for a freelancer in the west to have a significant chance to get the job.
So I built this for me and my friends: www.cnnected.com
But would love to know other ways or sites to not play the lowratewar with indian developers. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> I signed up, I like the idea that developers pay a small fee to get connected, this likely keeps the riff-raft out of the bidding process. What is the plan for if this service grows, and the bottom of the barrel contractors from overseas start to take over this service as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking of making it for european/us freelancers only. Not entirely sure yet. But all ideas are welcome or other platforms that are tackling similar ideas to see what they are doing to solve the problem.

<comment><USER2> Verifying in what way?

<comment><AUTHOR> Location could be one way. But will have to see and test

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't use eLance for the specific reason that its rates are so low. I find my leads other ways.

Here are some:

[http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/telecommute/](http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/telecommute/)

I have lots more that I'll post soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome tnx for posting, looking fwd seeing the other ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> How often do you expect this service to send out emails? Also, are you marketing to people looking for freelancers as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Will start out 2 times a week but I expect to ramp it up to daily jobs being posted. I am marketing it to those people as well yes, but first need to have a significant database of developers.</comment></comment>


How To Make VPNs Even More Secure - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-make-vpns-even-more-secure-120419/ <comment><USER2> > "When anonymity is a factor, pay with an un-trackable currency," explains > Andrew from PrivateInternetAccess.

> "For example, signup for an anonymous e-mail account using Tor and use a > Bitcoin Mixer to send Bitcoins to a newly generated address in your local > wallet.

Kind of pointless to go to such lengths when the VPN provider has your IP address.

<comment><USER3> Many VPN services claim that they do not maintain connection logs. Also, it's much safer to use bitcoins and a masked email address in case of breach by a party that doesn't have the authority to subpoena your ISP for the IP info. Also, there are plenty of ways to misdirect via IP if there is any suspicion that logs are maintained, and in that case they won't be able to easily tell who you are, as they would if you had filed a real credit card (or even a real email address).

<comment><USER2> > Many VPN services claim that they do not maintain connection logs

If you're paying for the service, then you need to authenticate to it either with a password or certificate. Either way, the VPN provider knows when you're connected. Also, to prevent sharing of accounts, they will often limit the number of IP addresses you can connect from (within a certain period of time), which means that almost all of them log IP addresses and connection times. That information, combined with other evidence, could be enough to connect you to certain activities.

For example, suppose you're harassing someone on a forum and they get the cops involved. They know the date and time of all of your posts, so they go to your VPN provider, and you're the only person who was connected every single time a post was made. Now, it's good to catch people like that, but if you require strong anonymity just use Tor.

<comment><USER4> There is absolutely no reason they would have to to log ip addresses to prevent account sharing. They can easily limit you to one logon at a time or simply ignore sharing and limit each account's bandwidth, preferably rounded to the megabyte or coarser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Admittedly I know almost nothing about bitcoins but suggestions like "use a patched Bitcoin client" and linking to Bitcoin-OTC,"a marketplace located in #bitcoin-otc channel on the freenode IRC network" imply a certain level of geekiness to even use this thing. Are there any good "bitcoins for dummies" kind of resources, or software that hides most of the complexity under a friendly UI for mere mortals?

<comment><USER6> Despite the title, this article isn't aimed at people looking for general- purpose private/secure communication. It's specifically for those who want to torrent pirated music/movies/tv, but do not want to leave any way for a subpoena from the US government to reveal their contact information. The goal isn't just privacy, but anonymity.

VPNs still work perfectly for private/secure communication, as long as you trust whoever's on the other end -- for most people, this is their employer.

For those who truly do need to be anonymous, Tor is still the standard. It doesn't work if you need to transfer terabytes of data anonymously, but it's fine for browsing or small-scale file exchange (eg wikileaks).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So this seems to be about using IP tunneling that is terminated at a commercial tunnel provider who promises anonymity, to hide your real address. As opposed to the usual meaning of VPN referring to IPSec or similar for confidentiality/integrity, and/or tunneling into the soft inside of the corporate "intranet".

<comment><USER8> It's the same technology, just a different use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are some ISPs more privacy-friendly than others? What should I look for when looking for a privacy-friendly ISP?

<comment><USER5> Here is a good review: [https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really- take-ano...](https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take- anonymity-seriously-111007/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The weakpoint is payment for the VPN (although to be fair to the article, it does cover this, albeit not in much depth)

<comment><USER11> I use a seedbox. The provider is in Canada and the server is Luxemburg. I connect to that with sFTP.

And for normal Internet traffic I have a VPS in New Jersey (Linode) that runs Squid that I route everything through.

While I am in no way totally private I am not the lowest hanging fruit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> WTF is this, and what is it doing on my HN front page.

Is it just me or have the quality of HN content taken a sharp nosedive in just few months? Another Erlang week seems to be in order.</comment>


Feature flagging to mitigate risk in database migration - <AUTHOR> http://blog.launchdarkly.com/feature-flagging-to-mitigate-risk-in-database-migration/ <comment><USER2> Sure, this works for one kind of migration -- a whole-hog swap of data source.

How would this work for alterations to an existing database?

I don't think it would, at least not for an unsharded relational database.

Anyhow, just something to think about. NoSQL's magic, right?

<comment><USER3> You can definitely use feature flags to slowly (and controllably) roll out an alteration to an existing database, but exactly what it would look like depends on the alteration.

If you are going to make a schema migration with no downtime (even if you are not feature-flagging it) you will need to make the code work with both the old and new schema for a period, anyway. So, if you are feature flagging it, this period might just be extended, and you roll out the migration slowly. The 'new' thing I introduce with this approach is really just the 'integrity check' (and the gradual rollout, allowing you to monitor for errors/performance issues).

For example, if your migration involves:

\- adding/removing a field: your code needs to deal with the fact that the field might not be there. This usually means you have a reasonable default value, or something.

\- restructuring: this is a broad category, so lets work with a more concrete example: you currently have a nested (unbounded) repeating sub-object, and you want to break them out into their own top-level documents in another table/collection. In this case, you will have a DAO function `getChildren(parent)`, which uses the feature flag to decide if it should make the query to read the parent, and then pull out the nested list of children, or if it should load the children from their separate collection. You can save the children in both places, and do the dual reads as well, comparing the results. When the cutover is complete, you run a script that removes the nested children (instead of decommissioning the old database, like in the example in the blog post).

Ultimately, the concept is the same: you do the work in both places for a period of time, and check the results. If there are any discrepancies, you still have the fully-functional original data source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did you encounter any performance problems during the 'Early Canary Read' phase? this seems like a lot of DB action.

<comment><USER3> Author here.

Yeah, at that point, you are doing two writes, and (possibly) two reads. I simplified the code a bit for the blog post, but you can do the read and write pairs concurrently, so you don't have to wait longer to get data to return to the caller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> interesting concept, but I don't see how rollbacks would work. aren't you at risk of losing data?

<comment><USER6> Why would you need to rollback?

The new DB is not authoritative until the final step of the switchover, so you could easily scrap it at any point.</comment></comment>


Mathematically detecting stock market bubbles before they burst - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111031220609.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29 <comment><USER2> Aren't all quants that work as speculators (eg math PhDs at hedge funds and prop trading firms) trying to do exactly this? I would be really surprised if they've found anything novel. Thousands of really smart people have been looking at this exact same data for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I see your submission has also been flagged - 8 points in under 2 hours and languishing down in the 70s, perhaps now lower.

There's something fundamentally broken about flagging.</comment>


Dell launches Ultrabook for $999 - <AUTHOR> http://www.dell.com/html/global/xps13/xps-13-ultrabook.html <comment><USER2> So I clicked through this article, expecting something that totally misses the point (like their Adamo a few years ago).

It doesn't match my immediate expectations. Which is good! The machine looks solid. I don't know if I like it more than my Air, but it looks promising.

I keep clicking through. In a machine like this, two things really matter: keyboard and display. As allwein says in another comment thread, they don't show the keyboard head-on. Which is concerning, but I can live with a crappy keyboard if the screen is great. So click click click, I keep on looking for display information.

 _"A tough yet brilliant 13.3" screen in a compact form similar to an 11" laptop."_ This sounds...well, I'm not sure what they're saying, but it sounds interesting at least! So I go to check out the specs.

No specs, anywhere. After a bit I realize that clicking "Buy XPS 13" takes me to the (god-awful, ugly) Dell page for the product line, where (if I pick "Customize") I can get some specs. The prices get me a bit frowny, but they're not _that_ crazy. So I look at the bottom-line one, which for my use case is more or less equivalent to my 11" Air except in size.

At last, there it is...WTF? _"Silver Anodized Aluminum and 13.3" HD (720p) Truelife WLED Display with 1.3MP HD Webcam"_.

There we go--there's the "attention to detail is for suckers" Dell I've come to know and loathe. Apple puts a 1440x900 display in their 13" Airs. They put a 1366x768 display in the 11" Airs. I mean, that's just sad--Dell is using a worse panel in their 13" 'ultrabook' than Apple does in their 11" Air. Dell has no excuse.

Somehow, the lessons of "don't make people use screens that suck" is lost along the way to the rest of the laptop manufacturers out there. I am (not very) deeply sorry, Dell, but packaging crap in a thinner, lighter box only makes it thinner, lighter crap.

<comment><USER3> Most manufacturers seem to do that these days, hiding display resolution somewhere obscure, while it represents one of the most important details that I need to know.

Personally, I'd like an Ultrabook with the 13" 1080p screen from the Sony Z series. (But not made by Sony, since I need something with decent quality, a decent warranty, and a decent company.)

<comment><USER4> _hiding display resolution somewhere obscure, while it represents one of the most important details that I need to know._

This isn't a coincidence. Sales can profit from ignorance, whether natural or engineered.

<comment><USER3> Depends on who you want to sell to. Newegg very effectively demonstrates the value of showing specific technical details and making them easy to filter or compare. Many vendor sites offer similar search mechanisms ("monitors larger than this size and this much resolution, with these inputs").

<comment><USER4> They want to sell to Dell customers.

<comment><USER3> Dell has one of the search mechanisms I just mentioned: on their laptop or monitor pages, you can click a few links to filter the set of products based on features you want. For monitors, they include resolution in those features; unfortunately, for laptops they don't.

<comment><USER4> Good thing we're talking about laptops, then. If we were including their monitor product pages in this critique we'd really look silly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 30 March 2005: X1 announced (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Latitude>)

      1280 × 768 at 16.8 million colors
      1.140 kg with 58 Whr Li-Ion 6 cell
      w: 286 mm
      h: 25.0 mm
      d: 196.8 mm

XPS13 ultrabook

      13.3" High Definition WLED, 300-nit (1366x768) 720p;
      Weight: Starting at 2.99lbs (1.36kg)6
      47WHr battery; 6-Cell Li-Polymer (built-in)3
      Width: 12.4" (316mm)
      Height: 0.24-0.71" (6-18mm)
      Depth: 8.1" (205mm)

So in 7 years, we've added 86 pixels and gotten bigger and heaver. I'm not sure if the X1 laptop was revolutionary, or laptops just haven't gotten that much better. Certainly the X1 was the best investment I've ever made; with a SSD upgrade it's still going strong!

<comment><USER6> I'm waiting for the Asus UX31 to drop to about $700. Unless the new Pro/Airs with 2000 by 1500ish rez are closer to $1000 than $2000.

They have a 1600x900 screen resolution. This is the most important spec for me. Everytime I see 1366x768 I cringe to imagine what an Eclipse Debug perspective would look like on that. Hey look "3 lines of code and 2 variables are viewable at the same time!"

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I was quite interested in them too. However, my worry is that initial Linux support with all the new parts would be a PITA. When I got the X1 7 years ago, I was a student and patching kernels and poking around various wiki-pages to get various things working was fun. Now I'm in the old and boring "just want it to work" camp :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The telling thing for me is that there is not a single image of the keyboard head-on. The keyboard is a make or break feature on a laptop of this size. I fear that not showing any images of the keyboard is indicative of a sub-par experience.

<comment><USER8> This problem has been solved many a ttimes before. It's not the first 13" laptop anybody has designed. So thogh I'd love to see a keyboard pic, I'd assume it's going to be inline with what's out there already.

Love these new ultrabooks btw. Apple kickstarted it as always and all the platforms benefit.

<comment><USER9> apple was a latecomer to the thin and light category. FYI.

<comment><USER10> It was one of the innovators in _affordable_ thin and light, though. While there were very light and thin laptops prior to the Air, they were usually either netbooks, or terribly expensive. Of course, so was the first-gen Air; the second one was really the interesting one.

<comment><USER9> nope, there were plenty of options like the Dell X1 (2.5lbs, 2005) and Sony VAIO Z (3.3lbs, 2000). these were mainstream and affordable and functional. the first air came in 2008.

<comment><USER10> What did the Vaio Z cost on release? My impression was that it, and all of Sony's ultra-small laptops, were always terrifyingly expensive. The current Vaio Z, certainly, starts at just under $2000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A 13" laptop a little bit bigger than the 11" Macbook Air, a little worse screen resolution than the 11" Macbook Air, at about the same price point as the 11" Macbook Air.

<comment><USER12> And companies wonder why ultrabooks have been a flop...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why make it out of aluminium? Does it have better heat properties or lighter weight than say some high quality plastics or steel, or any other metal?

<comment><USER14> Because at first glance it will pass for a macbook air.

I don't say that with any bitterness. I have and love my air, but as I find myself using less and less of OS X, and really just living in iTerm and my browser, the real appeal of the Air to me now is the hardware. If the Ultrabook stands up to the Air in quality, I'm seriously considering the Ultrabook + Ubuntu (double-u?) for my next notebook. Also assuming Ubuntu runs well on it, which my guess is if it doesn't now, it will soon.

<comment><USER15> Why would you do that instead of just putting Ubuntu on the Air?

<comment><USER14> In the case that Dell (or someone else) had better hardware at a better price. It doesn't look like that's the case with the Ultrabook just yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From a quick glance it looks ok but there are a few features (missing, I think) which would make me (as a mac book air 11") envious:

\- 1080p screen

\- 1080p web cam, tilting

\- large choice of colors for the anodized aluminum lid (the carbon body is a nice touch, assuming they can't find factory capacities to produce a full aluminum body at the moment ?)

\- _matte_ cormin gorilla glass (no idea if that's physically and chemically possible but cool it would be)

\- alternatively, a glossy screen which does not only look like but _is_ a capacitative touch screen (I always end up trying to use touch on the macbook air, oh my)

\- some other detail which really surprises people and makes you really want to own one of those ...

\- linux driver support for all components

edit: \- an external blue ray player, thin and matching in style

Still I'm looking forward to hear from people how the build-quality turns out, could be a nice affordable alternative for people looking for a windows notebook!

</comment><comment><USER17> I want to see my code on the screen not myself!

Who needs these glossy screens?

<comment><USER18> Matte displays show images more true-to-print too, I prefer my matte display both for programming / being outside / editing photos. I really don't understand why anyone would want a glossy display other than "it's easier to clean"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> All I want for Christmas is for a Linux optimized Ultra Book.

<comment><USER20> Yes, why does no manufacturer see that they could get a bunch of developers onboard by creating such a product? Is the developer segment really that uninteresting?

<comment><USER15> > Is the developer segment really that uninteresting?

Yes. It's also much, much more fragmented than you make it out to be. It's not like all developers are waiting with bated breath for the perfect Linux laptop. Many are perfectly happy with what they currently use.

A machine targeted towards developers wouldn't even appeal to the majority of developers, which is already a niche market to begin with. It's quite obvious why nobody does this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To get to the spec, click "Buy Xps 13", "Customize and buy", go to "Review and checkout" tab, scroll down - took me 5 minutes of clicking around to get to it. wtf dell.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this posted because the Ultrabook is interesting, or because the scroll-to- animate functionality of the website is interesting? For me, it's the latter, since I have long forsaken Dell.

Once the site loaded completely (which took a fair bit of time), I was able to use scrolling to move forward/backward through the animation of the demo. This is certainly an interesting UX, but after about 20 seconds of this I found it cumbersome.

<comment><USER23> Cumbersome. Yes. Definitely an anti-pattern. I shouldn't have to work so hard to see your stupid marketing campaign. It reminded me of this comic <http://i.imgur.com/MgmdP.png>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> no matter how pretty they make their laptops, they still run crappy software, IMO. i would buy this, wipe it out and load ubuntu, vs using windows. i find the ubuntu experience on dell laptops to be pretty good.

i'm still rocking a e1405 with ubuntu 10.4

<comment><USER25> Always a good option, although you have to be wary with respect to wireless/wifi drivers. The ubuntu releases tend to trail new hardware for wireless networking by several months for new windows laptops.

<comment><USER24> good to know. i was curious how the support has been for the wireless/wifi drivers in their newer machines...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> No-deal for me; keyboard looks like a piece of plastic: <http://www.engadget.com/photos/dell-xps-13-hands-on/#4704588>

</comment><comment><USER27> What is really interesting is not the product itself, but the animation that progresses as you scroll down the page. Very neat!

Basically instead of time controlling the sequence of frames, it is the scroll position.

<comment><USER2> I found it inconsistent, unintuitive, and jarring.

Bad web designer. No cookie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anywhere I can find specs? I mean real specs, with black on white columns containing numbers?

I hate flash so much mostly because it is impossible to get real data out of it. I mean, you support wifi? you don't say!

</comment><comment><USER29> Why use Flash for a site that's not even that.. flashy? Almost the exact same site could've be done in HTML and Javascript, except potential customers could view it on their iPads, for example.

</comment><comment><USER30> Wiping windows off, and replacing the HD with a clean Ubuntu install would be the first order of business. To me Keyboard, battery, and lack of fan noise are important in an Ultrabook.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's only a matter of time until John Gruber is alerted to this, and writes a Dell-bashing response.

</comment><comment><USER32> I absolutely hate this new bread of "scroll to do some js/flash magic" kind of interfaces.</comment>


Best Google OS Analysis? The Real Dan Lyon's Fake Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.topix.com/archives/000237.html

<comment><USER2> Chris Tolles and Dan Lyons have it wrong here.

Chrome stats still growing (according to w3cschools, Jan 2010 was 10.8% and Sept 2010 was 17.3%), even though I don't use it:

<http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp>

Logitech Revue will use Chrome:

[http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Companion-Google-Keyboard- Con...](http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Companion-Google-Keyboard- Controller/dp/B0040QE98O/)

AdMob stated in April that Android passed iOS in web traffic:

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/admob-android-passes- iphone...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/admob-android-passes-iphone-web- traffic-in-u-s/)

And everything you read these days has Android being a significant competitor:

<http://mashable.com/2010/07/22/android-iphone-os-stats/>

More stats on iOS and Android:

<http://chitika.com/research/></comment>