Scala School - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.github.io/scala_school/ <comment><USER2> Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on the web.

Here is what worked for me to learn the basics well: I started off with the book 'Scala for the Impatient', the first half of the book is freely available. I then used Scala School as a list of topics and researched on each using Google. StackExchange has some amazing answers that helped me a lot.

Free part of Scala for the Impatient: [http://fileadmin.cs.lth.se/scala/scala- impatient.pdf](http://fileadmin.cs.lth.se/scala/scala-impatient.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The real question: is it worth it? Up to now I could successfully avoid learning Scala. My problem with it is the complexity that the language by itself introduces and the readability of code that comes out at the end. Maybe I am just valuing simplicity too much when it comes to programming languages. Anyways thanks for the impatient guide!

<comment><USER4> If you have to use the JVM _and_ don't want to code in Java, your options are Scala or Clojure (maybe Groovy?). Then it comes down to essentially the tradeoff between a static typesystem vs macros (imho, ymmv etc).

I second the reccomendation for Chuisano and Bjarnasaon's "Functional Programming in Scala".

<comment><USER5> Kotlin and JRuby appear to be your next best options after Scala and Clojure. Both have growing user communities (thanks to Rails in the case of JRuby and Android in the case of Kotlin). Both solve the library problem by offering seamless compatibility — with Java and MRI (with some caveats [1]) respectively. If you start a long-term project in JRuby you'll be able to hire Ruby programmers down the line. Kotlin is a less safe bet in terms of hiring but I except its prospects to become clear soon, probably within a year.

[1] [https://github.com/jruby/jruby/wiki/DifferencesBetweenMriAnd...](https://github.com/jruby/jruby/wiki/DifferencesBetweenMriAndJruby)

<comment><USER5> The last sentence above should say "I expect".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A well known resource (albeit a bit outdated); however I'm genuinely curious why is this on the front page of hacker news.

I thought at first that it's been updated to some 2.1X version but, judging by the github repo, it hasn't been touched for years.

<comment><USER7> Also expected this to be an update or something. Strange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My biggest problem with Scala is that it's too powerful. Reading code I've written weeks or even days later is painful. Conciseness is not always good.

<comment><USER9> In what ways does Scala you've written end up being unreadable just days later? I honestly find that Scala code is some of the simplest and easiest to reason about of any language. Writing Scala has honestly been such a joy, it's easy to refactor, easy to read and write, and I almost never miss something -- if it compiles, Scala code is usually correct I find.

<comment><USER10> I think that, if you're not super aware of most of the features of Scala, that it can be confusing to understand what certain syntax means (implicits are a big one!)

Just the infix operator syntax plus implicits can lead to stack trace confusion all around

And try understanding some of the type signature funkiness! It can be difficult

I definitely think that Scala is a harder language than most to grasp, if only for the feature support not seen since C++

<comment><USER11> Scala's infix operator syntax is very mechanical. Much easier than e.g. Python where you have to remember whether a * b desugars to a.__times__(b) or a.__star__(b) or something else. The IDE support for those and for implicits is very good these days.

The type signatures can be complex but only when you're doing complex things with them - if you stick to doing the kind of things you'd do in another language you'll get similarly simple types.

You're absolutely right that the native stack traces are poor, but you can use tools that understand them better, e.g. Takipi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was learning Scala at one point. I was reading Atomic Scala [1] (I'm a big fan of Bruce Eckel as I learned Java from one of his earlier books, and some C++ before that). And I also took the Coursera Course from Martin O on functional reactive programming with Scala. I don't remember what is was actually called...

I'm still into alternative languages that run on the JVM...however I went and learned Go Lang in a weekend and it meets a lot of my needs for building out newer services.

Also, for my team the overhead of learning another JVM language (we already use Groovy quite a bit) didn't seem worth it in the end, even though I was a bit of a fan of the Scala idea for a few months.

I might still learn Scala some day, but we're not even on Java 8 at my current job, and that would alleviate a lot of my current Java grievances....

[1] [http://www.atomicscala.com/ebook/](http://www.atomicscala.com/ebook/)

<comment><USER13> Don't let your experience with Apache Groovy put you off upgrading to a new JVM language. I learnt Clojure after using Groovy for a few years -- Groovy 1.8 was the last version I used. I then looked at Haskell, and now I'm using Go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe I'm in the minority on this but I felt this guide by twitter was poorly written. It has good coverage but concepts were just not explained very well.

The way I learned was reading from front to back "The Scala Programming Language" by Martin himself and starting a new project completely in Scala (which I'm launching soon). I'm sure that's not the best approach for everyone but using Scala in a practical environment in an idiomatic way really helps ground the concepts which can at first seem intimidating and difficult to comprehend.

Mastery is a whole other story...

p.s. I recommend Scala Cheatsheet if you are just learning: [http://docs.scala-lang.org/cheatsheets/](http://docs.scala- lang.org/cheatsheets/)

</comment><comment><USER15> What I hate about Scala School is that they are still using Twitter Future's and not Scala Future's, that could be aweful for Beginners.

<comment><USER16> Twitter's Futures were developed when Scala's Futures weren't tail-recursive (and so not really production-quality). There's probably an item on the roadmap to port Finagle to using scala.concurrent.Future but I doubt it's high priority. The two support the same set of operations in any case - I doubt it'd be a huge problem for a beginner to translate one to the other.

<comment><USER15> Actually a Huge difference is that scala.util.Future takes a implicit ExecutionContext while com.twitter.Future does not.

<comment><USER16> It is for production. It's not for a beginner - they should just be using scala.concurrent.ExecutionContext.global.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can anyone recommend a good scala based open source project which gives a flavor of how to write good/effective scala

<comment><USER11> Do you want basics or advanced? At the moderately fancy level, Spray is great - any time you're using a directive, you can just click through in the IDE and see the implementation of what it actually does. And Doobie is a tour-de-force for advanced type constructs. At a more basic level a lot of Twitter's own libraries are straightforward readable code (e.g. Scrooge is one I've patched a bit myself), though coupled to the Twitter stack of Finagle/Scalding/etc. that you probably don't want to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Scala for the impatient is a 400 page book that essentially teaches the syntax :) I can recommend a drastically less time-consuming algorithm:

1\. Watch a 1-hour video that teaches HelloWorld-stuff in Scala: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzFt0YkZo8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzFt0YkZo8M)

2\. Then read first 45 pages (free sample) of my book [https://leanpub.com/modern-web-development-with- scala](https://leanpub.com/modern-web-development-with-scala)

</comment><comment><USER19> (Somewhat off-topic, sorry)

This book does an interesting thing:

> For each chapter (and occasionally for individual sections), I indicate the > experience level. The chapters progress through levels A1, L1, A2, L2, A3, > L3.

The number is the expertise level, from junior to expert; A stands for Application developer, L for Library developer.

I often find myself unsure about wheter a book or text is intended for the kind of user I am for whatever the topic is. Skimming through a book trying to identify what parts you should focus is not always easy.

Do you know of other books that do this kind of thing?

<comment><USER20> I find this schema, promoted if I'm not mistaken by Martin Odersky himself, as one of the biggest marketing blunders possible as far as programming languages are concerned.

You keep telling developers that they are not good enough but they should rest assured that some smarter people are working on the problem and they'll come back with the answers.

When in reality, I think that all developers, when using a library, would like to think that they could have written it themselves, it they would have had the time or the interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> are there any other big company relying on scala for their core infra ?

<comment><USER9> Walmart, EnerNOC, Verizon, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Coursera, Foursquare, Meetup.com, Nitro, Workday, AirBnB, there's quite a lot..

<comment><USER22> I'm curious, why Scala over all other options?

<comment><USER11> It's a fantastic language. It combines the conciseness and readability (if you stick to sensible method names) of Python with the safety of OCaml and the performance of Java. It combines the type-level power of Haskell (i.e. the ability to explicitly sequence effects) with traditional OO inheritance/subtyping and performance behaviour you can reason about (helped by the JVM's well-established profiling/instrumentation support). If you want to use a single language for everything, it can scale up to critical core codebases and down to throwaway scripts / interactive notebook-type use. What else would you use?

<comment><USER22> > What else would you use?

Oh, no, I was asking mostly as a noob. I've since decided to have a go at learning Scala, and your answer reinforces that decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I recently gave a talk on basics of functional programming. I have observed Scala syntax comes easier to people than Haskell or Clojure.

</comment><comment><USER24> Curious question, anyone here using Scala for Android development?

<comment><USER25> I spoken to many that have made Android apps with Scala but none that have pushed them to the appstore as the final binary is always quite big even for simple apps.

<comment><USER26> I wouldn't say that's true. I have an app written in Scala [1], and the apk is just 4 MB. Sure, that's more than a comparable Java app, but many apps reach 20+ MB due to graphics anyway.

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutomic.en...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nutomic.ensichat)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The Dark Side for Beginners ;)

</comment><comment><USER28> Isn't scala dying ?

<comment><USER29> As someone who's seeing plenty of Scala uptake around me that's a rather surprising claim with no supporting evidence. These days I'm writing 90+% of my code at work in Scala.

Indeed.com job data suggests that the answer to your suggestion is an obvious "No": [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/scala.html](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/scala.html)

<comment><USER30> This graph shows that Scala grew from 0.02% market share to 0.08% in the last four years. The fact that it's at 0.08% after more than ten years in existence should be a concern for anyone interested in learning it.

<comment><USER29> For comparison Ruby is just over 0.3% and has been flat for four years. It's the overall job market, not just programming jobs so all percentages will be low.

<comment><USER30> Sure, so this tells us there are about 20 times as many Ruby jobs than Scala ones.

<comment><USER29> 0.3 / 0.08 = 3.75

That's less that 4x as many Ruby jobs as Scala ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have heard that Twitter is now moving away from Scala.

<comment><USER32> Any source ? Any idea why?

<comment><USER33> I work at Twitter.

No, we're not. Probably just some rumor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My biggest challenge with (learning) Scala and the Scala community is that it feels like nobody is actually shipping software, or advocating for making shipping software easier.

And that's a shame, because Scala is language I love for writing a few dozen lines of code, and expressing a domain concept. It's a fantastic language for solving a homework problem set (and it's origins may be part of the reason why). But every library feels like it was concocted as a search for purity with zero attention given to the user experience.

The community is badly missing a DHH or Kenneth Reitz -- someone saying: "Ok, it's cool that we have this academic purity stuff and all that, now let's get serious about shipping software, and making tools that help people ship software." It's not that this view needs to dominate a community, but right now it's thoroughly unrepresented in Scala land.

<comment><USER35> Twitter? Foursquare? Linkedin?

(Also my old company, PagerDuty. Wee bit lower profile than the other three, admittedly.)

<comment><USER34> None of whom are producing well-supported public code / documentation / conference talks.

Edit: And to clarify. I think part of this is because there's a serious case of imposter syndrome among Scala developers. I feel like much Scala code I've written would make legitimately useful open source projects, but I'm not really happy with the interface, and I feel the innards could be a bit cleaner, so I don't release it, because it feels just hackish enough that I trust it myself, but don't want the outside world depending on it. I'm probably not the only one here.</comment></comment></comment>


The Country That Stopped Reading - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/the-country-that-stopped-reading.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

<comment><USER2> I wish the article had linked to the Unesco study. I wonder who Mexico beat out.</comment>


Show HN: Now in alpha missile.lab.io - <AUTHOR> http://missile.lab.io

<comment><USER2> An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's blank for me, i'm getting the following error, [http://i.imgur.com/hOgoySO.png](http://i.imgur.com/hOgoySO.png) (screenshot)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Use cursor keys to move and HOLD space to fire.

</comment><comment><USER4> blank for me as well</comment>


Amsterdam's Plan: If You Buy a Newly Built House, You Can't Rent It Out - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/03/amsterdam-rental-housing-prices-new-home-owner-occupied/585235/ <comment><USER2> Resident of Amsterdam here, any policy the city is going to come up with is realistically speaking only re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at this point. Some systemic issues:

1) Building new & building up is mostly politically impossible. A large part of the city is effectively a historic open-air museum. Supply is always going to be squeezed.

2) The rent controlled market is huge in The Netherlands and disproportionately big in Amsterdam compared to the rest of the country.

This puts off #1 because low-income people have an out, but squeezes prices on the middle and upper-end, and creates generational special-interests groups (there's decade-long waiting periods, people pass off such properties to immediate family etc.).

Most of the profit construction companies make on (highly regulated) new construction is reportedly on the relatively small proportion of apartments they're allowed to sell for a high price on the free market. The rest is on the mandatory public housing market from day one.

3) A further squeeze on non-rent controlled properties is created because some of those only escape that "market" by having a bunch of "points" that are calculated as a function of size, amenities etc.: [A] & [B].

This creates all sorts of absurd situations. E.g. having a sink on some random wall in the middle of a bedroom purely because it (along with other crazy point hacking) brought the property _just_ over the point limit.

4) (Re-)zoning of properties that do exist is relatively restricted and centrally micro-managed.

5) Interest rates have been dropping for years, leading to inflated property prices. It's relatively easy to get sub-2% loans, even as low as 1.5%.

A. [https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woningwaarderingsstelsel#Punte...](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woningwaarderingsstelsel#Punten)

B. [https://www.huurcommissie.nl/fileadmin/afbeeldingen/Download...](https://www.huurcommissie.nl/fileadmin/afbeeldingen/Downloads/Handleidingen/Beleidsboek_zelfstandige_woonruimte_versie_1_oktober_2016.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Is housing in Amsterdam that problematic? A friend recently moved there and would send me photos of places he was looking at for him and his family. He had plenty of really nice options at costs they could afford. It seemed vastly more affordable than NYC or the Bay Area.

<comment><USER4> Just because something is more affordable than the two most expensive housing markets in the world doesn't make it affordable.

Yes, by Bay standards, Amsterdam is not bad (especially for rent). It's still bad for virtually everyone in Amsterdam who isn't on rent control.

<comment><USER5> On the (sad) bright side of living in the Bay for awhile, if you ever move anywhere else, housing will probably all look like a bargain!

<comment><USER6> You'll probably also take a massive paycut.

<comment><USER5> For sure. I haven't done any research, but I'm sure there are some areas, though, where the % pay cut is less than the % reduction in housing costs, though.

<comment><USER7> If you do know of such a place, please post it. When I do the math SF always comes out on top.

<comment><USER8> I have much more money left over in Austin than I did in San Jose (and living in a 4bd house instead of a crappy SJ 2bd apartment) despite a COLA adjustment from the company... And by the looks of it I could get the pay back up here anyway if I can be bothered to drive to the office of some local company.

Purely personal anecdata, of course, but it does work for me, and the quality of life is (for me, anyway) much higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Like most _selective_ political actions in a market, I suspect this has good intent but will produce predictably counter-productive outcomes. The intent is obviously to "make housing more affordable", but they're only restricting one part of the market, and that part is "newly built" homes. What about the real estate market that is simply "homes"? So if newly built houses cannot be rented out anymore, and a large driver of building homes is this customer base of "landlords", what will happen to the rate of building, and the price of older homes?

It doesn't seem like a stretch to assume that the building rate will go down, and prices on older estates not affected by the law will go up. Unless the law is applied broadly across any and all estates, the end result will simply be, best case, that the market adjusts: worst case, that you end up with very unwanted and negative economical effects that no-one predicted.

The article states that "It's not yet been clarified, for example, how long an owner would have to occupy their home before being able to rent it out" \-- in my opinion the problem here is not where you draw the line, the problem _is_ the drawing of the line. It will only create synthetic movements in the market and I don't think it will help in achieving the stated goal at all.

If one were inclined to be cynical, one could even assume that like with most political proposals, there are those who stand to gain from this, and they may be sponsoring it. Namely: whoever owns "old" real estate in Amsterdam. Is it also cynical to believe that politicians may know that this will not help, but are more interested in looking like they are "doing something about it", rather than resolving the issue, causing economical loss for property owners? The stated beneficiaries of this proposal are those weak in buying power claiming the "right" to live in a certain place without being priced out -- normally not a group with huge political leverage.

<comment><USER10> The key problem is the rich buying property for literal rent-seeking to become even richer.

This drives prices up for homes in the city to a point that only if you are in a relationship and over 30 you might be able to buy your first 'home'.

There may be downsides to the measures proposed, but the fun part of government is that you can learn, change and adapt. Because you write the rules, you can change and you can use this ability to create a better living environment for people, which is the ultimate end goal.

<comment><USER9> > The key problem is the rich buying property for literal rent-seeking to > become even richer.

This key problem is in no way solved by the political proposal, as "the rich" can move to buy older real estate instead.

> This drives prices up for homes in the city to a point that only if you are > in a relationship and over 30 you might be able to buy your first 'home'.

The reason that prices are going up is because a lot of people want to spend a lot of money for the real estate, so in the end you must take a moral stand regarding who owns the right to live and/or own real estate in the city, and what this right is based on. Long term consistency is key here, because short lived stabs at the market like this one will not make any difference apart from creating volatility.

As soon as you create economical impediments to achieve your "moral", or "political" goals, you must ask yourself questions almost like a penetration tester: how would I exploit this law if I wanted to stand to gain from it economically? There's almost always a way, and unless you take this into account _before_ creating the law, you're just making the problem worse, and more complicated (normally the same thing).

> the fun part of government is that you can learn, change and adapt

Government shouldn't be having fun with laws. They should be enacting laws that are thoroughly studied, where the possible outcomes are weighed against eachother to minimize risk and maximize the odds of success. Of course you always need to evaluate and adapt, but this proposal is sloppy to say the least, perhaps even malicious.

<comment><USER11> > This key problem is in no way solved by the political proposal, as "the > rich" can move to buy older real estate instead.

I suspect this proposal has less to do with protecting middle class people's ability to be home owners, and has more to do with preventing perverse incentives around real estate development from having a long-term negative impact on Amsterdam's housing stock.

For instance: look at what's happening in Toronto. There are a massive number of high-end, 1-br condos being built because that's the type of property which makes sense as an investment instrument. Large swaths of the renting population are not served by that type of property, but investors are the customer for real-estate development, so that's what gets built.

<comment><USER9> > Large swaths of the renting population are not served by that type of > property, but investors are the customer for real-estate development, so > that's what gets built.

It all comes down to the same discussion: what are the inherent rights of a native population when compared to foreign capital owners. It's subjective. Your opinion could be anywhere between "money buys you property rights" to "land is owned by living on it" and you wouldn't be objectively wrong in any case, since you're making a _moral_ argument.

The problem appears when a moral argument should enter legal and political reality. When you look at this proposal through the lens of "what will be achieved", it's hard to be optimistic.

<comment><USER12> > It all comes down to the same discussion: what are the inherent rights of a > native population when compared to foreign capital owners. It's subjective.

Indeed it is, and in an honest democracy a question of this importance would be voted on in a referendum. But before doing that you'd first want the public to be informed of the facts. But in Canada the government won't even do that - we have no idea how much property is being purchased by foreign investors directly, or via proxy friends/relatives who have obtained Canadian citizenship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While not perfect it's absolutely commendable, compare this to the borderline criminal state of real estate market in places like the UK or Vancouver where foreign investors and corrupted politics destroyed and alienated the middle class population...Imho real estate should be absolutely outside the possibility of speculation and 'investment', a house is for a family/person to own and live in not some mega conglomerate side business of rip off rental and overinflated selling prices.

<comment><USER14> The UK is awful. Worse than American cities. No property tax, non existent/weak tenant laws, and renters have to pay the council taxes (in the US the owner is usually responsible for all HOA and taxes). The deposit protection schemes seem more designed to benefit landlords too.

<comment><USER15> For the landlord side: Renting out my one house in London after I bought another one to live in (across the country). I had tenants who flat out refused to pay their rent after a few months living there. This went on for several years, and it took legal battles and numerous court fees to evict them. None of which they turned up to contest.

Before they left, they plastered globs of lard on the walls, and destroyed the kitchen floor and wall by rigging the water pipes to constantly overflow down the outside wall.

I was not allowed to enter the property to inspect it, nor was I allowed to "harass them" by speaking to them face-to-face, because they didn't want me to. I was powerless.

Yes, they lost their deposit, but I was out of pocket tens of thousands, which I basically couldn't afford. I maxed out my credit cards and bank account overdrafts. Even selling the house, it took me nearly 5 years to get back to zero.

I'm not saying that UK law is worse for landlords, but the laws aren't particularly on the side of landlords either.

<comment><USER16> I'm going to call you out on the tenants remaining in the property for "several years". That simply wouldn't happen unless you didn't follow the procedure to evict them.

UK laws are very much in the favour of the landlord.

<comment><USER15> That's a reasonable call, and to be fair to the tenants; it might have been less than I remember. I haven't got the details to hand, so I can't check.

But without going into detail, I definitely buried my head in the sand too much, and they did pay a small amount at one stage to make me think it might be okay. It was sixteen years ago now, and I've thankfully forgotten a lot of it.

I do remember that I had to restart the whole process when it was thrown out because a date was wrong on a letter. I wasted a whole heap of time trying to get the judge to reverse that decision rather than moving on and starting again.

Anyway, like I said, I was very naive back then, and made lots of mistakes.

<comment><USER17> "It was sixteen years ago now, and I've thankfully forgotten a lot of it."

Sorry you've had such crap tenants. 16 Years is a long time, and the laws could have changed on this in this time. So there is a good chance you are both right!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good time to be a landlord in Amsterdam. This looks like it's designed to penalize poor/young/foreign people, who will not be able to benefit from a decrease in new housing prices, but will be hit by the rent increase once new supply of rentals dries out. Most benefit will accrue to current owners (the market will be segmented into places you can rent out — current stock — and places you can't, with current stock being more expensive).

<comment><USER19> Disincentivising a predatory rental market only lowers the cost of housing prices because it excludes buy-to-rent commercial landlording. Properties don't disappear from the market just because there's no landlord able to buy them. Granted this needs to be coupled with further disincentivising of the current stock being rented.

<comment><USER18> Rents will go up, as will prices for existing, rentable, houses. So current homeowners benefit at the expense of those who will continue to rent.

I have no opinion on the movement of new housing purchase prices. It depends on the kind of landlords buying houses in Amsterdam, and their alternative investment options; also on the volume of additional demand generated by the increase in rents.

I'm not sure why you believe the Amsterdam rental market to be predatory, or what you even mean by that. Perhaps you have more experience with it.

<comment><USER19> I'm far more experienced with the rental market in Dublin, I'm Irish living in the Netherlands. The situation in Dublin is the endgame of the same property market extremism.

The national obsession with landlording and trying to get someone else to pay for your mortgage ended a few short years ago with the world's biggest bailout. In Ireland there's very little regulation and what there is is almost completely unenforced. No lessons were learned and we now have a national housing crisis with a neoliberal government turning a blind eye to rampant homelessness and a lost generation. All potential solutions are met with excuses as to why it will only cause problems for the young being able to rent, thus furthering the crisis.

<comment><USER18> The (urban) solution is socialized housing, rent controls, and density. Not whatever this is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I currently own a house. I love owning my house.

But there have been long (decade+) stretches when I actively did not want to own. I was single, or I knew my family size would change and didn't want to buy a huge house, or I knew I would only be in the market for a few years.

The transaction costs of buying and selling each time would have been probably 5-10% of the total price of the house (broker fee, mortgage fees, inspections, etc). It simply would not have made sense to buy and sell a house every time I moved.

Having plenty of rentals available made it easy to move to where I needed to be, in a house size that made sense (neither too big nor small), in a cost- effective way.

The answer of "don't move so much" cuts income mobility. I moved to the SF Bay Area because it offered higher salaries. And it wouldn't solve the issue of family size changing.

(I haven't yet done the reverse -- which is to rent out the house I now own, but if I get a job offer somewhere else it'd be silly to force a sale to make it impossible for me to come back.)

<comment><USER21> Why are the buying and selling costs so high?! Is that an American thing? In Scotland I only had solicitor fees and moving/furnishing costs.

<comment><USER22> Population density, growing market, supply/demand.

If you're close to the center, it's more expensive.

What kind of area do you live in Scotland?

<comment><USER21> Edinburgh City Centre. I was referring to the fees being such a large % of transactions. Both my properties cost 1-2% in total fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting to read this, it seems like there are already some rules that make renting a bit more difficult and less attractive.

I'd like to share a few points about what makes buying a house in Amsterdam (and the Netherlands in general) interesting:

\- Amsterdam is growing and becoming the de fact European capital (english, tech jobs, etc) so it's growing a lot, and real estate prices are up \- Interest rates are very low (~2% on 30years fixed, if interests go down we can refinance after 5 years). So no risk of going up, and no risk of missing out when going down. \- 0 cash down necessary \- low cost of buying. We bought a "first time buyer package" for ~3000 euros which included real estate agent, notary, building inspection and financial evaluation. Only other expense we had was 500 euro fee for our mortgage. \- Practically no real estate tax (0.03789% of the official listed value) \- Prices are ~200-300k for a nice 1bedroom, 300-500 for nice 2 bedrooms. Prices seem reasonable compared to salaries.

So, in most cases, going from renting to buying a similar property is definitely worth it. You'll pay about the same monthly (all included).

To note, the buying market is pretty competitive (similar to SF) where people often over-big 10-20% on the asking price. I've gone to multiple open house, and helped ~5 other friends buy a place, and most buyers you see are young professionals / young families, and doesn't look like the market is saturated by landlords / investors.

Now, we looked into moving and renting our place in case we decide not to sell it: \- Can't rent on our mortgage \- We need to take a commercial mortgage, ~doubling the interest rate to 5%. This increase makes the monthly cost above what we would rent the place for

Those 2 last points to me make it clear that it's already pretty hard to just exploit the cheapness of buying/investing in properties and renting them (I looked myself to buy more properties and rent).

So this rule surprises me a little because the current housing market is already pretty regulated against renting and very supportive to buying. We definitely see much more owners, and much younger, than what we've seen on average in other cities we've lives (SF, NYC, Paris, Montreal).

<comment><USER24> _So, in most cases, going from renting to buying a similar property is definitely worth it. You 'll pay about the same monthly (all included)._

As someone who owns in SF, this is definitely not the case here.

For a $1.5M home in SF, the total monthly outlay includes mortgage ($5,557 @ 3.75% with 20% down), property taxes ($1,454), property insurance ($2,250) for a grand total of $9,262 per month. You could rent the same house for $6,000 per month. And that doesn't even include expected maintenance ($625 per month) and opportunity cost of your $300,000 down payment ($1,250 @ 5%). So grand total, you're spending over $11,000 per month or $5,000 more than the cost of renting.

The reason for this is appreciation. If you're house goes up in value by 5% per year, that $75,000 that more than covers the extra $60,000 you're paying over renting. Question is - will it keep going up that much?

Edit: updated with actual numbers.

<comment><USER25> Then why does anyone who owns property in SF rent it out rather than selling it?

<comment><USER24> Probably because a lot of those people bought the same house for $600,000 10 years ago. Their monthly cost is likely less than rent.

I know someone who bought a house 5 years ago and rented it out. She had to cough up $1,000 per month to pay all expenses. Rent has now caught up so she's breaking even.

In the rest of the US where housing prices aren't as inflated, it can actually be cheaper to own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good, it's ridiculous in Amsterdam right now with investors buying houses left and right just to rent them out.

A city of renters is a soulless city; less people are long-term invested and no one really buys into the community they live in.

<comment><USER27> > A city of renters is a soulless city

I am beyond skeptical on this point. The young and dynamic people responsible for a city's soul generally can't afford to buy (I would guess, I have no data)

<comment><USER28> One possible consequence of limiting the market is that it could lower the price of buying real estate. Hopefully, that should make it accessible to younger buyers.

<comment><USER29> Are there any occurrences of such a price control doing anything but worse unintended consequences?

<comment><USER28> There has been similar systems in place in France and Sweden, and probably other European countries. Usually, they are targetting financing system: you can borrow money at a rebated cost _if_ you do not rent it for a period of five to ten years.

The intended consequences are more people being able to afford a house and home ownership has increased with most policies that I can think of. There are some consequences: rental contracts are very hard to find in Stockholm for instance, but those hardly seem unintended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In France, a lot of cities propose "accessible housing" which can be brought with a zero interest, or nearly zero interest, loan. The condition usually is, if you buy it, you cannot rent it for 5 to 10 years. It does allow for more housing that are owned and not rented and avoid excessive investment.

One of the drawbacks though is, since it only apply to building that have been build with help from the city (has far as I know), it can sometimes, if done poorly, create slum with huge bloc of social housing. Nowadays, they usually try to spread the construction more through out the city and make more diverse building to avoid this.

</comment><comment><USER31> As someone who has just bought in another European city with high demand for housing , this sounds great on the surface level, but again the devil is in the details.

> It's not yet been clarified, for example, how long an owner would have to > occupy their home before being able to rent it out.

My GF has had offers of a years work in Melbourne and we have talked about it saying, it would be nice to do. Right now it would be easy to rent our place out, but it would be impossible if the rule stated that you must live in the place for 5 years.

<comment><USER32> How many people buy a new build house, and then within a year decide to move half-way around the world, whilst still keeping the house?

<comment><USER33> Bought the house, then got a long-term assignment/promotion in another city, but 100% plan on moving back in the future.

This is not uncommon.

<comment><USER31> Its probably only people with "good jobs" with opportunities like that who can afford to buy in major cities these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> At best this will do nothing, at worst the unintended consequence is a spike in rental prices. The root of the problem is supply and demand, and they're not willing to look at that. Increasing supply means highrises and more building permits, and reducing demand means restricting immigration, both highly toxic subjects.

</comment><comment><USER35> It looks mostly like the proponents of the law want to limit the growth of the city, and prevent it from becoming dense(r).

Building an apartment house and _not_ renting it out makes about zero sense. This means that only small, 1-2 family homes would be built, financed by family home loans.

This definitely is not going to help against foreign rich people buying "investment houses" and leaving them vacant. They could not rent them out even if they wanted to! But maybe it;s not a problem in Amsterdam.

</comment><comment><USER36> This law may work for it's intended purpose, but it's an unconscionable violation of property rights. I worry that our statistician's approach to legislation is hastening our times' abandonment of principle, and that we're sacrificing any particular individual's good to the good of faceless society.

<comment><USER37> Except society isn't faceless. It's our friends and neighbors. It's our cousins and coworkers.

I'm more than willing to give up a bit of my extremely affluent lifestyle if it would genuinely help those around me who haven't had the same economic opportunities as me.

<comment><USER38> >I'm more than willing to give up a bit of my extremely affluent lifestyle if it would genuinely help those around me who haven't had the same economic opportunities as me.

All well and good. It's fine and commendable to personally sacrifice but when you start advocating for stripping property rights from other people to do it, it stops being a personal sacrifice and more of an imposition on others' freedom.

What about unintended backfire consequences of this law: people who own a place and are traveling, unable to put their places on airbnb because of this law and thus leaving vacant houses anyways and constricting short-term rental supply?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yes, nasty renters don't deserve access to new houses.

<comment><USER40> How about "yes, the housing market should deprioritize making rich people even richer off the backs of renters"

<comment><USER39> By ensuring renters have an inferior selection.

<comment><USER40> Why do renters need to live in brand new houses?

<comment><USER39> They don't need to. But it seems rather unfair to say that people with decent income but who can't (or don't want to) access large amounts of capital must have an artificially reduced selection.

Imagine if it was flipped around: new houses cannot be sold, and can only be rented out. Would that be reasonable?

I totally understand why people dislike speculators who buy houses and let them sit empty. I get why they dislike investors who buy properties and put them out for short-term rentals like AirBnB. But getting upset at long-term rentals? Why? Lots of people rent, for many good reasons. Especially poorer people. What's so terrible about serving that market? If you think the landlords are making too much money, bring prices down by increasing the supply i.e. the exact opposite of this plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Two main thoughts here. First I love that municipalities are thinking creatively about the housing crisis. Second, I'm curious to see how policies like this end up playing out in practice. I can think of a bunch of negative outcomes such as rental properties degenerating and home builders getting less work.

In the end we can't know what's going to work until the experiment plays out which to my first point is why it's very encouraging to see so many places trying different policies.

<comment><USER41> This is very obviously not going to work out well. This policy means the total rentable property supply will now not increase and only decrease for X years based on this policy. Rents are going to spike throughout the city.

Trying to mess with the free market like this almost always has a bunch of unintended consequences and rarely works as intended.

<comment><USER42> I don't think it's obvious how this will turn out at all. What you state is one possible outcome, but it's not clear that is what will happen.

1) rental properties can still be built, they just have to be designated as such before their construction is approved

2) the price limits were designed to still make it possible to profitably build a new house, so the market will still produce new homes (maybe at a different rate)

3) they also put in place quotas for low, middle, and upper priced housing, guaranteeing a varied supply on the market.

4) middle income families will no longer need to compete with people buying investment rental homes, meaning they will be more able to buy affordable homes. This frees up rental property elsewhere in the system for someone else.

Housing markets are almost never free markets. It's quite rare to see a completely free market for where and what kind of housing is built. This is at least an attempt to make sure that entire part of the population isn't left out of owing a home. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. That's the great part of government — if it doesn't work, those in charge can be replaced by the citizens. I'm interested to see where the experiment goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Making sure that building enough affordable housing is possible for developers to begin with is of course not something that a NIMBY backed city council would ever do.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have no comment on if this is good or bad, I am just curious how laws like this get passed in the first place. You would assume that most home owners would not be in favor of something like this, as it obviously would seek to decrease the value of their property by reducing the potential acquirers. The only thing that would make sense is if in Amsterdam, most voters rent vs own.

<comment><USER9> > You would assume that most home owners would not be in favor of something > like this, as it obviously would seek to decrease the value of their > property by reducing the potential acquirers.

It's obvious even from the headline that this "ban" only applies to _newly built_ homes, meaning that if you own an "older" home (whatever the definition of that ends up being), this does not apply to you. So in a perverted sense, being an Amsterdam home owner may be beneficial, since the politicians are rigging the market to your advantage, if you are an "older" home owner.

As for renters of these "older" homes, I'd say the outcome is fairly predictable: your rent will skyrocket as the demand for your landlords real estate increases, unless there are already other political tools in place to cap rents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I'm glad this was posted here because it echoes the philosophy of a late (18th?) century philosopher who i cannot remember the name of. Perhaps some of the other well-read minds of hacker news can remind me what his name is.

Basically he's an ehticist, an economist, and a philosopher and he also promotes a "value system" in his philosophy that states that buying a home for any othe reason than to live in it yourself is ethically/morally wrong.

I have been looking for his name for ages since i found it first, should've bookmarked it, never did. Now i desperately want to find him and re-read some of his works as well as his wiki page.

Edit: His name might be Henry George and his philosophy Georgism. Does that sound right to any of yall? Or is it someone else I'm thinking of?

<comment><USER46> I get your point, but is it not fair to allow people to earn a living? Being a landlord is a job, it helps to put food on my table and a roof over my head. Surely there are other jobs out there, but why make this one illegal? All forms of employment can be used to exploit others, shall we make them all illegal?

<comment><USER47> I don't think the landlord labor/job is really the issue, it's the capitalization of real estate. Do you think it's ethical for banks and billionaires to buy up properties in very expensive markets and price out people who have been living there for decades? They're just looking to make a buck, and in the process may displace those with less power and luck to not be wealthy.

I doubt someone buying a property themselves, living in it while fixing it up, then renting it out is really the issue. That's the Mr. Money Moustache type approach, which to me is much less pernicious than the ultra wealthy leveraging their incredible luck and fortune.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> So more investors will leave houses empty. Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER49> >...households that would have formerly expected to buy, however, are increasingly finding themselves priced out of the market, substantially by investors who then place the property on the rental market...

This is exactly the core of the problem: without aggressive intervention, it is always more profitable to buy a property and rent it than to live in it. Potential owner occupiers will eventually always be out bid by investors in an uncontrolled market.

There were abundant measures to prevent this installed during the 20th century. They have been eliminated over the last decades and without them the market will naturally come to look like it did before the 20th century.

<comment><USER50> What I don't understand is, why aren't secondary dwellings taxed extremely heavily? Optimally, nobody should ever have to rent their residence for a prolonged amount of time, which means you need to disincentivize sitting on a property you don't live in. Making it hard to profit over time from such an investment is the only solution I see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> We have something similar here in Singapore. You cannot rent or sell a new HDB for 5 years. And you cannot rent to non-citizen / non-pr till it's 10 years old. I would say it works but that's only because the market is entirely different here.

<comment><USER52> What happens if you need to sell it for some reason? Job relocation perhaps?

<comment><USER53> You can apply for an exception from HDB (Singapore's housing authority). Most of the exceptions granted are for cases like divorce and emigration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> A flavour of this exists in Ireland, where the Government help to buy scheme offers up to €20,000 towards your new build house purchase if you are a first time buyer and commit to living in your home for the first 5 years.

<comment><USER55> That just ended up jacking up every property by 20k to give more profit to developers who were complaining.

Completely short-sighted.

<comment><USER24> Indeed. Canada does the same. "Let's make it easier for people to buy a home!", "Oh wow! Home prices have really gone up, let's make it even easier!", repeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I guess we don't truly have ownership of our property.

<comment><USER57> This doesn't seem like a helpful consideration. No polity on the planet allows for truly conditionless ownership of property.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> €302.000 is the average home price here? Hah! You can buy huge homes for that price just outside the Amsterdam Area (like I did).

<comment><USER59> No you can't.

<comment><USER60> Perhaps Almere, but I wouldn't call what you'd get there for 300k "huge", although you'd get a house rather than an apartment most likely.

<comment><USER58> Almere Poort/Hout, Lelystad, BiddingHuizen, Swifterbant. All <1 hour away from Amsterdam

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Lot of countries prevent foreign persons or institutions to own real estate for 100%. There has to be a local partner who owns the place for at least 50.1% This is much more effective than adding a law which can never cover all edge cases. And there are a lot of those which make it possible to buy property anyway even with the new law in place.

</comment><comment><USER62> One thing not mentioned: the fact that so much work in the Netherlands, especially in tech, is focused in just a few cities. If the work was more spread out over the country, not everybody would have to make their way to Amsterdam every day or live there.

</comment><comment><USER63> What is stopping buyers to resell the house to another entity and have that entity to rent it out?

Second-hand house wouldn't be considered newly built, would it?

</comment><comment><USER64> Just yesterday I came across one listing that worked out to 11,000 euro / sq meter. At that price there are very few rental options that would still work.

<comment><USER65> Crazy, I did some analysis on large cities in the Randstad in june/july last year. Amsterdam was by far the most expensive, but the most expensive house in price / sq meter was "only" ~9,000 euro / sq meter

[https://imgur.com/a/lrV9C5I](https://imgur.com/a/lrV9C5I)

<comment><USER66> I like what you did here. Where did you get the data? Scraped funda?

<comment><USER65> Yep, I scraped address, price and size from the house overview pages. I ended up with data from Funda going back ~3 months (so April, May & June) of all the 'gemeentes' in provinces of Utrecht, Zuid-Holland and Noord-Holland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> They're preventing rentals at all, not just short-term rentals? That seems counterproductive.

</comment><comment><USER68> Amsterdam is no longer culturally unique and the current mayor has made it worse.

</comment><comment><USER69> Perhaps this strategy can bring back the community-minded days of AirBnB?

</comment><comment><USER70> The decommodification of housing is the only tenable solution.

</comment><comment><USER71> What I'll never understand about complaints about 'affordable' housing -- if the housing supply is so unaffordable, how come vacancy rates are so low?

</comment><comment><USER72> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)

</comment><comment><USER73> This summons the image of modern day Anne Frank trying to find a long term rental through Airbnb, not finding any, and shaking her head.

</comment><comment> EZ-E We need to have higher interest rates to let the market come to its sense. Then the prices will drop for both buying and renting.

</comment><comment><USER74> It must be noted that this applies only to new homes, which are sold, temporarily.

Amsterdam builds around 5k homes a year (or about 1% of total stock). Of those 5k, about 40% are sold, 40% are rented to as social housing, the rest rented at market rates. So we're talking about a law that applies to about 2k homes per year, or <0.5% of the homes in the city, and likely only for the first two years. (there's no legal instruments or interest to restrict an person's use of his property long-term).

No huge impact, mostly symbolic. Plus, one can wonder whether it's effective. There's a lot of criticism on investors buying homes at market value and renting them out at market value, when really it has absolutely no bearing on the available housing stock to all citizens. There's a lot of rhetoric aimed against investors, which is kind of weird. Amsterdam is a transient place for many, so a strong non-social and non-purchase rental market has its place. Investors buy homes and rent them out to meet this demand. It pushes up prices, yes, but only because they're meeting this real demand from real people. And this higher price point is generating construction business that wouldn't exist (due to lack of economic feasibility) at the price levels of five years ago. This is what is creating new homes which actually solves the underlying problem: a housing shortage, which you can't solve by restricting use of property, capping prices or taxing investors, but by increasing the housing stock.

I appreciate a it's not as black and white as 'just let the market figure it out', but the current policy maker for housing is a member of the socialist party. I've enjoyed their impact on local politics generally, but I think some of their housing proposals aren't effective. Especially not in a housing context which is already extremely distorted by national housing & welfare policy and where market forces very are limited and produce weird outcomes. I'm not against this particular idea, but I also don't see it as a big win either. It's small at best, and ineffective at worst. We'll see.

</comment><comment><USER75> This is genius.

</comment><comment><USER76> good

</comment><comment><USER77> This is a great idea and I hope more cities take the hint and fight housing speculation.

<comment><USER78> I hope more cities tackle the actual cause and build/repair more housing.

<comment><USER79> There's no unlimited supply of land. And there's a limited distance that citizens can travel before that impacts their lifestyle or behavior.

Also, if you wanted to build higher buildings to accommodate more people in the same space, good luck doing that in a city center, because there's no space for such thing.

<comment> barry-cotter > Also, if you wanted to build higher buildings to accommodate more people in > the same space, good luck doing that in a city center, because there's no > space for such thing.

I have seen a three story building knocked down in Hong Kong and a 20 story building rise in its place without any damage to the structural integrity of its neighbours. Engineers are really good at building things if they're allowed to do so, even under significant constraints.

<comment><USER79> The problem is not a technical one, but a legal one. There are very few empty buildings in most euro cities, and people is typically reluctant to get out because of the hassle it causes them.

If there is a run down and empty building, then sure, but you won't find many.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Making a Better Airplane Using SigOpt (YC W15) and Rescale (YC W12) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sigopt.com/post/130771597853/making-a-better-airplane-using-sigopt-and-rescale <comment><AUTHOR> Author here (and co-founder of SigOpt). I'm happy to answer any questions about this post, our methods, or anything.

<comment><USER2> Great to see what you were able to accomplish with the SigOpt / Rescale integration - excited to see how commercial customers will be able to leverage your algorithm tech.</comment></comment>


Byebye Windows – Going Full Linux - <AUTHOR> https://yizhang82.dev/byebye-windows <comment><USER2> I use both. I work with Autodesk Inventor, MathCAD, Excel, and a bunch of other software that simply doesn't run on Linux, and if there are similar programs, they are far behind e.g. FreeCAD vs. Inventor. Like a programming language, and OS is just a tool too, so for web dev and other technologies that are stronger on Linux, use Linux. I also use Mathematica, Blender 3D and FreeCAD, and they run fine on Linux. The cost of laptops allows me to have two, and not use emulators, images or other VMs to run a different OS. I still have a 2011 iMac 27. I was running a dual boot system for a few years on my Alienware, but got tired of switching on the spur of the moment, and Windows runs better on it probably due to drivers, and for the not-so-important color keyboard changes. There are some edge cases, like using Continuous[1] to program in F# on my 2016 iPad Pro. For data science, machine learning, ANNs you can develop on anything if you are using a web service. I play with ML on both Linux and Windows. I like playing with Red[2] the programming language and Raylib[3]. Red runs better on Windows at the moment, although they are pushing for a better Linux experience.

[1] [http://continuous.codes/](http://continuous.codes/) [2] [https://www.red- lang.org/](https://www.red-lang.org/) [3] [https://www.raylib.com/](https://www.raylib.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Linux much faster and better than the window operating systems

</comment><comment><USER4> I would recommend the OP to use ALE linting in vim.</comment>


Touch Screens with Pop-up Buttons - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22550/

<comment><USER2> Eh... unnecessary.

<comment><USER3> Not really, this could be applied to in-car touch screens, as discussed here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=609218></comment></comment>


Startups Attempting to Reinvent the Magazine Industry - <AUTHOR> http://betakit.com/2012/04/14/startups-attempting-to-reinvent-the-magazine-industry

<comment><USER2> Ever since pg put magazines out as a fund-worthy idea, I've kept an ear open to see if anything innovative had been started, because it sounded like an interesting challenge. But these ideas are a bit obvious and sound like they've taken the TV playbook and tried to apply it to magazines: Add a cable tv subscription model! Add an interactive tv model with a chat box and games! Put TV on a different device!

So, here's an idea I'll throw out there: Someone create a magazine where the content is controlled by the subscriber base. Basically, take the idea of a sprint planning meeting into consumable media. Or, call it micro-commission media.

This would probably be easiest to start with a review type magazine, like a Consumer Reports. I often notice that the reviewed products aren't the ones I'm interested in learning about. Instead, upfront, you can let each subscriber allocate a set of points to review product X. Get enough points, and the product is reviewed. If you get manufacturers buying up a bunch of points to ensure their product is reviewed, so what--all that means is the product is bought and reviewed fairly.

It takes away the hope that the article is something that someone will want to read--the readers have already indicated this by putting their money down on it. It takes care of a revenue model, and it melds a methodology that many people are passionate about into a different world.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's all about the advertising partners...</comment>


Recover Raid Data - <AUTHOR> https://www.diskinternals.com/raid-recovery/ <comment><AUTHOR> Optimal software for data recovery on RAID arrays. The software helps to restore the structure of the disk itself, works in automatic mode.</comment>


Support.fm: Crowdfunding LGBTQ bail - <AUTHOR> http://www.support.fm/ <comment><AUTHOR> A crowdfunding tool to support queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people in jail, prison, and detention.

building a secure online platform where friends, families and allies can raise and distribute funds for queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people navigating incarceration—whether to provide critical support for those on the inside, to make payment of bail more rapidly, or to organize campaigns and coalitions.</comment>


The second crypto war and the future of the Internet - grey-area https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/01/the-second-crypto-war-and-the-future-of-the-internet/ <comment> UVB-76 _> If you're using an up-to-date iPhone to send a text message to another iPhone user, and the little bubble containing your message is blue, then neither Apple, nor your ISP, nor any law enforcement agency tapping into the transmission line is likely able to read the contents of the message._

That is incorrect and dangerous advice to give users.

As has been discussed before, as long as Apple controls the public key exchange process, they have the capability to intercept and decrypt your messages if they wish, or are compelled to do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple also controls the OS on both sides, and could silently push a "special" update to virtually anyone. If e.g. Abu Bakr al Baghdadi had an iPhone and was communicating with operations, and that phone could be identified, it'd be a race at NSA/TAO between compelling or technically subverting Apple to push such an update (if there is no other better solution), and the incoming Hellfire missile from CIA.

That said, iMessage in design and even implementation is utterly amazing compared to the normal quality of such systems from big companies. It is by far the most secure large-scale easy to use communications system available today. I think WhatsApp/Moxie-enhanced will probably surpass it when available, but that's an add-on application. iMessage is an out of the box default.

<comment><USER2> > Abu Bakr al Baghdadi had an iPhone and was communicating with operations,

I don't know what is more stunning; the blatant racism, or the fact that nobody seems to care about it.

<comment><USER3> How is that racist?

<comment><USER4> Anonbanker doesn't know who Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. So, if you think it's just some made up name it does come across as racist.

<comment><USER2> DanBC speaks truth, and I stand with egg on my face for playing the racism card, when it turned out I was actually the racist one for assuming the name was a joke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The difference is that most devices are now running strictly proprietary software. The crypto war and the "war on general purpose computing" mean that privacy is being attacked from two fronts, not just one.

In the '90s, you could distribute code for PGP in a book, and effectively circumvent regulation. Now, you can ban encryption apps in the walled garden and effectively shut down an entire genre of computation.

<comment><USER6> How can you tell when a closed source application is really secure? Is there a way to be 100% sure or does it always rely on a certain amount of trust in the developers/distributors? Sorry if it seems like a dumb question..

<comment><USER7> You can't, at least not practically. You could do debug/trace analysis and reverse engineer but that'd be a massive undertaking.

But it's also quite hard to tell if an open source application is secure. Do you have time to audit thousands of lines of impenetrable C/C++/Java/Go/etc. code? The rash of OpenSSL bugs we've had recently shows that "Linus's law" really doesn't work -- the fact that the code _can_ be audited openly doesn't mean anyone is going to spend the time to actually do it. People are busy.

It comes down to the question of "how paranoid are you?"

If I were _highly_ paranoid I'd take a defense in depth strategy -- layer multiple cryptosystems, possibly on multiple OSes/platforms, etc. But that level of paranoia comes at a price of course, both in setup time and overhead.

iMessage is pretty good for every day use. PGP is probably better since you have greater transparency, but is less convenient. SSH and SSL are also pretty good for every day use. But I would trust none of those things to protect me from the NSA or a very well funded criminal adversary.

<comment><USER8> Open source still has its security benefits. When an exploit is publicized, the "fix" for it can be highly scrutinized, and people can comment meaningfully on whether it actually fixes it, and can contribute their own. I remember looking at diffs and the accompanying analysis when heartbleed was out, and it was informative and reassuring.

When an exploit in closed source software is publicized, we have to take their word for it that it gets fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The first sentence sums up what's wrong with government reactions to crypto.

>[...] for the first time in history, anyone could encode and exchange a message that no law enforcement agency had the technical ability to intercept and decode.

Here's one famous counterexample: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One- time_pad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad)

People have always been able to communicate secrets. I don't underestimate the value of doing it conveniently, and obviously many people have been caught by lazily talking on a wiretapped phone, but the crypto war is only a war on convenience. There can't possibly be an effective war on communicating secrets unless people just give up trying. If governments want to fight it, they should at least be honest and say they're fighting convenient crypto, not crypto in general. They're fighting crypto that average people can access easily, crypto that makes everyday privacy achievable, not crypto used by coordinated criminals. At least it would make more sense and could lead to a reasonable debate.

<comment><USER10> Given the "code == speech" SCOTUS ruling, they may not be able to outlaw crypto tech itself, but they can damn sure throw you in a cage for using it, based on ISP monitoring and mandatory key disclosure.

As with guns, the criminals will simply ignore the law. Anti-crypto legislation will be aimed squarely at We The People.

<comment><USER9> I agree, but I also think if that happens, crypto will adapt to things like custom protocols built to be indistinguishable from regular traffic.

The great thing about code is that there's usually a way to change the rules. The scary part is that it leads to an endless arms race.

<comment><USER11> > crypto will adapt to things like custom protocols built to be > indistinguishable from regular traffic.

The name is steganography, and has been used since ancient times.

The best way to ensure the secrecy of a message is to prevent the adversary from learning the existence of the message. Second best is to provide a bunch of big dumb decoys for the real message to hide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Despite what Apple say, they _can_ read their messages. The NSA could get a secret court order that says "Please silently disable encryption for user Dave Jones in your next software update and forward his messages to us. Tell no- one."

I don't see how Apple could avoid that - the government already uses secret legal means to make them do things they don't want to and prevent them from telling anyone. This is no different.

</comment><comment><USER13> The cloudflare CEO talks about "SSL added and removed here" [0].

Then I go to their website [1], and see that unfortunately they forgot to add this annotation in the description of their product [2].

Could anyone tell them please :)?

[0] [https://agenda.weforum.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/01/prince...](https://agenda.weforum.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/01/prince-1024x768.png)

[1] [https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl](https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl)

[2] [https://www.cloudflare.com/images/ssl/ssl.png](https://www.cloudflare.com/images/ssl/ssl.png)

<comment><USER14> They are very clear and upfront about it and there are many cases where their simplest offering (the one with no encryption behind edge server) is good enough.

<comment><USER13> except the one with selfsigned certs doesn't really make a difference, and even for the last one as far as i know they still decrypt and recrypt stuff with their own key to be able to do caching etc.

Meaning, it's still not end to end, which is what you would expect when you hear SSL. Where are they upfront about that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've created a little series of lessons to teach our Year 8 (12yo) students about cryptography, as a direct response to all this rubbish.

[https://bournetocode.com/projects/8-CS- Cryptography/](https://bournetocode.com/projects/8-CS-Cryptography/)

If there is a second crypto war, I want my students to have a little bit of a head start.

<comment><USER16> This is cool, thanks for sharing. I'm passing it on to the relevant teachers at our school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CipherSaber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CipherSaber)

This is the best relic from the past war. We may need a new one soon...

<comment><USER18> Are current ciphers even simple enough for something like that? RC4 is pretty trivial to implement, but I think of AES as being pretty complex.

<comment> ryan-c Part of the point of CipherSaber was that not only is RC4 trivial to implement, but it is feasible to do so _entirely from memory_. I can't think of any other cipher that comes close to that except for maybe XXTEA (and it's progenitors, TEA and XTEA).

RC4 is so trivial that several people (including myself) were able to write implementations that fit in a single tweet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I feel this is the largest threat to freedom in the US in a long time, possibly ever. If the US has the ability to decrypt traffic from all of the major players I think, based on their history, they'll likely try to collect everything. All emails, purchases, internet searches, and so on would be cataloged. For example, if I applied for a government job in the future I could have my allegiance called into question for writing this comment. They would easily know who all but the most vigilant are based on information provided during purchases, correlated with IP addresses and cookie information.

The real criminals of course would use any number of other systems (say those based in other countries) which would not be collected in the dragnet. It would only be the average citizen who suffers.

<comment><USER20> Yeah. The irony I see in all of this is that the government did this to themselves. Government overcollection of information led to public need for encryption, which in turn led to the fact that the government can't collect information when it _does_ have a legal mandate to do it.

The best answer here is: the government should obey the laws and not spy on citizens, and maybe then the citizens won't seek refuge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't quite understand how the government thinks this will go. How do they think they are going to prevent encryption?

Also, does anyone else realize that they are essentially expecting to have no limitations? They want to, not only be able to essentially have access to your person at any time ... which is understandable to a certain extent ... under authority of a legal and proper warrant; but they now also want to be able to monitor and track every single thing you do and are at all times for future recall. Essentially, they are wanting to be able to reference the experience of your life, approaching your memory.

So what stops the government from reading your memories, once that technology is fine tuned? We are seriously on a precipice here, because humanity's political and civil society has not caught up to the exponential advances in technology.

The last time such a mismatch existed it resulted in WWI and WWII. Before we emerged, mumbling .... "WTF, just happened"

</comment><comment><USER22> > British Prime Minister David Cameron recently pledged that "modern forms of > communication" should not be "exempt from being listened to."

Why not? By the same logic, tables at all restaurants should be bugged.

Before technology, when people met the only way to know what they were saying was to be there. The world survived that.

</comment><comment><USER23> While certainly not a magic bullet, zero-knowledge systems are our best last line of defence against zero-day exploits. As the author is the CEO of the company that issued the infamous "Heartbleed Challenge", he should acknowledge that far from being some war of geeks vs spies, it's geeks vs malicious hackers. Yes, as far as Google's concerned, GCHQ fits that description, but it's silly to claim it's just about them. Even if you consider some intelligence agencies benign, there are a hundred-fold more that definitely aren't.

And the only underestimation happening here is the politicians'. If the cryptopocalypse were to happen tomorrow (i.e. David Cameron's fantasy), modernity would end as we know it. Financial markets wouldn't so much collapse as cease to exist. Hungarians recently took to the streets over a tax on data; what would happen if e-commerce became impossible? Imagine the impact on the rule of law if 10% of the economy disappeared overnight. Encryption isn't a threat to LE, it's the only thing protecting them from a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER24> BTW, the infamous 40-bit limit was set as part of a deal between NSA ans SPA in 1992, and applied to the RC2 and RC4 algoritms.

<comment><USER25> CMDF (DES w/ 40-bit keys), too.

<comment><USER24> I am talking about what was guaranteed to be exportable under the "7-day" review process, though 40-bit was a good rule of thumb for other algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When everything on the wire uses strong crypto, the only useful network data will be metadata. It will be interesting to see how traditional network IDS/IPS evolve to handle this. The signatures will be useless when they can't parse plaintext packets. Of course, orgs can always attempt to terminate SSL and do things with the cleartext packets, but that can get dicey.

Strong encryption on the wire (in transit) also renews the focus on the end points. The data are plaintext in memory on the devices. If the end points can be compromised, the data access problem is solved. Lot's of people are writing exploits (both good and bad guys) to do that.

When you combine network metadata with local device data, you've got a pretty complete picture.

<comment><USER27> Right. End-to-end encryption is just one of three key aspects. The second is hiding or randomizing metadata. Old-school Mixmaster nyms with Tor transport and alt.anonymous.messages as inbox does a good job. It's fatal weaknesses are complexity, and consequently small anonymity space.

Services such as CounterMail, Tutanota and ProtonMail are taking user-friendly (abeit weaker and proprietary) approaches. DarkMail may eventually be a fundamental solution, but may be too ambitious.

The third is end-point security. It's crucial to use full-disk encryption, and to avoid being exploited. That involves both software and wetware hardening.

But even that's inadequate. It's essential to compartmentalize unconformable information in separate and isolated compartments. Isolation comprises all aspects: devices, network and Internet connectivity, communication partners, and so on.

<comment><USER28> I like to also add an anonymous recipient feature present in OpenPGP. (-R or --throw-keyid for GnuPG) to strip metadata. (Supported at least on GnuPG for encryption/decryption, and Mac version of PGP for decryption. For some reason, not on Windows.) Also, implementations like GnuPG will allow recipient ID to be spoofed, but even less implementation will support it.

I believe using this in conjunction with some garbage recipients (with a secret key thrown out immediately after the creation of a public key) will randomize metadata quite well for OpenPGP.

EDIT: clarified option switch is for GnuPG

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The crypto war is not being waged by apple or google, that is ridiculous!

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra This time we should not fear of loud laws, but of silent subversion. You can no longer tell good guys from bad; everyone you trust can betray you. Forced to make pacts with bad people, giving them everything of yours.</comment>


FullContact Acquires Cobook with Pot, Ski Passes and Dogecoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.fullcontact.com/blog/fullcontact-acquires-cobook/

<comment><USER2> I don't think I've ever seen a linkbait headline for an acquisition announcement before.

>Just kidding, we didn't use Dogecoin. Or the other two. But they are moving to Colorado, so infer what you will.

</comment><comment><USER3> In context of a serious business move, I am not keen on seeing tongue in cheek link bait titles for articles. Seems to be in poor taste IMO.

Congrats to the Cobook team. This seems like a logical fit.</comment>


Ask HN: How does the NSA manage to hack elite companies? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> We're all software engineers (OK, a lot of us are software engineers). As someone in the computer business, hackers always fascinate me. Admittedly, I'm not a hacker, not in the "break into a secure system and take control of it" sense of the word.

Today I saw this article ([http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google- rep...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google-reports-nsa- secretly-intercepts-data-links)). I'm sure you've seen similar ones recently, from large companies and other countries. When you think about companies like Yahoo and Google, you realize that we are talking about some very, very smart people. These are not easy companies to get into. Their interviews are designed to screen out all but the very best, the most elite programmers. And when you are basically the "go to website" for most of the known world, you spend a LOT of time on things like security, and tracking requests, etc. And let's be honest, Google and Yahoo are in the business of tracking other websites - it is their bread and butter. They understand it and know it.

So I ask myself - HOW? How did the government manage to find and acquire programmers so skilled, so elite, that they are even smarter than the Google and Yahoo guys tied together? Moreover, how did they manage to consistently hack them?

To my knowledge, there are two main ways to get into a system. The first is what most people assume - that's a brute force attack. Find a weakness in the system, exploit that weakness, break in and do what you can before pappa bear catches you and kicks you out. Not a very effective approach for long term information gathering, right? And once done, the exploit is usually addressed.

The other way is to get someone "on the inside" to help. Get them hired, and then get them to covertly build a "back door" for them, an easy way in. This too is way easier said than done on so many levels. I don't know about you, but there are several guys on my team, and when security changes are made, there are lots of people who are aware of it, and would likely see it. It would be tough for me to build a back door without someone seeing it being checked in. Or able to find it easily, even just "tripping over it".

But I digress. In order to hack Google, Yahoo, France, Germany, yada yada yada, you'd have to get an inside guy, a super-elite smarter-than-google type of hacker into every one of those places. They'd have to have elite hackers growing on a farm somewhere if nothing else, and then all the connections everywhere to secretly get them hired and into positions of security and power. HOW???

I just don't understand. I seems like a unrealistic task to me. Maybe that's why I'm a run of the mill engineer however... :)

<comment><USER2> The only thing you need to tap into a SSL-secured infrastructure is an inside guy who has read access to the private key. Essentially, anyone with root access to the front-end server. That doesn't leave behind any traces.

Same for breaking into the networks (like the NSA did with the Google data center interconnections): you only need to know into which fiber you have to place a tap module into. And a subpoena or whatever against the company providing the fiber service (as most of the fibers are leased to Google by some other infrastructure company).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> GCHQ employs great mathematicians when they're young. It gives them a pleasant working environment. There's probably travel to US to work with American colleagues, and similar travel from US to work with UK colleagues.

There are plenty of genuine adversaries to use in recruitment.

And then, when you're doing the job, you're just cracking crypto or finding exploits, you're not spying on your neighbours.

There's a few fun bits of propaganda - GCHQ HACKS TERRORIST WEBSITE, REPLACES BOMB INSTRUCTIONS WITH CAKE RECIPES - for example.

So, you have these _really freakin ' smart_ people working on these interesting problems. They can learn from the rest of the Internet. They just can't share their learning back.

And then you have some managers somewhere reading the law, and coming up with some interesting non-conventional interpretation, and making use of all these interesting exploits and broken crypto systems.

Parliamentary oversight fails for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER4> If I were the NSA, I would have sleeper "retired government contractors" (a.k.a. former employees / dual-employees) getting jobs in the private sector in critical infrastructure roles.

None of these NSA guys have "Senior Cryptoanalyst, NSA" on their resume, they are get manufactured titles and positions representing some remote office in the Department of Defense. People take jobs after being in government service, so it would be very plausible for a "former government contractor" to take a job with Google, Microsoft or any other major technology company to get proprietary access to critical infrastructure.

This would be much easier than the "brute force attack" method of hacking a network.

</comment><comment><USER5> Because the threat-model they use didn't include a well-funded government opponent with submarines and the manpower and ability to physically interfere with private lines.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think much of the NSA's recent subversion comes from the amount of muscle they put on the telcos. The fact that technologists are concerned about the policy effects of PRISM and everything else revealed by Edward Snowden, the NSA hasn't had much luck with technology companies outside of their NSLs.

</comment><comment><USER7> What's the incident response protocol for illegal intrusion by a government agency? These crimes are never investigated or prosecuted, so what can you do except remove them from your systems and keep it quiet?

</comment><comment><USER8> The NSA orders companies to bend over.

</comment><comment><USER9> Because they are big.</comment>


Things Every Writer Should Know - <AUTHOR> http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2011/04/26/25-things-every-writer-should-know/ <comment><USER2> It's a terrible format (25 things? really?), but I still fell for it, and it's true: math does need more space donkeys.</comment>


Lanyrd (YC W11) Secures $1.4m In Seed Funding To Make Conferences More Social - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/lanyrd-secures-1-4-million-in-seed-funding-to-make-conferences-more-social/

<comment><USER3> A nice validation of being in the UK, given the rather negative air over startups in the UK recently. As much as I want to be in the US one day, the labor here is certainly a lot cheaper and easier to obtain.

I wonder, though, where's the money in something like Lanyrd? Payment processing for events? Promotion of events to the userbase? I'm guessing the investment is primarily a way to start exploring these possibilities?

<comment><USER4> I have always seen tons of monetization potential in Lanyrd. Conferences are a time of significant travel, planning, wining and dining, and other things that companies spend money on. And, Lanyrd stretches across a ton of industries. Just like companies will pay big bucks to sponsor an event, sponsoring the Lanyrd destination for that same event, if thousands of attendees will see it, is highly targeted and of similar value. As someone with a lengthy background in the advertising and lead gen space, Lanyrd seems like a gold mine to me in those areas alone, to say nothing of speaker reputation management, event planning assistance, group discounts for specific industries surround events, and more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hooray! (I'm not in the article but I invested)

<comment><USER6> Any insights on the company you can share?

<comment><USER5> In terms of? I've known Simon since before he built it.

<comment><USER6> Why did you invest? I'm always interested when e.g. Fred Wilson blogs about this kind of thing. So in terms of team, market, product, trends, or whatever you want.

<comment><USER7> Can't speak for joshu, but I invested simply because Simon and Natalie impressed me as co-founders, and I love the product.

<comment><USER5> I knew Simon before he did Lanyrd. I try to back friends when they do interesting stuff. I figure if your friends don't have your back, they aren't really your friends, right?

I've done about as well investing in friends as I have on thesis investment, so it's not a terrible strategy.

<comment><USER8> Do you worry about the friendship souring if things go awry with the company/investment? In the sense that if a !friend investment goes sour, perhaps it's rough, but you're not out a friend in addition to the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to hear some opinions here on the difference between "angel" and "seed" funding.

From some information I've gathered by reading and talking to people, "seed" funding is for product development, right? You might have a prototype, but you really haven't been able to prove product/market fit yet for lack of funds? In that case it seems that some "seed rounds" (eg. Lanyrd and OnSwipe) are really large.

I also gather than the size of the investment is not what determines the "stage" of the round - ie. Tech Crunch reported $1mil in "seed funding" for OnSwipe. They later went on to raise a "Series Awesome" of some $5mil.

Then there's "angel investment" which seems to be much less formal and probably more likely in the tens of thousands than hundreds of thousands (or $1mil+).

What I'm really wondering is: at what stage are these companies with their products when they get these seemingly enormous seed rounds?

A lot of what I read about "getting investment" seems to suggest you need traction, paying customers, product/market fit, a track record of running successful companies, etc.

But then it seems to me (from the outside, at least) that some companies manage to get quite a substantial investment as a "seed round" which seems to be (again, from the outside I really have no idea what's going on under the hood here) largely to finish off an otherwise prototypical product so that it can be released to the target market.

It's my understanding that once you get to "Series A" you're basically not a "startup" any more (by the definition that a "startup" exists to find a business model).

As you may be able to tell, I'm thoroughly confused. Any advice or links to relevant articles most appreciated.

<comment><USER5> There's no official names to the rounds, so it doesn't really matter.

A seed round is mostly just an angel round with some VCs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Lanyrd is one of those weird sites that I expect never to work because of how hard it is to consolidate content, and yet it always works. Glad to hear that things are going well for them; without Lanyrd I'm not sure how I'd sort through conferences.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much. Lots of people ask us how we scrape the data... the answer is we don't, it's all added by our community (the only exception is the schedules for larger events such as OSCON, which I sometimes import in to the site).

<comment><USER11> I'm impressed by how you've able to crowd source data collection to the users. Does the site contain gamification elements that reward and encourage community contributions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly - we're cautious of adding scoreboards / points etc because they can very easily distort the site, resulting in people gaming the system to increase their score rather than adding genuinely valuable data.

Instead, we've focused on getting the right incentives for people to add data. Speakers add events to fill out their speaker profiles for example, and attendees do it to track the events they've been to (you sometimes see people include conferences attended on their CVs, so this is actually a useful tool even for non-speakers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given the sheer volume of conferences these days - a problem that's only getting worse - I don't know how I'd plan my schedule without Lanyrd.

So this is excellent news.

</comment><comment><USER13> Great news! well done. Love to welcome you to Tech Centre Manchester - <USER2> an event to introduce Lanyrd to the North West community

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd love to come up to Manchester some time - drop us an email: contact at lanyrd dot com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great news! Congrats to Simon and Natalie.

<comment><USER15> Congrats guys!! Excited to see where you take it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Still my favorite site for conference information. Feels like it will only get better with time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how far the Milner investment took them, was it really needed?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Start Fund money gave us a bit of breathing room at the end of YC, meaning we didn't end up having to rush in to a deal we weren't happy with. From talking to other companies in our batch this seems to be one of the recurring advantages: you get a bit more time to put together your ideal round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> official at last. yay!

</comment><comment><USER19> congrats, I wonder how you'll make money though.

<comment><USER4> See my other comment here. I've got years of advertising and lead gen experience, and marketing to wide variety of decision making professionals during peak times of travel is a huge opportunity with a lot of options to increase ad pricing. There are other ancillary opportunities in event planning, speaker reputation management and more.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Maritaca.TV – The best way to follow Twitter while watching NFL games - <AUTHOR> http://maritaca.tv/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=showhn&utm_campaign=home <comment><AUTHOR> We mix tweets from professional journalists, bloggers and fans from both teams, then create a human curated twitter stream in real time. We usually have live analysis, photos, vines, instant fan reactions and a few jokes here and there.

A few months ago I read the "What Twitter Can Be" article from Chris Sacca ([http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can- be-2...](http://lowercasecapital.com/2015/06/03/what-twitter-can-be-2/)), and the "live" section of it resonated a lot with me. I thought "Damn, how I wish something like that existed", then I realized I could just make it as a side project.

We keep our schedules at the website, so you can see which are our upcoming events and check how our previous coverages turned out. If you want to get a feel for what we are doing here, you can check the stream for the season kickoff at [http://maritaca.tv/livefeed.html?id=pit@ne&utm_source=hacker...](http://maritaca.tv/livefeed.html?id=pit@ne&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=hncomment&utm_campaign=pit@ne). We will cover the Brows vs Jets ([http://maritaca.tv/livefeed.html?id=cle@nyj&utm_source=hacke...](http://maritaca.tv/livefeed.html?id=cle@nyj&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=hncomment&utm_campaign=cle@nyj)) game at 1pm ET, and the SNF tonight, Giants vs Cowboys ([http://maritaca.tv/livefeed.html?id=nyg@dal&utm_source=hacke...](http://maritaca.tv/livefeed.html?id=nyg@dal&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=hncomment&utm_campaign=nyg@dal)).

We are being featured right now on Product Hunt!</comment>


The Science Behind How We Learn New Skills - <AUTHOR> https://criticl.me/post/science-behind-how-we-learn-new-skills-1118

<comment><USER2> not a link</comment>