Understand Go pointers - <AUTHOR> https://dave.cheney.net/2017/04/26/understand-go-pointers-in-less-than-800-words-or-your-money-back <comment><USER2> I am still not sure why the language creators of Go decided to make pointers explicit (syntactically) instead of making references the default like most other languages. That is you still have pointers but you don't have to put "*" all over the place. I suppose it is because the language designers came from C or maybe they wanted to be that explicit?

I understand the value of having pointers even in a GC but I'am actually more concerned with the resource I'm pointing to and its lifecycle than that is pointers. That is there should be different types of pointers depending on where the data is stored and how it is reclaimed (something Rust does nicely with generics).

I'm not trying to bash Go rather I must be missing something (I don't know the language that well).

<comment><USER3> Having explicit pointers gives you more control over allocation. As you mention, Go is a GC language, and there are no guarantees of whether allocation will occur on the stack or the heap. But generally, non-pointer values will be stack-allocated. This reduces pressure on the GC, since the values are just discarded along with the stack frame on return.

For this reason, it's usually considered good form to pass values to functions instead of pointers, even if the values are larger. This allows the compiler to prove through escape analysis that the arguments don't need to be heap- allocated. In some cases pointers can be proven not to escape, but in a limited set of circumstances.

Having explicit pointers also resolves type system awkwardness between simple and complex data types. Consider Java, which is also a pass-by-value language, but has "reference" types, except for int, float, etc. So everything is a reference except this bag of simple data types, effectively creating a 2-tiered type system. Java has dealt with this by implementing boxing and unboxing rules for int/Integer and friends, which is fine, but adds complexity.

Finally, one of my personal favourite features about having a complex data type that is a value instead of a pointer or reference is that you can use structs and arrays as map keys.

<comment><USER4> So how big does my struct need to be before its more efficient to pass a pointer to it to a function?

<comment><USER5> I've often wondered this myself. Perhaps the right answer would be to benchmark and/or use the profiler.

On the other handy, I have never really had a situation where I had to pass a strict that was really big (more then 1MB).

Most of the time, big data structures are actually just slices, which use pointers to point to the memory address of the underlying array (as far as I understand).

So having sich big struct is rather unusual. Maybe it is possible to do with strings, though it would depend on how are strings implemented in go (I would guess they are just slices as well).

Furthermore, having big strings 1<x<50 MB) is rather unusual unless the strings can also become really big (1GB in which case you should not probably pass-by-reference or even better, buffer the string because arbitrary length strings can easily cause ram problems).

<comment><USER3> In Go, strings are internally a header that contains a length and a pointer. The bytes of the string itself are heap allocated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I clicked the article thinking that Go pointers are something special... but this seems targeted at the "programmers" who only know javascript...

<comment><USER7> Since you sort of ask: Go pointers themselves are not that special, because in a GC'ed language with no pointer arithmetic they're really just a map/territory-type distinction, but there are some syntax affordances that can make them briefly more confusing than they appear.

For method calls and field accesses, Go fuzzes whether you have an object or a pointer by making the "." operator work on both, rather than C's "." vs "->" distinction. Since it's never ambiguous, it's just pointless overhead to make the programmer worry about that. It can also be slightly confusing that the method itself can control whether it receives a pointer, so you can call object.Method on a concrete object, but Method will receive &object. As a professional programmer I appreciate not being bothered with this unambiguous detail that the language can easily handle for me, but it can confuse people in the early going, which is a legitimate criticism. (I still come down in favor of doing what it is doing, but it is a legitimate drawback.)

The other thing I see that fools people with experience from other languages is that the "nil" pointer is not the same thing as a NULL pointer in C. In C, the NULL pointer is simply a zero with no type information connected to it. In Go, pointers are actually (type, address) tuples, so a nil pointer to a custom struct is actually (pointer CustomStruct [1], nil), which means that the runtime is capable of correctly resolving methods on nil pointers and that you can therefore write methods that work on nil pointers. Nil pointers are still bad because they are a value added to all pointer types by the act of taking a pointer that you can't control, you get it whether you like it or not, _but_ they are not bad in the C sense that any attempt to touch one is a segfault.[2]

That's about all that matters in normal Go programming.

[1]: Asterisk is confusing HN's italicization there.

[2]: Which is I think an important aspect of understanding the "billion dollar mistake", by the way; it is easy to deconstruct that mistake as being two mistakes rolled in to one, which may perhaps explain why it was such a big mistake.

<comment><USER8> > Which is I think an important aspect of understanding the "billion dollar > mistake", by the way; it is easy to deconstruct that mistake as being two > mistakes rolled in to one, which may perhaps explain why it was such a big > mistake.

If it's two mistakes, it's one big one (having null pointers at all) and one tiny one (the fact that calling methods on null pointers is undefined behavior in C++). The latter is yet another C++ gotcha, but not nearly as pernicious as the former, which causes nearly all the null pointer-related bugs in the wild.

<comment> GuB-42 Undefined behavior is what makes C efficient. And NULL pointers are just a consequence of the ability of pointers to take numerical values. Naturally, this behavior was kept in C++, which is just a superset of C (with a few minor exceptions).

NULL pointers and undefined behavior make a lot of sense in C++. The mistake is replicating this behavior on languages where it doesn't.

<comment><USER9> > And NULL pointers are just a consequence of the ability of pointers to take > numerical values.

Not at all. The C standard doesn't allow pointers to take arbitrary numerical values; while you can cast back and forth, the only guarantee is that casting a pointer to a numeric value and back to a pointer still points to the original object (and even then only if the numeric type used is large enough, which couldn't be portably ensured prior to C99, and is only conditionally supported even now).

In particular, one thing that the standard does not guarantee - and there have been implementations that did not do so - is that casting a null pointer to int will produce zero, or that casting int zero to a pointer will produce null. Nor does it guarantee that a null pointer is an all-bits-zero value.

The fact that you can write "p = 0" in C is not because pointers can take arbitrary numerical values, but because the language syntax and semantics allow you to do so, with 0 being treated specially when assigned to an lvalue of a pointer type. But you can't write "p = 1", for example, because there's no such special treatment for any other integer literal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks the same as C pointers. Maybe the title is more clear if it would be: "Understand pointers, using Go". Then for a C programmer it's clear from the title that "pointers" is the same concept, and Go doesn't have a different type of "Go pointers".

Or instead of starting with:

"This post is for programmers coming to Go who are unfamiliar with the idea of pointers or a pointer type in Go."

It could start with:

"This post is for programmers coming to Go from a language without pointers or a pointer type."

<comment><USER3> They're not the same. Go doesn't have pointer arithmetic, and Go functions can safely return pointers to values that aren't created via new().

[https://play.golang.org/p/m3OdaXH98_](https://play.golang.org/p/m3OdaXH98_)

<comment><USER11> Yes it has, via unsafe package.

Which ANSI C example should I write for you in Go?

<comment><USER3> Package unsafe is in the spec, but converting unsafe.Pointer to uintptr (which is how I'm supposing you'd do your pointer arithmetic) is implementation- defined.

This means I could create a perfectly legal implementation of Go where such things result in complete nonsense. I don't think package unsafe "counts".

<comment><USER11> If package unsafe doesn't "count", anything that C compilers allow beyond what ANSI C specifies don't count as C, thus many of its system programming features just vanish.

<comment><USER3> I don't see how that relates to Go pointers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article referenced 'Cuneiform' which I had to Google. It's neat to see that languages evolved the same way math was developed and similar to how software programs grow as a series of expanding abstraction:

> Emerging in Sumer in the late fourth millennium BC (the Uruk IV period), > cuneiform writing began as a system of pictograms. In the third millennium, > the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract as the > number of characters in use grew smaller (Hittite cuneiform).

Software is very much a natural extension of the brain and how we processed the world around us.

<comment><USER13> My favourite bit of ancient writing is the Kushim Tablet. It's a clay document, written in pre-cuneiform archaic Sumerian. It was written in Uruk, about halfway between Baghdad and Basra in modern-day Iraq, in the 31st century BC - five thousand years ago. On it is are the oldest examples of two things fundamental to human civilisation: a person's name, and an industrial process. It's a receipt for ingredients for a brewery:

[http://www.schoyencollection.com/24-smaller- collections/wine...](http://www.schoyencollection.com/24-smaller- collections/wine-beer/ms-1717-beer-inanna-uruk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are there actually programmers who need to be explained the following: "...memory is just a series of numbered cells, and variables are just nicknames for a memory location assigned by the compiler."

What kind of programming can one do without even that level of mental model of what a computer does?

<comment><USER15> Did you never go through the beginning phase where you didn't understand pointers? That's usually a breakthrough moment, not something you start out with.

<comment><USER11> No, because the languages I had available to me were Timex 2068 Basic and Z80 Assembly.

Maybe the first couple of hours when I still hadn't read the DIM, DATA, READ, POKE and PEEK manual pages.

Just like on Dave Cheney's post, seeing a few box examples was enough to get it.

<comment><USER15> So you benefitted from exactly the sort of explanation you now seem to be questioning?

<comment><USER11> No, because I never had a "breakthrough moment".

It just felt natural on how a computer was working, typing example after example, to a 10 year old version of myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thank you! This is extremely useful!

I've always wanted to break into Go, but pointers scare me after my experience in C in University. While I got the usefulness and it's functions (and usage), it was not something I felt comfortable with.

This definitely it easier!

</comment><comment><USER17> The word "Go" is not essential in the title.

<comment><USER18> If it didn't include Go, this would barely be scratching the surface (pointer arithmetic)

I see Go's pointer as closer to C#'s ref/out than anything

<comment><USER7> I _personally_ (emphasis intentional) consider the core distinction between "references" and "pointers" to be whether you can do pointer arithmetic on the pointers. Pointers without pointer arithmetic aren't hardly scary at all, especially in languages where there is no way to deallocate the underlying value but leave the pointer behind such that it may point to the wrong thing later, be that due to something like Rust or with GC like Go.

So _personally_ , I think of Go as having references, but not pointers (outside of unsafe).

Of course every language community uses those terms its own way, but that _seems to me_ to be the most broadly useful way of looking at it.

<comment><USER19> I've spent a lot of time on this, working on Rust's docs, and the way I see it is that "pointer" is the most generic concept, with "reference" being a more restricted form. So all references are pointers but not all pointers are references.

Words are hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Understand Go pointers in less than 800 words or your money back"

There are multiple pictures each of which is worth 1000 words. Where is my money?

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a good explanation of what happens on the machine.

However, most languages (C, C++, etc) have different definitions of what pointers are, and many operations that seem reasonable on the machine model are in fact undefined behavior.

In C, for example, you cannot reference one object from a pointer to another object (there is one exception to this rule).

<comment><USER22> > In C, for example, you cannot reference one object from a pointer to another > object (there is one exception to this rule).

I'm confused about what this means--can you explain?

<comment><USER23> You can't both cast a double* to an int* and then dereference the int* , expecting to read an int-sized chunk of the double. It's called strict aliasing and there are defined scenarios where it _is_ allowed (one is that char* is an alias for all pointers).</comment></comment></comment>


Intel wades into smartphone wars - Moorestown Atom - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/05/intel_debuts_moorestown_for_smartphones/

<comment><USER2> The key graph: " _But despite his enthusiasm, Chandrasekher refused to say which smartphone vendors have climbed aboard Intel's new smartphone bandwagon:_ ".

"You can't fool Mother Nature", and until and unless Intel gets some design wins we won't have any idea if they're going to be competitive in this space. I seriously wonder about their contention that they haven't missed the boat, the ARM ecosystem is so big and so healthy it's likely Intel will need the standard factor of 10 advantage to get anywhere ... and I don't sense they've got that.

And as someone else has pointed out in another ARM vs. Atom thread, with ARM you have a zillion vendors to choose from, with Intel only one.

As ableal says, more likely a play to fend off competition in the tablet and notebook markets. Dislodging ARM in smartphones will be nearly impossible, but if viewed as a disruptive technology ARM just might eat a lot of Intel's lunch over the long term absent Intel getting serious about low power.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some good-looking (cherry-picked) numbers in the piece, and also some good comments at the site.

I agree with one of the takes there: this may not get into, or make sense for, actual cellphone SoCs; on the other hand, it might help stem the rising ARM & co tide into the tablet (netbook, etc.) market.</comment>


Datamining a Flat in Munich - <AUTHOR> http://funnybretzel.svbtle.com/datamining-a-flat-in-munich <comment><USER2> _The conclusion from this little study, is that a girl with an italian name, gets an 90% answer rate, a guy with an arab name and is younger than 25 gets, 1% answer rate. The master of all, is the young munich guy who is around 25_

Sadly, this doesn't surprise me.

Across Europe, numerous anti-discrimination laws have been (rightfully) enacted, but it just pushes any inclination to discriminate that might exist into private. Oh, we "didn't receive" your e-mail, or oh, I "didn't see" your résumé.. This is why some people got upset about Google+ demanding real names and similar "use your real name" policies elsewhere, as even a name alone can be a huge trigger for discriminatory behavior.

<comment><USER3> Anti-discrimination laws do not solve any problems, they make them worse. If someone is not willing to hire a person because of their ethnicity/color/sex/age/whatever, a law will not make him do it. Finding an excuse is too easy and it is basically impossible to prove such things in court. I recommend watching [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzXXvUjg8Fo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzXXvUjg8Fo)

<comment><USER4> Isn't it a basic right of an owner to rent his property to anyone he likes without explaining the decision (even if the decision is based on racial prejudice)?

<comment><USER5> Not quite, as long as we as a society want to protect the minorities. Either you force equal treatment, or things can escalate quite quickly:

\- basic right of owner to rent property to anyone he likes without explaining the decision (and not to rent to anyone else...)

\- basic right of hotel owner to accept anyone he choses (and deny access to anyone else)

\- basic right of restarant manager to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)

\- basic right of transportation owner to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)

\- basic right of hospital operator to accept anyone he chooses (and deny service to anyone else)

Now pick your minority: it might have been Jews or the Slavic for the Nazis, it might have been the blacks in South Africa -- or the US, or homosexuals in Russia. Or the red-headed, the fat, the old, ...

Once you step onto this path, it's hard to put hard stop someplace

<comment><USER6> I wonder why economic laws does not work here? I.e. if certain categories of people comes with certain risk in the eyes of landlords, this should be reflected in price, and who don't want to have to deal with adjusting price for risks should loose to once who are more flexible?

<comment><USER7> High demand, low supply. A landlord in Munich can ask - more or less - whatever he wants and still find people who are desperate to get a flat. Any flat. For any price.

<comment><USER4> Of course. Even if all these people were named Hans, age 25, no family and high paid tech jobs, still half of them wouldn't have a place to live. No laws can change the numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My sympathies, I lived in Munich 15 years ago and it was a nightmare to find a place even back then. I've heard it's only gotten worse.

We (Nestoria.de) aggregate listings of most of the players in real estate in Germany (IS24, immowelt, immonet, süddeutsche, others) and offer an API. We also offer an API of price trends (ie what the avg rent is in an area and if it's going up or down).

Enjoy: [http://www.nestoria.co.uk/help/api-search- listings](http://www.nestoria.co.uk/help/api-search-listings)

<comment><USER9> Wish I knew it when I was moving to Munich 6 months ago. Sounds like a tough job, some of those sites aren't structured very well. I thought about automating it too, but it seemed like too much hassle back then.

I have to say though, when you are a german couple, have a double income with no children/no pets, its not that hard to find something. I don't envy the rest though!

<comment><USER8> One of our biggest challenges is making the service known. The problem is real estate is a low frequency category. When you are searching, you care a lot, when you aren't you couldn't care less. As a result, even if we do a great job, once you find a place you gone.

We've been doing it for many years and have tried many things, but if anyone has further suggestions always happy to learn.

<comment><USER9> I imagine, real estate keywords are probably very expensive. Also, I have an ad blocker.

In cities like Munich, speed is very important - is your search real-time or at least near rt? If so, I'd advertise that. I need to be sure I'm not missing any offerings, and that they aren't slower to show than when going to the 'real' site.

<comment><USER8> Ha! Unfortunately nothing about the real estate industry is real time.

We do the best we can and push our partners to do the same. Over the years it is getting better, but it is not close to what consumers want.

That said, speed is a much bigger issue in some markets (rentals in cities like Munich) and much less in others (buying a house out in a village).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I do not know about the situation in Munich, but I spent lots of time looking for a place in Bonn last year and from my experience the approach from the article has one serious flaw:

While the real estate websites offer contact forms to send e-mails, many people hate dealing with e-mails. Landlords and even "professional" real estate agents often ignore e-mails. Sometimes it is because of the sheer volume they get, but I suspect often it is just that they never really adapted to the medium.

Many (most?) ads include a phone number. And I have had far better results by calling than by sending an e-mail. You should of course be one of the first people to call...

<comment><USER11> I was going at first to agree with you based on my experience with Berlin: when the ads there give a particular date in which the apartment will be shown, those interested have to fill a form right after seeing it. So in this situation there's no incentive for the owner to check the e-mails.

However, that doesn't explain why both the Italian girl and Hanz from Munich got over a 90% answer rate - if they didn't check the e-mails, the response rate should have been lower.

So while I agree about that one flaw, I don't really think it affects the results that much.

<comment><USER10> Do not get me wrong, I do not disagree with his findings. That is probably very accurate and that is awful.

But originally he was not out to mine this data. He actually needed a place to live, and I wanted to point out that he might have approached this the wrong way.

Personally I prefer e-mail over phone calls. A lot. So this was not obvious to me up until my experience last year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm in the business of renting out flats. Not in Munich. Sadly, I'm in a lower-demand market, and I wouldn't rush to classify this as "discrimination".

It is very very difficult to deal with bad tenants. They exist, a lot of them. And it is very very difficult to know who is a bad tenant through these websites and Facebook groups. The problem here is an information problem. If these sites gave the person applying for a flat the chance to give information to prove they are good enough, that would be a blessing, both for (good) renters and for landlords.

I am not talking about financial information. I would be pretty happy with some references that would indicate the person is honest and serious and easy to deal with, even if they don't have much money; some access to Facebook profile and posts or other data available at the internet would do the job for me.

<comment><USER13> Why the heck shouldn't I classify this as discrimination? He tried Hans, an Italian female name, and his own, I believe is Karim. And he gets less replies than any other.

He probably wrote a pretty darn good e-mail saying how educated and well- behaved he is, bla bla from Paris have degrees etc, but guess what, no replies. Just because of his name! That is what I call discrimination, and in Germany it is pretty common.

<comment><USER14> What if the tenants have had more bad experiences with male arab tenants and more good experiences with female italians? Could it be called "science" instead of "discrimination"?

<comment><USER13> We are not talking about a single tenant here, OP had enough data to mine, we are talking about whole munich.

Are you telling me that whole munich had arab tenants at least once in their past?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was recently looking for a new flat in Berlin, and I didn't have the same type of problem the OP had, but once I had an interview, I had to make a decision on whether I wanted the flat or not quite quickly. So I used a variant of the optimal strategy of the secretary problem[0]: Decided on a rough maximal number of flats I wanted to visit N, visit N/e flats without real intention of renting, to sample the market, and then take the first flat that is better than all of the previously viewed flats. Worked out remarkably well for me.

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

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm one of the founders at OpenRent (UK rental site [1]), and loved your post. We face this kind of problem daily, and have tools in place to make sure our landlords reply to all tenants - even if it's to provide a reason why they're not suitable.

We're constantly looking at better ways to solve this problem and improve the tenant experience - and your post will prove an excellent bit of anecdotal insight for us. Our data is similar, showing even just a name can impact response rate!

To those suggesting all applicants should provide more data (facebook / linkedin / credit history), it's not always that simple. Still in the UK many renters don't have an online "presence". And whilst that may not be a problem for landlords with "hot" properties, putting off tenants for landlords with little demand is an absolute no go for us - sure, we want applicants to be of a high quality, but just because they don't have that information doesn't mean they aren't suitable.

We think allowing tenants to provide more information, whilst supporting all application levels is key - but making it clear that the more data you provide the higher your chances of success and a quick response (even if it's a simple no) isn't always easy.

[1] - [https://www.openrent.co.uk](https://www.openrent.co.uk)

<comment><USER12> It is not really "open" if you have to pay, right?

<comment><USER16> You don't _have_ to pay to use the site, apply for properties, or advertise properties - the fact that wasn't immediately clear is something we probably need to work on!

We charge to advertise on _external_ websites only (who charge us), to conduct referencing (because it costs us), and to set up tenancies (again, because it costs us) - rental transactions complete daily on our site completely for free.

<comment><USER12> Sorry for the misunderstanding. Now that you explained it, I think this is a GREAT business model.

Thank you for existing.

(Does it work great? Do you have a lot of paying customers?)

<comment><USER16> We have over 15k landlords, and let a property on average in less than a week - so yes, I think it works pretty well. :-)

The more people using our platform, the better it gets, so really we just need to work on our marketing - starting with making sure people understand our concept from the word go. Would you mind explaining why you thought there was a charge, and what pages helped you understand the business better?

<comment><USER12> When you land the website, you see two boxes, one is labeled "TENANTS" and the other "LANDLORDS". One says "NO FEES", the other "ONLY £29".

It was clear to me that landlords had to pay a fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hanz with a Z? Surely a Bavarian hiphop artist!

</comment><comment><USER18> > a girl with an italian name, gets an 90% answer rate, a guy with an arab > name and is younger than 25 gets, 1% answer rate

Depressing.

</comment><comment><USER19> I pay less than €800 for my 45m² 3 subway stops away from the central station. And I found it by talking to people within 3 months ... :) Paying more than €800 for a small room means even by Munich standards just that you are getting ripped off.

</comment><comment><USER20> Getting an answer is only the first step. Afterwards you are invited with around 20-30 other persons to visit the flat. It's like cattle looking for a new shed.

<comment><USER21> When I was looking for a flat together with my girlfriend 3 years ago, we got several viewings of our own together with the agent.

This seems to depend completely on whether the commission is paid by the owner or the tenant - the only time we had a "crowded" viewing (but still only about 5 other people) was for a flat where the commission was paid by the owner.

Another factor might have been that we were looking in the outskirts of Munich - if you think you absolutely need to live in Schwabing or Glockenbachviertel, it's your own damn fault.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Two years ago I was in a similar situation. I had 6 weeks to find a fully furnished apartment in Munich from 800km away. For me the response rate for furnished apartments was 100%, although some simply said the apartment has been rented out already.

I also turned to crawling. I regularly crawled IS24's furnished apartment section and put new entries into a Google Fusion Table. That way I could filter on fields and see the apartments on a map at the same time. This wasn't automated as much as the original poster's solution. But my main requirement was that the apartment be near a subway station of a line that stops at my place of work, which is not that easy to automate.

After about a week I found an apartment that was rented out by the owner directly (none of that agent fee nonsense). I was the first to contact the guy - a few minutes after it was posted. I had to decide if I take it the same day. Based only on pictures... It was a good deal. Colleagues of mine were paying MUCH MORE and got MUCH LESS.

</comment><comment><USER23> Cool post.

We want to buy something in Munich and indeed, even if you are prepared to spend a million or more, it is extremely hard to get an invitation to visit a place (Even if you are in the right age and your wife is an italian girl, like mine).

It would be really cool to outwit the real estate dealers in the way you did it. I keep thinking. Ideas are welcome.

<comment><USER21> They didn't outwit the dealers, they "outwitted" other people looking for flats by crowding them out via spamming the dealers.

<comment><USER24> Not really, TLDR says he found his apartment thru friends in the end, so all this crawling was for nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Appartment rental agencies cost roughly 3 times the monthly rent, which > accounts for around 2000€. No need to say this was a no go for me as I > prefer keeping that money and making something good out of it.

As far as I know this fee will soon have to be paid by the landlord rather than the potential tenant (by german law).

<comment><USER8> But surely they will just pass the fee to the tenant in the form of higher rent?

<comment><USER26> ... in the form of higher _and recurring_ rent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was very surprised to find Caracas at #9 in the linked article of most expensive cities in the world; Venezuela having a pro capita GDP of around $13K I would have expected the cost of life to be quite low.

Does anyone have first hand experience of that, or an explanation of why it is so?

<comment><USER28> Inequality?

It's an oil country. I'd not be surprised to find it's full of million-dollar apartments driving the average up. Maybe the low wage workers live beyond the city boundary, or in favelas that are excluded from the average.

[http://www.architonic.com/ntsht/over-site-how-caracas-s- new-...](http://www.architonic.com/ntsht/over-site-how-caracas-s-new-cable- car-system-is-making-the-city-s-favelas-more-visible/7000511)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> And what about politicians demanding 40% is female, while only 10% of the candidates are female... That is actually one silly law (i'm not trying to discriminate, but it's kinda unfair for finding the best candidates).

</comment><comment><USER30> I've just finished doing the same for Edinburgh, UK and share many of the OP's frustrations. The monopoly that many letting agencies have in that they are also managing apartments adds to the shortage of accommodation in Europe's largest cities. Unlike in previous years, besides a worsening of the availability of accommodation I have also noticed an increase in scammers this year (i.e. people copying pictures from other city's agencies and trying to convince people to pay pre-deposits or application/administrative fees to 'secure keys').

</comment><comment><USER31> Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, identifies people like this author as "mavens". :-)

The world is better off for having them.

<comment><USER32> Maybe you could say some more about it, to make it useful for people who haven't read that book?

<comment><USER31> It's a significant portion of the book so to summarize in a tiny comment will likely not do justice to the concept. However, I'll try. :-)

In essence, maven comes from Yiddish, and it means "one who accumulates knowledge". Economists spend a lot of time studying mavens and their habits.

Mavens are the people who will analyze every big screen TV on the market, pouring over data, correcting consumer report articles on minutia, and looking for the best deal. They're also the ones who analyze flight itineraries looking for the best combination of layovers and low fare, and they are the tiny fraction of people who actually read the prices on goods in a supermarket and will complain when the supermarket writes "special offer" on something without actually lowering the price, thus holding the market to account.

The interesting thing about mavens is that they not only pour over this data for their own purposes, but they actively share it with the world (even if 'world' only means 'other people they talk to directly') at large in order to help others, consciously or unconsciously.

The work of the few obsessors benefits everyone because markets don't "get away" with conning us.

<comment><USER33> You just made me want to read this book... Thank you.

<comment><USER31> You won't regret it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What was your dataset of people who were applying? If a girl with an Italian name gets 90% and a guy with an arab name and is younger than 25 gets 1%, what about the in-between?

I'd be curious to know where I stand..

</comment><comment><USER35> > This was pretty easy as there is absolutely no captcha system used by that > time, on those websites

Captcha is not really a problem if you are willing to spend a few cents.

</comment><comment><USER36> "Reasonnable means that the rent doesn't exceed 800€ for a 15m² flat"

Is living in 15 m² reasonable ?

I live in a studio of about 30 m² and I find it claustrophobic at times.

<comment><USER32> He can't afford more than a 15m² flat but even these are sometimes too expensive. That's not what he says literally, but it's probably his idea, considering that nobody would like to live in just 15 m² but many people have an upper limit on what they can pay.

<comment><USER36> I was wondering if you can actually find flats that small.

While I was looking here in Madrid, the least I could find were 20/25 m2 flats.

Regardless, as someone that has shared the author's pains multiple times, kudos to him for the creativity of his method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Brilliant punchline.</comment>


Ask HN: Rate my Start-up webticketing.net - <AUTHOR>

I've been slowly working on http://www.webticketing.net in between projects for the past 6 months. And its now at the point I'm ready to get feedback and open up the site.
We launched our first event today, a charity hack event for paypal.
http://www.webticketing.net/charityhack/
The idea is a simple cheap ticketing solution, with a low flat rate fee.
Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated. <comment><USER3> Simple, effective and well executed! nice one (I actually can think of uses for this!!)

I especially like your time chooser method - that is really natural (though susceptable to shock/shake). The rest of the sign up form seemed a little oddly laid out (with the right column)

When you create an event it doesnt take you to the "invite people" page but to the admin overview, which then takes several clicks to get to the event page possibly directing to the events page might be better (with obvious links to the overview/management)?

Also the next step is obviously promoting an event and it is not clear how to do this. Some sort of popup when your redirected to the event page after setup that says "look here are some options --->" might help.

Have you got any plans for printable tickets? Or for the ability of the admin to reserve tickets themselves (say if they sell over the phone or via another medium but still allowing them to track "sales" in one place). Any plans to create a "template" event for reuse (if you hold weekly events say).

What about the email tickets - is it possible to add the ability to customise them? (for example I know some guys who would, if using you, like the ID number printed super large for easy checking).

What about ticket id's? Is it possible to customise these or at least track them in the CSV file you provide - so that they can be checked?

I understand some of that might not apply for your target market - <USER2> throwing random thoughts out there. All in all I think its really cool!

Any use?

(whats your revenue model like and what are your target audience? Do you think you can get enough events to make it profitable (actually I can see it working for club events organisers (we host some sites for them so I know the market in our area is like) as a ticker mechanism. <\-- if you dont want to answer s'cool, just interested)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks really great feedback, much appreciated.

1\. The Time Picker isn't mine, its a open source JQuery Plugin <http://haineault.com/media/jquery/ui-timepickr/page/>

2\. We are working on the Invite Friends/Promote code still, which is why there is a kink in the workflow at the moment, by the time its done, it will all make much more sense.

3\. Printable Tickets are planned, actually investigating using moo.com api or something similar, but won't be doing these in the near future.

4\. Reserved Tickets are due out next

5\. Templates, in due course.

6\. No plans to customize the Email at the moment, but we are certainly considering a white label solution which would allow this.

7\. Ticket id's aren't customisable, but adding them to the CSV would make a lot of sense, will certainly do that.

I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think we could make this profitable, hope that is enough of an answer :)

Thanks for the great feedback much to ponder, and will certainly adjust the feature list accordingly.

Mat

<comment><USER3> wicked stuff (and thanks for the link to the JQuery plugin).

One comment I would have is that I would look into the white label approach a bit more. There could be a niche for brandable ticket sales sites - you know like if you run a club night a way to brand the whole interface with their theme and so forth.

We host a few club nights websites and I know something like that would interest them (because current solutions are a bit steep in upfornt cost, installation and maintenance).

<comment><AUTHOR> Not going to say too much more on here, but watch this space :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started clicking on the giant green + to start creating an event and it wasn't clickable. You should link that to your sign up page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we have had this comment a few times now, time to make the big boxes clickable :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would recommend a simple video highlighting the simple sign up process. 1-2-3 really prove to people that it takes minutes focusing on the number of steps involved and that the screens are not very long (not much scrolling).

Then I would focus on the ease of creating an event. Again hopefully 1-2-3.

The same or another video would contain the end user experience of buying tix for your event. So before signing up for anything you have a full blown view of what signing up will be like, setting up an event, and what your event goers will be experiencing.

Great idea. Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, much appreciated. Looks like a screencast is in order, truth is from <http://www.webticketing.net> it takes 1 click to register (on the front page), then one click to create event. From there on, it will all go live the instance you click the confirmation email.

We really should demo how easy this is though.

Mat

<comment><USER6> I've actually gone through this process and it was amazingly quick to get create an event (I thought I'd got something wrong). A lot better than eventbrite. However, a screencast would be great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for taking the time to go through the process. It's our main goal, to make the whole process as quick as possible. Which is why we didn't bother with a screencast, but seems we need one! Thanks for the tips, will put one together next week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You guys are going up against the big daddys in this space: <http://www.eventbrite.com/>

I did some research into this space. There are acutally tons of companies in this space which IMHO is a good thing for you. I would try to focus on one niche to get revenue coming in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our initial niches are university and nightclub events, hence the wacky colors, but we do aim to tackle eventbrite.com and the more mainstreams events eventually.

Mat

<comment><USER8> Your transaction fee of 50p per ticket in the UK is far too high for University events. A lot of them would be £5-£10, so somewhere between 10% - 5% commission plus there are then withdrawal fees from PP for the money.

Eventbrite charge a flat 3% on the ticket price if you use their payment processing. What advantage do you offer over eventbrite?

<comment><USER9> If you are selling tickets to your event, the Eventbrite fee is $0.99 + 2.5% per ticket sold. (max fee $9.95)

<http://www.eventbrite.com/t/eventbrite-invoice>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> clickable link: <http://www.webticketing.net>

</comment><comment><USER11> great app using new Beta PayPalX API's and has allowed us to put together a hack weekend and site in a few days.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great design and good, fast registration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it, had some feedback suggesting the create event isn't obvious enough as a sign-up on the front page, so may change the wording.

Mat

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> All very good so far... Only a couple of things: I found the UI when creating the event to be slightly muddled, my eye followed down the page and i completely forgot about the right hand side panels. I feel the user feedback on errors could be more noticeable - maybe put it at the top of the page as well as above the field it is referring to. A smooth looking site none the less...

</comment><comment><USER14> I would need to see screenshots, demo, or video; before I would sign up. Other than that I like the design.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a quick video interview here

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GhAicc3iCE>

Need to do a screen cast and put it on the frontpage still though, hadn't thought of that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks really slick, great idea too.

</comment><comment><USER16> cool, i like the design and the idea as well very much needed

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't know if it's too late to mention this; but this posting has all the same fake user reviews like matclayton's other post did.

</comment><comment><USER18> Great start, though provide alternative payment options if possible - that way you don't scare anyone off.

</comment><comment><USER19> I haven't done anything with it yet, but I do want to say it's a really great looking design.

</comment><comment><USER20> why have a image like this? <http://s.wtimg.com/site_media/images/payment_options.png>

at 128k its heavier than some whole web pages. (any ideas?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ouch thanks, that image isn't even used in this version of the site, its from an old build, which is why it is still a high res version. Have removed it from the next CSS revision to go out. Will have a check around for anymore excess images, Thanks.

Mat

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would definitely change the name. It sounds more like a job ticketing. EDIT: And you can also add a link to an event on the front or a stream of events being created.

<comment><USER3> as someone who has been searching for a decent name/domain relating to tickets and ticketing (not for these kind of tickets) I can tell you it's tough!

Webticketing is an awesome catch even with the slight confusion!

<comment><USER22> webticketing is ok, but it is still a .net domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would love a link to an event .ical file, like eventbrite etc do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Already provide these, when you signup to an event the iCal file is include in the email, an should auto add to your calender.

<comment><USER23> Awesome, adding it in the email is a lovely touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great app - not a fan of paypal though!

</comment><comment><USER25> blargh paypal.

just kidding, thats a really good landing page.

</comment><comment><USER26> The convenient part of event brite for me is their extensive API, do you have anything like that planned?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, just take time and we don't want to open it up until we are confident the design is robust.</comment></comment>


Police raid Amazon's Tokyo offices - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31000904 <comment><USER2> > The crackdown by police follows a change to Japanese laws enacted in June > last year that criminalised the possession of real images of child sexual > abuse. The creation and distribution of such images has been illegal since > 1999.

In the meantime in convenience stores everywhere across Japan, kids can get manga showing women or school girls being raped and nobody has any problem with that. I guess I will never understand morals here.

<comment><USER3> No, they're not sold to kids. And I don't see your problem. On one hand, we have real children being abused in real life. A demand for such pictures would mean a demand for child abuse. On the other hand, we have drawings that most apparently satisfy certain fetishes that people seem to have. I don't see what's immoral with the latter, literally nobody was harmed in the process.

<comment><USER2> > literally nobody was harmed in the process.

Because you think being exposed over and over to something does not harm someone's mind, or change their perception ?

> No, they're not sold to kids.

I'm not talking about adult ones, I'm talking about even the ones for young folks: there's plenty of hard core sexual content as well in. Check it out for yourself.

<comment><USER4> There is debate that heightened exposure to pornography correlates with lower incidences of rape: [http://freakonomics.com/2011/08/04/porn-and-rape-the- debate-...](http://freakonomics.com/2011/08/04/porn-and-rape-the-debate- continues/)

>the U.S. states in which rapes rose by 53 percent had the least Internet access between 1980 and 2000—and so the least access to Internet porn. States with the most access saw a 27 percent drop in reported rapes.

But there are so many other factors playing into this (with heightened exposure to Internet due to higher income and more free time also comes a higher level of education, which may deter rape), so the debate is still going on, but a clear "porn -> rape" correlation doesn't seem to exist.

<comment><USER2> > There is debate that heightened exposure to pornography correlates with > lower incidences of rape: [http://freakonomics.com/2011/08/04/porn-and-rape- > the-debate-...](http://freakonomics.com/2011/08/04/porn-and-rape-the- > debate-..).

Hello ? I'm not saying porn and rape is linked. I'm saying you can get tons of hardcore material everywhere in Japan, so why go only after the ones selling pictures ? Personally I dont see much difference between a drawing a kid being raped and an actual picture, for the end viewer. In both situations you are allowing that person to feel good about it, which is, in my view, wrong anyway.

<comment><USER5> To repeat what was said earlier: _because it 's not about the viewer_. It's about the child actually being molested.

Q: Why is child pornography illegal?

A: Because it requires real life children to be abused in real life

Q: Why is CG / drawings of child pornography controversial?

A: Because we don't know if it will lead to real children being abused in real life.

Does this answer your questions?

<comment><USER2> > To repeat what was said earlier: because it's not about the viewer. It's > about the child actually being molested.

You would not get (much) child molestation if there was no public for these images in the first place.

So on one side, it's forbidden to share pics of real children (for the reasons you mentioned), but it's fine to check/sell drawings of children being molested. It just seems very counter productive to go both ways at the same time. You can imagine that people who already enjoy drawings would also enjoy pictures and therefore actively look for them.

<comment><USER5> Okay, that's a more nuanced and better argument.

We are now entering the "do video games cause violence" discussion hall. We take a number. It's ZY412787A331992. The 90s LED display mounted on the south wall says "unmoderated caucus".

We take a seat, close our eyes, and relax in the echoes of decades of brouhaha.

Do you want a drink?

<comment><USER2> > We are now entering the "do video games cause violence" discussion hall

Actually we are not. I am merely saying that the market of legal questionable things is likely increasing the market of illegal things, not talking about pictures causing rape directly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's Happening, Facebook? You're turning me into an asshole, that's what - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagonow.com/fluffy-naked-sex-party/2012/12/whats-happening-facebook-youre-turning-me-into-an-asshole-thats-what/

<comment><USER2> I love that Facebook is blamed for making one's internal dialogue external. That's not Facebook MAKING you an asshole. That's Facebook REVEALING you're an asshole.

I think Facebook is guilty of a lot of things, but this isn't one of them.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I started reading this, sympathetic to the fact that facebook is changing how we interact and expecting some kind of insightful revelation about it, and just ended up thinking, "it sounds like you're just kind of an asshole."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm very sorry for the author of this post. She clearly has messed up emotional and social life - she's hanging out with people incompatible with her but has an emotional attachment to them and can't bring herself to do what she should have done years ago: just forget about all those people (cousins, parents, sister, friend from high school), remove their phone numbers and block their very first attempts of "friending" on Facebook.

Not talking about someone's thoughts is not the way to go; why would you want to be around people who don't want to know what you think? Why would you want to be friends with people who are offended easily?

If anything, Facebook did her a favor: it showed her how toxic and dysfunctional her relations were. It's time to end those relations and move along with life - with or without Facebook, which doesn't matter, as long long as it is with the right people.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't blame Facebook for having bad judgement.

It's wise to be discreet in your opinion on a public forum... especially if you care what the people who read it may think about you afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have some people like that on my life, but I would never tell them that kind of stuff, even though I think the same. I just ignore them. I have them added to my facebook, but unscribed from their posts, have them on my "restricted list" (who can not se what I post) and out of my chat list. To all effects, they think I just don't use my facebook.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting what Total Information Awareness does to relationships. I'm reminded of the (excellent) episode of Black Mirror, 'The Entire History of You', which is apparently available in full on YouTube here:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImbpjWRMy2k>

<comment><USER8> YouTube says that this video is not available in the U.S.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One might as well blame the <input> box.

No, seriously -- there's a context-free aspect ("Write a comment...") of a blank comment box that invites all range of interaction, positive and negative, relevant and not. Imagine if instead of a blank <input> box, users were prompted with a question ("Do you also like ice cream?") or statement ("Leave your condolences...") that guided the relevancy of the response.

</comment><comment><USER10> When is it acceptable to use ALL CAPS!?!? in a post like this?

</comment><comment><USER11> It's more about culture than Facebook when social ties (especially family bonds) are so weak that they can be broken with a status update.</comment>


Ask HN: Thinking about relocating, suggestions? - <AUTHOR>

Where should I live?
I'm a single founder with a [stable] revenue generating startup (lifestyle business). I'm technical but also have business development and marketing experience so I pretty much run the whole shop.
I broke up with my long-term girlfriend a few months ago and I've still not completely recovered. I have no friends where I live, the weather is horrible, my flat is £950 a month not including council tax (£180) and other utilities for the equivalent of a trailer on a bypass.
Every month or so I read articles on HN about people who move and work from paradise locations where the weather is beautiful, the food is mouth watering and the quality of lifestyle is to die for. Best of all, it's cheap/er!
I desperately need the above and a change of scenery, even if temporary.
I have a GB passport and I can live pretty much anywhere for X amount of time, with little visa requirements. I don't mind relocating for 3, 6 or 12 months. I will very rarely need to return for meetings as most of these can be done using video conferencing and I have people on the ground who can help if needed.
I haven't done much research (apologies), this is my first point of call and I've only just decided that I need to take action.
The criteria are, good: Internet access, climate, food and rates
I welcome suggestions / experiences. Thank you. <comment><USER6> I think Bangkok hits most of your bullet points. You could find a nice apartment with fitness, pool and a maid for 60% of what you're paying now. Most of the nicer places will want a year contract (and might whine if you're not a resident) but shorter term apts are certainly available.

You can have a decent dinner for two for US $40 / $80 with wine. The French food here is so-so, the Italian and Japanese top notch. Chinese is good (not great). The Korean is great. They really never got American food here. If you don't want to spend, you can eat a couple of good bowls of noodles for $3.

Internet access is decent. I get 8Mb/s (actual speed) for around $30 / month. Mobile is a different story. They never made the transition to 3G here so speeds are bad. There is one carrier that unofficially supports 3G (they get around the law by running a permanent trial in Bangkok) but even that is pretty slow. I still use my iPhone to look stuff up, but the experience isn't great.

Cars are somewhat expensive (compared to the US). Sport bikes are insanely so (a Street Triple is taxed 100%, any BWM 200%). Mac prices are on par with the US (which IIRC would be more attractive than UK prices).

If you're not broke they're pretty easy going about immigration. You can live here for well over a year as a tourist as long as you follow the rules.

It's not all roses though. The city is congested. It's damn hot most of the time (unless it's raining like the world is ending). For a slight increase in cost, you could move to an island though. Then you get to live in paradise.

</comment><comment><USER7> The US is probably out - due to VISA requirements you can't stay there for any length of time. But if you do go there, I would advise setting yourself up with HSBC Premier in the UK first, then getting USD bank accounts setup via them (they are real, local US accounts with cheque books and debit cards - <USER2> just a "currency account"). In fact that advice probably applies irrespective of where you move - get a local account setup from here first if you can. Setting up local bank accounts as a foreigner can be a real pain in the arse, and yet they are so essential if you want to get any kind of income (or even just to avoid wild exchange rate fluctuations).

Start going minimalist now, if you are not already. The worst thing you can do is lug all this useless shit with you around the globe, or move somewhere and start accumulating crap. Yes I am speaking from experience.

Finally, if you are not that well travelled, start by actually travelling :). By that I mean use the net to target some places, then take yourself on a holiday and hit all those places. Don't plan any of the usual touristy crap, just try to take in the environment you are in. See if the place gels with you or not, as much as something can in a week.

Good luck with it.

</comment><comment> dav-id India is a great place, you wont have any issues with language and from the looks of things on HN in places like Delhi there are small hacker communities that you can get involved in if you're looking to meet those kinds of people.

You can rent a 2 bed appt for around £400 a month in a good area - <USER3> this is more than you were planning on but I think it is somewhere that you wouldn't have to fight with. I found China to be an incredible place but if I am perfectly honest it is not an easy place to be - fun and eye opening but can be an absolute nightmare if you don't speak the local dialect - even if you have some very helpful local friends. That said Shanghai has a large expat community where you will be able to very easily get involved in (<http://www.shanghaiexpat.com/>)

BTW - I am personally going to be in Delhi a lot as I am setting up a business there and I spent a lot of time in Shanghai in the past.

<comment><USER8> Weather is really bad in Delhi these days, around 108 degrees and then they have very long power cuts every day :(

Hacker Community is growing but infrastructure is poor and internet connectivity is slow & unreliable. Roads are overcrowded, and driving is dangerous. You will have to rely on very bad public transport, which you will not want to do during 108 degrees temperature.

Besides, Delhi is an expensive place to live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem I foresee with the "cheap/er" places that you mentioned is that they tend to suffer from infrastructure problems. This includes net connectivity/speed, powercuts, healthcare among other things. Be sure check that out thoroughly before you make a commitment.

Some places in Asia that I think will suit your criteria: Singapore, Okinawa. But they aren't exactly cheap.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER10> I spent 3 months in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, and loved it. Rent for a nice 2 bed townhouse was $1000 but cheaper is possible. It's a surfing beach with a bit of a nightlife. Lots of europeans, I met several british people there. The food was okay, internet access was alright (1-2mbps) but sometimes unreliable. The weather is perfect during the dry season (nov-may), and apparently is tolerable during most of the wet season because the surfing is even better. It's not completely paradise though, its a poor country, drugs and petty theft is common, but altogether not too bad.

</comment><comment><USER11> Morocco,Spain,Turkey are great places for internet,weather,food

</comment><comment><USER12> First of all, congrats on getting out of a bad relationship (assuming) and having the option of picking up and going anywhere your heart desires - <USER4> should know you're one lucky guy!

My picks: Buenos Aires (maybe 30% cheaper), Montreal (6 summer months) (maybe 20% cheaper), Hawaii (maybe 20% cheaper), Barcelona, Istanbul, Fiji, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, and Porto Alegre in Brazil.

</comment><comment><USER13> Philippines - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines>

</comment><comment><USER8> Bueno Aires fits your criteria. Life style in Bueno Aires is best bang for the buck. Active Hacker community is a bonus.

</comment><comment><USER14> Switzerland-Lugano, on the Swiss/Italian border is a personal favorite.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well the best area is the heart of it all - Silicon Valley - USA - <USER5> View or Palo Alto or San Francisco. Depending if you are trying to grow your business.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not trying to grow my business. The location need have nothing to do with my startup.

<comment><USER16> That may be true. The lifestyle in Silicon Valley is pretty awesome. I've lived in and visited several world class cities and the Bay area outshines pretty much everyone. You _might_ be able to increase your friend pool if you are a technical person. For example, MakerFaire is happening soon! Or you could go to Noisebridge in SF. I've had awesome random tech conversations with people at coffee places (MV used to be full of folks doing YC). The place has excellent weather (by my personal standards - I don't like rain and snow). You have Napa, Yosemite, Santa Cruz, Tahoe and a bunch of other places nearby for weekend getaways.

Other cities I can recommend: Vancouver and Dubai.

<comment><USER12> Vancouver is climatically bankrupt (exception: Apr - Oct, then its the most beautiful place, heaven on earth!). Costs are about half of what you're paying. I lived there for a decade and went to college there, let me know if you want to know more.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fear of Failure Prevents Minimal, but Necessary Time Off - <AUTHOR> http://andysparks.co/post/34718564879/week-4-fear-of-failure-prevents-minimal-but-necessary

<comment><USER2> Check out the book, "The Power of Full Engagement." The short of it is that yes, you do need a break. You'll be more productive managing your time and doing important things (like occasionally relaxing and being sure to exercise regularly) than just trying to sit at your computer working 24/7.

Also, don't look at breaks as a major unplug or nothing at all. Our brains work in 90-120 minute cycles (similar to our sleep cycles) and so building in short breaks (even only 5-10 minutes) can be incredibly refreshing and make you more productive than if you cranked through a whole day.

The book is no BS either; the authors have helped Fortune 500 leaders and professional athletes rise to the top of their game (like helping a tennis player become #1 in the World).

Happy to talk more some time as I'm just wrapping the book up and starting to apply some of the lessons from it. It's helping me understand why for instance my most productive hour of my week is the hour after i keep home from my soccer games and how to have more heavy execution sessions like it.

Don't feel guilty. It's about working smart and hard.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agree and empathize with this completely. There's a lot of pressure to be online 24/7, always cranking, always building, always increasing 'productivity.'

But part of business (and the advantage for so many successful companies) is creative thinking and the ability to see an opportunity that others don't. Stepping back and 'turning off' is critical to the creative thinking process: it's the 'incubation' stage that leads to 'illumination' or the Aha-moment: [http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2011/11/how-to-think- creativel...](http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2011/11/how-to-think- creatively.html)

So next time you feel like a slacker for having a beer with friends, know that you might actually be on the verge of a breakthrough.

</comment><comment><USER4> An important topic, Andy! Related: if you're motivated (positively) enough to work that extensively, that's a gift unto itself. Take a step back and think about working just 8 hours a day at anything. How would you feel if that's something you didn't love? How would you feel doing something you didn't love for even 4 hours a day? 2 hours a day?

If you love what you do and are motivated to do that thing for such long hours, more power to you!</comment>


Next Arab American on a stamp could be Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://thearabdailynews.com/2014/02/21/next-arab-american-stamp-steve-jobs/ <comment><USER3> I'm probably going to be hated on for this post, but Steve Jobs doesn't represent Arab Americans, because he was adopted and wasn't brought up in Arab culture, religion or language. He called his biological parents 'an egg and sperm'.

While this is probably obvious for most people, I don't think calling Steve Jobs "Arab" is really of service to anyone. If you want to rise the profile of Arab Americans or Arabs in general there are a lot of great people to choose from.

<comment><USER4> He is half Syrian. Syrians are not even Arabs. Neither are Lebanese or Egyptian, or Iranian (Persian) people. It just happened that at some point Arabs invaded their lands.

This is like calling Spanish people Arabs, because Arabs used to be there at some point, or calling English people French, because French used to be there at some point.

The ethnicity knowledge of the Americans is no better than their geographical knowledge.

<comment><USER5> People living in Syria 3,000 years ago were not Arabs. People living in Syria today, are Arabs. Who is an Arab? Well, one that speaks Arabic and living in an Arab country. You want to get into DNA? I'm Palestinian, born in Jordan and now working in the US. My DNA tests show >60% Middle Eastern/Arab DNA albeit my paternal lineage tracing back to ancient Egypt.

<comment><USER6> Actually Arabs were living in Syria in 9th century BC.

<comment><USER5> 9th century BC is ~100 years more recent than 3,000 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bill Gates should be in a "great American humanitarians" series.

Why exactly should Steve Jobs be on a stamp?

This gives me an idea, Post Office should sell application fees for stamp ideas like license plates to fund their insane retirement plan requirements.

But then we might end up with confederate flag stamps like Georgia plates.

Of course you can print almost anything as your own stamps legally now. And in the end I think people spend a whole second if any time at all looking at a stamp.

<comment><USER8> > _Why exactly should Steve Jobs be on a stamp?_

Iconic figure of the late 20th/early 21st century IT revolution?

Led a company that was involved in multiple hugely-successful, era-defining products (the Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad) along with many industry leading products (the Macbook Air and iMac to name but two)?

Had a unique management style - I don't mean the unpleasantness, I mean the laser-sharp focus on a few product categories and on pushing smart people to deliver amazing things that even they didn't think they could deliver - <USER2> management style which everyone tries to emulate in some ways these days...?

Founded, built up, was kicked out of, came back into and rescued what became for a little while the most valuable company in the world by market cap?

Any of the above is reason enough for a postage stamp, of all things. All of them together seem to make it a no-brainer.

And yes, Bill Gates no doubt deserves a postage stamp too - but I'd argue it's for his relentless delivery of Microsoft's mission: a computer on every desk and in every home. They achieved it and they changed the world with that.

<comment><USER9> I've never found any of these reasons very compelling. Esp. that various Apple devices "define an era." I shudder to think that history will look back on the last twenty years and think primarily of iPads and iPods, and even worse that a manager will be considered the genius behind it all. Certainly he's an inspiration for business people, and maybe that's enough for a postage stamp, but I'd pick plenty of other people before Jobs.

<comment><USER10> For all the people ranting how great iPhones are at the moment, just look back 6 or 7 years to the "revolutionary scrollwheel!" rants that were going on back then. Seems kind of irrelevant and unimportant these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "We are all human beings, and our nationality is simply an accident of birth." - Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Nobel prize winner for chemistry in 2009

<comment><USER5> You know how difficult it is to remove "religion" (using it as a general term; so nationalism is a part of) from humans? Very difficult. It's part of our biology. Although thousands of years ago it was crucial for our survival, it is primitive behaviour right now and destroys us unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The title appears to be link-bait in order to discuss the (so far unsuccessful) effort to get another American of Syrian decent (Khalil Gibran) on a postage stamp.

<comment><USER13> Big mistake calling Gibran Syrian... [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalil_Gibran](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalil_Gibran)

Actually, even calling him American is wrong. From the Wikipedia article:

> The young emigrant from Lebanon who came through Ellis Island in 1895 never > became an American citizen; he loved his birthplace too much

<comment><USER12> Thank you for correcting me, I skimmed the article quickly after realizing it wasn't really about Jobs and clearly misread something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've always found it ironic that the same people that claim race does not exist are the same people who encourage and support these types of race-based promotions and classifications (well, as long as they are non-white).

<comment><USER10> I find it ironic that the people who claim to be against racism actually seem to promote it with positive discrimination policies. Positive discrimination for one person is negative discrimination for the rest.

Truly non racist behaviour would not mention the race, and treat everyone as equal.

(I also find the attitude in the States kind of strange, as there is a lot more mention of racial background than in the UK. If someone "does well" in life and is from a racial minority, the background is pretty much always mentioned).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Americans claim, he is our, Buddhist claim, he is our, and now Arab. Solely because of his success, not because, who he was.

<comment><USER16> Well said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So how many Americans will be described as X American where X is any other country? How about European American? If not, why not?

<comment><USER6> You know Europe is not a country, Although Americans seam to think Africa is :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Last I checked Europe and Africa are both continents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it just me who thinks this heritage bullshit needs to stop? Why are people just content knowing that someone of their (or certain) heritage is the one who made it big? My question has always been what have I or you done or contributed? Granted I am far off from doing anything substantial in life but please, let's be a little mature here.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is being on a stamp even a good thing anymore? I'm not sure I'd want people to associate my picture with snail mail.

<comment><USER20> -"We've put your picture on a mail stamp. Now people will see your face everytime they send mail".

-"You mean my face will be pasted in their signature?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How much of an Arab was Steve Jobs? Why not Swiss?

<comment><USER22> He was adopted from Egypt that is as arab you can get.

<comment><USER23> His father was Arabic, not his mother.

<comment><USER22> I guess i had my facts wrong then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> nature and nurture... you can't dismiss either. one is your genetic wiring (hardware) and the other is your indelible early childhood experience (firmware) ... and then there's your re-programmable self (software) ... His bio father being from that part of the world means his dad's genetic make is probably shared with 14% of Semites (Jews and Arabs of that area), 75% of south east Turks and southern Greeks, and 10% of sub-Saharan Africans. This is by no means an informed analysis of his dad's genetic heritage. Just an educated guess.

<comment><USER10> I know two identical twins (well they have an unidentical triplet sister as well). Interestingly they have reasonably different personalities - the nice one and the arse (relatively speaking).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Oh I see, arabs are opposed to differential treatment based on race only when they are getting the short stick.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, bro, because getting your picture on a postage stamp _totally_ makes up for 40+ years of systematic racial vilification.

<comment><USER25> No bro, because you don't have the right to scream racism while you have arab organisations who fight to "put pictures of an arab poet on a postage stamp".

<comment><USER27> Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamp, sample a look back you look and you find nothing but rednecks for 400 years if you check.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quartz, built on free distribution, has put its articles behind a paywall - <AUTHOR> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/05/quartz-built-on-free-distribution-has-put-its-articles-behind-a-paywall/ <comment><USER2> Looks like Quartz link references go down in priority now.</comment>


College Grads' Outlook Grim - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303450704575159833495021498.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_careers <comment><USER2> One note: I can't think of a worse place in the US to job hunt from than Michigan state.

<comment><USER3> Why is that? Because of the state of Michigan's economic condition? Or is MSU poor at landing grads jobs?

<comment><USER2> The former, which is _really_ bad and not housing bubble induced (i.e. it looks to be structural), with industrial Ohio south of it also not doing well.

My understanding of MSU (which I considered going to in 1979) is that it's an above average state school. Location aside, I wouldn't expect its grads to have any more than the normal amount of trouble finding jobs (the normal right now of course being bad).</comment></comment></comment>


Struggling with the Gender Gap - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeanhsu.com/2011/05/31/struggling-with-the-gender-gap/

<comment><USER3> Some female academics in the STEM fields have started wildly successful blogs that talk about gender issues in an academic environment. A few I recommend to academics/grad students/postdocs of both genders are Female Science Professor, Academic Jungle and Female Computer Scientist.

My impression is that these and other blogs have been tremendously successful in letting young female scientists learn about extremely successful female role models in academia. They've also been extremely illuminating personally to me (a male engineer) because they call out instances where folks are "innocuously" sexist, and helped me understand how even certain cases of well- intentioned male behavior is actually discouraging from a female PoV.

All I can say to the OP is:

(1) she should keep writing so that young women entering CS know that successful female s/w engineers exist.

(2) encourage other successful female s/w engineers to start blogging.

(3) don't ever hesitate to blog about instances of sexism - well-intentioned or otherwise - because at the very least this can help clueless male engineers learn how to behave.

(4) Don't ever hesitate to confront people for sexist speech or actions. The problem is only going to away if we create a culture where sexism would be career suicide and the first step to this is confronting the sexists.

</comment><comment><USER4> If she [the author] cares so much about the social aspects of being in IT industry then I don't know why she cannot accept the way it is.

All I see is "Look how cool and special I am! I'm a girl and I can navigate in the men's world!". She tries to bring up a problem but I cannot quiet see a real problem there.

"Already at a disadvantage, they are playing a seemingly impossible game of catchup with very little positive feedback or support. The culture, the standards, and the norms are all male-centric, and the book talks about women in computing being guests in a male-hosted world."

It's a big problem if you want to become an average programmer that has to rely on that feedback and support. Guess what? Most truly skilled people learned almost everything by themselves. Generally speaking most intelligent people learn by themselves (if there are means to do it) and find themselves a little alienated from the general culture.

My point is simply if you want to achieve exceptional results you will most likely be an exceptional person too. And being a woman, being ugly being whatever will not have much influence. In some situations it will help, in some it might do the opposite, it's random.

If you want to be average then yea, as a woman it will be harder in IT, but if you want to be average why not pick a job average woman does?

<comment><USER5> Disclaimer: The author of the post has been nothing but helpful to me in my latest endeavor and I have never met her in real life (yet).

 _If she [the author] cares so much about the social aspects of being in IT industry then I don't know why she cannot accept the way it is._

Why should she have to accept it the way it is?

As human beings we all have the basic right and duty to improve things for the better. If the situation is not the way it should be and I believe the comments agree to that premise then WHY should she try NOT IMPROVE them?

If the same topic were addressed by a male programmer we would all be talking how chivalry and good people are in abundance who want things to change, would not we?

Thank you for the downvote that you shall soon exercise but someone had to say this loud even if it shows mildly irrational side of me.

<comment><USER6> _WHY should she try NOT IMPROVE them?_

Because she's not trying to improve them - she's trying to skew the game. Maybe it's "male-centric" to insist that only the quality of the work matters - but personally I say that quality of work transcends gender and speaks for itself. Because my long experience of this industry is that we are the least biased people on the planet, gay, straight, black, white, boy, girl, fat, then, it doesn't matter if you can deliver. And if you can't deliver - <USER2> excuses that work in the rest of the world - don't cut it with us.

<comment><USER7> Here's the problem though: if you're interested in meritocracy, it has to be a true meritocracy all the way through. You can't ignore other parts of the process and then, only at the very end, say that the quality of work is the only thing that matters. Sure, if boys and girls at home and in our education system were treated equally, encouraged to pursue the same things, given the same opportunities...then yes, you could make this argument.

The problem, though, is that this isn't the case. Women in the United States aren't shying away from STEM disciplines because they're generally intellectually incapable of it; it's because they encounter strong societal pressures against doing so. Other countries--I'm thinking of Romania in particular, which sent a large number of IMO medalists to my university during my years there--have many more women in math and science. (And no, they're not bad at what they do.) Unless you're going to try to claim that Romanian women are somehow different or more talented than American women, it seems clear that the ways that our society and educators are affecting them are responsible for this disparity.

And once you take that into consideration, the argument for improving this problem starts to become a lot more reasonable. It bears a lot of similarity to that line from Lyndon Johnson: " You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." It's pretty similar here. Jean (and others dedicated to this cause) aren't interested in "skewing" the game unfairly. Instead, they contend that because of issues earlier in the process, whatever they may be, the gender gap isn't and shouldn't be the natural order of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the same author: [http://www.jeanhsu.com/2011/02/28/the-benefits-of- being-a-fe...](http://www.jeanhsu.com/2011/02/28/the-benefits-of-being-a- female-software-engineer/)

 _The odds are really freaking good, and only some of the goods are odd. Sure there are a bunch of socially awkward engineers, but because of the sheer scarcity of women in the field, if you are a single female you can have first pick of a lot of really nice available guys._

I thought the days were past when women only got jobs to find husbands, seems not!

<comment><USER8> Attaching a sexist comment to a post about the challenges of being a female engineer is not cute or helpful.

<comment><USER9> I think that post is trying to point out the irony of the fact that the same author was promoting the female stereotype of "just getting a job to find a husband" in her other post, while lamenting the gender issues associated with being a woman in computer science in this post.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. She's the sort of person who will use being female to her advantage when she can - and when not, she'll use it as an excuse.

Me, all I care about is the work, same as everyone else who's not got an agenda of their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Her opening statement closely resembles what I felt seeing another jeanhsu article about gender. I also thought it was woefully ironic when she mentioned that she has tried to avoid the topic of gender, when in actuality, that's the only correlation I have to her at this point.

Jean -- if you don't want to be known as the person who only talks about gender issues, at the very least, try to intersperse some technical discussions into your gender articles. Or, better yet, write articles about tech instead of the fact that you're female.

<comment><USER11> It's selection bias because it's a hot topic. There are articles in between those to posts and I don't believe she posted the article to HN. It's just a selection of her blog that the HN userbase likes. I don't particularly agree with her POV but I think it's unfair to characterize her blog as about the gender gap.

As an aside, it's not like men are actively encouraged to become programmers by their social peers. There are a small group of men who program and support each other in that vein, in the general population it doesn't exactly represent the hopes and dreams of parents of male children. (Eg. Mom and Dad statistically would encourage becoming a lawyer or doctor much more than a programmer).

I think as a society we should encourage women and men to do what they want rather than that they should fill some predefined gap that we think needs filling. I could care less about the gender gap in computing or the gender gap in nursing.

<comment><USER9> I think that the line of thought goes something like:

* There's a variance between the number of men and women in field X.

* This gap does not correlate with the number of men and women in the general population.

* Therefore field X must be discouraging women from going into the field that would otherwise be interested in the field.

I believe the thinking is that if everyone did what they wanted to do, then the gender balance in any random field would probably be relatively close to the gender balance of the general populace.</comment></comment></comment>


List.js – Adds search, sort, and filters to HTML lists, tables - <AUTHOR> http://listjs.com <comment><USER2> Good work. Question: Is it not the 'done thing' to use data attributes to hook in js functionality nowadays instead of using class attributes? This isn't a dig, more of an intrigued to see what peoples' thoughts are on this.

<comment><USER3> When I made the first version 2 years ago I thought that classes would feel more natural to newbies, but since then have data-attributes become pretty much standard in the community.

But today it's mostly a performance thing. List.js is supposed to be very fast and handle really long lists (check out [http://sindresorhus.com/bower- components/](http://sindresorhus.com/bower-components/) it has 6000+ items)

<comment><USER2> Excellent example use in the wild thanks, demonstrates your point well. And good to see list.js in the list. Bower rules. [http://sindresorhus.com/bower- components/#!/search/list.js](http://sindresorhus.com/bower- components/#!/search/list.js)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The fuzzy search is broken. "ck" doesn't match "LeChuck", and "mal" matches "Herman Toothrot".

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice and easy to use data binding.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looking forward to testing this!

</comment><comment><USER7> Do one thing and do it well.

Nice work :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow! Really nice!</comment>


How to manage you brand assets - <AUTHOR> https://brandcloud.pro/blog-en/how-to-manage-your-brand-assets <comment><AUTHOR> The word brand has been appearing more often in the marketing field. Natural development of society leads to adopting long-term sustainable principles. Equally a strong brand can assure constant position in the market. As David Ogilvy said in his famous quote: "Brand will be the only thing left after your factory burns down." The term brand has been used in social media and web magazines and new terms has been created like: brand awareness, branding, building a brand, brand identity or brand vision.

Read more: The word brand has been appearing more often in the marketing field. Natural development of society leads to adopting long-term sustainable principles. Equally a strong brand can assure constant position in the market. As David Ogilvy said in his famous quote: "Brand will be the only thing left after your factory burns down." The term brand has been used in social media and web magazines and new terms has been created like: brand awareness, branding, building a brand, brand identity or brand vision.

Read more: [https://brandcloud.pro/blog-en/how-to-manage-your-brand- asse...](https://brandcloud.pro/blog-en/how-to-manage-your-brand-assets)</comment>


Bitcoin Mining Rate and Waste - <AUTHOR> https://pthree.org/2016/01/30/bitcoin-mining-rate-and-waste/ <comment><AUTHOR> "This comes at the expense of 1.3 million pounds of CO2 released into the atmosphere every hour. I would argue that Bitcoin is the worst idea to come out of Computer Science in the history of mankind."

Any good counterarguments? :)</comment>