Landlords are trying not to rent to startups in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://42floors.com/blog/cre/landlords-are-trying-not-to-rent-startups <comment><USER2> One solution that is not being discussed is for VCs to offer office space for start-ups.

VCs have longer time-horizons (a typical VC fund will be spent over 5 or so years) and appear more stable to landlords. In addition, one of the toughest problems for VCs as I understand is dealflow - when it comes to a super- competitive round, Andreessen or Sequoia will often push other VC firms out of the round by throwing their prestige around.

SF Office space could make the difference to a hot start-up looking to raise their Seed or Series A and move to the city, especially coupled with a time horizon of only 12-24 months. It may not be enough to lead a competitive round, but may certainly enough to get a piece of it.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't this distort the VC's portfolio? Institutional investors give VCs their money to put into high-risk, high-reward investments, not real estate leases. How would they justify this?

<comment><USER4> Institutional investors give VC's money part of which their investees then put into real estate leases anyway. Cutting out the hassle for the startup that should be focusing on product seems efficient in more than one way.

<comment><USER5> And the institutional investors likely also have a sizeable commercial real estate portfolio, so it's just a bunch of money going around in circles. I think the general term for this is 'the economy'. We probably group similar assets in to 'industries' because certain schools of thought believe this generates more economic activity, also for convenient accounting.

<comment><USER6> > We probably group similar assets in to 'industries' because certain schools > of thought believe this generates more economic activity, also for > convenient accounting.

Accounting is much easier than it used to be, so we can afford to be a bit more inconvenient. Maybe it's time for a vertically integrated startup service provider. Don't VCs already do things like arrange legal services for their portfolio companies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a great analysis and the argument makes perfect sense in every respect. The only thing I find dubious is the idea that the bust is 2-4 years out. I think if you polled most SF commercial landlords, they would tell you that they expect most of their startup tenants to start having difficulty paying the rent in no more than 18 months. It would be interesting to see some actual data on this. After all, there's not much benefit to demanding 5-year leases if you think that (a) prices are going to keep going up for 3 or 4 more years, and (b) your tenants are mostly going to be solvent for at least that long. If the landlords really believed the bust were 3 or 4 years out, given the sub-sub-sublease problem, they'd take startups on 1-year terms at a MUCH higher rate than established tenants who could negotiate modest discounts on longer-term leases. The evidence presented suggests rather strongly that most landlords don't expect these startups to be in business in 2 years, and I agree.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, many landlords seem to feel like the trouble is a mere few months away, although often any attempt at getting them to discuss how they arrived at that conclusion gets something like "I just know it."

So one wonders about the whole "wisdom of the crowds" or "herd" in this case, and whether or not they can sense something that isn't showing up in other indicators. I've been looking but other than the extensively covered late stage valuation madness I've not found good correlation for this feeling.

<comment><USER9> A lot of this may come from the belief that the economy is only being propped up by the easy money policies of the Fed, and that the Fed is going to start tightening rapidly in the fall. There's a sense that once the tightening starts, everyone will run for the exits at once, and we'll have another 2008 situation but worse.

<comment><USER10> Not to pile on too much, but the Fed has been amazingly slow to raise rates and only shows signs of doing the most timid increase. It's the cheap money that's fueling the mad rush, yes, but it's a blunt policy tool being used to help along parts of the country that are really still struggling.

Until Detroit and Stockton and Pittsburgh are doing well again, aggressive policy is going to continue to fuel massive growth in SF and the Bay Area.

Tightening is not coming fast nor aggressively.

<comment><USER11> What happens if those areas simply don't start doing well again? Large parts of America have been declining for generations (West Virginia, much of Ohio, etc)

<comment><USER7> Which is likely. Echoes of the eurozone here for sure; SF probably needs 8% interest rates but even 0% is doing very little for the Rust Belt and other perennially depressed regions. Now, the eurozone critics think the problem is lack of fiscal union, but the US suggests it goes a lot deeper than that.

<comment><USER12> In principle, couldn't the issue be too few fiscal transfers? I.e. San Francisco should be paying even more into the federal coffers, to be redistributed even more to Alabama and New Mexico?

Or, thinking about the other direction, even restricting ourselves to within California San Francisco and the Bay Area single-handedly pay for a massively disproportionate part of state government services and redistribution. Perhaps it's time to go way back to metropolitan city-states as the proper scale of government.

<comment><USER13> See Tim Draper's proposal for splitting California into 6 separate states: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Californias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Californias)

<comment><USER12> It doesn't make sense to separate Marin from San Francisco. And while we're at it, I'll take Sonoma and Napa. Maybe Davis too, because, you know, YOLO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Or, consider starting a company outside of San Francisco. Not just outside of SoMA, actually outside of San Francisco. (I know, I know, blasphemy.)

Eventually the price of real estate and labor will be so high that the relative disadvantages of other locations will not matter.

<comment><USER15> I think the advantage of a massive skilled labor pool and investors within walking distance is a nearly insurmountable advantage.

For a small company, I'd say the time/cost of hiring a few good engineers is way more than a few months rent. You'll certainly pay a respectable headhunter quite a bit.

<comment><USER16> I never understood why investors need to be 'close.' I also don't understand why most startups need an office. Basecamp is entirely remote with an office just for show. They only use it a few times a year. Unless you build hardware, an office is unnecessary. A dumb waste of money, especially early in a startup's life. I do some side work for a major international medical lab and their entire Dev team is remote -- and this is enterprise. I am not sure some flower delivery app that aggregates social sharing metrics using Go really needs to have an office. As far as 'access to talent,' that's a bulkshit metric as well. Remote workers can be anywhere. You can even hire foreign workers without needing visas. Most engineers aren't living in San Fran except for their jobs. Making $140k per year is the San Fran equivalent of minimum wage, especially if you have a family. Compare that cost of living to any other place in the country and San Fran engineers actually don't get paid very well at all. Add California taxes into it and I'm just not getting the attraction.

I live in the South of France in a big house that costs me $800 per month. I am about a 10 min walk from the TGV station that can take me to Paris in just over 2 hours. My kids are in French pre-k, I have top notch medical insurance that costs $139 per month to cover the whole family beyond the government insurance and I don't have to worry about my wife getting harassed by urine soaked homeless people at BART stations.

I can't speak for all engineers but given that there is an entire word outside of San Franscisco, I can see zero advantage to living there. Talent is there because they have to be. I'm sure a huge percentage would rather be working from a beach in Thailand or Tulum.

As far as investors, who cares? If you have a product people want to buy, investors will come to you. It's a myth that proximity matters. There were investors long before Silicon Valley startups were a thing. Plenty of billion dollar companies founded everywhere else. At this point, San Fran and the valley are prestige locations as opposed to offering any competitive advantages.

<comment><USER17> >Making $140k per year is the San Fran equivalent of minimum wage

Is this really true? Seems far-fetched. Isn't that $20-30k higher than the Google base starting salary?

<comment><USER18> No, I don't know why people always say that. I live on less then half that. I eat out, drink, do stuff on weekends and pay my school loans and bills. Thats like 7000 a month? If you can't get by with that comfortably high cost of living is not your issue...

<comment><USER17> If you don't mind me asking, what are you paying for rent? Been considering moving out there so trying to get a feel for things.

<comment><USER19> I have an exceptional deal on my 2 bedroom in Mountain View which costs me around 2400/month. I believe the current market rate for my apartment is something like 3300.

If you're willing to live a bit further out (like Milpitas/Santa Clara), you can live somewhere for under/around 2000, which (when split with a spouse/partner/roommate) can be reasonable given the salaries in the area.

<comment><USER17> So I'm assuming you split the place with someone else? I imagine it is no trouble to find roommates out there, or am I wrong?

Looks like I'd have to live with roommates if I moved out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There are already several comments on this Hacker News thread where people suggest things like remote work. Others suggest moving to less expensive cities. Someone mentioned Tennessee. "mooreds" made the suggestion "consider starting a company outside of San Francisco". But such comments ignore (are in denial? are in defiance?) what is actually happening, which is described in the 3rd sentence of the linked article:

"the migration of startups from the Peninsula to San Francisco have led to the lowest vacancy rates ever"

The big move away from the cities played out in the USA as automobiles became popular. The trend started in the 1930s and was at its peak during the years 1945 to 2000. It's worth noting that what we are looking at now is some re- centralization. That may be surprising or counter-intuitive, but since it is happening, it is worth investigating why it is happening. And all of the folks who think remote work is the answer might want to ask themselves why the ease of remote work is not offsetting the trend that's moving jobs into place like San Francisco and New York.

<comment><USER21> All fair points, but remote work also has increased massively ( [http://fortune.com/2015/02/12/lessons-learned- from-3-compani...](http://fortune.com/2015/02/12/lessons-learned- from-3-companies-that-have-long-embraced-remote-work/) ). It is interesting to consider that well-paid remote workers, free to live where they choose, may also be choosing to live in these bigger cities. I'm fully remote and I live in a city, albeit a relative small one (SLC), when I could easily pay a ~$300/mo mortgage for a small rural house in the middle of nowhere if I chose to. I suspect that re-centralization is orthogonal to, rather than antithetical to, remote work.

<comment><USER22> > _~$300 /mo mortgage for a small rural house in the middle of nowhere_

How's the internet access out there?

<comment><USER21> Slow but available. There's a lot of empty land if you aren't picky about where you live...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Obvious arbitrage possibility is obvious, and being exploited by new companies (WeWork for $10b valuation) themselves -- if you're better at evaluating startups than big dumb landlords, you can profit here. And there isn't a shortage of capital to play this game.

<comment><USER7> If you're skilled at evaluating startups and have access to capital, owning real estate is a waste of time. This isn't an arbitrage opportunity. At best it's just borrowing short to lend long: the liabilities of the spot lease firms are in long-term leases and debt owed against owned real estate; the assets are short-term and demand leases on that property. This is no different from what gets overextended banks in big trouble when a bust occurs. In fact, we can even go a little farther: the banks that think they're the best at managing subprime credit risk (i.e., have the most underwriting skill) tend to take the biggest hit, because that skill is almost never real.

</comment></comment><comment> bmir-alum-007 If you're a startup founder with fiscal authority, do your darnedest _not to sign long-term anything_ unless it reduces both long-term cost and risk more than it adds to liabilities. There are a bazillion dot-coms in the 1990's that optimistically over-expanded and got stuck paying rent for years afterward on empty buildings they furnished but never used.

Seriously, expand only if you have people stacked three high and just enough to cover the next 1-2 years of conservative growth. And don't spend arms and legs on new furniture or other generic, high-depreciation items, get gently used kit from liquidators and recyclers. Enterprise shops throw out perfectly good stuff because they're redecorating or it's lifecycled out because it's recurring budgeted. _Capture every advantage of their waste to your benefit._

Put another way, don't waste cash to look rich, spend some to make staff and yourself comfortable enough to get the job done and keep morale/productivity up (Penny wise, pound wise.) A badge of honor for entrepreneurs is spending as least as possible with the best results. Only looney billionaires buy diamonds to use as doorstops. (Sure most startups flush cash down the drain, but there's no reason for founders to inordinately waste investor's cash because it counts against their reputation in future dealings.)

</comment><comment><USER24> While in SV, I couldn't understand the hate towards East Bay: it's fairly priced, close to the 'hub' and not as violent as otherwise portrayed.

Could anyone elaborate?

<comment><USER25> I live in West Oakland and the favorite game is still "fireworks or gunshots". Its a great place to live if you're in your 20s, but I wouldn't want to move my family here. Maybe up by Berkeley is better?

<comment><USER26> Huh, that's funny, because West Oakland is mostly families and they are fighting for their lives to stay in their neighborhood due to pressure from people like you.

P.S. if you're scared, move.

<comment><USER25> Not scared! Most of the families I've talked to around my neighborhood want to move out to a better / safer place. Could just be my specific block though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Another reason I didn't see mentioned: many open floor plan spaces are still permitted as light-industrial spaces. Due to the intricacies of the city's zoning laws and unfortunate politics, landlords are at a greater risk of receiving a zoning violation for leasing space to a tech company than they would be if they found a "blue-collar" tenant.

</comment><comment><USER28> It was so different back in 2006. At Quantcast, we sublet a big space that Snocap (Shawn Fanning's second company) had abandoned when they shut down. It was cheap I dunno maybe $2/sqft/mo. We paid $1 for all the existing furniture.

Then we needed to sublet our old space at 2nd and Townsend. Shawn Fanning's new company Rupture wanted the space. We hadn't moved out the furniture yet, and they were interested. So we sold it to them for $1. Way more relaxed back then.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why is it just assumed economic downfalls and recessions should happen every 7-10 years?

Self fulfilling prophecy?

Bugs in the system?

<comment><USER30> My hypothesis is that it is a real thing, and it has to do with human behavior. 7-10 years is enough time for enough people to forget the pain of a previous crash. It's enough time for a new generation to arise.

There are of course other cycles based on human time scales. In movie soundtracks, there is a rule that you should never insert a song 0-15 years old. It either has to be brand new, or older than 15 years.

Where does the number 15 come from? Human time scales. A half a generation. The number 5 would be too short, while 30 would be too long.

[http://www.furious.com/perfect/culturecycles.html](http://www.furious.com/perfect/culturecycles.html)

<comment><USER29> For an artificially structured system of agreed upon rules that are in everyone's best interest to optimize for prosperity, "human time scales" and emotional memory, in economic systems, should have little influence.

Especially considering historical blunders and clear lessons that we've learned.

<comment><USER31> It requires human effort to maintain any emotional memory. If you don't contact your relatives with a card or a call to remind them you exist, you don't enjoy a good relationship with them. And if the government doesn't periodically run campaigns like "don't waste water", people forget to conserve it. These are commons goods that the market doesn't ascribe any value to unless it is directly related to current product and service. Hence, we are flooded with advertising. There is advertising everywhere. But there is no such thing for "remember the last boom and bust."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's a crazy thought:

Maybe it's time to consider another location for startups. San Francisco is reaching it's limits, and let's be honest technology can really launch from anywhere. Let's get some other cities moving, San Francisco has enough.

<comment><USER33> Has already been tried countless times, and all have failed so far.

<comment><USER34> Seattle hasn't failed, instead it is booming. There's almost too many startups, too many job offers. I don't want anyone else to move here, we have too much traffic, home prices rising almost too fast (I say that even though I own a home :-)).

<comment><USER33> Agree on Seattle. I think you can't 'create' a SV. It happens bottom up as opposed to top down. For example, what if Leland Stanford Jr didn't die prematurely at age 15 in 1884 -- and his parents didn't build a University in his honour? Chances are SV would not be SV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Has anyone done the analysis at which point the higher rents and labor costs outweigh the benefits of access to low cost capital? At some point it makes no sense to start a new business in the SF area even when taking into account access to investors.

</comment><comment><USER36> Honestly, if 42floors just discovered this...they should never have gotten into the commercial real estate business.

Real Estate 101 is about leverage and the cost to borrow is directly impacted by the tenant mix and their respective credit ratings.

How do you operate in the real estate leasing game for years without knowing what landlords want?!

</comment><comment><USER37> Is it that much of a disadvantage to get offices really close to Bart stations outside of SF?

</comment><comment><USER38> sound to me like a conflict in a a landlords desire for long leases and a startups desire for short leases.

Of the two, it's more practical for landlords to accept shorter leases.

</comment><comment><USER39> I am going to ask a really stupid question and then run for the hills.

The article goes "low cost of capital", "5 year lease", "startups struggling to get their offers accepted by a landlord", "large security deposits" ...

Why don't these wellfunded startups just buy their own office buildings?

<comment><USER40> They're well-funded for a tech startup, not Donald Trump levels of funding! Prime SF commercial real-estate is going for $500-$1000/sq ft these days, so buying, say, a 5-story, 50,000-sq-ft office building will run you $25-50 million. Tech VCs don't want that level of investment tied up in commercial real-estate; if they wanted to do that, they'd form a real-estate investment fund instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why not sign shorter term leases??

<comment><USER42> In SF? All they have to do is wait 10 seconds and someone else will be around to rent to. Rent is going up while vacancy rates are plummeting, that's a landlord's market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Remote work and starting the company elsewhere are pretty easy solutions to this problem.

<comment><USER44> If all of your employees are remote, what do you show your investors, partners, board members, and creditors when they want a tour of your facility? How do you show them that you've got smart people working on hard problems? For some (bad?) startups, this is an even more valuable function of engineers than engineering.

<comment><USER21> > For some (bad?) startups, this is an even more valuable function of > engineers than engineering.

How on earth is this healthy? If your "company" continues to exist by sucking up investment money gained by doing a song-and-dance with a group of folks in an office, but never churns out a product, this is success? Good lord.

<comment><USER45> Welcome to the valley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Wow. I remember this is exactly what happened in 2001 and 2007. Maybe things are different this time.

<comment><USER14> Large landlords with experience are probably a better group to bet on (in terms of understanding long term economic trends) than startups.

Just like the bond market is a better indicator of economic growth than the stock market. More money, more professionals, longer memories, not as much optimism.

Edit: _future_ economic growth expectations, rather.

<comment><USER15> As much as I'd like the US to crash to reality a bit so we can get our house together... a Chinese slowdown + European clusterfuck makes the US the best place to invest, still. That gives this boom a slightly longer lease on life.

<comment><USER39> In 2007 a lot of Europeans thought that EU and China would decouple themselves from the emerging debt/housing crisis in the USA.

<comment><USER14> Ah, decoupling.

I don't think the US is decoupled at all. It's just the least crappy house in the neighborhood.

See Lou Barnes for some interested commentary on this: [http://pmglending.com/loubarnes/credit- news/](http://pmglending.com/loubarnes/credit-news/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Sucks when the free market doesn't work out in your favor, eh.

<comment><USER33> Rent control and outrageous zoning laws are _not_ a free market. It's funny, and sad, that the two cities who have the most laws in relation to accomodation, NY and SF, are both of the cities who have the highest prices.</comment></comment>


Airbus reveals aircraft of the future - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/seethrough-plane-airbus-reveals-aircraft-of-the-future-20110614-1g15w.html

<comment><USER2> > The aircraft's bone-like structure would allow for panoramic views.

Great, that's exactly what I need. People around me opening up their "skylight" while I'm trying to get some shut-eye. It's bad enough when someone opens the tiny windows we have right now. Makes it damn near impossible to sleep without an eye mask, which are really uncomfortable (for me).

There are exactly 7 things that I want from a "futuristic" airplane:

1) Make it so my ears don't pop.

2) Get rid of the ridiculously loud engine drone.

3) Make the seats/legroom bigger.

4) Increase the air humidity so my throat and eyes don't dry out.

5) Free internet and power outlet in coach.

6) Make it OK to use wireless & electronic devices during all times of the flight (even takeoff/landing).

7) Get rid of the damn windows, or at least make it possible for me to somehow block all light from entering my vicinity.

But I'm sure as hell not holding my breath for any of those things, because they're probably the last things on Airbus's mind.

<comment><USER3> > 1) Make it so my ears don't pop.

Learn to open your eustachian tube or yawn on demand at that problem goes away! Unfortunately, I'm not sure this can be taught.

<comment><USER4> Yes but no... If you have a bad condition like me you can do everything yet it will hurt like hell...

Two things work. Nose spray (unblocks nose and the whole canals). And sinutab an hour before landing...

I'm no reseller of those I'm just sharing for the ones who've been in horrendous pain like me...

<comment><USER3> What do you mean it will hurt like hell? If you open your eustachian tubes, the pressure is equalized, so you don't feel any discomfort at all.

<comment><USER5> If you suffer from sinus inflammation, either from an temporary infection or a chronic condition, they do not open.

If you have problems in your ear, such as a perforated eardrum or an inflammation; you may still be able to equalise pressure, but it can be painful to do so.

Other genetic or congenital conditions exist that can prevent or hinder pressure equalisation.

<comment><USER3> Ah, I see... Hmm, I imagine air travel would be quite painful in that case. Why doesn't the cabin pressure perfectly equal ground pressure? Doesn't it make sense that an airtight cabin will keep the pressure it's sealed at?

<comment><USER2> It's not that easy. The pressure difference between the inside and outside puts a great amount of strain on the fuselage. I think what they do is just reduce the rate at which the pressure changes.

<comment><USER3> I see, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This press release, rewritten as a news article, seems like it comes from a parallel universe in which carriers are not trying to drive costs to zero.

I especially liked the comment from the VP that part of their plans for making the plane environmentally sound starts with recyclable components. As if recycling the plane is a major design consideration.

<comment><USER7> As a European company, I believe recycling has to be a major part of their development efforts.

They could easily be caught up in EU laws and regulations regarding recycling. Though the link below pertains to electronics, I believe there are similar laws for automobiles, so they could just be thinking ahead.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic_Equipment_Directive)

Further to that, recycling is good practice in something as resource intensive as an airplane. Recycling bits from lots of different phones is, I suspect, much more challenging than recycling large chunks from planes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I almost spit my drink out while watching the video. This has so much PR/Marketing written all over it it is hard to fathom anyone outside of those departments have even seen those "concepts". Almost like some intern fresh out of the European equivalent of RISD[0] sat down with some crayons and dreamt up something derived from Star Trek and Star Wars simultaneously. My favorite line:

"Gone are the regulated class divisions of First, Business and Economy, replaced by personalised zones that offer flexible, tailored levels of relaxation, interactivity and working spaces."

That, my friends, is probably the only thing that will happen by 2050. And the odds on that are slim to none.

[0]<http://www.risd.edu/> (yes, go look at the image, 1/4, they have up right now.)

</comment><comment><USER9> I hate this kind of 'design' and constantly wonder how these firms that make these kinds of conceptual, artists' renderings stay in business.

It's totally searching for solutions to problems that don't exist, and even worse, creating problems that don't exist now.

A transparent plane would be exciting for one flight, but think about what most people do on planes, especially those that fly often. They sleep, catch up on work, read, or watch the in-flight entertainment. These frequent flyers make up the majority of an airline's business and these designs would only complicate their lives.

If you asked any passenger what they would want to see improved, they would be things like "more space", "wi-fi", "better seats" and "lower cost". All of these designs probably act in opposition to these wishes.

Who want's virtual golf on a plane when that space could be used to widen the space between seating?

<comment><USER10> its PR, airbus relies on large cash injections from the EU. this is to make airbus look like a good corporate citizen and a good use of taxpayers money.

<comment><USER11> No more than Boeing relies on the US taxpayer. Most likely this was just done because someone thought it would be cool.

<comment><USER10> Arguably Boeing relies much more on the US government in far more worrying ways than corporate welfare <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFUFFzkCQXw>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My favorite line: "Our research shows that passengers of 2050 will expect a seamless travel experience while also caring for the environment," Charles Champion, Airbus Executive Vice President Engineering.

I wonder how they researched what passengers of 2050 expect. If they invented time traveling, they should demo that instead.

Besides the fact that it's going to be a "reality" in 2050 which means it has a high chance of never becoming a reality as discussed today, it's a pretty cool concept video. I'm that guy who loves staring out the window every 10-20 mins or so. I'd enjoy it if it was used in production today. Not sure what the state of the art will be in 40 years.

<comment><USER13> They interviewed 6 year olds clearly.

I love these "visions" that constantly get thrown about with no discussion as to how or why the airlines would want this for their business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is the airplane of 40 years in the future?

Compare this to the past 40 years: in 1970, we had... the Boeing 737 and 747. They're still making them today.

Sure, there have been evolutionary enhancements. But that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence for future revolutions.

<comment><USER15> Why should developments in any area ever move at the same speed all the time? Think how long people travelled on horses and carts, and then how (relatively) quickly cars appeared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, so much negativity in the comments! Who spat in your kool-aid today?...

Where's your innovating spirit, people?

Yes it's a PR thing, yes it's very likely off by more than a thin margin, yes it's prospective because, guess what, 2050 is in the future. That doesn't mean it's not interesting.

Just because it isn't a teenager in his californian basement "inventing" new ways to ruin my twitter stream with childish gamification scheme doesn't make it evil.

<comment><USER17> Maybe because people expect better from an aircraft maker. You'd think they'd have some kind of realistic view on matters, but it looks like they hired a sci-fi author to do their PR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Things that I'd like to be solved:

1., Optimize the time spent checking in and out. So much time is wasted on the ground, especially on shorter trips it sometimes feels longer than the actual trip (luggage, security, etc.)

2., Flying long-haul in economy class just plainly sucks. Sitting all the time, for 12 hours, is hell. Having no Wi-Fi, no power outlet and sometimes no room to unfold a notebook (if the guy in front reclines his seat) is just bad. Different seating arrangements are being tried out in business class (diagonal, etc), but there is no innovation in coach. People bring these u-shaped neck pillows to alleviate some of the pain, why is seat design so bad?

3., Personalized transfer info while in flight. Why do I need to check after landing if my gate has been changed? Better airlines display the info on monitors, but it still isn't convenient. Transfer in bigger airports like Frankfurt can lead to very long running exercises.

4., Turbulence. THE reason why ideas like bars, social areas will never work. If you're not tied down, you might get seriously hurt. Plus, on trans-atlantic flights your are forbidden to stand around in groups because of terror fears. Flight = seat.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yeah right. They had all manner of conceptual drawings for the A380 as well with suspiciously spacious looking interiors as well. What we're actually going to get from an aircraft of the future is something with more, smaller seats.

</comment><comment><USER20> I found it amusing. Perhaps the most amusing part was that they predict people will actually be flying airplanes from point A to point B in 2050.

If you have 3D holographic like pods, you could skype that and not go anywhere. So for business you need to travel, uh why? Can you slip into AndroBot's latest offering and attend a concert on the other side of the globe in 'person' where you have 'better than retina resolution' imagery and 'better than aural recognition' audio and no jet lag and no need to remember to bring your toothbrush?

No business travel btw means no airlines (well at least none of the current airlines). If you really physically had to move your actual self from say San Francisco to Tokyo wouldn't you just buy a space on a Virgin Galactic hopper, go sub-orbital and be there in 45 minutes? You'll be 'online' the entire trip so you don't need the transportation vendor to try to 'guess' what sort of thing you would find entertaining.

Pleasure zeppelins? Sure I could see those, lazily drifting across the recovered rain forests of south America, 'air cruising'.

But I think the days of 'airlines' carrying 'people' are numbered. Give everyone their own personal 100gbit Intenet connection to the world and travel loses a lot of its desirability.

Here's my prediction, in 2050 the only airplane you can fly in as a passenger will be a Boeing 747 that is being run and maintained by an enthusiast society which is preserving what it was like in the 'old' days. :-)

<comment><USER21> Not sure. Electronic communication keeps increasing, apparently making travel always less needed, yet flight passenger numbers worldwide keep increasing.

Yes, the electronic experience will improve, but expect real world attractions that will also improve in intensity. Think Burj Khaliva or Spaceship 2.

<comment><USER20> _"Not sure. Electronic communication keeps increasing, apparently making travel always less needed, yet flight passenger numbers worldwide keep increasing."_

TL;DR version: When telepresence is good enough, the airline passenger business will become an unprofitable niche for specialty companies.

Well here is the reasoning I use, love to hear the counter argument.

The economics of the airline business are dominated by business travelers, they value time over money but there is a ceiling on how much money they will spend. [1]

The cost of air travel is going up for organic reasons (cost of fuel, airport taxes, maintenance burdens) in the presence of a constant pressure on their customers from the business space on margins. In the absence of legislation, the cost of maintaining airport infrastructure for a region is born by the set of people who use it.

The cost of network connectivity is going down, the ability to send more and more data over the existing infrastructure is going up, and the 'experience' of meeting online is going up as well.

I'm witness to the leading edge of the substitution where network connectivity is trumping travel. I get lots of vendors trying to sell me stuff and more and more of them want to 'skype in' and talk to me rather than come by the office.

If I project that out 40 years I imagine that 'network' experience should be equivalent to "being there", and the cost of flying will be unbearable because businesses which fly sales people around will be at a competitive disadvantage.

So the intersection of these trends for business that can be conducted this way will. I am further guessing that telepresence will nail a bunch of things which now cannot be done like this, namely factory inspection and site evaluations. I don't know if you're familiar with Trevor's vision here [2] but I can tell you that shipping a dexterous telepresence robot to China to check on quality control issues in the factory, especially if you can leave it there for multiple re-use, will be much more efficient than 'going' there.

So this combination will, I suspect, "force" businesses out of using airlines. For an airline to retain the business they would have to be 'better' somehow than telepresence. The metrics I can come up with for 'better' are its 'faster', 'cheaper', and 'easier to do often.'

From that, if a majority of the business users that currently use airlines to conduct business stop, then the airlines will lose the ability to charge them premium prices against their time specific needs. If you re-factor the airline business model to rely solely on tourist/casual travel you put them under severe price pressure (flying is a commodity, and even more so if the passengers are willing to schedule around the lowest possible price).

If we can agree that air travel prices will spiral upward due to the combination of higher costs and fewer premium paying passengers, other modes of travel which are currently uneconomical can become so. For example rail service between relatively close (less than 500 miles or 800 km) destinations can offer a superior experience because of reduced scheduling constraints and the ability to dynamically adapt to demand. (easy to add a car to a train, hard to add another 10 rows to an airplane).

Substitution would lead to fewer passengers which would lower aggregate passenger revenue, and since costs are fixed regardless of passenger occupancy, the tension between what you would have to charge to fly someone profitably and the ability to sell that many seats reliably, will (I predict) result in the collapse of what we're calling the 'airline' business in this discussion.

Some demand could be picked up by the now growing telepresence robot market (since it doesn't compete with airlines any more) and unlike the airline business the cost of telepresence robots goes down the more you build rather than up like it does for airlines.

 _"Yes, the electronic experience will improve, but expect real world attractions that will also improve in intensity. Think Burj Khaliva or Spaceship 2."_

At the risk of invoking the simulation argument, if you cannot tell, other than perhaps by acceleration, that you aren't "there" how much more are you willing to pay to actually be there? I won't argue with Spaceship 2, as mention in the original post there will always be a need to get from point a to point b at _any_ cost, which is something a slightly upgraded Spaceship 2 could do, but for the Burj Khaliva? If the difference in cost between having your telepresence robot walk around and check it out vs actually going there was one week of salary per person would you opt to go? how about two weeks salary? Economics tells us there will be some demand but there may not be enough to support a business. Here is a current (and local) example. Consider the basic ingredients for cooking food. (We're talking flour, sugar, spice, etc) These things have gone from having their own aisle in grocery markets to being practically 'specialty' items. People still eat, but economics of cooking your own food vs the convenience of pre-prepared food has reduced the demand for the basics. I doubt they will ever go away completely but the market becomes a specialty market supporting a very limited consumer base. Do I think there would be enough 'reality' tourists who are willing to pay extra to be there to support the infrastructure for flying people around from where they might be to where they might go? No. The cost of maintaining airports, schedules, planes, fuel, maintenance supplies, and crews across the entire country is fixed.

There exists a point where keeping the infrastructure around doesn't make sense for the use by potential customers. That is already true [3] in some small airports that are kept alive by federal subsidies and fees on airline passengers. As passenger levels decrease it will become harder and harder to maintain support for those. Once its cheaper to just build a train which will take you to the nearest city with an airport its game over for small town airports.

The technology for telepresence gets 'good enough' when the ever rising costs of air travel cross the threshold which makes the choice of flying untenable. From that point airline passenger travel decreases until all but specialty airlines have gone out of business. My guess is we'll see it happen before 2050 :-)

[1] [http://www.whu.edu/cms/fileadmin/redaktion/LS- RegOek/Working...](http://www.whu.edu/cms/fileadmin/redaktion/LS- RegOek/Working_Paper_Series/WP-10-01.pdf)

[2] <http://www.anybot.com/#front>

[3] [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1201266...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120126620)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had not really paid attention to it before, but this plane had no windows. Instead, the walls, ceiling and floor had turned completely transparent. Or so it seemed. I reached down and touched the floor and apparently it was some kind of screen. The entire interior of the plane was covered with this screen material, and it was displaying a view that made the plane appear transparent. Overhead there was a brilliant blue sky with a few puffy clouds. Beside us in the distance were other planes. Below was a remarkable city and we were flying right over it.

<http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna.htm>, Chapter 6

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone see that and wonder how those long international flights that track the sun would allow passengers to sleep?

<comment><USER24> I thought this - then remembered the A380's lighting systems that (in theory) help passengers get less jetlagged. Similar to F.lux [ <http://stereopsis.com/flux/> ] for display color temperature, just on a bigger scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ahhh, see-through aluminum now where could they have possible come up with that? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_materials#Met...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_materials#Metals_for_starship_construction)

And clearly, staring right into the blaring sun at around 9k ft up in the air is going to make for an even greater and more satisfying travel experience!

You know what a truly wonderful vision for 2050 would be? Travel without having to deal with the airlines and without being locked in a crampy seat the size of sardine can and without having to wait through endless and pointless lines of "security checks". I hate those security checks... if only someone would come up with truly smart and efficient security procedures: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Gurion_International_Airpor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Gurion_International_Airport#Security_procedures)

<comment><USER3> I thought of a portal system, similar to what's used in the game, only you'd have a door frame installed in your house with a dial pad next to it. You'd dial the person whose door you wanted to connect to, they'd authorize it (perhaps after a small conversation) and the two door frames would create a portal to each other's room, as if the rooms were connected.

This is nothing more than an interesting thought experiment, but I figured that it would already make _all_ forms of transformation obsolete, except perhaps for ones used for leisure. Everything would be much cheaper, as you could basically just carry everything from production to distribution to people's homes within a few seconds.

It would also probably make most forms of _communication_ obsolete, as you could just walk into the next room and see your friends, and you could go out in any place in the world, so it would also revolutionize travel.

Physical shops would be turned into their online equivalents, as locality would no longer play any part in anything, but they would only exist for the pleasure (and marketing) of physically shopping. Actually, I can't decide whether online stores would perish instead...

Anyway, it's an interesting world to contemplate.</comment></comment>


Hiew (Hacker's view) - <AUTHOR> http://www.hiew.ru <comment><USER2> Can't believe it still exists. It is what? Thirty years old now?</comment>


ququ wiki - Learn About Anything in 10 Words - <AUTHOR> http://ququ.wiki

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I understand. It's a wiki where the pages are the words in questions asked, and it's currently completely unpopulated, and therefore currently effectively useless. Is that right?

So I type in a question and it takes me to an empty wiki page, inviting me to add an answer. However, first I must login using my Facebook credentials.

Have I got that right? If not, it could do with explaining. If I have got it right, my advice is that you need to start populating it first, before you try to get people to contribute. In short, for every 100 readers you'll get one who might contribute. There needs to be content to get visitors, and even then, you need a lot of traffic to make it self-sustaining.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely correct! It is great notion, thanks for that. At the moment we are aiming for those one of 100 who contributes, and will try to reach them to help me shape the product. At the same time some people enter the search terms, further I hand pick "normal" terms and write definition myself, that is the way I am population it.</comment></comment>


How to Be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary - <AUTHOR> http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html <comment><USER2> Lots of very well summarized stuff. But web development has changed so much since 2002 !

While all of these subjects are still relevant : debug, log, memory, unit test, etc. I think nowaday a beginner will rapidly face broader problems in his career :

.Deployment / monitoring / Devops / Cloud

.Frontend VS Backend development

.Mobile development

All these subjects were a lot more isolated 13 years ago.

What he calls "heavy tools" like database, Full text search, they have all become a lot more common today. I wouldn't be surprised that a young developer will have to experience 2 or 3 different databases the first years he starts working (SQL / redis / mongo, etc)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice! This one is awesome, the one that made me want to be a programmer in the first place. The other one is Coders at Work, which I read at some random Starbucks in Houston.

</comment><comment><USER4> Informative, concise, to the point.

Any programmer who's been working in the field for a while most likely knows a lot of the points mentioned in that text, but it's very nice to see this information organized and categorized.

Very good read.

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading these during college.We had such a dearth of programming reading materials that I really appreciate the ones that I came to find.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _Learn to touch-type. This is an intermediate skill because writing code is > so hard that the speed at which you can type is irrelevant and can 't put > much of a dent in the time it takes to write code, no matter how good you > are. However, by the time you are an intermediate programmer you will > probably spend a lot of time writing natural language to your colleagues and > others. This is a fun test of your commitment; it takes dedicated time that > is not much fun to learn something like that. Legend has it that when > Michael Tiemann[2] was at MCC people would stand outside his door to listen > to the hum generated by his keystrokes which were so rapid as to be > indistinguishable._

I know that this piece wasn't written that long ago (2003)...but thinking back on those days of programming, I believe that so much has changed in information availability and operating systems that while fast touch-typing is still just an intermediate benefit, being able to memorize shortcuts and execute them by touch is of _enormous_ benefit.

What I mean is that while Google was good in 2003, now I can type in an error message and basically be assured that the relevant Stack Overflow question will come up. Or maybe not, so I pop up a couple of Google searches, tabbing between windows as I type in my query. As those load up, I Alt-tab to my terminal window to re-run the problematic command, or at least examine it for typos. By then, at least one of my Google queries will have finished, so I Alt-Tab to my browser, click one of the search results, then Alt-Tab to the other Google query, click on one of _its_ results. By this point, the Google search results that I skimmed over, or perhaps from the OneBox/Direct Answer, has given me an idea to what my problem was. So while waiting for the actual pages linked from Google to load up, I alt-tab back into Terminal to see if any of those hints apply. If not, Alt-Tab to the browser, etc. etc.

Today I was teaching a student how to work with Twitter data from the command- line...and because Bash is not ideal for doing math or for parsing multi-line data...it took me a few tries of tabbing into a Bash reference manual, and many taps of the Up/History key, and Ctrl-A/Ctrl-E to navigate the prompt line, to come up with the command to calculate someone's rate of Tweets (after hitting the API with a command-line program)...to the student, it must have looked like a constant stream of actual coding to get to the answer, when in fact, it was just a flurry of stupid mistakes and fixes in a span of a few seconds.

In the past, when a book was still often the best reference, or a very long webpage explanation...being able to quickly navigate the operating system may have not been such a big deal, as you were better served by just stopping your coding work to just read. Now (just as with all aspects of life and society), there seems to be a greater need to quickly navigate and filter information. I guess it's a sort of multi-tasking...which may not always be ideal, but it is much _less_ ideal if you're multi-tasking and using your mouse to get around.

<comment><USER7> I can suggest you a free educational service for those who want to learn to touch type, which helped me a lot [http://www.typingstudy.com](http://www.typingstudy.com) :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why isn't this a book? This is great stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great and relevant advice

</comment><comment><USER10> great summary!!!</comment>


I do not want to use your product - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/design-ux/a2928af70032

<comment><USER2> Not all products are this way. If someone buys a Porsche, it's not just a way of getting from point A to point B: it's also fun to drive. Even a product as ordinary as a kitchen knife or a wrench, if it's well designed, can be a pleasure to use.</comment>


Google Trends: Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends?q=Clojure

<comment><USER2> Is the region based data on that page normalized ? Otherwise its funky that more people in Sweden and Finland are searching for Clojure than the USA.

</comment><comment><USER3> Graph scale makes all the difference: try searching "python, clojure", "java, clojure", or "c#, clojure".</comment>


Ask HN:yc rejection, what's plan of action now?   - <AUTHOR>

Definitely feeling disappointed but will continue to work,any pointers going forward. <comment><USER2> Were you actually contacted by YC? Did you learn anything from the experience?

I was never even contacted, but was accepted by Start-up Chile, and am stoked to leave tomorrow for 6 months in Chile with a bunch of other hackers.

I'm sure YC is a great experience, but it is only one way, apparently, this time, it isn't your way (or mine). So you have to find another way. Whatever it ends up being, it could be better than YC. You just never know.

I once lost the biggest contract opportunity I ever had, but within two weeks was working with a much bigger client which put me on a completely different course. That wouldn't have happened if I had closed the deal with the first client.

Hopefully you got some positive feedback from YC (if you were contacted at all).

It's like you're on the road, and the express bus just went by, and maybe you were only two minutes from the bus stop. But you can still be on the road, still travelling to the destination. Stick out your thumb, maybe somebody will offer you a free lift. If not, keep walking, you'll get there eventually, as long as you keep going.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't base your business around getting into YC. You don't need YC to grow your business, it's just a very helpful stepping stone.

</comment><comment><USER4> Bruce Wayne: I wanted to save Gotham. I've failed.

Alfred: Why do we fall, sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys</comment>


One Pixel Cinema - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mattbierner.com/one-pixel-cinema/ <comment><USER2> Nice writeup, the dominant color approach looks promising. I've also tried something similar using averaging.

Not sure if this is any better than your solution, but my approach with ffmpeg was this command:

        ffmpeg -i "$myvideo" -r 1 -threads 4 -s 320x240 -vcodec mjpeg img%04d.jpg

The -r flag sets the framerate to 1, which in my understanding gets a frame per second. I also used all the cores of my laptop. The -s flag just does the same thing as your filter, though in my case I also fudged the aspect ratio of the resulting frames. I chose to save in jpeg to save some minuscule space.

In my approach I squashed each frame horizontally to one pixel, so I get vertical slivers that average each frame. Then I just added them all together horizontally. Here is the result of that for Requiem for a Dream before resizing [0] and after [1] to get a better overview. In terms of usefulness it might not give too much information, but it's nice to look at and sometimes you can even spot individual scenes.

[0]: [http://i.imgur.com/SgpYOoD.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/SgpYOoD.jpg) [1]: [http://i.imgur.com/pDGvlgb.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/pDGvlgb.jpg)

<comment><USER3> [http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/](http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/) does films in a similar manner. I think these things are cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So this appears to be at least partially a plug for the authors "Blot're" service, which I wouldn't hold against him (he can blog about whatever he wants!). But I clicked through to blot.re and can't for the life of me figure out what the hell it is. Anyone else have a clue?

<comment><USER5> > Blot're is the world's first IoT ready social network.

[https://github.com/mattbierner/blotre](https://github.com/mattbierner/blotre)

Still not quite sure, but this feels like progress. It uses color to display status updates and has an API so your IoT devices can update their color.

<comment><USER6> That is Internet of Toasters, not Internet of Things. It appears to be a beautiful and inspired piss-take that may perhaps find value

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Someone at the University of Utah produces and maintains a great piece of image processing software which unfortunately has a pretty complicated CLI UI. It can do this sort of thing and much more with a few commands. It's called Teem, and the SourceForge link is down but it's normally found at teem.sourceforge.net and under the jurisdiction of [https://www.sci.utah.edu](https://www.sci.utah.edu). If anyone wants a tutorial to it I can link to some given permission from the author.

It's used by at least one artist to do basically this, with Titanic: [http://salavon.com/work/TopGrossingFilmAllTime/](http://salavon.com/work/TopGrossingFilmAllTime/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if doing a color median would produce interesting results? That is plotting the colors in 3D space and picking the one closest to the geo-center of the point cloud. Or maybe doing some sort of HLS histogram and picking the most common one? In both those cases you need to deal with the possibility that there's more than 1 "correct" answer, though.

</comment><comment><USER9> Before clicking on this I was really hoping it was the camera equivalent of the Yo app.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yo./id834335592?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/yo./id834335592?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER10> Similar experiment I did a while back : [http://www.bidouille.org/misc/moviemaps](http://www.bidouille.org/misc/moviemaps)

</comment><comment><USER11> So many instances of "theif"

</comment><comment><USER12> If the OP is here...

"Kind of memorizing actually" -> "Kind of mesmerizing actually" ?</comment>


Put down the abstract factory and get something done - <AUTHOR> http://jdconley.com/blog/archive/2009/01/26/put-down-the-abstract-factory-and-get-something-done.aspx

<comment><USER2> The general idea is worthwhile, but not to the extreme the author suggests:

        > Maintainability isn't a factor. Best practices don't
        > matter. Design patterns don't matter. All that matters
        > is getting things done.

Naturally, you must find a happy medium. Go for maintainability and best practices wherever possible, but don't lose sight of your goal: create your product.

That said, the author did acknowledge the need for moderation toward the end. Best practices are thusly named for a reason.

<comment><USER3> Agreed.

Another thing the author does not mention is that many of these things you can make very habitual and even into zero cost macros (especially if using a mature IDE).

A habitual extra 15 seconds spent minding something that requires no 'real thought' because you do it all the time can have an enormous long-term organizational impact.

<comment><USER4> Everybody writes shit code when they implement something new to get it working as quickly as possible. What matters is spending an extra 10-30 minutes before checking your code in to turn that sloppy code into a work of art.

It's really that easy.

<comment><USER3> Everyone does that? Then I'm having some kind of Russell's paradox situation with your comment :-)

<comment><USER4> Yes, I mean it's not unusual to take the shortcuts described in the article to produce working code. Even the very best programmers who turn in immaculately maintainable software do not just sit down at their desk and type perfect code into their editor.

First you write a really bad version that mostly works. Then you go back and fix that abomination before anybody else sees it. You don't want everybody else to think you suck at programming, right? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a terrible attitude. If you don't write maintainable code then the price you pay for it later is that your project eventually ends up permanently stuck in the mud.

There is a line that you can cross where no amount of refactoring will rescue you from the mountain of technical debt you've accumulated. Once you're on the other side of that line, your project is 'bankrupt' and other than putting out fires you're never going to get anything done ever again.</comment>


Call Your Friends for Free Through Lucyphone Exploit - <AUTHOR> http://miguelcostas.tumblr.com/post/12000821807/hack-lucyphone-to-make-free-calls-to-your-friends

<comment><USER2> I just tried it and it works :) You'd think that they'd hire better developers .... What's a good 1-900 number to try?

</comment><comment><USER3> That totally works! Awesome, thanks! :)</comment>


The Great Code Club - <AUTHOR> http://www.greatcodeclub.com/ <comment><USER2> This seems cool, as far as I can tell it's more for one's personal education, rather than producing something for others to use?

So I'm curious... is there any kind of "open-source incubator" out there? Like, a site with 500 developers signed up, they all vote on new project ideas, start a new project each month, kind of like a great big collaborative hackathon, in order to put out some really impressive piece of software, that then hopefully lives on?

E.g., an open-source iTunes integrated with bittorrent, complete with iPhone app. A font-design program for amateurs. A keyframed animation tool that outputs to HTML5 canvas. A dynamic texture generator program. A user-friendly neural net trainer. A new lossy image compression format and encoder/decoder designed for resolution independence instead of a fixed pixel grid. I don't know, just cool projects that get people really excited.

I mean, the logistics of organizing such a thing would be a little crazy, since not every type of project is amenable to a large number of developers working in parallel, and you'd need a kind of domain expert and lead architect on each one. But it would be so, so cool...

<comment><USER3> That's exactly what Assembly does ([https://assemblymade.com/ideas](https://assemblymade.com/ideas)). We enable everyone to openly collaborate on real products and then share the upside. Every month there is revenue Assembly transparently pays the bills and splits the remaining proceeds with everyone that built the app.

disclosure: one of the founders of Assembly

<comment><USER4> I've gone through the site, and am curious about your business model. Essentially, you are creating co-op apps: how much of a cut of that app goes to the assembly team? Is it 50%, with you taking control of selling the app/making the business decisions? Or is the stake constantly changing (i.e. I contributed early, but my share gets diluted as more people work on more tasks to continue making revenue?), and you at some point want to sell the app?

<comment><USER3> Great questions - this FAQ page should hopefully answer all of them: [https://assemblymade.com/help/profits](https://assemblymade.com/help/profits)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat, but I would prefer something similar to Alcoholics Anonymous. A self- support group for people who already have personal projects, want to work on them, but are either lazy or procrastinating or paralyzed by analysis.

Although I would probably not pay money for either.

<comment><USER6> IMO ... a psychiatrist. If you really have that much trouble starting a personal project then you either need to fix yourself or have someone help you fix yourself.

sorry for bluntness, haven't had enough coffee or sleep.

<comment><USER7> Well, yes, that's what support groups are. Not all problems require drugs (the psychiatrist's USP is the ability to write prescriptions).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm the creator of the club. Happy to answer any questions about this. I'm just getting started with this so feedback is very much appreciated :)

<comment><USER9> So I get to pay you $30/m to work for you on projects and I get to talk to the other developers you have locked up in your forum and to listen to you do a screencast of unverifiable quality. Sounds amazing, sign me up!

<comment><USER6> wait, it _costs_ money? lol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are you trying to find people who are learning to code, or recruit experienced developers?

Falling into the latter group, I don't see any reason to pay $30/mo for an online community which already takes my time.

<comment><USER8> It's for experienced developers who want to code on cool projects on the side.

I will be producing screencasts, articles and supporting ppl in the club. I think there's a value to this. Teaching other developers online is what I do for a living.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure I'm getting it... you want people to pay to work on cool projects? like the ticket to a cool bar or something like that?

<comment><USER12> I don't really get it either. As an experienced developer if I want to work on a cool project I either start my own or I go on github and contribute to something I'm interested in. While the creator claims to be recruiting experienced developer's I don't see why any good developer would pay a monthly fee to work on a side project. This seems like it would attract more amateur or novice programmers who aren't comfortable contributing to a large mature project on github.

<comment><USER13> I agree, but i find this suitable for me. because whenever i try to contribute to a project on github, i spend an awful lot of time in browsing all the projects in my language of choice and end up not contributing to any of them. If there are less choices involved, its better, and since he is curating the content, it would involve less of those hassles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A little off-topic, but it makes me a little sad that the exemplar my_great_project it mentions is in JavaScript.

It's not because of the language itself. It's because it's implied that the platform my_great_project would be built on is "Chrome, the new C runtime". This is the "platform of the future" and that makes me kinda sad.

EDIT: clarified

<comment><USER8> I guess it's safe to say that most web dev know JavaScript.

That's why I chose to use it as an example and will also use it to present projects in the club.

<comment><USER15> So is it just for web devs then?

<comment><USER8> Not at all. But I'm assuming some knowledge of web development.

For example, one project will be to code an HTML5 game, but you can choose to implement it in C or Java. You'll need to be able to understand JavaScript/HTML to learn from the screencasts that will present the project since I will be using JS and HTML5 canvas.

That's just an example, another project idea I have atm is implementing language or compiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this more of a curated program where I am assigned a project to work on and given support towards doing so, or is this a community where people come in with projects and the community works collaboratively towards supporting these projects?

Is it a club or a school?

<comment><USER8> It will start as a curated program. But my hope is to make it evolve to be both. A place to get knowledge, inspiration and motivation. And then a place to get help and support making your own thing when you're ready.

<comment><USER17> I think then that the name is a little disingenuous. "Club" connotes a community, but not a directed program of study with a supervising teacher. The first half of the website, everything up until "Learning for all types of learners," describes an awesome community idea. Your product screenshot is a re-skinned Discourse forum.

But you swerve into this sort-of class format so we can "build our resumes" to be like Twitter employees, and you're looking for $30/mo for it? This seems like less collaborative community, and more a carefully branded training course from [http://classes.codedinc.com/](http://classes.codedinc.com/).

<comment><USER8> Not at all what I had in mind. I want this to be a community and not a course.

But to get there we have to start somewhere. And I know people can bond and form a community better if they work on similar problems, thus the projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Nice idea. I don't have the time to do this right now as I'm already working on a few side projects but I'll definitely be checking back in a few months. Not too sure $30 is the right price. $20/25 feels better to me (small difference I know but $30 just 'feels' a little high).

<comment><USER18> I wonder how much that is just [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring).

If it was set at $20... would $10/$15 have felt right?

<comment> k-mcgrady Good point. I also think it's slightly psychological as I'd be more likely to pay if it was $29.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know Marc-André and can vouch for the quality of his instruction and his creative, effective class formats. This is a very cheap way to learn a lot from him, and I highly recommend it.

(I teach software engineering for a living.)

</comment><comment><USER20> Blocked by WebSense at my work. "Potentially Damaging Content." :(

</comment><comment><USER21> I never have any problems starting something new. I have problems finishing what I start. When I start a new project I do the hard parts first for a proof of concept. Except now that I know it can be done I loose interest...

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice resource - just applied

</comment><comment><USER23> This looks really great. I have enough knowledge from school and online courses that I really dont need to take another curated tutorial.

We havent started development on my main project at work and I am itching to use my new skills. Recently I have been looking for something to collaborate on with more experienced devs but havent found an outlet. This looks like something I was looking for.

</comment><comment><USER24> Cool idea.

And if you're gonna blur an image, blur the image. :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Just applied, very excited to see how this works.

</comment><comment><USER18> @macournoyer, reading the comments here, it sounds like your value proposition isn't articulated clearly enough. There's a bunch of mentions of the price and not knowing what they are getting.

In your comments here, you mention the importance of your instruction and teaching, which I think is great. Perhaps make that clearer on the website?

Looks like a good idea to me.

</comment><comment><USER26> I really appreciate this idea and have signed up, but the $30 monthly tag seems a bit much with the amount of information given.

This could really benefit from a trial period, or maybe a demo project. A demo project would be neat; have it offer everything the other monthly projects will so people know exactly what they are getting into.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious why this even mentions that no credit card is required to apply. Is it required later? Why mention it at all if it's not?

Also, I use Ghostery and it blocks Google Analytics which seems to consequently block the click-through on your Apply button.

<comment><USER28> Notice the last checkbox in the application form:

 _I 'm willing to commit $30/mo to become a better developer._

<comment><USER27> Gotcha, I couldn't get to the next page because of Ghostery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Any idea when it will be launching and do you have plans to limit the size of the community?

<comment><USER8> It should be launching next week or the next week after that at the latest.

Yes, I will limit the size of the community. The goal is to get a core group of very passionate people first.

<comment><USER29> I probably should have made my motivation a bit longer ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So.... Your forum is meta.discourse.org with a photoshopped logo and a blur?

<comment><USER31> Seems like a great use of Discourse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It would be nice to receive a confirmation mail. I'm quite sure if my application got to you now :)

</comment><comment><USER33> This seems like a nifty idea. I have definitely been plagued with coders block in the past.

</comment><comment><USER34> Buyer beware

<comment><USER35> Yeah, something about the look or copy comes off as a free site but then it isn't.</comment></comment>


Microsoft creates special application class for Windows 8 browsers - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/25704/Microsoft_creates_special_application_class_for_Windows_8_browsers <comment><USER3> If you want to understand what's going on, then go to the source. Either read the Microsoft documentation or read the documentation coming from an actual browser vendor working on this. At Mozilla, we talk about what we're doing so you're likely to get the best information with us.

[http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/02/building...](http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/02/building- firefox-for.html) and <http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/129/>

<comment><USER4> [author of the OSN article here]

Which is exactly why I always link to the source. Always check the source material, whether you agree with an article or not. Most people on HN (and OSNews) do so, luckily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Since the Metro environment imposes numerous restrictions that would hinder the development of a decent browser, Microsoft has created a new application class, called "Metro style enabled desktop browser"._

On the one hand the author seems to be criticizing Microsoft for insisting on a set of ecosystem standards, on the other hand the criticism is for creating a kludge.

It's 2012 and the OS is in _beta_ , any comparison of the development of of third party browsers to those of the Netscape days is absurd. These days Microsoft provides a browser to round out their product line and to facilitate the user's ability to engage the internet immediately following a fresh install.

Browsers are so ubiquitous as to appear on feature phones. They are commodities, not strategic tools in the quest for OS market share.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty shocked that Microsoft hasn't been better at maintaining appearances for the EU. If I was on that team (easy to say, I know), I'd make darn sure that third party browser developers were kept in the loop. Publish the info on MSDN. Shower them with emails asking them if they need help. It's good for the OS, the public, and it would be a good proactive measure toward maintaining regulatory compliance.

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure the IE and Firefox teams get together regularly. I don't think the same sense of comraderie exists between the IE and chrome teams.

<comment><USER6> Not that I know any of the parties, but what makes you think that?

<comment><USER8> Perhaps the (formerly) regular release cakes that they exchanged: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Response_from_Microsoft>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's really hard to parse articles from OSNews, Groklaw, and by Redhat employees about Microsoft and Windows 8, specifically, to try and filter out the bias and hate and cut to the chase.

First, the very first line.

>And thus, Microsoft bites itself in its behind with Metro.

Uh what? Putting the supposed conclusion as the first line as if the the headline says everything? (BTW the headline is pretty obtuse, even for a geek like me).

> Microsoft has had to define a separate application class [.docx] - <USER2> > from Metro and desktop applications - just to make third party web browsers > possible for Windows 8.

Isn't that a good thing? Microsoft is already one step better than Apple that it's making special allowances in the security sandbox for browsers? Try developing a real browser for the current post-PC iOS devices.

Why is this being spun into a bad thing? The problem is that allowing everything will allow malware/spyware to come into the picture. Then these very same people disparaging MS for this move would then disparage Windows devices as insecure and virus-prone and recommend people switch to other platforms! Not to mention very real battery life concerns.

Also, all the desktop browsers will continue to work the same on Windows 8 x86 PCs and tablets. You can even have them as the only app pinned in the default start screen!

>This stuff all came out because the Firefox team has announced it's working on implementing such a Metro style enabled desktop browser. However, Microsoft has provided very little information on this obscure third application class as of yet, making it very hard for browser developers to properly target it. Of course, Windows 8 is still in development, but considering the company's past behaviour, it's easy to assume they're doing this on purpose.

Right, and when Microsoft has to change something in Windows 8 that will affect 3rd party browsers, these very same people will be yelling about an intentional conspiracy to break those browsers and slow down development. In short, you can never satisfy these folks. So why even bother trying? They will dislike MS at any cost, so it's better for MS to do things the right way and at their own pace.

Already MS loses the VIOLA! Steve Jobs type unveiling moment because of the constant sharing of information with developers and users via extensive blogs and pre-release versions which will likely reduce the hype and sales at launch.

>Another uncertainty at this point is the ARM version of Windows 8. A Metro style enabled desktop browser must be distributed the old-fashioned way as opposed to through the new Windows Store, and since the traditional desktop is locked down on the ARM version (i.e., it is not possible to install applications outside of the Windows Store on ARM), this currently means Mozilla and Google will not be able to distribute Firefox or Chrome for the ARM version of Windows 8.

We are constantly reminded here and everywhere that there is no tablet market and there is only an iPad market. Why don't these same people complain about third party browsers being completely banned on the iPad which has a huge share in the tablet market? Why pick on WoA that is essentially starting from zero and has a mountain to climb before getting any share and has the odds stacked against it with 200K iPad apps etc. (and will likely fail according to many pundits) ?

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/new_ipad_how_apple_s_tablet_strategy_parallels_its_unbeatable_ipod_success_.html)

Going back to the first line and conclusion of the article:

>And thus, Microsoft bites itself in its behind with Metro

How? Is that because they have specially allowed 3rd party browsers unlike the super successful iPad>? The IE10 in the previews released so far seem pretty fast and decent. I feel dimmer after reading the article and for the people who accuse Microsoft of FUD, all this smells very much like misleading FUD against Metro.

<comment><USER10> >Why don't these same people complain about third party browsers being completely banned on the iPad which has a huge share in the tablet market?

There are many third party browsers available on the App Store for iPad. I'm not sure where you got the idea that they're "banned"?

<comment><USER11> Those are Safari skins, not browsers.</comment></comment></comment>