What Chinese students go through to get into top American universities (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-long-march-from-china-to-the-ivies <comment><USER2>
      Chinese students are products of an educational system that, for all of its high achievers, is built to suppress intellectual curiosity, creativity and individuality – the very qualities that American admissions officers value most.

Let's not pretend Chinese students are turned away because they lack individuality.

The fairly well documented[0][1][2] truth here is that American universities are using qualities like "leadership" to justify what is really a quota on Asian students.

I totally understand that none of the evidence is conclusive, but the fact that this is happening to Asian American students, who for the most part never go through the Chinese educational system this particular article blames, should at least cast a good amount of doubt on their claim.

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson- asian-a...](http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian- american-admission-rates-20150609-story.html)

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-american-organizations- see...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-american-organizations-seek-federal- probe-of-harvard-admission-policies-1431719348)

[2] [https://priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite- colleges-...](https://priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite-colleges- discriminate-against-asians)

<comment><USER3> Admissions try to get a well-rounded student body rather than many well- rounded students but the Asian-American "tiger-mom" phenomena is not a joke for elite college admissions officers. They really do see large numbers of what are known (in derogatory terms) as Asian-clones: 4.0 GPA, violin or piano skills, and no authentic detectable motivation other than getting high grades for the purpose of becoming a doctor or lawyer.

<comment><USER4> So? If the 1000 best candidates are Asian then you should admit the 1000 Asians.

I can see giving extra help to historically marginalized races at the expense of whites, but why ding Asians? They weren't responsible for racism in the US. They weren't the ones stealing resources from other people.

Do correct me if I'm wrong but your post seems to amount to "a lot of Asians work hard and are smart, so let's have a quota on Asians because they're hardworking and smart in a way I find boring".

By the way, as a matter of policy, it seems fine to me if people can become doctors who are smart and who only worked hard because they wanted to become doctors. When I go to the doctor I care mainly about whether they know their shit, not whether they were subjectively "well-rounded" at age 18.

<comment><USER5> But what is "best"? While their achievements are commendable, admitting all of them will lead to a homogeneous student body and presumably not the best outcome for the institution, its graduates, or society.

<comment><USER6> What is wrong with a homogeneous student body? Forced diversity is AS racist as discrimination against blacks.

<comment><USER7> Eisenhower federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to compel a public school to accept 9 black students was "forced diversity". Every step we've made against racism has been "forced diversity". Denying people the right to intimidate, even murder minorities to keep "a homogeneous student body" is "forced diversity". What it is _not_ is racism.

This is the heart and soul of why we no longer tolerate "a homogeneous student body". Because we know how that plays out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tangential Asian-National Students in US University Anecdote Time:

I attended a rather prestigious Graduate School program in the Liberal Arts at a state school. Education specifically. Campus population in the tens of thousands.

In some classes, I actually felt like part of a minority. There were consistently large populations Asian nationals in the field. Many nationalities, mind you, such as South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and maybe one or two others. Teachers in their home country, they were attending to get the US Masters/PhD with every intention of returning home and getting a raise.

Yes, they did participate well in the learning environment, language issues aside, but more than one got homesick and would quit the program due to culture shock of living in the US for 2+ years. I can sympathize.

My takeaway was that the University was very happy to take the (presumably) higher tuition from foreign students primarily interested in the Degree for status advancement than turn them away. It could help keep a department going in a way, and, in turn, the University didn't worry that these graduates were going to stick around and try to get US jobs on those degrees. It kind of wasn't the bargain.

It is worth noting, I think, that most of the Asian national students in my program or field were in their 30s or 40s. They had life experience, families, professional careers...I guess the point of the reflection is the University got a good revenue stream and the Graduates got their Degree for status back home. Win-win? Ehhhh...

</comment><comment><USER9> Part deux: What Asian students go through once they get their degrees from American Universities.

They go down the rabbit hole of America's broken immigration system, starting with OPT visa, then H1B (read lottery luck, not based on skills) & then the country based quota for green card currently 7 to 9 years for EB2 categories for India & China. Did I forgot to mention the exorbitant out of state tuition fees and the loans they took for it in their home country ?

<comment><USER10> You don't have to pay back loans if you don't return to your home country.

<comment><USER11> The lenders are not idiots. I'm very sure they either are signed by their families or they have other ways of enforcing collection.

<comment><USER10> A lot of lenders are idiots. My evidence is the 2008 subprime lending crisis.

<comment><USER9> 2008 subprime lending crisis happened only in America.

Lets think outside of America for this one. Lenders outside America are not idiots. Most of them lend on a solid collateral and someone from the family will have to have co-sign the loan, especially if its a huge sum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My statistics graduate program was about 2/3 Chinese with very poor English skills. This lead to complete self-segregation and a horrible TA experience for undergrads they were assigned to. To boot, cheating in this group was rampant.

<comment><USER13> True. I can relate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Regarding the children of famous/important people, perhaps someone can shed some light.

How exactly do you specify on your application who your parents are?

I remember the process at Oxford, there wasn't really a way to say "oh btw my dad is a rock star" other than the personal statement. And it's hardly going to impress the person who's interviewing you to blurt out something like that, because all the questions are technical.

<comment><USER15> It depends a lot on the degree and type of importance.

If your dad is Mick Jagger, the last name will probably suffice. Less facetiously, there are still Roosevelts and Cabbotts and Coolidges out there and those names do carry weight in some places. I imagine there are some names which would go pretty far at Oxford too.

If your parents are more self-made (or the last name doesn't reflect the lineage), the personal statement can absolutely cover this. "Growing up in the shadow of my family" is partly about personal development, but partly a way to say "check out my family".

Honestly, though?

In the US, this gets handled via side channels. Our applications have a space for 'legacy status', where you list past attendees in your family. Anything counts, but rich and famous alumni are especially good. And if your family is important enough, they'll probably have talked to the school completely independent of your application. Likely, they'll have started years before you applied.

I know several people from top US colleges who have a story about meeting some strangely unqualified classmate, and then discovering that they shared a name with some building on campus. At the very top end, there's certainly room to pave the way with donations and personal friendships.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> They forgot to mention the SEVIS record madness (want to know what the muslim registry will look like?), I20, being heckled or killed in the streets and casual border crossing racism by the CBP.

<comment><USER17> > being heckled or killed in the streets

huh?

>casual border crossing racism by the CBP.

I had an "immigration office" tell me "you will be kicked out like dogs if these documents don't verify". My dad swore off visiting me in America due to his similar experience, I don't blame him. What decent person would put up with this, why do they do this?

<comment><USER18> >> being heckled or killed in the streets

> huh?

There were a couple (at least 2, maybe 3) of high-profile murders of Chinese grad students at UCLA within the past couple of years, which is my guess about what OP is referring to. The victims were targeted for their perceived wealth and/or foreignness.

<comment><USER16> and one at ASU last year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Christ almighty, I wish I could share the actual source, but I can't find it.

There was a study a decade(?) ago that took a look at 'Top Schools' and instead of looking at the best students, they took a look at the _worst_ students. They took out the legacy children, the athletes, etc, and only looked at the kids that got in on their 'merits'. Typically, the schools will have a ranking system that combines GPA, ACT, SAT, etc. The researchers (out of Michigan, maybe?) then looked at the bottom people in that ranking order that accepted into the schools.

I read the popular press article about it (Wired?) where they focused on a kid from Arizona that got into Stanford. He was super passionate about this park near his house that he hiked in. His grades and whatnot were average at best. When budget cuts closed the park, the guy fundraised and solicited the state house until the park re-opened. He applied to Stanford on a lark, and got in mostly based on the essay about the park closure.

The researchers concluded that the 'bottom' kids that got into super elite schools were are very unique, but similar in one way: They were super passionate about one specific thing. These kids were _really_ spiky, not well- rounded. Effectively, Stanford et al. were actually asking the kids to come to their schools. These kids really didn't need the schools to begin with, they were going to continue doing their thing anyways. But those schools wanted those kids because of that passion.

So maybe then we should be trying to go for that approach when it comes to education for our children. Maybe we should be trying to make them super passionate about one specific thing and not trying to be well rounded; a 'T' shaped mind where they have a little bit of know-how about a lot of stuff and a lot of know-how about one thing instead of a '\---' shaped mind where they know a little bit about a whole ton of things.

If anyone knows where the original paper is, PLEASE link it!

<comment><USER20> Only because there exist a few kids who are very passionate about a specific thing and thus admitted to a top school this does not imply, that the "typical" kid with this property will be admitted.

I would rather conjecture that many well-rounded pupils will get admitted plus a few (but not more) "special characters". Thus it would be a bad strategy if you want to go to Stanford to become passionate in only one thing.

<comment><USER19> From the research, what I took away was that you should just 'be awesome' at whatever you want to be 'awesome' at, work on those things, and not really care who 'wants' you. Like, all those students that did get in would have still gone and done the things that they wanted to do. They were that passionate. That, I think, is the 'better life' path. And since the original article that stated this HN thread was focused on people that are trying to have a better life, I think it has a lot to say. Instead of trying to kill your personality and passion and trying to be yet another perfect little gingerbread-man so you have a chance at the slot-machine that is college admissions, encourage your passions and grit and personality and live a life you want to live, have that better life now and do what you want to be doing. The 'typical' kid should go be passionate and _love_ something and not give a damn about getting into Stanford. How to find that passion or that thing? I have no idea and am still searching myself. But I'd think that path of searching is a lot better than being yet another perfect applicant.</comment></comment></comment>


National Novel Generation Month, 2015 edition, create  a story via algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015 <comment><USER2> Has anyone grabbed Gutenberg novels in the past and indexed all the proper names and common nouns? I'd love to have a Madlib-like generator for The [Count] of [Monte Cristo].

<comment><USER3> I tried it in 2013 but got bogged down in getting the POS-tagging working right. POS-tagging has improved in the meantime, so someone should give it a shot again...</comment></comment>


Phuc Dat Bich Is Beyond Tired of Getting Kicked Off Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/phuc-dat-bich-kicked-off-facebook.html <comment><USER2> I don't think his name is real.

I live in Vietnam and when I showed this to my wife, who in turned showed it to her cousins, everyone was fairly incredulous claiming that there is no way this was a real Vietnamese name.

Bich is not a last name used here, it's actually a female first name. Dat is also not really used as a middle name either.

Bạch is a last name, so the only thing I can think is that there was a mixup in immigration, similar to how european last names changed during migration to the US.

<comment><USER3> Vietnamese names can be a little strange. In college, I had a professor whose first name was usually given to women. All of my Vietnamese friends thought the prof was a woman when they first heard the name.

<comment><USER4> I know the feeling. My name is Simone and I am from Italy. In most of the world, they think it's a female name (usual guess: French lady) until they see me :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One would think FB would have in its data store a "This account has been flagged in the past and it has been reviewed and approved no need to review again" checkbox by now

<comment><USER6> Reminds me of customer service:

1\. _gets through_

2\. _spends a few minutes explaining the issue_

3\. "I'll connect you to <other department>"

4\. _spends a few minutes explaining the issue_

5\. "Wait 24h. Call again if issue persists."

6\. go to step 1

Y U NO WRITE DOWN MY ISSUE FOR FUTURE USE?

<comment><USER7> I had terrible issues with Comcast, and after the fourth or so call I made sure that the agent wrote down all the necessary details, and I would tell agents in later calls to read the details. Not that my problem was ever resolved, but at least I didn't have to explain it every time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of the Vietnamese noodle bar in London named "Phật Phúc" which translates to Happy Buddha (Vietnamese puts adjectives after the noun so it's the "Phật" that translates to Buddha). I presume they thought about the likely English mispronunciation when they picked it...

(There's apparently also a Phật Phúc in Ho Chi Mihn City - a Chinese takeaway)

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if the Norwegians having the fairly common first name(s) "Odd Even"/"Odd-Even" have any issues. "Odd" is of course also a great first name on its own, especially if English is your second language: "Hello, my name is Odd". "Odd, how?". "No, it really is just Odd" (etc).

(Odd means point/edge/tip, as in "spear tip/point", and is pronounced fairly close to "odd", "Even" is pronounced with long e-s, like "end" \-- and is a variation on Øyvind which is probably from Norse Øy - luck and Vindr (warrior)).

I'm not sure what would be the best common last name to match it with. I suppose the foreign "Moore" would be good. "Even Moore".

<comment><USER10> Another problematic Norwegian name is Gun.

A friend of my mother named Gun supposedly had to add an extra N to be allowed on Facebook.

<comment><USER8> Gun is so rare that as a Norwegian I still had to look it up to see if anyone actually used it. Apparently there are about 350 of them vs. about 9000 with "Gunn".

We do have lots of unusual variations in use, though, so I'm not surprised. It was only after World War II that these things were accurately recorded, and so I have an uncle that has one spelling of his name on his birth certificate, one in his passport, but uses a third spelling for everything else. How he's managed to keep that going, I don't know, since e.g. bank records in Norway are keyed to the same central government register used to issue passports.

<comment><USER11> 19 407 people named Gun in Sweden and more than 1 000 in Finland.

<comment><USER12> There's even a 'Gun Berlin' and quite a few 'Gun Persson's in Sweden. As well as 'Rune Fart', and a 'Shit' who lives in Angered, though that is not a traditional Swedish name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Now I'm curious whether the differences in name (and more generally, language) sounds are essentially just based on the fluke of whatever sounds happened to start being adopted in various regions millennia ago, and then slowly evolved... or if there is actually a genetic difference between people of different races that causes some sounds to be slightly more pleasant-sounding and/or more easily pronounced than others, which had some influence on the sounds that were more likely to develop into language (and to be picked for names).

<comment><USER14> The article points out that the name is pronounced "Foo Da Bic"

<comment><USER15> Why, when romanising their alphabet, did the Vietnamese do it in a way that didn't line up with any European language?

<comment><USER16> No romanisation system _quite_ lines up with a specific European language. After all, no European language has the same phonology as the language you're romanising.

You also might make apparently strange choices so that the romanisation reflects certain relationships between phonemes or within the language's native writing system. For example, the nihon-siki and kunrei-siki romanisations of Japanese render し and じ as 'si' and 'zi', even though they'd be pronounced more like 'shi' and 'ji', because し is usually grouped with さ ('sa'), す ('su'), せ ('se') and そ ('so'), and じ is grouped with ざ ('za'), ず ('zu'), ぜ ('ze'), and ぞ ('zo'). The Hepburn romanisation of Japanese, on the other hand, renders them as 'shi' and 'ji' for better pronunciation by English speakers, but this obscures the relationship to the other syllables. It also introduces an ambiguity when transliterating back into Japanese's own script, as there are actually two other symbols in the same family which can be used to write these same sounds, which Hepburn can't romanise differently as it needs to present clear pronunciation.

Pinyin provides another example. It has the three groups of initials (leading consonants) z-, c- and s-; zh-, ch- and sh-; and j-, q- and x-. An English speaker would pronounce none of these correctly, and they don't match any European language. But there's an internal consistency here within Pinyin: the first group are alveolar consonants, the second retroflex, the third alveo- palatal, and the first initial in each group is an unaspirated affricate, the second an aspirated affricate, the third a fricative. It's providing useful information which is lost if you try to make it so it's pronounced correctly by English speakers - which is rather fruitless given there's some phonetic distinctions in there which don't exist in English.

<comment><USER17> The ambiguous characters in Hepburn are zu (ず) and zu (du) (づ) and o(お) and o (wo) (を). They can be quite confusing to new learners.

I think pinyin is hard to understand for a layman. Eg how many people said Guangzhou or Sichuan correctly on the first go?!

<comment><USER18> I don't think pinyin is _that_ hard to understand as a layman, at least no harder than a typical Latin-alphabet language other than your own. It's not great if your goal were a phonetic transliteration into English, but even most European languages would fail that test. For example Polish has quite unintuitive spelling for an English speaker. Same with Portuguese and Danish for that matter. If you put pinyin alongside those languages as just another Latin-script-using-language, I don't find it especially weird, basically in the normal range of variation. An English speaker has to learn specific rules to pronounce it (approximately) correctly, but not an unusually large number of them.

<comment><USER17> Good point, like "Ypres" or "Orleans". Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Faked:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10626761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10626761)

</comment><comment><USER19> Back in grad school there was a guy named Fuk Yun.

</comment><comment><USER3> He should rename his profile to, "the Notorious PDB."</comment>


Software development needs a Campfire - <AUTHOR> http://blog.iriomk.com/post/74660977150/software-development-needs-a-campfire

<comment><USER2> Anyone who thinks that remote developers can have the same interactions as developers in the same room is crazy! Even if you have great chat room software.

Face to face interactions have so much more bandwidth.</comment>


Indigenous datasets: A listing to help AI perform better in India - <AUTHOR> https://factordaily.com/indigenous-datasets-from-india/ <comment><USER2> Glad to see multiple contributions from my college.

Here are few more datasets which I am aware of and can be added to the list:

\- Dataset for Indian National Rupee [https://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit- projects/curr...](https://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit- projects/currency-recognition-on-mobile-phones)

\- City-scale Road Audit using Deep Learning dataset [https://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit- projects/city...](https://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit- projects/city-scale-road-audit)

\- Multi domain corpus for sentimental analysis (Telugu dataset, download link isn't working probably email for download)

<comment><USER3> There is also an India Driving Dataset: [http://idd.insaan.iiit.ac.in/](http://idd.insaan.iiit.ac.in/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This reminds me of a paper put out by a few researchers at Google Brain: `No Classification without Representation: Assessing Geodiversity Issues in Open Data Sets for the Developing World` [0]

The take away was that existing open image datasets are biased toward western contexts (eg what a wedding looks like), leading to low performance when applied in non-western contexts.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.08536](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.08536)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://tdil-dc.in/index.php?lang=en](https://tdil-dc.in/index.php?lang=en) has good some good datasets. Only problem is you need to agree the t&s and fax the document to Delhi to get the access. They supposedly will send the DVD. I don't understand why they are doing. If Indian government wants to foster the research, they should put them in public domain.</comment>


Show HN: My shell script for HTTP/HTTPS troubleshooting and profiling - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/trimstray/htrace.sh <comment><USER2> Not to rain on your parade with nicely formatted code like hardly any shell projects do, but what I would have expected for such a tool that I just want to use:

wget [https://github/.../releases/.../stable/htrace.sh](https://github/.../releases/.../stable/htrace.sh)

Only gave it a quick look and saw the other comment asking for dependencies. if there are some, why not list them in the README.

I'm really not against installers, but falls under the "small handy tool" category and not "I will spend time automating the install, either it works or it doesn't"

<comment><USER3> You're crazy. This fellow deserves all of today's internet points. He even has a man page!

<comment><USER4> The project/script is freaking great, it's well-written but its installation method needs some work.

It symlinks from the git cloned directory to /usr/local/bin during installation.

When it runs, it does helpfully tell you which tools it needs, but each of those tools has a different install method:

* two are system packages

* one is a Go executable

* another a php composer package

* another is installed via npm

(that's a lot of extra language dependencies for a single script if you don't already have everything installed)

<comment><USER5> It'd be a great/easy to use docker image. I'd go that route before I'd worry about npm/php/golang on my system.

<comment><AUTHOR> dockerfile is also available: [https://github.com/trimstray/htrace.sh/blob/master/build/Doc...](https://github.com/trimstray/htrace.sh/blob/master/build/Dockerfile)

<comment><USER5> That would be worthwhile in the README! If you agree I'll PR the instructions

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. PRs welcome!

<comment><USER5> Just swung around to this. You are killing it :P

(good job!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Plug for a related tool that I use constantly.

It's called Swiss Army Knife for SMTP, or "SWAKS" for short.

[http://www.jetmore.org/john/code/swaks/](http://www.jetmore.org/john/code/swaks/)

This tool is one of the best tools I've ever seen. It's well thought out, well designed, and the documentation is very usable.

(Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with the author or the tool.)

</comment><comment><USER4> One comment: put the list of package dependencies before the install, or check for their packages during setup.sh

Make life a little easier for the user ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks really cool.

Why are you using a URL in place of a domain name, in the invocation example? Seems confusing. I would expect to see just a domain name there. Although I wouldn't complain if it works with both a domain and a full URL, automatically stripping off the parts it doesn't need. Also seeing [http://](http://) instead of [https://](https://) is starting to feel strange these days, but I do realize both are still used and your tool works with both as it should.

Very nice readme! And nice to see it has a man page. I would leave out the "It's simple:" line because that tends to make less confident people (like new people just learning) blame themselves if they have problems, and then instead of giving you feedback they'll give up and move on.

<comment><USER8> Great job. Small nitpick. Agree —domain should probably be called —url instead. Domain implies no scheme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> as others said , dependecies need to be sorted. other than that i think this is quite cool and i will use it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I suggest a convenient way to set cookie or auth headers. A lot of endpoints are behind authentication. The --req-headers flag is feasible, but there should be a shortcut flag just for authentication headers. Maybe --cookie and --auth ?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/trimstray/htrace.sh/issues/50](https://github.com/trimstray/htrace.sh/issues/50)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll update this project with your suggestions from this thread.

Thank you for your support!

</comment><comment><USER11> Here is a similar tool all contained in one shell script that only depends on openssl. [1] Albeit, a bit more verbose and doesn't have that nice one page output.

[1] - [https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh](https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh)

</comment><comment><USER12> Also helpful, with zero dependencies (in PERL): [https://github.com/portcullislabs/ssl-cipher-suite- enum](https://github.com/portcullislabs/ssl-cipher-suite-enum)

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice.

It's a step up from httpie, which is nice to craft requests, but not to check for security.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks really, really useful. Bookmarked, cloned, and shared with my team!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. All suggestions/PR are welcome.

</comment><comment><USER14> Bookmarked, looks useful. Kudos!</comment>


Rising Temperatures Could Melt Most Himalayan Glaciers by 2100 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/world/asia/himalayas-glaciers-warming.html <comment><USER2> I'm curious how much colder we would have to make the planet in order for this not to happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0](https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0)

June 29, 1989

UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

<comment><USER4> What is the problem with that article? We failed to stop global warming, and now it's likely that - regardless of what is done, even cutting to zero net carbon emissions - that the Maldives will be lost in the century.

<comment><USER3> The problem is that there have been alarmist articles like this posted for nearly a hundred years proclaiming gloom for days that are now in the past.

<comment><USER5> And they did not have the science and data to support them, now we do. Let's just hope we are being a bit too alarmist and it gets us to change our behaviour fast enough and not too late. We'd rather be wrong on this, you know.

<comment><USER3> > And they did not have the science and data to support them, now we do.

We know more than we knew then. We don't (and can't) know the outcome with current climate science. It's currently impossible for us to model the complex system that is Earth's climate with ranges into the decades. We can't even model weather a month out. Claiming climate science is settled is incredibly disingenuous and it bothers me that more scientists don't step up and say "hey here's what we think might happen but it's impossible to say for sure".

> We'd rather be wrong on this, you know.

Oh I definitely believe you on that, it's just that taking away rights from people to accomplish climate goals is not a zero-sum game and it needs to be treated with care and caution, not alarmism.

<comment><USER5> A lot of care was taken in the wording of the last IPCC report to communicate what findings have which level of confidence. The range is from 'virtually certain' to unsure, and yes, some parts are indeed not settled yet, but the main findings are more than sufficient to tell humanity that _we need to act now_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report#C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report#Climate_change_2013:_report_overview)

> Oh I definitely believe you on that, it's just that taking away rights from > people to accomplish climate goals is not a zero-sum game and it needs to be > treated with care and caution, not alarmism.

That is for the politicians to work out. The load must be balanced of course, but if we don't act fast everyone will suffer for it. Calm and fast would be best though.

edit: Oh and the recent report about the ozone hole had some good news: The ozone hole is closing and the gases that were not emitted due to the controls also saved us from ~0.4°C of warming. (If the 'business-as-usual' projections are right, but there is no way to check that.) Plus, these greenhouse gas concentrations go down over time. Much easier than CO2 and methane, but a first win!

<comment><USER3> > A lot of care was taken in the wording of the last IPCC report to > communicate what findings have which level of confidence.

The level of confidence is near zero, and if the IPCC was being honest and unbiased that is what they would say. As I said previously upthread, anybody who claims they can model our climate with any level of accuracy on the order of decades is being completely disingenuous. We can't model weather even a month out. The history of global warming alarmism has nearly a hundred-year long trail of missed predictions. But they have it right this time, right?

<comment><USER5> Nobody claims accuracy on the timescale of such a high resolution. Aditionally, we don't know about future emissions and land-use changes, and feedback effects, so we cannot predict the exact future.

Please check the wikipedia page for what is actually claimed.

<comment><USER3> > Please check the wikipedia page for what is actually claimed.

You want to point me to a fact you are trying to refute?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's a thought exercise; we are moving into renewables with absolute breakneck speed. At this point, it's essentially cheaper to use renewable energy than fossil fuels. Market forces are moving us towards clean energy at an accelerating rate. Left alone, our economies will rapidly approach 100% renewable energy due to price alone. So ask yourselves why propaganda outlets like the Washington Post (DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS--give me a fucking break) or the NY Times breathlessly run article after article every day preparing citizens to give up their rights to choices; choice of what house they're allowed to live in, what kind of car they're allowed to drive etc.

But you can't criticize the golden calf of global warming^H^H^H^Hclimate change right? What's the saying, show me who you're not allowed to criticize and I'll show you who holds power over you.

<comment><USER6> Already have people telling me i'm not allowed to live in my 3000sqft house with my 2 vehicles in that tiny house thread.

<comment><USER5> How much fossil energy are you using with this setup? That is the only relevant question for this topic.

<comment><USER6> Actually it's a lot more complicated than that. but to answer your question just gas electric and natural gas is a metric ton a month of CO2 out

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19079410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19079410) \- this threatens the food supply of 3 billion people. It is an enormous, near term threat to the stability of civilization. This is _by_ 2100\. The impact will be sooner. People will not stay in one place to starve to death, and food supplies from other locations will be affected.

<comment><USER5> If the precipitation patterns stay the same (unlikely), this at least can be fixed with a few dams and proper water management.</comment></comment>


The Pocket Handbook of Image Processing Algorithms in C (1993) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://adaptiveart.eecs.umich.edu/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/The-pocket-handbook-of-image-processing-algorithms-in-C.pdf

<comment><USER2> note that this book has some significant bugs (I remember specifically a faulty quadratic equation that I was stuck on), but I don't think you use this book for the code, which is pretty outdated. This book is useful as a reminder that things like photoshop are driven by algorithms, many of which are not rocket science but rather, fit in your pocket.

One thing I particularly like about this book is that the author used photographs of his child that look super unhappy. After applying filters to them, she looks even more unhappy. It gives the book a dark and foreboding feeling.

Anyway, I always show this book to my students (along with processes like saving a raw image and opening it in audacity as a sound file, the custom tool in photoshop) as a means of demystifying image processing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice looking book. Handy to keep in your back pocket in case you're walking down the street and see someone staring at a laptop and yelling in anguish, 'Please, can't someone help me implement a proper noise algorithm!? This is an emergency!'

</comment><comment><USER4> It is unclear if this is legal to redistribute in this fashion.

</comment><comment><USER5> The code style is making me nervous. Why use ++x over x++ when incrementing variables?

<comment><USER6> 20+ year C/C++ programmer here. I always use ++x unless the postfix version (x++) provides more succinct code.

The postfix operator can incur a temporary variable to be created by the compiler and thus make code slower.

Reference: [http://www.idinews.com/peeves/prefixIncr.html](http://www.idinews.com/peeves/prefixIncr.html)

Also, item #6 from "More Effective C++": [http://bin- login.name/ftp/pub/docs/programming_languages/cpp...](http://bin- login.name/ftp/pub/docs/programming_languages/cpp/cffective_cpp/MEC/MI6_FR.HTM)

<comment><USER7> Do note that modern compilers can detect when the return value of the ++ operator is unused, and skip the extra steps when unneeded. (I've verified the resulting assembler myself from GCC 3.X.) That said, I still use the prefix notation because I can't come up with a good reason not to.

<comment><USER8> > _Do note that modern compilers can detect when the return value of the ++ > operator is unused, and skip the extra steps when unneeded._

Is there an equivalent instruction in assembly for postfix increment/decrement?

<comment><USER7> Neither one really has a direct "equivalent" in assembly.

Prefix is going to look something like:

      inc eax # increment the value
      mov eax,ecx # copy the return value to its destination

Postfix is going to look something like:

      mov eax,ebx # copy original value
      inc eax # increment value
      mov ebx,ecx # copy original value to final destination

The actual code you'd get would vary a _lot_ between compilers, architectures, and even just different contexts within the same compiler-architecture combination.

<comment><USER8> Thank you, dammit I really should learn assembly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Published in 1993

<comment><USER10> so patents on these can not longer be valid!</comment></comment>


Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight - <AUTHOR> https://press.airbnb.com/airbnb-signs-agreement-to-acquire-hoteltonight/ <comment><USER3> What's amazing at Airbnb is their ability to make places look so much nicer in the pictures than what they look like in reality.

After staying in a crack house in Barcelona, a dirty dark hole in Manhattan, a "private" villa in France where the owner was screwing an endless stream of boyfriends behind the flimsy kitchen door at 10AM, a thermite infested apartment in Sicily with horrid beds, I still feel like a total asshole when leaving a negative review. I'm not sure why I keep going back to it.

<comment><USER4> It really seems to depend on the city. For about $100/night in Zurich I stayed once in a huge top floor flat and once in a bedroom with private bath in a giant palace with plenty of room to entertain dozens, which I did. My company's negotiated hotel rate was $425/night and I pocketed the balance.

In NYC all of the Airbnb inventory is bedbug-ridden hovels. Perhaps this simply reflects the housing stock of the region.

<comment><USER5> What kind of company pays YOU 425USD regardless of the price of the accomodation where you stay? Genuinely curious. All I've ever seen is (in your case) "you can expense per night up to 425USD"

<comment><USER6> I haven't seen that high, but some companies pay the government per diem rate, which depends on the city. Some cities are $200/day for food alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Those who have used HotelTonight, can you comment on your experience?

For me, there have been several rare occasions when I needed a room at last minute, but HotelTonight was never actually cheaper than any other aggregators or booking directly with the hotel. All being equal I vastly prefer booking direct so I get my points and elite benefits. I guess they have a fancy interface, and that's... it? Maybe it's market dependent (I only tried it in NYC and SF)?

<comment><USER8> I use it a lot (several times each month for the past ~3 years).

I absolutely love it.

\- You can trust that the hotels are good enough. Never had a bad experience

\- Takes <15s to book

\- They have their own rewards system which really starts to add up the more you use it

\- They may never give you the absolute cheapest option available in that city for that night, but you'll get an amazing deal on a higher-quality hotel

\- My experience using other booking sites for 'cheap deals' has been that you're often treated as a lower-tier customer, for example being given worse rooms (ground floor, no windows etc). The HotelTonight experience is the opposite. ~25% of the time, I receive a room upgrade without asking

\- No hidden charges

I'm not a person who is loyal to a brand by nature. But HotelTonight is the closest I've come to feeling that way so far.

<comment><USER9> "My experience using other booking sites for 'cheap deals' has been that you're often treated as a lower-tier customer, for example being given worse rooms (ground floor, no windows etc). The HotelTonight experience is the opposite. ~25% of the time, I receive a room upgrade without asking"

They're all OTAs. You're just as likely to get a "good" room with HotelTonight as you would with Priceline, Hotwire, etc. The quality of room you receive is mostly dependent on room availability and the check-in agent.

<comment><USER8> > You're just as likely to get a "good" room with HotelTonight as you would > with Priceline, Hotwire, etc.

Can't speak for every hotel (obviously), but I know for a fact this isn't true for several.

Hotels always have better and worse rooms - it's very rare to have a building where there isn't a loud/dark/musty room or two.

In most hotels where I know a member of staff, they freely admit to having several 'worse' rooms which are given to booking.com/priceline etc guests first, regardless of availability.

They purposefully save a few 'better' rooms in case valued customers show up last minute. For some reason, HT customers get lumped into this category - maybe because it's assumed they have the purchasing power to become a 'real' customer in the future (but that's just a guess).

<comment><USER10> There is a high chance that this is anecdotal, specially if both OTAs were offering you the room at the same price. For bigger chains, the person at the front desk hardly cares about where you booked from. It could be the case where there were very few rooms remaining when you booked with OTAs other than HT so you ended up with worse rooms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's interesting that no one here, after 160 comments, is speculating about the impact to Booking.com

B. is the 7th largest internet company in the world but because it's in Amsterdam and not US based, hardly anyone think about them. They have incredible technology, often on-par with the big ones but I'm not anyone here could name one problem where they pionnered a solution.

Disclaimer: I used to work for one of their subsidiaries.

<comment><USER12> my favorite part about Booking is that it will tell me how many other people are currently looking at the last available room i'm looking it. Let's me know if i have to swoop it up quickly!

<comment><USER13> I'd always assumed that was a lie. To me, the most useful feature of Booking is the refundability of most of their reservations, so I don't have to book hotel and flights simultaneously.

<comment><USER14> It's not a lie.

Booking has received tremendous regulatory/legal scrutiny on that group of features and they wouldn't be caught red handed doing something indefensible in that space. That being said, there are clearly some decisions to be made about what "currently looking at" means: As engineers, we all know that nothing is tracking user eyeballs (thankfully), so in reality these things are necessarily implemented as a rolling sum of non-bot page views within X minutes.

Whether or not the information is correct, of course, doesn't mean anybody has to like the feature. I personally really don't like it, but acknowledge that it was a feature with shockingly significant business impact when first released.

Source: Used to work there. Read the respective code at the time (~2015/2016 or so).

<comment><USER13> Good to have an authoritative answer on this! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> pretty interesting. My hypothesis is that there's a large cohort of people (myself included) who hesitate to use airbnb because there is still a real issue of inconsistency with back and forth with host, key hand off, etc that people who are attracted to hoteltonight (extremely last minute bookings) would hate and that airbnb is trying to figure out how to appeal to that base.

<comment> why-el It wouldn't surprise me if Airbnb moves to the hardware space pretty soon, trusting their long time hosts with say wall-mountable boxes that speak Airbnb APIs and can facilitates key exchange, door locking/unlocking based on timed codes, and so on. Heck, build one and Airbnb will most likely buy it from you. ;)

<comment><USER16> That stuff already exists, albeit in less advanced forms (a lock box with a number code, for example). If hosts aren't using them I'm not sure that adding another layer of technical whatevers on top of it is going to change anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The HotelTonight app and website will continue to operate as they do today

I really hope that's the case, I love Hotel Tonight but will absolutely stop using it if I end up getting someone's condo. Regardless, I'm worried that hotel selection will go way down. They keep emphasizing boutique hotels, but that's not people go to Hotel Tonight for. I could definitely see large hotel chains not wanting to do business with Airbnb though...

<comment><USER18> This is boilerplate new acquisition-speak. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't immediately integrate everything.

1\. Buy company

2\. Draft press release saying "nothing to see here, folks"

3\. Wait a year

4\. Company absorbs what they like, discards the rest

<comment><USER19> There are also plenty of examples where this didn't happen...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This looks like a good opportunity to discuss something I'm concerned about regarding booking apps. We used Expedia I believe to book a hotel last year and I remember that it charged a $20 fee on top of an $80 hotel room. I believe they had an agreement where the online and in-person price was the same, so the hotel basically ate that $20.

So it's good for them to get the constant business (similarly to how Groupon works) but I can't help but feel that more of that $20 should have gone to the hotel staff, especially maids doing the actual work of cleaning up after everyone.

To me, running a bunch of web services to book rooms could be done on a properly configured computer taking 10,000 reservations a second for ~$10 per month. So the cost for booking apps has got to be mostly logistical (getting hotels onboarded with the organization, paying for liabilities, etc).

My question is, will competition in these spaces ever lower the fees and free up more money for labor? Or are we entering an endgame where labor gets relegated to the shadows?

<comment><USER21> Whenever I see comments along the lines of "In my mind you could replace this 20,000 person company with a computer running a script for $10 months", I'm convinced that folks don't know what really goes in to running a large e-commerce site.

To be sure, I'm not arguing there isn't a lot of waste at these large companies, but running a large eCommerce business at scale is a hugely complicated endeavor. For one, the economics of large OTAs mean that very small increases in conversion rates can result in _huge_ increases in revenue, so they all have very large teams optimizing their sites, running a ton of A/B tests, optimizing their search advertising bidding, etc.

Yes, it definitely would be possible to build a fairly straightforward hotel booking site with a very small number of people. To do it in a way that makes any money is a much more difficult problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This makes a lot of sense.

I travel a lot for work (100+ nights per year).

Sometimes I stay for 2+ nights, often it's just a 1-night stop over.

For 2+ nights, I almost always go with an AirBnB - more space to cook/work/think etc.

For 1 night though, AirBnBs are too much hassle. I don't want to have to _choose_ a great location from a long list which includes some terrible options. I just want a clean bed, bathroom and decent wifi in a good location. HotelTonight gets me that in under 30s.

I'm not sure how AirBnB locations can/will be built into HotelTonight - <USER2> all HotelTonight is all about ease of use, low friction and flexibility. The very things AirBnBs are bad at (coordinating check in times etc).

<comment><USER22> > I'm not sure how AirBnB locations can/will be built into HotelTonight - > after all HotelTonight is all about ease of use, low friction and > flexibility. The very things AirBnBs are bad at (coordinating check in times > etc).

I expect them to just show hotel tonight data in the airbnb interface. From the press release:

> We are making it easier for people who use Airbnb to find last-minute places > to stay when Home hosts are often already booked. The availability of > boutique hotels—in addition to private rooms and entire homes that are > instantly bookable—helps ensure authentic, high-quality stays are available > on-demand, especially at the last minute.

I think about it this way all the time: AirBnB bought the product for X price, because they think it will help them make Y more money. They don't even need to "merge" as long as the product is profitable but if they can get even 1% more with a cross over, then AirBnB (the parent co) is making even more money (with more risk ofc)

<comment><USER23> I'm pretty sure AirBnB acquired HotelTonight so they can legally speculate about owning a much larger share of overall travel booking, including traditional hotels, on their S-1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Theres one other feature of HotelTonight thats super useful - I often want to book a room very late into the night. Think finding a room at 11pm or 1am. A lot of hotels dont want to deal with you or aren't sure how to handle the rate/days. HotelTonight made that unquestionable and easy.

</comment><comment><USER25> No mention of an acquisition price. Congrats to Sam Shank and the team though!

<comment><USER15> Hm not sure if it's much cause for celebration for the HT team...they raised $130m and probably sold at max their last valuation. Employees aren't going to make out with much and unclear if anyone is getting let go.

Every OTA does last minute bookings now...reality is what they offer has been largely commoditized.

<comment><USER26> Got any data to back that up?

My anecdotal understanding was that HotelTonight was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Some component of that $130m may have been secondary stock sale.

I don't think we have enough data to determine what the price might have been, or how well employees will do.

<comment><USER15> I'm referring to their last valuation of $400m in 2017. The company hasn't hockeysticked since then, by any measure (e.g. App Store rank), so I think we can deduce the sale price was likely well below $1b, maybe 500m at very best but guessing lower. Factoring liquidation preferences for VCs and you get a small pie for most people involved.

<comment><USER27> > Factoring liquidation preferences for VCs and you get a small pie for most > people involved.

Let's say HotelTonight was acquired for $500 mln. How much of that the founders could get at most based on the last valuation?

<comment><USER15> I don't know what the terms are or how much the CEO/founder has. Assuming a 2x liquidation preference there would be $240m left after investors take their share. If the CEO has 5% then that's $12m.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I still to this day scratch my head over how we've normalized sleeping in another stranger's bed, as as hosts have normalized complete strangers touching our stuff and having sex in our beds. It's wild.

<comment><USER28> A majority of the airbnb hosts nowadays are professionally managed ones at this point. I would say out of my last 10 stays, only 2 of them were hosts who actually lived in them. Airbnb is essentially a hotel operation at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> On business trips I prefer hotels for 1 night. 3 nights or more is always an apartment (Airbnb or Booking.com which is often easier to book with). I hate eating outside alone and prefer cooking some food while enjoying JRE, Netflix or a call with friends and family. 2 nights is a mix.

Family trips are always in apartments. It's just nicer than Hotels.

Also, I find hotels pretty sad in general but that's maybe because I worked in some:)

Edit: typo

</comment><comment><USER30> AirBnb used to be great, but in recent years their huge platform fees have put me off.

I've had great success finding good places to stay by using AirBnb as a catalogue, then Googling the property and booking through the owner's own website. Last year we stayed in a lovely house in Bruges for less than half the price it would have been if I'd booked through AirBnb.

</comment><comment><USER31> There are two CEOs I admire and respect. Two people I have ever met who are both beyond wickedly smart, and, absolutely wonderful kind truly caring humans. Sam Shank and Jeff Lawson. Sam the CEO of hotel tonight is an incredibly brilliant intellectual, and also a genuinely wonderful person. I'm so happy they both did so well. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER32> I hope they truly remain independent. It's a great platform. A few years ago I was in Paris. It was a last minute thing and I used a similar website to HotelTonight that was the "hot" product in the last minute industry for big EU cities. Basically I got to stay at a really exclusive hotel for an extremely interesting rate. Something like 60% of its original value. I guess hotels don't care anymore at a certain point as long as they get their minimum back. Especially this was when Airbnb was the new cool kid in town. It is kinda interesting how Airbnb is just now moving into this market slowly eating the hotel industry one piece at a time

</comment><comment><USER33> This just looks like Twitter acquiring vine 2.0.

A big player acquiring an orthogonal product...most likely meaning they'll just kill it. I doubt hotels will partner with AirBnB on a booking service.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have no problem getting AirBnb's at the last minute. I look for ones that say "self check-in" or "check-in anytime" and are bookable instantly. I think since AirBnb is already succeeding at that, this will just increase their success in that area. All they need to do is find those offering that service or have them come to them, whether they be people with extra rooms, or a full fledged hotel.

<comment><USER24> Usually the stock of these is very low day-of in any major city.

<comment><USER34> Oh, true, I haven't travelled in season in a while. I often wind up traveling in the off season (summer in hot places, winter in cool places that aren't ski towns). I think there are some places that tend to be affordable almost year round, but your comment reminded me what it's like to try to find a place in Miami in the late winter. It's not an AirBnb specific problem, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I have used HotelTonight several times and I loved it. In general I found cheaper deals. Now with AirBnB, it will be interesting to see if hotel chains that partner with HotelTonight continue working as there is no love lost between Airbnb and hoteling industry. I guess Airbnb will try to make HT as an hybrid app of hotels and Airbnb bookings.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's funny how when you talk to some of their higher-ups they still claim they are a start-up (and so they should be allowed to act like it). But start-ups rarely acquire.

</comment><comment><USER29> Some say Airbnb is diluting their brand. What does it stand for today? It used to be about the sharing economy, belong anywhere and so on. What is it now?

</comment><comment><USER37> Dying to know what the acquisiton price was. A good friend of mine works for them and I have been saying for years that they would be acquired.

</comment><comment><USER38> How is HotelTonight, can anyone give me some insight? I have never used their service in the past.

</comment><comment><USER39> Isn't this what Tosi got fired for advocating? He must be having an aneurysm.

</comment><comment><USER40> Airbnb disrupts travel by offering hotel rooms :)

</comment><comment><USER41> I feel like HotelTonight, like HotelTonight!

</comment><comment><USER36> Is there a list of AirBnb acquisitions ?

</comment><comment><USER41> Like ChickenTonight, only for hotels.

<comment><USER41> Haha, someone don't like this joke

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Fantastic product, super concerned about AirBnB acquisition - not because of what they'll do to the product, but I guarantee their partnerships with hotels and hotel groups will evaporate when contracts expire.

A hotel working with Airbnb is like BlockBuster working with Netflix to share customer data. The hotels groups aren't as fucking stupid as Blockbuster was, though.

<comment> throwaway-1283 Completely disagree with this analogy. Hotels have their place, and in so many ways they can be superior to a home rental.

I am the furthest thing from a luddite, but I personally prefer (as I know many others) hotels to Airbnb. There's a consistency to the hotel product that you can't get with Airbnb that I place a premium on, especially for short or last minute stays.

I'm also not really sure why Airbnb is considered a "tech" co in the same way FB or Netflix is. There's is no real time component to the app, and it isn't dealing with billions of people using the app at the same time like a FB or Google is. In the few times I've used Airbnb over the years I'm honestly surprised by how little "tech" really permeates my experience (i.e. its just a basic web app that facilitates the listing + payment transfer + messaging...once I've made the reservation and paid Airbnb's job is essentially done).

<comment><USER43> I honestly question who hotels are for. I'm in the top 2% in income, and I actually prefer staying in a hotel, but they'r e just insanely expensive.

Do you mostly stay in hotels for business reasons? Or are you just rolling in money?

<comment><USER17> If an Airbnb is a lot cheaper there is going to be a reason, often it's location. I tend to move around and the ridiculous cleaning fees for Airbnb make it a non-starter. I'm flying to San Diego tomorrow and Hotel Tonight has several nice looking choices at around $100 a night (~$120 with taxes and fees). I just looked at Airbnb and I can get a studio apartment in a similar area for $79 a night which seems like a steal, but it's $184 after fees! $70 cleaning, $19 service fee and $16 "Occupancy taxes and fees". Airbnb is worse than Ticketmaster in this regard.

I would only use Airbnb for long stays when I need extra bedrooms. It just doesn't make sense for the traveling I do or for most business travel.

<comment><USER44> It sounds like that host has configured their listing wrong if cleaning is the same price as a night rental. Or they set the base cleaning price very high on purpose to deter short-term guests. I'm used to seeing the cleaning price more ~$10–20 per night.

<comment><USER45> I'm a multi-unit host and I charge a $50 cleaning fee for a $100/Night two- bedroom.

I've been thinking of doubling or trebling the cleaning fee and reducing my nightly rates lately to better mirror my costs: I spend almost as much time greeting and cleaning guests who stay two nights as those who stay two weeks, so I spend a lot more time in two weeks if I have multiple guests.

Upping the cleaning fee to $100-150 so it pays for my 'greeting time' as well sounds fairer for everyone: it'll be cheaper for long term guests, as it should since they're less work per day.

<comment><USER46> Interesting. I actually charge much more for the room, and less for the cleaning fee. Charging a low cleaning fee sends the message that I'm not doing as much cleaning, and I don't. Fresh sheets and towels, of course, a full roomba-sweep, clean toilet/shower/bathroom sink and clean, scrubbed countertops are a must. But the fridge has some spots, the floor doesn't get mopped unless it's bad, and there's often dust on the windowsills, spiderwebs and dirt in the patio door cracks, the windows have streaks, etc.

I've found that if I charge less for cleaning, then do less cleaning (I can usually turn my one-bedroom space in about 75 minutes, if I get the roomba started before I do), I'm happier, and the guests tolerate it. It's not hotel- quality, but I'm not providing a hotel, I'm providing a short term home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Fuck hotel tonight, they're not even a real business and they're just scamming people out of money. They hide their mandatory "resort fees" underneath the Pay button so that it's not visible on screen, and those fees aren't included in any of the prices that are either shown initially or are visible on payment screen (room rate, taxes & fees, or total).

You can see how this works in this video I made here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdrFYb4otTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdrFYb4otTs)

The entire app is designed to trick people about what the actual prices are. The founder is a total scumbag and belongs in prison.

<comment><USER17> In prison? That's exactly how all hotel bookings work. I agree resort fees are a scam, but that's how it works and it's always charged directly by the property.

<comment><USER47> > that's how it works and it's always charged directly by the property.

If the hotel wants to charge their own fee separate from the app then that's not a problem at all. The problem is the Hotel Tonight lying about what the prices are.

<comment><USER48> If hotels aren't disclosing these fees to HotelTonight, that's hardly HT's fault.

<comment><USER49> The fee is disclosed in the small print on HT. But it's not part of the total you pay to HT.

<comment><USER50> when is a fee not a fee? why isn't it included in the fee + taxes ?

<comment><USER49> That's the point we are trying to make. I don't agree with this practice. I don't agree with the "Resort Fee" practice and I'd love to learn about a hotel aggregator that doesn't do this. Any recommendation?

<comment><USER24> I dont think they exist. This is part of how the hotel stipulates its operation and listing on a website.

 _Edit:_ from a US perspective, maybe things are better over the pond.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> damn.

</comment><comment><USER52> AirBnB has massive amount of money and clout.

What should one do with money and clout?

Build a thing...

What type of thing?

AirBnBs are consumed by primarily individuals/couples

How provid?

Welp - where do they go?

They have the data.

So - how about buy up and build tiny-home communities in highest ABnB places?

Partner with Epic Tiny Home providers such as WindRiverTinyHomes

Why not throw that clout around on city planning depts whi dont know how to zone, divest parcels... Alameda is an example - whom I have spoken with about just this

Why not work with Warren Buffets Manufactured Homes groups (whom I have spoken with) to make an inventory....

Why not do many things...

Fuck AIRBnB - have a 20 year vision.

Build a freaking community based on a bolt-on tiny home over a shared common infrastructure in a very common design-build model. (Ive designed built gas stations, fast food, cell sites, data centers, and millions of square feet) - there are LOTs of people like me.

Go build something.</comment>


Doug Bowman, former Visual Design Lead at Google, joins Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twitter.com/2009/03/welcome-doug-bowman.html <comment><USER2> Rather ironically, I feel like Doug left a company which was being run by engineers, when what it really needed was more designers, to join a company that is being run by designers, when what it really needs is more engineers...

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice. Maybe he'll undo that recent goofy change of @replies to @username.

<comment><USER3> Whomever modded me down: Do you think that seeing @yourname is as intuitive to users about what it does as @replies?</comment></comment>


Audio from Scratch with Go: Stereo Panning - <AUTHOR> https://dylanmeeus.github.io/posts/audio-from-scratch-pt4/ <comment><USER3> Wonder if this should take into account pan laws:

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

* [https://www.image-line.com/support/flstudio_online_manual/ht...](https://www.image-line.com/support/flstudio_online_manual/html/songsettings_settings.htm) (search for "panning law")

<comment><USER4> I believe this minimal implementation actually over-compensates for pan law because it has a -6dB center. In other words, if you ask this tool for zero panning, it will actually divide the amplitude by 2 (probably not what most people would expect!) In DAWs, -3dB or 0dB center is more common. In a tool like this I would suggest a 0dB center by default, so that zero panning does not change the amplitude. This would be what you second link calls triangular pan law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having had to do some mass audio stuff on datasets recently I discovered SoX - a self proclaimed "swiss army knife" for sound processing. Delighted to find multiple bindings in Go, I eventually decided to just do it in python as there was a very solid library there and it was just simpler for my use case.

<comment><USER6> The command line application is also quite useful. Usually you wouldn't need to go into a programming language at all to wield its power

<comment><USER5> Yeah you're right it is. I was strongly considering just writing a bash script but I had a bunch of probabilistic stuff going on for using effects, so stuck with python.

<comment><USER6> I've had good luck writing ruby scripts that just shell out to Sox because I didn't feel like learning the API

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a fun tutorial for processing audio in Go, but generally panning will sound bad if you only adjust the amplitude/level.

The two important missing pieces are phase delay and frequency-specific attenuation (the "head" model). Audio coming from the left side of your head reaches your left ear first, then your right ear later. Also, your head blocks certain frequencies more than others. Both of these effects are super noticeable and necessary to make panning sound "3D".

Adding these things to the Go code would actually be fairly straightforward, you just need to add a filter to `applyPan`. The filter would only need around 12 taps to sound good.

Here's a javascript tutorial which includes both of these additional features:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API/Web_audio_spatialization_basics)

<comment><USER8> You say this like it's bog standard but adding HRTF and compensation for speaker distance are not part of a standard panning algorithm. This is more likely to exist in another module, such as for ambisonics or correction.

<comment><USER9> HRTF is often used in game audio and AR [2], but never [1] as a mix effect in commercial DAWs.

HRTF is a blunt instrument anyway. It's supposed to model _your_ head and not just a standard imaginary generic head, and that's impossible without sticking a microphone inside each ear.

It's also a headphone-only effect. As soon as you play the sound through speakers you get room reflections and all kinds of other artefacts which wash out the spatial detail.

[1] Almost never. There are HRTF plugins, but they're hardly ever used in music mixing.

[2] Apple has some HRTF patents for recording audio on multiple channels - <USER2> just two - using HRTFs to capture apparent depth.

<comment><USER8> Sorry this is just wrong. What is your basis for saying that HRTF are never used in commerical DAWs? Have you read anything by Bob Katz or Rashad Becker? Or perhaps you're not aware of the several options people reach for to perform multichannel mixing using ambisonics:

[https://plugins.iem.at/](https://plugins.iem.at/)

[https://www.ssa-plugins.com/](https://www.ssa-plugins.com/)

[http://www.ambisonictoolkit.net/documentation/reaper/](http://www.ambisonictoolkit.net/documentation/reaper/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, this is really cool. I wonder how far the author plans to go with this? DSP gets pretty complex pretty quickly . . .

<comment><AUTHOR> Her, author here! :)

Glad you liked it! I don't have concrete plans actually, just doing this for fun so we'll see how far I get :)

<comment><USER11> Might have been an interesting point to stream this data (basic sine) to an audio output instead of file. That's more immediately hands on.

(Sorry, this refers to the first entry in your audio/go series)

<comment><USER12> that can easily get pretty tricky if you don't want to depend a lot on libraries, which the last time I checked weren't great for golang in this area. I have worked with ALSA (advanced linux sound architecture) a bit, implementing basic midi input from a keyboard + sound generators + plugins with go interfaces and pkg/plugin + stream to audio output... and it's a mess of devices, buffers and formats. and that's only for one OS. and if you start doing anything non-trivial, making the programs work well in real-time is not for the faint of heart.

if there was a single format supported everywhere, minimum buffer sizes and a common API for all OSes, it would be a whole another, much more pleasant story

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [ Edited/Deleted reply because I missed the fact that this code distributes a single mono signal across 2 outputs. The terminology for this stuff is never totally clear: some people would call this a mono panner, some would call it a stereo panner, some call it a 1in/2out panner ]

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there, yep I'm actually aware of what you're saying. I actually wrote this at the bottom of the post:

"There is actually a flaw with this panning function that we are using. However it is not apparent to us yet because we can only set a pan for an entire audio source"

I'm working from something simple up to something more complex, but tackling it in small parts. Next I'm writing about applying breakpoints where the pan can be set throughout the track and you can notice the power dip - and then we'll work on fixing that. ;-)

<comment><USER13> For some reason, I just realized that despite your talk about 2 channel WAV files, this code is actually a 1 input to 2 output panner.

So I take back what I said about it being a balance control entirely. Sorry for that.</comment></comment></comment>


Parallelism, Concurrency, and Asynchrony in Perl 6 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpqnNCx7wVY

<comment><USER2> I'm really looking forward to watching this talk. I recently wrote a tool that uses Perl 6's Supplies to monitor directories/files and take various actions when changes are detected. By using reactive programming with Supplies, the whole program reads in a declarative way, and chains of actions can easily be modified and combined. Here's an example: [https://gist.github.com/muraiki/222814d5928f648be3c1](https://gist.github.com/muraiki/222814d5928f648be3c1)

If you've used the Reactive Extensions library across any of its various supported languages, Supplies are very similar (and IIRC were inspired by Rx). It's very powerful and I look forward to using it alongside everything else Perl 6 brings to the table, both PCA-related (for lack of a shorter term for Parallelism, Concurrency, and Asynchrony) and otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER3> Jnthn's been giving this talk for a while, but my understanding is that he keeps it updated, and he did recently make some large changes to the language WRT these features, so tihs may have updated material in it.

Edit: Yes, it's drastically different than the original version he gave a year ago. Worth watching again if you've already seen it, IMO.

<comment><USER4> He gave it again yesterday here in Olten.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best compare/contrast between Parallelism and Concurrency I've read is by Yosef K: [http://yosefk.com/blog/parallelism-and-concurrency-need- diff...](http://yosefk.com/blog/parallelism-and-concurrency-need-different- tools.html)

Related hackernews discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5711232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5711232)</comment>


7 Ways to "Hack" Your Interactions with Candidates, Glen Cathey Style - <AUTHOR> https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/passive-candidate-recruiting/2017/glen-catheys-7-hacks-for-winning-over-passive-talent <comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was very weird, but interesting to see what some recruiters believe is effective behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER2> Ughhh, I cringed when I saw the word "Hack" used.</comment>


Ask HN: Parents of HN – have you ever had to outwit your tech-savvy kid? - <AUTHOR> As a generation of programmers and IT professionals begin and progress through family life, I am sure that a generation of technically-proficient children are being raised, and potentially giving their parents a run for their money. I'm curious if this has led to any games of chess between parent and child, kids trying to outwit their sysadmin or coder parents <comment><USER2> I have kids, one that is grown and finishing college and another in high school right now. My son who is grown went towards computers early and did his high school in one of the better public school robotics programs. I underestimated his sophistication & level of knowledge in his sophomore year of HS, primarily in his ability to get around the internet controls and filters I had setup. Honestly they were not primarily there for him anyhow, more so for his younger sister, but there was one that was aimed squarely at him which was a time limiter. I forced off time for all internet/electronic activities for him because if I didn't the kid would've been a vampire in his bedroom and turned pasty, which living in a sunny sub-tropical state wouldn't work out well for him.

Nothing I had setup initially was that difficult to defeat, but I realized pretty quick I had to step up my security as he was learning quite a bit as he was going through school, more than I expected him to at least. I never told him not to try or punished him for trying, in fact my wife was upset with me for a short time because I encouraged him to try. My thought was if he was trying to best me he'd learn something, and if he got past me I'd learn something. So to me, win-win.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess that I'm lucky -- I'm far more tech-savvy than my children.</comment>


Ask HN: Who (in America) is working today? - <AUTHOR>

I've just found out that a company I worked for, who we wont name, but is a company owned and operated by a different nationality has people working today at their North American call center.
Evidently, this has quite a few people steamed, since it's not the first National Holiday they've had to work (I was subject to this myself a few times), but it is evident of the cultural disconnect of how the two nationalities view work.  This is an interesting thinking point for another time.
So I'm curious: is there anyone here today, a workerbee of the 9 to 5 that had to come in on the 4th? <comment><USER2> It's a call center: are they getting paid by the hour, and if so, to sit there and do nothing?</comment>


'Free-range' kids and our parenting police state - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-kids-and-our-parenting-police-state/2015/04/13/42c30336-e1df-11e4-905f-cc896d379a32_story.html

<comment><USER2> It's better for them to learn how to deal with abusive cops now when they don't look old enough to get shot for being disrespectful.

Bullies with guns are more and more common and that won't probably change when your kids grow older. Prisons need to continue to bring profits and there's too much money to be made in justice system and enforcement. Learning how to deal with self-righteous maniacs with guns might save their lives some day.</comment>


Google in 2012: A year when mobile and social seeds began to shoot roots - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/12/26/google-2012-a-year-in-review/ <comment><USER2> its game for big players :( not small one</comment>


9 Ways Asos Gets Ecommerce Usability Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.lauradhamilton.com/9-ways-asos-gets-ecommerce-usability-wrong

<comment><USER2> Some points I disagree with:

1\. Disabling functionality based on user location is evil. It's entirely possible to both have iDEAL card and to live in the US (or somewhere else).

2\. You're not manually entering that number every time, are you? And many formatting libs interfere with properly pasting stuff.

3\. Names of customers from non-english speaking countries are latinized for display on a card. So, a user can use his real name for profile page and a transliterated name for billing.

9\. I think security code must be entered on the checkout page right before submitting the order per some regulations. Also, it's just 3 digits.</comment>


Ask HN: What comms/collab software do you use for remote work? - <AUTHOR>

Companies are becoming freer and more open to an idea of their employees working remotely. So I am just wondering what software do you use for audio/video conferencing, maybe whiteboarding and other applications to minimize the gap of not being able to communicate in face to face manner?<p>Thanks in advance. <comment><USER3> For my software consulting clients:

* Assembla, Basecamp, Trello - project management

* Skype, Google Talk, Adium/Pidgin, Yammer - <USER2>

* Dropbox, GitHub, and Bitbucket - file sharing

* Wordpress, Jekyl, Google Docs - blogs and writing

</comment><comment><USER4> We use Skype, it has video conference calling, chat, audio and screen sharing. We use Bitbucket which does either Git, Mercurial, or SVN hosting with a ticket and wiki system and we use Dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER5> Asana, Campfire, Dropbox, Github, Skype/iChat/GoogleHangouts

</comment><comment><USER6> Emails. Goog docs. Our own app. Team viewer.</comment>


Court battle over GrubHub driver's pay could have big impact on "gig economy" - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/first-case-over-workers-rights-in-the-gig-economy-heads-to-trial/ <comment><USER2> Does the "gig economy" really do much besides pay under minimum wage and shift most risk onto the independent contractors?

<comment><USER3> Yes, it provides roughly a million workers with part-time income amounting to $xx billion per year.

Given the relatively unrestricted ability to quit these positions at any time, it's safe to assume these workers had no better alternative. And, without the gig economy, either would not have work or would be working in lesser desirable positions.

Does it suck that so many people don't have better income alternatives? Yes.

Should these companies be forced to pay higher wages? Possibly.

Would the world be a better place if these companies never existed? No.

<comment><USER4> You just made the textbook argument against minimum wage (assuming at-will employment). Which does hold water, however unpopular. The real argument seems to be if we continue to try to make protections for workers 'sensible', or let the market decide, and to what extent.</comment></comment></comment>


Angular v8.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/releases <comment><USER2> Angular is really a great framework. I think a lot of people complaining about Angular haven't actually built an app in Angular 4+. I also wish the Angular team had just called Angular 2 something else, since the 1 -> 2 transition frustrated a lot of people who jumped ship and never looked back. I also understand that people just have different preferences, which is fine, too.

Out of the box, you get: routing with lazy loading, full TypeScript support and a TypeScript-first ecosystem, a great CLI that completely abstracts Webpack and the build process, easy and mostly automatic updates with the CLI, reactivity with RxJS baked-in and supported widely in the community, a great forms library, and, of course, a component-based approach to UI development. The uniformity is a big benefit. It's easy to ramp up on a new Angular project, and there are fewer decisions to make when starting a new one. The built-in parts of the framework are all high quality and an easy bet. There's no need to evaluate different routers, form libraries, HTTP clients, get back up to speed on configuring Webpack only to forget how until next time, etc.

It's also interesting to see the React community move towards some of the things that Angular has been doing for years: embracing TypeScript, extracting business logic to services (or you can call them Hooks), creating injectable shared state (or you can call it Context).

<comment><USER3> I've been using Angular for a few months now and it's mostly been a good experience. We've been using Angular 7.

My biggest gripe, and this might just be my inexperience, is fighting the change detector to try and ensure reasonable performance when displaying a large number of elements. There are certainly mechanisms to do this but it does seem to take some work.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, the Angular team is aware that this is a pain point. There were several talks at NG-Conf a few weeks ago that referenced replacing or removing zone.js-powered change detection for increased performance and/or smaller build sizes. They're trying to avoid another Angular 2 situation though, so it may take a while for a backwards compatible solution to surface as the default.

<comment><USER5> This is precisely what I don't like about Angular. That there is all this _stuff_. And I have to care about what it is doing under the hood (and this is complicated and not especially well documented).

In React if I have performance issues, then it's pretty easy to work out what's causing them.

<comment><USER4> You can largely ignore what Angular is doing under the hood, tbh. If you're having performance issues, the answer is often related to change detection (aka, Zone.js).

<comment><USER5> > If you're having performance issues, the answer is often related to change > detection (aka, Zone.js).

This is part of Angular really. At least it's not optional to use it. Change detection issues are not fun to debug!

<comment><USER4> > At least it's not optional to use it.

Zone.js is optional, although it is on by default. It's considered best practice to remove it when building standalone components with Angular Elements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations on the release! For all the talk of React and Vue I still like the 'batteries-included' approach of Angular.

I mostly do Kotlin in my day job so Angular aligns fairly nicely with the way applications are structured. I don't get the militant need for terseness that's seen in approaches like React Hooks. I also don't need the choice between multiple backwards-incompatible (or competing) routers, nor do I have a need for functionally pure reducers.

So, it may not be sexy, but It Works and that's good enough for me :)

<comment><USER7> I've been burnt by the non-Euclidian enormity of ExtJS, so I understand the desire for something simpler. On the other hand, when you leave the world of progressive enhancement and widgets (ie. jQuery), you find yourself needing a lot of common infrastructure and picking and matching that can be quite tedious (never mind dependency hell), which is something that react always had issues with -- and that seems to extend fractally, where it's not just MobX vs. React but then what framework/project setup you have on top of each of these choices. And now hooks.

Still, angular always struck me as going slightly too far into Java-land -- my Struts/J2EE/DI battle scars are larger than even my ExtJS mutilations.

And in between you've got VueJS/Vuex, which seems to move a bit too close to react at times, and EmberJs, which seems to move too slowly and/or without many people watching it.

I really want to go back to late-90s desktop UI development sometimes…

<comment><USER8> WebAssembly is still a couple of years away, sadly.

<comment><USER7> Yes, then we'll get _native_ J2EE in the browser instead of JS copies…

The whole interaction model is just a lot more tedious than desktop UI development. One of the few approaches that I actually liked (not just tolerated) was Seaside, but that went away when the blood-dimmed tide of JS was let loose.

<comment><USER9> >then we'll get native J2EE in the browser instead of JS copies…

Can't wait. Imagining all the possibilities...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This release is awesome, here is a summary from the Angular team blog - [https://blog.angular.io/version-8-of-angular-smaller- bundles...](https://blog.angular.io/version-8-of-angular-smaller-bundles-cli- apis-and-alignment-with-the-ecosystem-af0261112a27)

The main feature among many is differential loading, that will load different versions of the application depending on the capabilities of the browser.

This will avoid installing polyfills without the need for them and reduce the bundle size. There are reports of 40kb reduction in bundle size, which is a lot.

More than that, this release does a lot of preparation work for Ivy in version 9, which will bring a completely new rendering layer.

Also, there is a lot of preparatory work for the introduction of Bazel in the build pipeline, which will bring us fully incremental builds (recompiling only the part of the code that changed and nothing more).

<comment><USER11> Differential serving can easily be done using babel and webpack. Been doing it for awhile now.

<comment><USER10> Yes, it was possible with Angular also before, just like with other frameworks, but now this is built-in the Angular CLI build pipeline.

This means that this is now mostly transparent to developers, and taken care for us by the build pipeline without having, for example, to configure webpack and Typescript manually ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In my opinion Angular's story is a story of how people invent problems and then valiantly tackle them.

\- We want to re-write the whole thing from scratch. In TypeScript.

\- And let's use Google's Closure Compiler for JavaScript. Even though it doesn't support TypeScript, modules, or anything, really from non-Google Javascript world (at the time)

\- Oh. Then... Let's create a TypeScript to Closure Translator even though TypeScript doesn't let you extend the compiler and TypeScript and Closure are in general not entirely compatible

\- Oh, and we use a weird combination of annotations and templates to work, so... we need to compile our templates into TypeScript (which we need to translate to Closure-compatible JavaScript which will then be compiled further down)

\- Only the whole process is abysmally slow. Let's implement incremental compilation.

\- It's probably still slow, complicated, and error-prone. We know! Let's use Google's Bazel! You know, the tool to build huge codebases in parallel on clusters. Yeah, why not use _that_ to build JS code?

\- Only bazel has no support for either Closure, or Javascript, or TypeScript, so we have to build tools and integrations to work with bazel!

And the quests just keep popping up.

<comment><USER13> What's the point you are trying to achieve with that negativity?

Writing non existing tooling around some tools is almost positive as they can pave the journey to other and better tooling.

Also, I doubt you are paying a cent to those developers to justify your complaints about it.

<comment><USER12> > What's the point you are trying to achieve with that negativity?

Not trying to achieve anything. It's my own personal opinion on how I view Angular's development. The devs dig deeper and deeper holes to bravely climb out of them.

> Writing non existing tooling around some tools is almost positive

Since there's no cost-benefit analysis, "almost positive" is entirely speculation.

> I doubt you are paying a cent to those developers to justify your complaints > about it.

"Only paying customers are allowed to voice criticism. Please purchase a criticism package or a yearly subscription today. Volume discounts are available, contact your nearest sales representative"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While the effort by the Angular team deserves praise, I think for the vast majority of use cases it is a mistake to do it all client side.

With some exceptions, there is really no benefit in making a SPA but there are many drawbacks.

I don't say this lightly. I used AngularJS in 2015 and since then I've been making SPAs in React, Vue, and Inferno + Mobx.

<comment><USER15> I tend to agree. But in defense of the SPA, my experience is that over time, most screens accrete complexity.

You start out with a simple content screen. Then the client wants comments. Then they want richer comments. Then they want live comments. Etc.

Over time, most of my web applications tend to require richer and richer interactivity on each screen. As a result, it's nice to have started out with a client-side framework, rather than hitting some threshold where you suddenly need to switch things over.

<comment><USER16> Your last paragraph summarizes why I default to a client-side framework if there's going to be much of any JS interactivity at all on a screen.

Even something that seems simple like a search form can be surprisingly interactive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was recently at a Microsoft heavy tech conference and spoke to at least 50 .Net developers. Anyone who also did front end did so in Angular. I was surprised at how popular it is!

<comment><USER18> I work in the Danish public sector and we currently have 300 systems from various contractors. Almost all of them are moving toward a C#/JAVA api based backend and an Angular front. Only one of those systems uses Vue. None of them use React.

Outside the public sector React is a bit more popular, but it's still mainly used outside of enterprise and Vue rarely sees any use.

The job-market doesn't seem to follow the tech hype cycles much, at least not when you live in a country like mine.

<comment><USER19> I can confirm this for the Dutch public sector as well. I'm saying this as a longtime React contractor. There's some React contracts, but very few and no Vue that I know of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This should point to [https://github.com/angular/angular- cli/releases/tag/v8.0.0](https://github.com/angular/angular- cli/releases/tag/v8.0.0) which is the release page for this version rather than all releases.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't update if a mod wants to update it for me then go ahead

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Literally just finished a huge re-write of an angular 4 app to latest Angualr 7 today, to revise the UI and improve everything. As I was about to merge it in I see this... time to upgrade!

<comment><USER9> Job security

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder what's the story behind delays of Ivy? Can somebody elaborate? It was first scheduled for v6 (don't remember , then for v7, now there is v8 and it's again rescheduled for v9.

<comment><USER23> It needs to be backwards compatible and it is tested with google internal applications and needs to be approved by said applications.

<comment><USER24> That what they have been saying for years, not what the REAL reason.

<comment><USER23> What would be the real reason then? It's not like they are workng on something else. Ivy is pretty much all they are working on for the past 1-2 years. Even to the point where events like Angular Connect are very boring because there is nothing new except this. I'm pretty sure they want to release it ASAP and be done with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I honestly had no idea this was still a thing. We jumped ship to riot.js back around Angular V2 and haven't really thought about another javascript framework since. All of our web tools have been vanilla JS/CSS/HTML with riot tying it all together for the last 3+ years now. It really does seem like the ideal way to compose single page web applications. We do use some 3rd party stuff like codemirror, momentjs, etc., but that's about it. Not even jQuery to be found unless some 3rd party component depends on it.

The advantages of not using someone's framework, language or module system is that we have a direct and stable surface (the DOM) against which to tie things together. Complex web interactions we attempted to do (and failed to do) using Angular directives/components/etc became trivial using our vanilla+riot approach. It almost feels like cheating by comparison, and then you don't care because your incredibly-complex web interaction that involves 5+ vendor libraries and 8 nested API calls just works and is easy to inspect directly.

Obviously, you need some discipline to manage something with less structure around it, but all it takes is a handful of code review sessions to get other developers synced up on how things work in this more 'open' world. There honestly aren't a lot of new things to learn either (there are definitely more things to unlearn coming from Angular). Productivity is also a huge plus. I don't have to spend an hour reviewing the semantics around some Angular construct before I do my work. After a few weeks away from some web project, I can jump directly into the HTML/JS/CSS, crank out a new .html riot tag file and be done with it in less time than it would have taken to re-sync my brain into Angular semantics land.

If you haven't tried riot yet, you should definitely take a look. Once we got our first application working on it and we understood the basics, it felt like we had escaped from frontend jail and could do anything we wanted to. For everyone who views front-end as a mosh pit of chaos and uncertainty, I strongly suggest trying this approach out on a throwaway project when you get some free time.

<comment><USER14> Anyone knows when Riot v4 will be ready?

I wanted to try Riot but then I saw they were working on v4 with the Simulacra guy and decided to wait until the new version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Angular is too abstract / has a steep learning curve. You need to learn too many design patterns at once (factory, provider, service, singleton, pipes, directives, observable, component, container, dependency injection). Trying something simple is trivial, but trying something more complex is overly difficult.

<comment><USER27> True, but you are learning ubiquitous programming concepts in about as well conceived of an implementation as you will get in a frontend scripting framework.

While none of the extra complexity is crucial to making a dynamic website, it earns its keep when you try to build a big online application. Why not just learn that stuff.

I think all the bundled pre-built functionality, like reactive forms, is the hardest part of Angular. That can be tedious to learn. But then again, so is 3rd party library X, so it's a wash.

Factories are no longer in Angular 2

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I feel Svelte is the framework that Angular author actually wanted to build since the first version.

<comment><USER29> Funnily enough, Ivy takes a pretty similar approach to Svelte with its markDirty calls similar to Svelte's $$invalidate calls.

That said, Angular doesn't utilize its compiler the same way Svelte does (yet) so time will tell.

<comment><USER30> I think moving stuff from runtime to compiletime is the theme of most changes to Angular 2+ compared to Angular 1. So I'm very much expecting Angular devs to look at Svelte and start hitting ctrl-c ctrl-v repeatedly on their keyboards :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Congratulations on the release and thanks to core team and all contributors for their work!

</comment><comment><USER9> Angular feels like frontend framework built by backend java Spring developers, that hate frontend development.

<comment><USER32> This feels like an argument made by somebody who has never built a serious project in either, and has instead formed an opinion based on quick glance at the respective syntaxes.

To me, Angular is what HTML and the DOM would look like if they had been designed from the beginning for application development:

\- Custom elements backed by controller classes. \- Data-binding and event- binding syntax baked into HTML \- Component style encapsulation, on by default.

React seems far more like a project created by people who dislike front-end development: As I recall the genesis of the project was to replace traditional DOM mutation with a more PHP-esque approach of updating state and re-rendering everything, just as you would do on the back-end.

<comment><USER33> Every time I look at Angular, I remember that they use string literals for both HTML and CSS which is strongly off-putting. Especially because for HTML, it becomes another template language like Vue.js, whereas React.js is just JavaScript with a simple and predictable syntax transformation.

<comment><USER34> You see the template and css as literals in little Angular examples, but the normal case is that the literals are just names of the separate html and (s)css file names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does anyone know how Angular compares to Aurelia?</comment>