Facebook's Culture Problem May Be Fatal - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/05/facebooks_culture_problem_may.html <comment><USER2> Facebook is doing more than just taking away something from their users, they're being downright dishonest. Until recently Facebook's pitch to users was that it was a way to connect with people that you actually know. They were deliberately closer to the closed/private end of the spectrum. And back when they had real competition (myspace), privacy was one of the key differentiators. I still think privacy is one of the big reasons that Facebook's popularity took off like it did.

Now they're pulling a giant bait-and-switch. Attract users with privacy, kill competition, then kill privacy to gain easy profitability. This alone is pretty disingenuous, but to make these changes behind users backs (for example, pictures that were once private became publicly viewable) shows a blatant disregard for the trust that users gave Facebook when they signed up.

<comment><USER3> I think you've nailed it, bait-and-switch is the frustrating bit.

That said though, I wonder if there is a way a big corporation can avoid this path, they'll have to monetize somehow and once they're monetizing they'll have to do better and better every year of they will look like they are stagnant.

So the only way to maintain that - and for facebook monetization has always been an issue - was to squeeze the lemons a bit harder.

Some of them will squeal, but as long as the majority stays you can't really fault them, no matter how sleazy it is.

Network of friends = lock in, lock in => abuse.

It's always been like that.

<comment><USER4> Facebook was monetizing just fine. They had simple ads that were generating millions in revenue and profit.

The problem is that they are trying to hyper-monetize. Zuckerberg turned down a $2BN offer from Yahoo, so clearly he believed he could make the company worth more than that.

<comment><USER5> > Zuckerberg turned down a $2BN offer from Yahoo, so clearly he believed he > could make the company worth more than that.

I thought that Yahoo offered $1B and Microsoft (later) offered several (15?) billion.

Note that Zuckerberg may have interests other than money. For example, he may be happier running a company worth $3B than having $5B.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft didn't offer 15bn... they invested a couple hundred million (~250mm, if I recall) to buy a certain percent of the company. That led to a 15bn valuation.

<comment><USER5> From [http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/06/technology/facebook_excerpt_...](http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/06/technology/facebook_excerpt_full.fortune/)

 _But Ballmer had come with something more sweeping in mind. "Why don't we just buy you for $15 billion?" he replied, according to a very knowledgeable source. Zuckerberg was unmoved even by this offer. "I don't want to sell the company unless I can keep control," said Zuckerberg, as he always did in such situations. Ballmer took this reply as a sort of challenge. He went back to Microsoft's headquarters and concocted a plan intended to acquire Facebook in stages over a period of years to enable Zuckerberg to keep calling the shots._

Zuckerberg also rejected that offer. The deal that was struck was for $250M at a $15B valuation

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs._

The classic example of a company intelligently growing up with a generation is McDonald's and baby boomers.

First, cheap food at drive-ins where teenagers can hang out, check out cars, and find dates. Then happy meals for their kids, who can stay in their car seats in the drive-thru. Now, healthier choices and high end coffee.

<comment><USER8> But Facebook is really only 6 years old right? That's not really enough time for a generation to grow. I think what we're seeing is that Facebook's user- growth is being driven by older and older people.

<comment><USER9> I'd argue that the HRB article is right in that people who signed up with Facebook in college six years have since moved on to a professional career, got married, and/or had kids. These are pretty big changes in peoples' life and what they demand changes respectively. People that were sharing keg stand pictures 6 years ago today want to share pictures of their baby running around.

<comment><USER10> Six years is a lot longer for a 20something than the same six years for a 50something. Both in overall life percentage and in major life changes during that timeframe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think facebook is a perfect example of what happens when businesses are created "by accident", where a product is created first then a business model is grafted on afterwards. As the article mentions the needs of the users are in conflict with those of advertisers and it's a problem.

An increase in value for advertisers means a decrease in value for users. Users want privacy, advertisers want everything in the open. Facebook in an attempt to sustain growth has effectively forced users to accept people within their networks that they aren't really close to and this makes users less comfortable in their own space.

Facebook is at a critical juncture and its future depends on how it manages the problems they are facing now because the house of cards can come tumbling down at any moment. What they have going for it though is that there isn't really any clear alternative at the moment that users can turn to. What clear though is that people do want an alternative but till then I suspect most will bear with it till the alternative comes to their rescue.

<comment><USER12> The same things is happening with Twitter. It was just a cool little thing to do at the beginning, then they had issues scaling, now they're just co-opting whatever worked well in the ecosystem. It's the same bait-and-switch, just with developers around the API as the losers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the biggest problem with facebook is that Zuckerberg is jealous of the Google guys and wants it to become a Google size company.

This started with the crapton of funding they've taken on. Which led to them hiring hundreds of Google level engineers. Which led them to needing even more funding to stay afloat.

And now that they have so many obligations to investors they need to monetize it at any cost to justify the valuation.

So they are doing it at the cost of user's privacy, since that's one commodity that most people don't really care about.

<comment><USER14> Your first sentence, in particular, is a great observation. Although it may not just be Zuckerberg, but the board in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if Facebook would have done better if they had started charging power users. If users were the customers Facebook would have avoided this whole mess. Assuming a reasonable $10/month per power user, a conversion rate of 2-3%, at 500 million users they'd be generating $1.2-$1.8 billion in high- margin revenue. Instead, users are the product. Advertisers are the customers. And Facebook is generating maybe $1B in lower-margin revs. Admittedly the growth prospects of being the big display advertising/lead gen platform are better than being the leading social network.

On the other hand, isn't this great for HN users? Facebook is screwing up in some core areas. Up and at'em, I say!

<comment><USER15> Interesting... How would you define power user? (In this context)

<comment><USER16> There are several groups they could go after:

a) people, often students who run their entire social lives on facebook, have 1000+ friends, and spend a long time every day on the site. Often students. Probably don't have much money -- but you might be able to get them hooked with small payments. Also, market it as a gift thing. Your uncle doesn't know what to get you for chrismas, but knows you spend a lot of time on facebook and has no problem spending $20 for a present. Also something to buy for the girl you're flirting with (and yes, it likely is that gendered). Livejournal made this work very well. In this situation it doesn't matter _what_ you offer for the paid account, just that it exists as an option.

b) anybody using it profesionally: event promoters, venue owners, bands, etc. May not deeply like or understand FB, but getting it right is worth serious money to them. Simplification, information management, statistics, maybe tech support.

c) Professionals who know nothing about facebook, but feel they should have a presence there. Sell them a service with lots of hand-holding, maybe integration with tools they already use.

<comment><USER15> Thank you :)

Just here's link for a) <http://www.livejournal.com/paidaccounts/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article is one of the more thoughtful ones on this.

I think Facebook is running up against human nature. Yes, humans are social, but we are also exclusive. Software that provides an outlet for the former but not the latter is betting against human nature. That's not a strong position to take, particularly when your success was built on both of those factors. Relying on lock-in to support these changes is hoping that the superstructure will compensate for removing a girder. It may work, but the fundamentals are against it. And there's a tinge of recklessness about it.

</comment><comment><USER18> If facebook, with its more than 400 million users, and all the time its users spend on the site, can't figure out a way to make money on that without breaking privacy, then it deserves to fail.

</comment><comment><USER19> People keep mentioning alternatives to FB but I feel pretty locked-in. I would be interested in joining a site that was a superset of Facebook... that is, a site where I could control and access my Facebook data but also interact beyond Facebook.

<comment><USER20> Someone needs to create a standardized Social Network file. Then users could "download their facebook" then upload it to another social network.

<comment><USER18> At the rate facebook is currently going, in a couple years all data on facebook will be world-readable. At that point it should be easy for anyone to download their facebook to another site. One could then clone facebook, and at an agreed-upon date, everyone could move over to the new site.

I say this only half in jest. One can't get 400 million + people to move, but niche sites could certainly peel off a substantial number of users over time. And facebook itself started out as a niche social netorking site...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My biggest issue with Facebook is that it is so incredibly buggy. It seems like they don't run any testing before doing changes to the UI or releasing new features. Basic functionality seems to only be working off-and-on, and sometimes you just get periods where Facebook becomes totally unusable, for instance when your news feed (or "News Ahoy!" as it says on mine) is sorted completely randomly and only shows old updates (and no, I'm not talking about the "Shiniest booty" here, but the "Fresh booty").

Yes, I use Pirate as the language on Facebook, can you tell?

</comment><comment><USER22> On a side note, does anyone think that given all this Facebook backlash, there will be greater user resistance to signing into a website using Facebook Connect?

At some point, I was starting to perceive FB connect as this holy grail that would finally bring some convergence and eliminate multiple logins and so forth. Of course, there are alternatives like OpenID, Google Friend Connect but they seem to be on the fringe still in terms of adoption and usage.

I run a site where the only way to sign up (as yet) is using FB connect, primarily to improve the authenticity of members (and it also reduces fake profiles by order of magnitude).

This backlash is definitely making me question if it's the right thing to do anymore.

</comment><comment><USER23> This article basically says that Facebook is making its product worse for users to make it more valuable to advertisers. I don't think that's the case. A Facebook where users share most of the things they post with everyone but restrict the privacy of the few items that they don't want everyone to see is a more useful and interesting product to use. They just need to make it clear who will be able to see the item you're about to post instead of hiding it behind the lock button. A more open Facebook is more valuable to advertisers _and_ users.

</comment><comment><USER24> _This was the technology platform they were born into_

Erm...no. The technology this generation was born into was the internet, and it wasn't until barely 10 years ago that the social web became what it is. The aspects of social activity is the technology this generation was born into, and the only reason this is relevant for discussion is that just like we evolved out of IRC, ICQ and are moving away from AIM, too they will move away from centralized, top-down hierarchies of managing social interactions.

</comment><comment><USER25> "A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs."

I don't think the problem was with keeping up but rather staying the same service. Facebook needed to not evolve and remain the same way it always was when it was first conceived.

</comment><comment><USER26> While we all argue, accuse and bemoan, my parents, grandparents, non-technical friends, and the rest of the world continue logging into facebook every day to post baby pictures and invite people to parties. They care not for _any_ of this.

</comment><comment><USER27> You know my take on this whole facebook privacy issue?

"Use Twitter Instead!"

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who expect to have a private playhouse online where they can say anything without any consequences, particularly if they want it as a consumer product.

If you're going to boast in public that you like to drink a Sparks for lunch, violate the open container law, and walk by the police station, don't be surprised if the cops notice.

In fact, if you're going to say something that you don't want to get out, you'd better be really careful of how you protect it. Nixon learned that lesson the hard way.

<comment><USER29> Are you saying that if I explicitly set my privacy settings on Facebook to be fully private, it is still o.k. for Facebook to make my data public because I should have no expectation of privacy on the Internet?

<comment><USER30> Doesn't sound at all like that's what the parent poster is trying to say. Sounds more like a caution against posting anything, anywhere, that could be harmful or damaging to oneself, while harbouring the unreasonable expectation that it will remain private for eternity. Whether that privacy breach comes from maliciousness, or negligence, the same cautionary principle applies.

<comment><USER31> The challenge is that there are two orthogonal issues here: Sympathy for users and criticism for businesses.

If someone spends thousands of dollars on hair implants because they believed an informercial telling them that they will get laid every night of the week, I would sit them down and have a long talk about tooth fairies, santa clause, bridges, and swamp land salesmen.

But I would still despise the businesspeople preying on the gullibility or naivité of their customers.

So perhaps it is a very good idea not to put anything online that would ruin you if it leaked. But it's still reprehensible to leak things after setting an expectation that they are private.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lessons on How to Start a Hard Tech Startup, with Sam Altman - <AUTHOR> http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/lessons-on-how-to-start-a-hard-tech-startup-with-sam-altman <comment><USER2> The implication then that there are four quadrants: hard tech to easy tech, high tech to low tech.

Hard and high:

\- cure cancer

\- colonize Mars

\- live forever

Hard and low:

\- make better syringes

\- make better pills

Easy and low:

\- match people that have cars with people that want rides

\- match people that have houses with people that want rooms

Easy and high:

???

<comment><USER3> Self driving cars? Geohotz made one by himself... In his man-cave... With a box of scraps.

<comment><USER4> That says something about him, not about the tech!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is this website? First it was the underwear post and now this. Is this the new Medium?

<comment><USER6> Looks like there's a pretty steady stream of them [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mitadmissions.org](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mitadmissions.org)</comment></comment>


A slack bot for creating engagement in sync or async teams - <AUTHOR> http://www.icebreakertime.com <comment><AUTHOR> Featured on slack's app directory: [https://www.slack.com/apps/A016WJ9RQCX- icebreaker-time](https://www.slack.com/apps/A016WJ9RQCX-icebreaker-time)

Icebreaker time has 1000+ engaging and fun questions!

Create engagement in teams asynchronously, synchronously during meetings, or during any kind of social time!

It's super simple to use: just type /icebreaker on any channel or private chat to get a question.

Daily usage of icebreaker time will boost people to learn from each other, get to know each other better by finding things in common, thus creating a more engaging and friendly environment.

If you're looking for a way to keep everyone engaged, icebreaker time is here to help you. Try it out!</comment>


Show HN: Searchkit – React components for elasticsearch - <AUTHOR> http://www.searchkit.co <comment><USER2> Nice! Funny is that Algolia released something very similar some time ago: [https://community.algolia.com/instantsearch.js/](https://community.algolia.com/instantsearch.js/)

It seems searckit took great inspiration from it:

\- component naming (search box, refinement list, hierarchical menu)

\- documentation organisation:

\+ [http://searchkit.co/](http://searchkit.co/) is using an imdb demo just as [https://www.algolia.com/](https://www.algolia.com/) homepage

\+ [https://ssetem.gitbooks.io/searchkit/content/](https://ssetem.gitbooks.io/searchkit/content/) vs [https://community.algolia.com/instantsearch.js/documentation...](https://community.algolia.com/instantsearch.js/documentation/) (see "components" menu on the left)

\- react based (but only works if you have react though)

\- and more parts maybe

@Author could you give some more details on the parts of instantsearch.js that were inspiring to your project?

Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep we did take a look at Algolia components. They made a great library and we took inspiration from their API. The difference with us is we focused on building with elasticsearch and we use declarative based components focusing towards the more experienced developer crowd.

<comment><USER2> thanks for your honest reply, good luck with the library!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm enthused, but would suggest you don't put an entry in the user's history for every keystroke in the search box.

<comment><USER4> Yes, this! People seem not to know when to use replaceState over pushState. And in my eyes this is a clear candidate for replaceState. (There are also examples the other way around, such as GitHub's PR tabs, drives me insane every time.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Thanks for noticing a side effect of the way we update our url. It should be replaceState for the search box. Other actions like pagination, applying filters and sorting should be pushState however.

We also throttle the searchbox search requests as you type.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi I am the Co-Author of Searchkit

We have now switched to Apache license Due to interest and our wish is for many new contributors to add to Searchkit's ecosystem + component library [https://github.com/searchkit/searchkit/blob/master/LICENSE](https://github.com/searchkit/searchkit/blob/master/LICENSE) We will be working hard in the next weeks to add to the developer documentation, and walkthroughs on making custom components. Thanks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> (Author) This is our first release of searchkit. Adding more components and documentation in the next few days. Let us know if theres something missing you like by opening a github issue. Thanks! Joe

<comment><USER6> Have you considered a more permissive license, like Apache/MIT/BSD?

<comment><USER7> What's wrong with the GNU license?

<comment><USER8> Assuming your question arises from a state of ignorance, rather than from rhetorical flourish:

What distinguishes GNU licenses from more permissive licenses is that the GNU licenses require derived works be released under an appropriate GNU license as well.

This is not quite anti-commercial, but does put the kibosh on some otherwise viable business models. If you wish you could incorporate some of this code in a proprietary product that you can sell licenses to, then what's wrong with the GNU license - from that stand point - is that it forbids that.

That's the intended purpose of the GNU licenses - to promote software that respects user freedoms by making it easier to write such software (because of access to existing GPL/AGPL code) relative to the ease of writing software that infringes on those freedoms.

As a necessary side effect, it is also the case that you cannot move GNU- licensed code into a non-GNU-licensed-but-compatible codebase _without changing the license to an appropriate GNU license_. Code _can_ move the other way, from compatible permissive license to GPL.

Sort of the worst case, in terms of unintended consequences, is code under an incompatible-but-otherwise-free license, where code can't move either way for not really any good reason.

Fortunately, people seem to have _generally_ settled on GPL-compatible licenses, whether permissive or copyleft.

<comment><USER9> > Assuming your question arises from a state of ignorance, rather than from > rhetorical flourish

It is quite clear to me that the parent's intention was to challenge the ritualistic "Why not MIT/BSD?" type of argument. It is the author's prerogative to decide which license the software should be under. While I use permissive licenses for my work usually, I see the merit in GPL licenses and might even switch back to it at some point. They serve different goals, and I suspect that in future we're more likely to converge towards GPL-like licenses.

GPL protects the rights of independent developers better than permissive licenses; and as software development becomes more accessible, we're likely to see more work pocketed off by companies without giving due credit, or even entirely forked off. GPL clearly recognizes that companies will not give back unless required by the law. If we're to have a fairer and more decentralized (political) power distribution, we need the protections of the GPL.

If I could flick a switch to turn all OSS projects to GPL, it'll impact the entire industry in a good way. OTOH, changing everything to permissive licenses will have absolutely no impact.

<comment><USER8> _' It is quite clear to me that the parent's intention was to challenge the ritualistic "Why not MIT/BSD?" type of argument.'_

It seems plenty possible, hence my explicit note that I was assuming otherwise. It doesn't seem clear - I've encountered people asking that question honestly and I tried to give an honest answer. To the degree that I'm a partisan in this discussion I am pro-GPL, but I think it's worth acknowledging the legitimate points raised by reasonable people on the other side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks nice. I'd prefer higher-order (wrapper) components to extending the component classes though, HOCs are more idiomatic.

Another question, somewhat off-topic. How do people feel about talking to elastic search directly (via proxy or not), versus going through another service layer. The argument for a service layer is providing a cleaner and more stable API for front-end developers. The downside is that elasticsearch has a lot of useful features, and it's hard to imagine an API that's much simpler that exposes them in a useful way, you'd end up significantly slowing down development of front-end search features.

My reason for asking here, is that libraries like this are appealing, but may not fit well with the way more micro-service-y teams approach search.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, we can look into higher order components for wrapping and overriding blank states etc.

The service layer is purely opt in, and its a thin proxy incase you want to apply permissions, it speaks elasticsearch purely, this is one thing we don't want to change. E.g. our demos actually connect direct to a read only elasticsearch instance

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks great. But don't add every key press to the browser history. Not cool ;)

<comment><USER5> thanks for the feedback, this is fixed now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks awesome. We are building something on react and we will probably use this.

thanks.</comment>


If Money Doesn't Buy Happiness, What Does? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@TheDelusionalWriter/if-money-doesnt-buy-happiness-what-does-b5fb9bdaa246 <comment><USER2> Happiness is a transaction, you don't get it for free. I'm convinced after searching for over 13 years to people to make me happy, the only thing that really makes me happy is helping others.

It's ironic, isn't it? To feel happy you have to do something for another. We only feel happy giving to another, any selfish want in and of itself will never lead to happiness.</comment>


The Pond - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/04/15/the_pond.html <comment><USER3> Good piece, good advice. Since OP was generally negative on remote work, I want to put forward a counter-example of situations when remote work is an advantage: When you can get 24 hour support without anybody working nightshifts (by harnessing timezones) and even more, when you are shielding valuable people from operational hassles in order to allow them development time.

OP says: "What was a 27-second walk down the hallway to yell at Bob about his crap code is a now 30-minutes constructing an email." My response to that is (a) dude, pick up the phone, it won't take more than 27 seconds but more to the point (b) Maybe Bob would write less bad code if he didn't have people waltzing in to talk to him all the time.

I totally sympathise with the telecon complains though and I agree, it's not for everyone. I went nuts trying to work from home during family leave, I felt so out of the loop (sorry, Pond).

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a classic problem in start ups, and I would strongly recommend against doing remote if you can avoid it. I only know a few people who have ever pulled it off successfully, and they are _really_ good. Statistical outliers.

You cannot replace having an entire team in the same spot where people can grab a white board and clearly talk about what something means. Just the energy alone is probably enough to keep everyone active on the project. It's difficult when you don't see others contributing to a project. You start to think you're putting in more work than the rest.

I've worked for two start ups. The first one didn't do remote work, and while the leadership initially was poor, the execution was actually insane. The second start up had mostly remote workers, a few PhDs in the same city, and me and another guy doing the front end and servers, and it was a little slow. I tried to recruit some people who had worked at Google and YouTube (as undergrads), and they turned the offer down simply because most of our team was remote. A lot of people join a start up because they want to meet other smart people, not just work on a cool product.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ugh...great article about the reality of workplace communications, but I think it needs to be underlined.

From what I've seen, remote is a function of the whole team -- not just 'does this guy depend on the Pond' but 'does the rest of the team depend on the Pond for their interactions with him/her' and 'do I, as a manager, depend on the Pond?'

I'll be forthright -- I don't like the Pond. To me it implies a lack of communication discipline; dysfunctional project management; a place where tribal knowledge and unwritten nuance rule behavior; and a place where power is derived from mastery of this subtle channel rather than documented performance and technical prowess. Rands' checklist for 'remoteable' workers is filled with issues of communication discipline -- able to get a point across in IM; cover an entire issue, eloquently, in email. I would add at least a couple more, such as 'reviews, documents, and publishes the [technical] decision process', and 'keeps trustworthy metrics on progress and technical issues'.

Too often groups use colocation as an excuse for undisciplined communication, then run into this uncertainty about remote workers as a side effect of the monster they've built.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've worked with developers who never EVER allow themselves to be interrupted.

Yes, yes, I acknowledge mental state, "flow", etc.

...but when you've got a developer who comes in, nods "hi", goes straight to his desk, codes for 8 hours, then stands up, nods "bye" and leaves, that's almost as disruptive to team cohesion.

"Schedule a meeting" is not an acceptable answer. There is value - big value - to informal communication.

I suggest that all resilient systems need a bit of unscripted, unscheduled slop.

This applies to HR policies, customer support policies, building large physical structures ... and team interactions.

<comment><USER7> My advice for working with such people is to just use email. Require people to respond within 4 hours and before they leave and 95% of the time that's good enough. Interrupting flow costs between 1/2 and 4 hours of productivity, but most people take breaks so as long as they respond in a reasonable time frame it should be fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting article. Can't help but think about how it's no coincidence that so many technology companies have come to exist in such close physical proximity in Silicon Valley. This article speaks to managing a team, but the power of the Pond metaphor goes well beyond single companies/teams.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good article but it fails to mention perhaps the most important technology for making it work - the telephone. I'm not so sold on teleconferencing - <USER2> issues as with videoconferencing. But one-to-one calls can and do work.

</comment><comment><USER10> The problem he is describing is the information disparity in the mixed onsite/remote setup. In my current company all the developers (~15) are remote and it works well as we all have to effectively use email, im and phone to get things done. We don't have the informal office chat channel.

I have worked in all three scenarios, onsite, remote and mixed onsite/remote and the mixed scenario is clearly the worst. The onsite vs. remote debate comes down to the makeup of the team you have, it's a different type of person that is successful in each setup.

</comment><comment><USER11> That is a very interesting and lucid narrative on working remotely. I've not read his stuff before. I like it. He points out some of the obvious on office social interaction, but in an organic way (hence, _the pond_ ). To that he outlines points addressing his concerns, recognizing the necessity of remote work, but driving home the social costs and identifying his metrics for the traits someone would need to successfully work remotely.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER12> I would take the Pond a step further. Programmer/analysts should not have their own office space in IT. They should be sitting with their users.

If I have to listen to idle chatter all day, I don't want hear Joe bitch about the poorly written code he has inherited or Mary complain how hard it is to normalize her database. I want to hear Tim bitch about how hard it is to update an invoice or Julie complain about why data has to be re-entered into a web app from an Excel spreadsheet.

The best application software comes not from technical prowess, but from intimate knowledge of that application. If you're not a user, you should be suffering with them. Need office space? Knock off 2 birds with one stone and sit with your users.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've done Remote and the Pond. I like the Pond a lot better.

</comment><comment><USER14> That is just an opinion. For me, for example, remote work is a essential idea in this economic crisis. We can save on office, on hardware, phone bills - everything. trac with discussion plugin and blog plugins is time-tested solution, along with little bit of self-discipline, of course. System administration tasks, for example, on Unix systems (which were designed for remote work, in contrary with all those desktop virtualization crap) can be perfectly done remotely. One week ago I did some emergency tasks on Informix server located in arctic Russian city Murmansk from Kathmandu, Nepal via local EDGE connection. There are many more benefits from globalization-affected outsourcing - the cost of living, conditions, climate, people around you and so on.</comment>


Show HN: the iPhone version of News/YC, a Hacker News reader - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bennyguitar/News-YC---iPhone

<comment><USER2> I wanted to see daily and weekly top 10 stories and also ask/show hn stories. So I wrote a HTML5 webapp that works on all browsers including ios/android.

<http://premii.com/hn/>

There are still few bugs that i need to fix.

<comment><USER3> It's beautiful, and the animations on the mobile site look great. It's also one of the best-performing web apps I've used. Nice job.

<comment><USER4> I use <http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/> — it's also web app but it is the best looking HN readear out there and I've tried a dozen of them. I'd love to have a native app with this look, and was even going to do one myself, but I guess that will never happen — there are already to many apps for HN :)

<comment><USER5> I made an open source Hacker News app that's inspired from HackerWeb: <https://github.com/weiran/Hackers>

No iPad version yet, working on that for 2.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why did you choose not to use HNKit from chpwn's news:yc? <https://github.com/Xuzz/HNKit> The way you do it right now seems like it would be terribly slow.

 _The API calls made by this app are slightly tricky. For the front-page posts, a call is made to<http://hnsearch.com/bigrss> and then the resulting xml is parsed to grab the unique IDs from each post. Those are then sent as a request to the actual API to get the posts. The comments, unfortunately, return as basically a totally unordered set. I create a linked list out of those, and then I turn it into a flat array based on the nested nature of the comments - so UITableView will render correctly._

<comment><AUTHOR> HNKit isn't in ARC, and does a myriad of things that I think are unnecessary and can be maintained cleaner (there's absolutely no documentation!!!). Those methods are actually very quick (imperceptibly fast) right now - but I'm not a computer scientist by any means, so I believe they can be made even faster by someone that knows a better data structure to use. Each comment comes back out of order with a parent ID and a comment ID. A comment that is a reply to Comment 1 will have the parent ID matching Comment 1's comment ID (hence my linked list structure right now). There's got to be a better way, and that's also why I open sourced the whole thing.

HNKit is also doing XML parsing over everything, and string comparisons can be fairly slow as well. That, in conjunction with not being ARC ready and a total lack of documentation made me choose something else entirely.

<comment><USER7> Hey, I wrote HNKit.

I'll admit I haven't had time to write documentation. However, most everything follows Cocoa conventions, and the headers should be pretty readable. Absolute worst case, there's an existing app using the framework as an example. :)

You can also combine ARC and non-ARC code in one project. HNKit was written before ARC (although I still prefer manual memory management), but there's nothing keeping you from using HNKit with an ARC-based app. And unless you're modifying HNKit itself, you wouldn't ever need to see or write any retain or release calls as a client of the API. Apple did a pretty good job making ARC and non-ARC code interoperate well.

I'm happy to help with any HNKit questions — feel free to open issues on GitHub if there's anything confusing. HNKit already supports most of the things you are hoping to implement (logging in, commenting, voting), so I would hate to have all that effort duplicated. If you have any specifics about things that could be done better, I'm all ears.

Performance-wise, HNKit hasn't been optimized, but it does do parsing on a background thread. In general, a bit of extra local parsing is almost always going to be faster than additional network fetches. I haven't had any performance issues, even on older devices, so I doubt that part will be an issue at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Xuzz,

Didn't mean for that to come off rude if it read that way. I haven't dug too far deep into HNKit - I was really just worried about the interplay of ARC and nonARC code and what that meant for the future of maintainability of my own codebase (really for things that go multiple classes deep, I didn't want to introduce retain cycles and the like).

I'm considering creating a branch of this with HNKit and starting to build that in to see how it plays with everything I have now.

<comment><USER8> You can integrate non-ARC code into an iOS app pretty easily: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8958761/how-to-remove- arc...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8958761/how-to-remove-arc-from- xcode/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We just setup a CI process for this app on cisimple here: <https://www.cisimple.com/jobs/kh1isdaal986n3ip9>

Includes a Kickfolio embed so you can actually run the app in-browser. Enjoy!

<comment><USER10> News site via an iOS sim, so I can read more news in the browser. Turtles all the way down.

<comment><USER11> Turtles with news:yc! <http://i.imgur.com/GkdgzLr.jpg>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I get the best HN mobile experience on Android either with the stock browser or Chrome Mobile since both have an automatic text reflow (or so called automatic word wrap). This feature is one of the most I miss on my iPhone which let a lot of classic websites top every native app on mobile devices. Reading HN and commenting is as fast as on a desktop. I tried several HN apps on iOS (I have both an iOS and Android device in parallel operation) and none of them got close to HN on Android's mobile browsers in terms of convenience and usability.

<comment><USER13> Have you tried out mine? It's open source, and if you find something lacking I'd love your feedback.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksof...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksoftware.hackernews)

<comment><USER14> Great app! Very fast, fluid, and pleasing design.

Three things:

1\. Is there any way to allow for selecting and copying of text from someone's comment? It is very often that someone posts something so profound or useful here on HN that I want to snip the text to save it in Evernote for future reference.

2\. And like css771 posted, remembering your scroll position in comments (and which comments are folded) would be a HUGE addition. I often click a link in someone's comment which opens in the browser, go back to the app, and the reading position is reset, including any and all folded comments I had. Quite frustrating. Fixing this would be _incredible_!

3\. Minor visual issue, but it seems the first indentation of a comment is not indented, as the other levels are. The first indented level has a color, but is not actually indented. This would help to make comments slightly more readable. I do love how easy it is to fold comments though. A quick tap and instantly folded.

Anyway, I love the app; you did a great job on it. If it had these three features above, it would definitely be my go-to Android app for Hacker News. Thank you!

+1 for the app, and I hope you found my feedback useful too!

P.S. Feel free to contact me via my personal email via my profile if you need any more detailed feedback, as I was a software tester for a while and hopefully you found my feedback and writing style useful.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the feedback, Paul! As to your points:

1) I'd have to look into how I would make the "tap and hold" to select text work. In the meantime, if you long press on a comment and click "Share", it will bring up the sharing menu. Then you can select to either share a link to the comment, or the actual text of the comment (which you can then email, SMS, open in Evernote, etc.)

2) That's coming when I have a chance to work on the app again (busy busy!)

3) It's that way to save horizontal space when you're on a phone and the comments get nested deeply. Was it particularly confusing as a first time user?

You can email me if you have any other questions or just open an issue on Github. My email and Github are in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a regular user of the app - it's a bit buggy but it's definitely the best looking and most usable HN reader out there. If I spot bugs in daily use should I open issues on github?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes absolutely!

I just recently changed the API to hnsearch's version (the only officially sanctioned one by HN) so hopefully a lot of the bugs will be smoothed out. I hope the new update doesn't crash and actually loads stories for you from now on out.

<comment><USER16> I actually prefer google search using "site:". Seems to return much better results for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does this send our HN credentials anywhere other than directly to the ycombinator site? I see a bunch of https and some http URLs in the code and could probably verify one way or another with an hour or two of work, but what can you tell me short of that?

<comment><AUTHOR> It only sends the credentials once when you login, and that's only to HN's https login page. It then only includes HN's regular cookie in the http headers on requests that go to an https page inside HN after you've logged in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why is this app called News/YC? It seems uncomfortably close to chpwn's news:yc.

</comment><comment><USER19> Very nice, thanks. One thing that is odd/slightly annoying is the way the comments initially scroll up. The issue is that the comments list scrolls at a different speed to the speed at which I'm dragging it due to the simultaneous scrolling up of the title bar. I think initially just the title bar should slide out of the way, and when it's gone, scrolling should continue on the comments list. Ultimately my finger should at the same position in then comments list as when it started the drag. i.e. Very much like how a category slides out of the way in a regular UITableView.

<comment><USER19> Actually this affects the main news items list also.

In addition, when I'm part way down the list I can't tell whether the grey "x Points ... y seconds ago by zzz" separator bar applies to the item above or below it. Maybe adjusting the shading of the bar and border would make it more obvious to which it belonged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a list of HN-related projects and tools somewhere? There is a great number of weekend projects that enhance or complement the HN reading experince.. E.g. I enjoy the "collapse this subtree" bookmarklet. There are also some projects that "summarize" HN news over some period for those of us who dont have time to be here every day. There are also some projects that aim for "dont miss anything from front page", some "parsers" for code processing etc.

Would be great to have a list of such projects in one place.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is awesome. As a self taught developer, I love looking at other people's code to compare and contrast my own coding styles and learn to improve my side projects code structure. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, but I'm not trained in CS at all haha - so take everything with a grain of salt. I've got an Art degree, and taught myself everything. So there's bound to be a lot of things that can be done a hell of a lot better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yes! This looks so much nicer than HackerNode. Thank you, however there is one thing I really miss and that's Pocket integration.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow this is awesome, I use this all the time and had wished I could contribute. Can't wait to start!

</comment><comment><USER24> Just optimised this app for iPad , i required it badly.

<https://github.com/tapanthaker/News-YC---iPhone>

</comment><comment><USER25> Does it allow for collapsing comment threads?

Edit: Just installed it and it's very nice, but a great feature to add would be... collapsible comments :-) Please?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it does already :) - just double click the header bar in a comment (where the username is) and it will collapse that comment and all nested ones under it.

<comment><USER26> Awesome app!

Would love to add a feature where if you swipe left, all the comments in that thread get collapsed.

It's useful when there are long threads that gets totally out of hand and you dont realize it until you're 1/3 way through. This way you can collapse all of them without having to go to the top.

AlienBlue does this currently with reddit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very nice project! Do you need some help with it? I saw the list with upcoming features. Making it universal (iPad compatible) would be nice too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, open any pull requests you see fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Plan to release it on the App Store?

<comment><USER29> It is already

"The app can be found on the iOS App Store here: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news- yc/id592893508?ls=1&...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news- yc/id592893508?ls=1&mt=8) "

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> now make it for android

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't even know what the state of the game is for HN Readers on Android right now. What are the best ones people are using?

<comment><USER13> Mine :) I don't know whose is sleeker since I don't have an iPhone to try yours out, but mine is definitely winning on the more-open-source front considering yours is missing a license.

<https://github.com/bishopmatthew/hackernews>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yours looks pretty sweet - and thanks for mentioning the lack of licensure, I just added it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Predicting that the title will change to "News/YC for iPhone" in less than an hour. :)

For people reading this later, previous title: "Show HN: the sleekest iOS HN Reader is now open sourced! Let's make it the best."

<comment><USER32> I recently found out that the guidelines explicitly say, _"[barring exceptions] please use the original title"_. (<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>)

I'm still sympathetic to the title-change complaints, and I think HN is leaving a source of creativity on the table to the community's detriment. But the guidelines are theirs to setup and enforce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's 2013, why aren't you using properties in all of your classes? And you should be prefixing your classes to avoid namespace collisions.

<comment> ux-app > It's 2013, why aren't you using properties in all of your classes?

It's snarky comments like these that prevent people from confidently sharing their code.

Got a helpful comment to make? Great! How about sharing it minus the veiled insults next time?

OP doesn't owe you clean code. Don't like the code? Don't use it.

<comment><USER34> > OP doesn't owe you clean code. Don't like the code? Don't use it.

Or better yet, contribute a patch/PR. The OP's intention in sharing it was to get contributors: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5678490></comment></comment></comment>


Craig Federighi talks to John Gruber about Swift - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/139/federighi-gruber-transcript <comment><USER2> The most fascinating part of this for me was how deeply technical Craig is. He's more than just pretty hair.

<comment><USER3> That actually carries over to most levels of management at Apple, the Managers are just really good Engineers with a few extra scheduling skills..

<comment><USER4> I'm always baffled why it's so common that the person in charge of something is often the person with the least direct knowledge about how it actually works.

It makes more sense to me that companies should be taking quality employees and providing them management training, as opposed to hiring somebody with a "management" degree who has little to no knowledge of the actual work that's done.

I guess that's just a symptom though of workers changing jobs more frequently.

<comment><USER5> "Doing X", and "Managing people doing X", are two pretty distinct skills—and interests. If you find someone really good at doing a thing, why would you pull them out of that position? Odds are they won't be good at it, and they won't enjoy it. There are people who enjoy both, but they're rare.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Find someone not good at X then have them manage a dozen people doing X and pay them 50% more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read the transcript but at the end I wished they had touched upon some comparisons of Swift with C# and the open sourcing of the .NET platform by Microsoft. Craig's/Apple's comments on that would be interesting now that C# and .NET are also becoming truly cross platform (unlike the Mono platform that lagged behind), which is something Swift also aims to be, although we don't know what frameworks and libraries from Apple would or could become cross platform.

Also, C# and .NET have had longer than a decade to become what they are today. It would've been interesting to hear more details on what lessons and developments from the last decade and a half helped accelerate the development of Swift (not just from C#.NET, but also other languages and programming paradigms).

Chris Lattner's page [0] just mentions a one liner saying "...it also greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list."

A geeky interview with Chris Lattner might be the next thing to look forward to on this topic. :)

[0]: [http://nondot.org/sabre/](http://nondot.org/sabre/)</comment>


Blending Tech Workers and Locals in San Francisco's Troubled Mid-Market - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/technology/blending-tech-workers-and-locals-in-san-franciscos-troubled-mid-market.html

<comment><USER2> > "What we'd really like to see is these companies hiring people into their > tech cathedrals,"

Few are opposed to this, provided the people in question have qualifications other than "needs employment".</comment>


Uploading files which method you prefer? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys I've been wondering where would be the best place to upload files such as photos, music, videos and etc? into the file system? or database?

This pretty much answers my question but what do the wizards here in YC think? <http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/10/15/binaries-belong-in-the-database- too>

<comment><USER2> Actually, many YC wizards disagree with that article in its entirety. In many cases, not only do binaries not belong in the database, nothing else does.

In short: It depends on your application, and probably only you can know for sure (and then probably only with experimentation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm thinking that Amazon's S3 is getting hard to beat for storage, especially with their recent price reduction. We plan to go that route with our app,

<comment><AUTHOR> But didn't S3 go down some time ago? How does that say for reliability?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like yousendit.com for transferring files from one place to another.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are we as a society unable to account for negative externalities? - <AUTHOR> It doesn't seem like there are many hinderances to incorporating the costs of negative externalities into our products.<p>We have accurate data on what the costs are, we have the rule of law, foreign actors who do not abide by the same regulation can be taxed or banned. Why do we not simply charge corporations for external harm they do so that costs can can be passed on to customers thereby adjusting demand of harmful products appropriately? What is the blocker? <comment><USER2> > Ask HN: Why are we as a society unable to account for negative > externalities?

Because (1) externalities, especially diffuse ones, are often difficult to objectively assess in magnitude (this is true of some internalities, too, which is a source of market failure), and (2) the people who benefit most from not accounting for externalities are also the people with disproportionate power in society.

</comment><comment><USER3> Externalities usually become obvious after the fact. The problems we aim to solve through our inventions are multi-dimensional topologies. Like tree, at any given point we can only see portions of it, leaving other perspectives unaccounted. Trimming leaves or branches would reveal deeper previously unseen parts.

The human brain and our tools thus far are more adapted to solving linear problems, so the higher the dimensionality and non-linear the relationships, the less we're able to produce determinist results.

I personally believe problems of this kind we cannot arrive at perfect solutions, only optimal ones. By optimal, I mean making trade-offs on certain variables so as to minimize total cost. The weights are also variables depending on trends of the epoch (environmental factors not such a big deal a decade ago, big deal now --> need to update our equation)

The other factor comes as a form of bureaucracy. It takes time to push the change through the chain of politics, re-aligning incentives, carving new markets and distribution channels, changing market sentiments, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are many problems

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

For instance estimates of the "social cost of carbon" vary widely

[https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climatechange/social-c...](https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climatechange/social- cost-carbon_.html)

one of the most important factors is the "Discount factor" which is highly subjective. (How much do we care about 10 years from now as opposed to 1000 years from now?)

Some people don't like the idea that "rich people" get the right to pollute.

In some cases "paying money" might just legitimize bad behavior. A day care center in Tel Aviv tried charging people money if they picked their kids up late, it was not successful at letting the staff leave home early because some parents decided it was worth paying the fee.

<comment><USER5> If there is a fine involved with a certain behavior, this can commoditize the behavior in a way - it's an extra option that you can buy.

An interesting historical example for this may be the trading of indulgences (pardons for sins) in the late Middle Ages.

When (parts of) the church started to sell indulgences, so that people could pay for spending less time in purgatory for minor sins lead to a veritable explosion of trade with absolution of sin, financing wars, construction projects etc. Minor sinning was suddenly not that serious anymore for the wealthy and the church gained even more economic power.

Indulgences were even sold for dead relatives. Think about your family worrying for the soul of your dead aunt (who had a bad habit of blashpheming) and trying to scrape together what is effectively ransom for an imaginary hostage...

While the rich were relatively fine with the system, the poor were now even discriminated against in the afterlife, since they couldn't just buy their dead realtives or themselves a shorter time in purgatory. In some theologicians' eyes this clashed with dogma and to the public would end up as one factor driving the reformation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> IIRC what you're talking about is called "True Cost Economics". I first read about it years ago, & when I look for the article now it's a 404.

However I was able to find an excerpt here:

[http://www.utne.com/community/truecosteconomics](http://www.utne.com/community/truecosteconomics)

</comment><comment><USER7> Let me rephrase this to annoy you. Why are we as a society unable to account for positive externalities?

They're externalities. You're probably wrong in the grand century scale scheme of things, heck you're probably wrong in the 5 -10 year scale of things.

<comment><USER8> That's a really good question flip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Because the negative externalities don't affect the balance sheets of companies. However the companies with the biggest profits can lobby politicians more effectively. They can also pick their favorite jurisdictions to operate from.

<comment><USER10> This comment gets closest to the heart of things. Such costs can only be imposed by the state, but the state has limited power/desire to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't it fundamentally an inherent game theory problem? Why don't prisoners cooperate in the prisoners' dilemma?</comment>


How are created new programming languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.scriptol.com/compiler/new-programming-language.php

<comment><USER2> I hoped for some interesting read, instead the article could be summed up in 3 sentences:

Python, Ruby and Scriptol were created by starting with ergonomic study and user survery. Java, C# and Scala by repeating old habits of some programmers. The syntax of latter three languages sucks - it's full of cryptic symbols, including semicolons, and it's based on C which doesn't make sense today.

Ok, so what is this user survey? In some ways it is the same as repeating habits of people - when you are doing a survery people will tend to vote for habits they have from programming languages they use. Even my friends who are just CS students (so shouldn't have bad habits from years of coding in the industry and seem to have more theoretical approach) are afraid of languages that resemble Java too little. I'm not saying this can't be done correctly, I think that this article simply lacks of content on methodology of gathering ideas for new PL and doesn't answer the question in the title. It would also cool to read what scriptol's authors did to make the language suit users' needs better.

Also as far as I know scala and javascript has the same attitude towards semi colons - they are no obligatory. I'd say that scala has more 'new' ideas than Go and JS [1]

[1] think pattern matching, actors - I know they are not actually new, but it seems to me that scala can become 'most mainstream' among languages that implement such features

</comment><comment><USER3> This misses a few things (aside from english grammar).

For one, while there are fields where user demand is the most important design basis, language design is not one of them. I believe that the design of a language should put ab initio thoughts at the beginning. That box "Ergonomic study and user survey" is actually "Old user habits". Nowadays, everyone seems to think that a useful language has to look like C. I think that this habit is a big impediment to innovation in this field.

This brings me to the next point of bother: semicola are not simply something to be dropped from otherwise C-like syntax. It is actually not dropped, but replaced by syntactic whitespace. That means that the programmer has the additional burden of determining whether he may put a newline at some point in code without it being interpreted as a statement terminator. I believe that syntactic whitespace---i.e. that the amount and type of whitespace are significant for the interpretation of the program---is a fundamentally flawed idea. Of course, C syntax is a complete mess, but dropping semicola is not a solution at all because the real problem sits much deeper.</comment>


Coverflow using javascript - <AUTHOR> http://radnan.public.iastate.edu/coverflow/ <comment><USER2> Soooooo slow (in Firefox 3). It is definitely do-able at speed though as <http://www.classycode.co.uk/CoverFlow/> does it fast - the only problem there is the interface (a "wheel" like mechanism).

</comment><comment><USER3> works great in safari, hopeful the coming re-imagining of firefox's javascript engine will speed it up greatly. reminds me a lot of the java interactions in the lively kernel, only without the vector images. <http://research.sun.com/projects/lively/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Lots of js animation works great in FF3, but this is terribly slow.

</comment><comment><USER5> this is really slick, seemed snappy on safari 3 for me</comment>


Apollo 11: Mission Out of Control - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/apollo-11-mission-out-of-control/ <comment><USER2> That's just wow. I really think it is mind blowing and awesome what we achieved with so few resources.</comment>


Seattle's Homeless Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/seattles-homeless-challenge <comment><USER2> It was recently announced that King County and the City of Seattle want to consolidate their homeless response into a single agency.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/durkan-and- constan...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/durkan-and-constantine- endorse-recommendations-to-consolidate-fragmented-homelessness-system/)

Hopefully this can be a good step forward in the right direction. As mentioned by other comments, there are much better resources for learning about homelessness in Seattle than an interview with a dropout Seattle City Council candidate who has a pretty clear political agenda.

<comment><USER3> >there are much better resources for learning about homelessness in Seattle than an interview with a dropout Seattle City Council candidate who has a pretty clear political agenda

Agreed that there are better ways to get informed but it's a politician's job to have a clear political agenda. Forgive me if I'm detecting the wrong tone but I'm becoming accustomed to hearing people say "political agenda" with the implication of some sinister plot.

<comment><USER2> Sorry if that was the implication. I just wanted to make it clear that Rufo is not _just_ a film maker, but also someone with political aspirations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another challenge is that most direct funding (aside from Medicaid) comes from municipalities rather than the state or the federal government. So other areas are incentivized to ship their homeless to Seattle or at the very least consider it not their problem to begin with.

With state and federal funding you could enact a program where the addicted people living on the streets rather than in shelters (who are the homeless people who cause most of the problems) are committed to involuntary sobriety programs, and then on completion provided with private housing (not a shelter, some 1bed public housing) and, as the article mentions, some low-skill job like picking up trash on the condition that they remain clean (kind of like a halfway house). You could also long term house the severely mentally ill who cannot live on their own in psychiatric facilities. That would cost a lot of money up front but could actually solve the problem long term.

Also note that even in Seattle over 2/3 of homeless people live in cars or shelters. Most homeless people aren't the crazy people on the corner harassing you for drug money and camping in public parks, even though those are the most visible

<comment><USER5> Keep in mind that about half of our country's political leadership see the strain on major cities as a win-win-win: They don't have to allocate funds to properly deal with the problem and the urban liberals and lower class are subsequently punished. The solution is rather clear when viewed from the federal level, but the motivation is low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The $1 billion/year number cited by this ex-candidate has been so widely and so completely discredited that anyone using it has an agenda. Here's a short summary of one massive flaw:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/7dijkx/homelessn...](https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/7dijkx/homelessness_the_seattle_area_spends_more_than_1/dpypw87/)

Yes, it actually counted the assessed value of land and buildings as a per- year operational expense, as if the land was re-purchased, and the buildings re-erected, every year.

The real number is somewhere between it and $90 million ([https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/homeless/seattle-h...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/homeless/seattle-homelessness-spending-tops-90-million/)), depending heavily on how one amortizes capital assets (land, buildings) and allocates shared services. It's nowhere near $1 billion/year though.

UPDATE: To learn more about homelessness in Seattle, here's some starting points:

1\. McKinsey's "The Economics of Homelessness in Seattle and King County": [https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of- cities/...](https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-cities/the- economics-of-homelessness-in-seattle-and-king-county) ("In total, we estimate a budget of $360 million to $410 million would be needed. This is about twice what the system invests today.")

2\. Barbara Poppe's 2016 recommendations ([https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/B...](https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/BPA.pdf)) and 2018 Q&A ([https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/qa-two- ye...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/qa-two-years-after- her-report-on-seattles-homelessness-how-does-barbara-poppe-grade-the-city/)).

3\. Survey of 1,056 homeless people: [http://allhomekc.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/05/FINALDRAFT-C...](http://allhomekc.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/05/FINALDRAFT-COUNTUSIN2018REPORT-5.25.18.pdf). Skip to page 23. I think pages 28, 30-31, 33-34, 43, 45, and 66 have the most information for the least time.

4\. Seattle Times homelessness coverage ([https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/homeless/](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/)), which has an RSS feed ([https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/homeless/feed/](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle- news/homeless/feed/)).

<comment><USER7> > ex-candidate

Oh, so it's just sour grapes after he lost an election. I guess we can skip over this due to his agenda.

But wait...

> [...] I put my hat in the ring early and I got tremendous support from > across the city, from a lot of people in neighborhoods who are fed up with > some of the policy of failures that they're seeing every day. But I got a > very quick education in how activists pressure groups work. And in a very > short time period as my campaign was gaining some momentum, I started > getting barraged by harassment, by threats.

> One individual from an activist group had posted hundreds of messages, > threatening messages over the period of a few weeks. They had gone after my > wife attempting to get her fired from her employer. She works at Microsoft. > They had been posting white supremacists content to my family. And I'm a > biracial family, interracial marriage. And [we] have mixed race kids. And > then the final straw is they actually went after my kids, they started > posting hateful messages to my eight year old son school, facebook page. And > not only that, they let people know that they knew where I lived, and really > just kind of engaged in a reign of terror. And I very regretfully withdrew > from the race because it was a decision that I had to make for the best > interest of my family.

> And I felt conflicted because I deeply want policy change. But the political > environment, as you've seen with in Seattle, as you've seen with Andy knows, > reporting for city journal down in Portland, is saturated with the threat of > violence.

Yikes.

Now I'm not sure. Should we discount the side that quotes a bad number from the media, having missed the Reddit post disproving it? Or should we discount the side that harasses and threatens a candidate, his wife and his children until he retires from an election?

Maybe they cancel out. Anyway, I'd suggest reading the whole transcript after all, $1 billion or not. There's some interesting stuff in there.

<comment><USER6> > I guess we can skip over this due to his agenda.

No, you should skip over this because the number is obviously factually flawed. I can't link to the Puget Sound Business Journal infographic it's from because PSBJ uses a paywall. Regarding "having missed the Reddit post disproving it," as I wrote, it was widely discredited (including in Reddit comments). It's unlikely that anyone following the issue as closely as a city council candidate would have "missed" that.

I'm all for learning more about the problem. However, all 4 sources that I linked to are closer to primary sources for the information they provide, and 3 or 4 of the 4 are less biased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> from my observation, the primary drivers are

1) the heroin/fentanyl epidemic

2) political choices or fiscal constraints as local spending on public healthcare/shelters/mental-wards/criminal-justice has not kept up with spiraling costs increases and population growth

3) the minimum rents in coastal cities exceeding the max SSID benefit ( ~$750/month) in the early 2010s

The sub causes of (3) are myriad but include; a decade of easy credit inflating property values, revival of American cities, local zoning/permitting strangling construction, and I guess the economic success of West coast technology companies (although this tax base keeps the government sector afloat particularly in California, so think the progressives protest a bit too much)

The east coast does not have as many problems with (2) because there is an effective "right to shelter" with subfreezing winter temps. Having enough shelter capacity helps prevent the short-term homeless from becoming "chronically homeless".

<comment><USER9> > local zoning/permitting strangling construction

Looking at the Seattle skyline from my apartment, it's construction cranes as far as the eye can see.

A lot of construction is happening. It's not enough, though, because there's an absolute torrent of people into the area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's the 'challenge': Seattle spends $$tens of millions each year on treating the symptoms.

Mostly policing, sheltering and moving tent-emcampments around. Wasted money.

The cause (exacerbated by huge price increases) is home-less-ness. The cure is _homes_. Apart from showcase projects, no progress. Buy the property, build small homes, move people in.

So why doesn't it happen? Follow the money.

<comment><USER11> In the words of Steve Balmer:

Developers Developers Developers Developers

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Keep in mind that Chris Rufo is known to call all of his opponents ideologues, has ties to to the Claremont Institute (known for dabbling a bit in white nationalism), frequently complained about his opponents 'virtue signalling' and talks about 'break[ing] up the homeless industrial complex'

He tends to be biased more towards criminalizing homelessness and institutionalizing them. I also noticed in this podcast he makes claims that are simply not backed up by evidence, specifically when he's talking about Canada and the safe injection sites.

This isn't to say that homelessness isn't a problem in Seattle, because it is. We're seeing similar issues happen to San Francisco as in Seattle due to rising rent and poor healthcare opportunities and there's unfortunately no easy solution.

<comment><USER13> > has ties to to the Claremont Institute (known for dabbling a bit in white > nationalism)

It's gotten to the point that I don't trust these vague-links-to-white- nationalism accusations at all. They so rarely have any substance to them that they make me more suspicious of the person accusing than the person being accused.

<comment><USER14> Ad hominem isn't a good look, nor an effective argument when it comes to policy. Too often I see dismissals based on indirect associations with the Koch brothers or unsubstantiated allegations of white nationalism. I don't see how ad hominem by progressives is any better than someone dismissing research data because of "links" to think tanks funded by George Soros, etc.

<comment><USER3> >I don't see how ad hominem by progressives is any better than someone dismissing research data because of "links" to think tanks funded by George Soros, etc.

Are you saying association with a partisan think tank is equally as damning as association with white nationalism?

It's an issue of morality. Being morally bankrupt should probably challenge somebody's credibility more than having stances on policy that some don't agree with.

<comment><USER14> Please read my comment closely. I said neither are "damning", because ad hominem shouldn't be considered a reason to "damn" ideas in an unrelated policy debate. Especially unsubstantiated allegations about a second or third degree connection.

<comment><USER3> I agree that ad hominem attacks are overwhelmingly used to evade the responsibility of substantive debate. The problem is that policy debates are not purely objective and in reality people weigh presented perspectives and evidence according to the perceived credibility of a given source. As a result, information that speaks to the soundness of a person's judgement has a place in policy debate as a means of drawing conclusions in the absence of indisputable facts.

We're all placing faith in something that determines what we call truth and what we call lies or ignorance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> rents, regional policies, and not enough mental health and addiction services are the main reasons i think. we need to spend about 250 million more annually to properly address it. vienna is an example of a city that has succeeded. one problem is that without an income tax, most taxes are regressive. so our best bet is an increase in propert taxes.

</comment><comment><USER11> Make a brutalist prison-like structure downtown where:

\- Anyone can get a free bed/meal

\- Anyone can get illegal drugs provided to them by a nurse for free. Nurse may give 5 min sobriety pep talk before administering.

\- You have to piss clean before you can leave.

Seems like for $80k/person a year, we could clean up the streets, make the addicts much happier and safer, and perhaps even have some money left over. I'm sure it'd take a huge load off emergency services too - removing the economic needs of satisfying addiction seems like it could drastically reduce crime, why steal for a fix if you can get it for free?

<comment><USER16> > _make the addicts much happier and safer_

This is the current trend in many progressive cities, and so far it's a massive failure. Perhaps it's not surprising that when you work to make addicts happier, you attract more addicts. You also wind up with an entire industry that spends hundreds of millions of tax dollars catering to the addicts, and which perversely needs addicts to remain addicted in order for the industry to survive. The situation only gets worse.

These policies put the addict's needs above those of the non-addicts, since most non-addicts do not want a neighborhood filled with junkies who moved in to get free services, free needles, and legal injection sites.

Common knowledge used to be that an addict needs to hit "rock bottom" before they will turn their life around. If this is true, by making addicts happier and more comfortable, you're not helping anybody.

<comment><USER11> This has not been attempted anywhere. What are you referring to?

>who typically do not want their neighborhood filled with addicts who have moved in to get free services, free needles, and safe spaces.

The lack of a policy for dealing with homeless addicts is a effectively just a policy of keeping them in the poorest neighborhoods. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away, we can do better.

<comment><USER14> Seattle does not enforce laws against public drug use and recently vacated all gross misdemeanor charges, citing the "case load". This just incentivizes bad behavior and further increases the case load. Every time I take my weekly walk I find 2-5 of those "free" used syringes with uncapped needles on sidewalks. While some decriminalization is good, if it is accompanied by indulging people's addictions and lackadaisical enforcement of littering, loitering, and harassment laws it only makes the problem worse.

<comment><USER11> By making the decriminalization location-based, it would concentrate the problem and make providing services to those individuals much cheaper because of economies of scale.

I'd imagine if there was free heroin and needles inside, not many people would continue buying H and discarding syringes on the street.

<comment><USER14> Hopefully these facilities can consistently confront disagreeable and potentially unstable users and ensure they are discarding all needles that were used before leaving. Seattle's track record of enforcement in other areas makes me pessimistic, unfortunately.

One idea I've heard of is requiring more needles to be handed in before fresh needles are handed out as a means of incentivizing neighborhood cleanup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I submitted it. I didn't expect it to hit the front page.

A few stats on Seattle homelessness:

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle- sta...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-statistics- on-homelessness-and.html)

A few stats on California homelessness:

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california- statistics-on-homelessness.html)

"Homes for the homeless" is always a bad idea. For one thing, it de facto helps entrench the problem, if only due to The Shirky Principle. For another, it fosters "creative" solutions that amount to designing something that would only appeal to you if you were currently sleeping in a dumpster.

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the- shirky-...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky- principle-and-homelessness.html)

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/homes- for-h...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/homes-for-homeless- is-always-bad-idea.html)

I've done a lot of research over the years. I would like to see market rate housing solutions for _people_ , not "homes for the homeless." I don't think we solve this by trying to "help the homeless" per se. That's just survival mode, basically. I think we solve it in part by adding more missing middle housing and replacing the million SROs that have been torn down in recent decades, plus creating a single payer medical system. The ACA was the only politically viable solution. It isn't actually a good solution. I don't have citations at my fingertips, but I've seen research linking housing instability and excessive medical bills.

Housing is typically the single biggest expense in a household budget. Transportation is typically the second biggest. Medical expenses in the US are a shockingly high percentage of GDP, on the order of a fifth of our economy.

Supplying walkable urban housing at the right price point and proper universal medical coverage wouldn't solve homelessness, but would make a big difference in the issue.

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the- clear-c...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear- connection-between-housing.html)

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the- missing...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing- middle.html)

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

So, as nutshell as possible, those are some of my thoughts on the problem space as someone who both had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy and spent several years homeless and got myself back into housing without going through some program. I continue to blog about it in some fashion or other, continue to communicate with currently homeless individuals and try to supply useful information to try to make some small difference.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if the explosion in homelessness is in any way related to the importation of voters from San Francisco & related areas. Similar policies, similar problems?

<comment><USER9> No.

I think it's in some way related to the explosion in cost of living, importation of tech workers getting paid ludicrous amounts of money, and, despite record-setting construction rates, inability to match housing supply with demand.

Also, consider that the housing climate in Seattle is highly different from SF. There is no proposition 9. There is no rent control. There is no 'lovely California weather attracting rough sleepers' and no mythical 'bus-fulls of homeless people being shipped in from other states.' And, yet, homelessness is skyrocketing.

Maybe rent control and prop 9 aren't solely to blame for out-of-control homelessness? Maybe people like me are the problem?

<comment><USER18> I would say the legalization of marijuana

<comment><USER3> No. Homelessness exploded in San Francisco before legalization in California.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I completely missed the boat on that one with home prices. I guess that's why it's a tough issue. It's not something you can just answer without knowing a ton of variables which maybe is a task for AI. My bad. I really liked this video -> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6h7fL22WCE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6h7fL22WCE) regarding a man who tried to help (in LA) by making tiny homes.

<comment><USER20> > House/rent prices have gone way up.

No they haven't recently from sources I have seen. Housing prices are falling [0] (admittedly might be due to rising interest rates) and rents fell earlier this year [1].

[0]: [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle- ar...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-area-home- prices-drop-again-with-6-month-decline-among-largest-ever/)

[1]: [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle- ar...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-area-rents- drop-significantly-for-first-time-this-decade-as-new-apartments-sit-empty/)

<comment><USER21> A Month or even a year's price decline is insignificant. Housing prices have outpaced inflation and far outpaced wage gains nation wide for decades.[0]

As is true of every asset class relative to the value of labor[1]

Indeed, barring extreme systemic changes, there are a couple of things that we can be absolutely certain of nation wide in 10 years: housing will be less affordable and there will be more homeless.

[0] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/how-much-housing-prices- have...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/how-much-housing-prices-have-risen- since-1940.html)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty- First_Ce...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty- First_Century)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> He discounts _immediately_ the obvious solution for the problem houseless people face: providing them homes.

At $80,000 a year, it's absurd that we are unable to use that money to actually finance housing.

What he says about it:

>about 80 percent of people who are on the streets, uh, struggle with lifetime drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness

Is a total non-sequitur. People that struggle with lifetime addiction and mental illness have those problems exacerbated by not having housing. Providing stable housing is _the first step_ toward coping with that illness.

They're doing it in Canada, and the results validate this policy:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/world/canada/homeless- can...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/world/canada/homeless-canada- medicine-hat-housing-first.html)

>the cost of housing the homeless was far less than the cost of the emergency services needed by the homeless while they were living on the street.

>"The reduction in days in jail alone pays for the program," said Jaime Rogers, a Medicine Hat housing official. She cited studies that said the average homeless person costs taxpayers 120,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $91,600, in services, while it costs just 18,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $13,740, to house someone and provide the necessary retention support.

<comment><USER23> I really dislike it when people downvote perfectly valid political opinions they disagree with and don't even bother to respond to you. I agree with you that building homes for the homeless is a fantastically effective way to deal with homelessness. I'm sorry you're not getting the respect you deserve. You've got my upvote.

<comment><USER3> I suspect some of the downvotes are coming not from disagreement, but because the first line of the parent's comment misstates the interviewee's conclusions about providing housing. I share your view that downvotes should be reserved for comments that don't encourage productive discussion and comments should be used to disagree, and misstating conclusions from an article is not productive.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. Thanks for the clear reply. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rotate Sales/Support Agent WhatsApp Numbers - <AUTHOR> Hi,
So my friend had an idea that I'm not sure whether good or not but are there people out there that use WhatsApp as their sales tool (especially to close sale)?
So his idea is to rotate the agent telephone numbers (that has WhatsApp) so that a company can just use one URL in an ad and that system will rotate it for that company.
Oh yeah, maybe this tool can be used to rotate WhatsApp numbers as a support tool as well for any business that use WhatsApp as their support tool.
At least the company that use this tool doesn't need to create multiple ads with the same numbers (especially in FB ads) and on their website, they can use it to rotate their sales/support agent.
Do you think it's a good idea? I'm thinking of building it as a product and maybe charge a bit. 3-5 dollars maybe?
Thank you for your feedback! <comment><AUTHOR> Let me add some details:

Lets imagine you have 4 or 5 salespeople. And you wanted people to contact them through WhatsApp after you run your ad in FB.

You can create multiple ads with different phone numbers (with a short link to WhatsApp), or you can use the rotator to rotate the salespeople numbers so that you only use 1 link to rotate through the WhatsApp numbers.

Do you get the idea? I think it's useful for business that use WhatsApp as one of their sales tool or as a support tool...</comment>


The Data Are In: It's Time for Major Reopening - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-data-are-in-its-time-for-major-reopening-11592264199 <comment><USER2> Um, then why are so many places that have already opened closing again? Cases are surging nationwide, with particular hot spots in FL, TX, AZ. Methinks this writer has a non-fact-based agenda.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, typical propaganda from WSJ's pro-Trump editorial board.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you program in black or white? - <AUTHOR>

I just switched from Eclipse to TextMate a month ago. With that change I also wanted to try out coloured text on black background.
Interestingly it's a huge improvement for me. I seem to be much more focussed. It's also really pleasing to look at code now.
Did you have similar experiences? In which colours do you program? <comment><USER2> I started out with dark backgrounds because of vim + Linux. The default terminal was black. Now I use the dark background w/ color text for all my editors/IDEs.

I tried switching to the white background for a week, but it really hurt my eyes. I had to switch back after a few days.

<comment><USER3> Same experience here. I start having difficulty coding when the background is too bright, or even when the text is too bright on a black background (I had the text be a light gray for nearly a year, and I never really realized it wasn't white. Then when I looked at white on black code, it looked very bright and unpleasant to read.)

<comment><USER4> Really? I never had that problem. I started out using Notepad++'s default coloring (black on white). Then I switched to Vim and used a dark background. Switching between dark and light background has never been a problem for me.

Could you elaborate more on your situation? Did you always use a dark background? What are the conditions around where you code?

Light grey on black for me is still too hard to see. I prefer pure black and white. On the Windows Command Prompt, I set the default color to 0F instead of the default.

My concern is not so much with a dark/light scheme, but with color contrast.

Currently, I use Vim with a dark colorscheme ('desert') and I love it. My friend, Aaron, also uses a dark colorscheme.

However, my other friend, Brian C., has an affinity for light backgrounds. Whenever I show him code on any dark colorscheme, his first response is to make it white. Then again, that is his normal setup; that is what he always deals with.

<comment><USER3> I coded at first a few years ago with the normal Eclipse-type scheme, but then when I switched to Linux+Vim and later Linux+Emacs I've always used a black background with light gray text. I'm probably just not used to coding on light backgrounds, since I haven't done it in a long while - if I did it for a few hours, I'd probably adjust. I just haven't really had the need to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use light background. I feel like I have to. Any time I switch from light text to dark text it takes time for my eyes to adjust. So when I'm looking up documentation etc everything need to be the same. Even the bar at the top bothers me. SO I use the black on white.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been using dark/black backgrounds for literally years. The question that most interests me now is warm vs cool colors for syntax highlighting. Without realizing it, I had been using primarily warm tones for a long time. Then, I installed MacVim and started using the default dark bg theme, which uses cool tones... I kinda like it!

</comment><comment><USER7> See: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect>

<comment><USER8> Interesting point. So perhaps the implicit suggestions is to randomise your backgrounds and colour schemes to improve productivity. Maybe if you told others that it was part of an experiment and the results were 'being monitored' it might work for a while. Otherwise I don't think so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I cant stand light backgrounds, i prefer dark ones(but not black). This is the vim colorscheme im using:

<http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1778>

I like it a lot!

<comment><USER10> There's a great VibrantInk port for vim around too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recently switched from a black & white scheme to a colored scheme. As of now I'm enjoying a black-greyish background with some nifty colors.

IMO, colored code makes the process much more fun. I'm not sure if it makes me more productive though, but I wouldn't rule it out.

Small screenshot: [http://photos-f.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak- snc1/v2102/219/106/34...](http://photos-f.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak- snc1/v2102/219/106/340100047/n340100047_68221_5999.jpg)

<comment><USER12> what editor is this?

<comment><USER13> Looks like Komodo Edit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't like white _or_ black backgrounds, though I prefer white to black in a typical windowed environment. If my editor has the full screen it doesn't matter, but I don't like menus and other windows being a lot brighter than the editor. It's either distracting, or it's a jarring readjustment every time I have to change windows.

If it weren't for syntax highlighting, I'd prefer slight color variations, with not much preference towards dark-on-light or light-on-dark. If I have a lighter background I usually prefer the text to be black. If I have a darker background I usually prefer the text to be slightly colored. In web terms, an example would be "99DD99" text on "303030" background, or "99DD99" background with black text.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've got to put a vote in for white backgrounds. I find dark background terribly hard to read, especially with colored text. White backgrounds have a higher contrast with the text. I also turn the brightness down on my monitors, so I don't feel it's too blinding.

I also can't stand it if the syntax highlighting is too colorful. I like some coloring for reserved words, type names, comments, and string literals. Other than that black on white.

What I find more important that color schemes is having a nice font. If you're on Windows, and not using Consolas, you're missing out big time. Consolas is actually designed to look good with sub-pixel rendering. If you can't use Consolas, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is a nice second.

</comment><comment><USER16> I didn't realize it for quite some time, but what I actually use is:

      - dark means "brain: use vim keys" (:colo darkblue)
      - light means use arrow/CUA keys, a la most "normal" applications.

(ps, please add
/
 formatting)

</comment><comment><USER17> I actually program with a navy blue background in some languages and a white background in others. With ruby, python I have a blue background in vim and with xhtml, css, and javascript I use a white background.

</comment><comment><USER18> I strongly prefer light on dark, but hated pretty much every emacs theme I found. A couple days ago, I ported a friend's "IR Black" vim theme to emacs. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but:

[http://github.com/burke/color-theme-ir- black/blob/master/scr...](http://github.com/burke/color-theme-ir- black/blob/master/screenshot.png)

EDIT: Upon further investigation, I believe this color theme originated from <http://blog.infinitered.com/entries/show/6> .

</comment><comment><USER19> Strange - I've been using black (lately w syntax coloring) text/white background since I was first able to (early '80s - VT100 days) after using white on black for most of the 70's.

</comment><comment><USER20> I like a white background. The color schemes for black backgrounds always seem to be off for one color or another.

</comment><comment><USER21> #222 for background, something like #eee for common text, and light pale colors for vars/stings/etc. I found that #fff text on #000 bg hurts even more than plain black-on-white.

Also, overhighlighting kills my ability to focus - I use at max. 4 colors

</comment><comment><USER22> i had a vt510 connected to an openbsd machine in my bedroom about 10 years ago and did most of my unix work with it. since it can't display colors, i setup mutt, vim, tin, epic, etc. to only use bold/underline/reverse attributes for highlighting instead of different colors.

10 years later and i'm now using openbsd on a laptop and typing in an xterm instead of a vt510, but i still only use bold/underline/reverse in all of those terminal apps. however, i did switch from grey text on a black background on the vt510 to black text on a white background in xterm, but that's probably just because it's the default on openbsd.

</comment><comment><USER23> Terminal I go dark - Textmate I go light.

Maybe I should switch to dark - it is a bit nicer on the eyes I think.

Edit: Switched over Textmate to a dark theme, and I am glad for the reminder. I don't know why on this new machine I didn't have it set that way!

</comment><comment><USER24> I started using the Railscast TextMate theme a few months ago and have been quite satisfied - it's got a dark grey-ish brown background. <http://railscasts.com/about>

</comment><comment><USER25> I use black or syntax coloring on gray or ivory background. My eyes are old and the contrast with colors on black is too low for me to read easily. I prefer the off white background because pure white is too bright.

</comment><comment><USER26> It depends on the language I am programming in.

Java - white (Eclipse)

Python - Black (gedit)

Lisp - White (emacs)

Ruby - White (TextEdit)

C/C++ - Black (gedit)

I have noticed that certain text editors have dark themes I like, whereas other dark themes just hurt my eyes. I have no true preference, only what I am used to.

</comment><comment><USER27> I use the ZenBurn colors. <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000682.html>

Very easy to read. And not boring.

</comment><comment><USER28> Black background, light-coloured text, not too much Angry Fruit Salad, very small fonts to fit as much as possible on the screen.

Easier on the eyes, plus it happens to be what I'm used to.

</comment><comment><USER29> Black Background, White Text.

If I SSH into a remote machine, I'm still in my normal environment. Another reason I use VIM as well. If I need to get fancy, I can SCP my .vimrc in as well.

</comment><comment><USER30> I use Visual Studio with the Vibrant Ink color scheme from TextMate, and I've had the same experience. I find it surprisingly pleasant.

</comment><comment><USER31> Dark on light, always. Specifically, I use #0d2a3a as my background; a nice dark blue I find a bit more pleasing than just black.

</comment><comment><USER32> On Eclipse and Xcode it's black text (or colored for keywords) on white background. I haven't programmed on a black background since the early 90s on the Apple II.

I remember making the switch, at first I was shocked. By now, I'm completely used to it.

<http://fairsoftware.net> : where geeks are their own boss

</comment><comment><USER33> Black background, green text. I've never managed to move past the televideo terminal!

</comment><comment><USER34> I prefer black on grey for editor windows and gray on black for terminal windows.

</comment><comment><USER35> Been using Cobalt theme in Textmate (dark blue) for years myself.

</comment><comment><USER36> :colorscheme desert

</comment><comment><USER37> I program in shades of gray.

</comment><comment><USER38> green on black</comment>