How the Universal Symbols for Escalators, Restrooms, and Transport Were Designed - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-universal-symbols-for-escalators-restrooms-and-transport-were-designed <comment><USER2> The icon thing has bugged me since its appearance on the Mac:

1\. Companies tend to copyright them, rendering a universal set impossible. At least these universal symbols are not copyrighted.

2\. If you don't know what they mean, there's no way to find out.

Take the universal symbols (though not in that list) for on and off: | and O. I still cannot remember which is on and which is off. I can't find out, either, without googling for it. With the words "on" and "off", I know what they mean.

And more importantly, if I do not know English, I can trivially look up "on" and "off". Why is "|" as a symbol better than "on" as a symbol?

Why is "Helvetica Man" inherently better than "men" and "toilet"? Knowing English is not necessary to recognize the words "men" and "toilet" with just as much facility as having enough savvy to remember that a silhouette of a man means "mens toilet".

Back in 1985, an Apple salesman showed up at our company to sell us on Macs. Part of his spiel was passing around a sheet of paper with icons on them and asking us what the icons meant. None of us had used a gui before, and he was bitterly annoyed that we guessed wrong on nearly all of them. The one I remember most we decided represented a box of Kleenex. (That one was the 'print' icon.) The air went out of his presentation after that.

The idea there was that there was something wrong with using English words, like "print". A phonetic language really is a great advance. Words can be looked up in a dictionary. Where are icons looked up (especially if they are different on every system due to copyrights)?

Is learning a dozen standardized English words really harder for someone who knows no English than learning a dozen icons?

When I use a gui app, I still have to hover over the icon that somebody got a design award for (sarcasm!) hoping that the coder saw fit to add a tooltip so I know what it does.

<comment><USER3> > And more importantly, if I do not know English, I can trivially look up "on" > and "off". Why is "|" as a symbol better than "on" as a symbol? > > Why is > "Helvetica Man" inherently better than "men" and "toilet"? Knowing English > is not necessary to recognize the words "men" and "toilet" with just as much > facility as having enough savvy to remember that a silhouette of a man means > "mens toilet".

For one simple reason: If you know them, they're far quicker to read. Take road traffic for example. Everytime I visit America I notice how much more efficient clean, distinct symbols are: Practically _everything_ is conveyed by written out words "Speed Limit", "No Parking", "No right turn on red", "No U-Turns" and so on. Such signs require, that I read and parse them. In fact, if one understands English it's probably taking longer to recognize a sign, because several functional units in your brain try to take precedence on the interpretation.

In Europe we have very distinct symbols for each and every traffic regulation. The effect of this is that you can read them very quickly (it happens almost unconciously) and more importantly it even works if you glimpse them only in the periphery of your vision.

<comment><USER2> I agree that once you know the European traffic symbols, they require less cognitive effort.

Once you know what they are. You might think they are all obvious, having grown up with them. But they aren't. I went to Germany when I was 9, and they most assuredly are not intuitively obvious.

Ironically, I was told that the European traffic symbols came about because the Europeans could not agree on which language to use. The only exception was they adopted the U.S. "STOP" sign.

<comment><USER4> They aren't intuitive to those of us who grew up with them either, nor are they meant to be. You learn them, though, if you want a license.

It's not easy and is super frustrating and arbitrary when you're first going through them in preparation for your test. But if you want a license, you do it. And then you know them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link to the full set of symbols, if anyone else is interested: [http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/](http://www.aiga.org/symbol-signs/)

<comment><USER6> Thanks!

Note, FTA:

> They changed one of the three male figures riding in an elevator to a female > figure.

In the link you posted, the three figures in the elevator are all Helvetica Man. OTOH, the "nursery" symbol is a baby, not a bottle. So it's not the original symbol set, but it might not be the most up-to-date, either.

EDIT. The "exit" symbol is interesting. It's a circle split vertically. I don't recall ever seeing that before. (Or perhaps I saw it, but had no idea what it meant.)

<comment><USER7> I've seen the Exit symbol. It was green as opposed to the red No Entry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The AIGA symbols are interesting in the biases they encode.

The symbol for "man" is the outline of an adult human. The symbol for "woman" is the outline of an adult human, but wearing a dress. So, male is considered the default. Masculinity is the absence of femininity.

The symbol for "toilets" is the symbol for "woman" (an adult human with a dress) next to the symbol for "man" (an human), with a dividing line between them. We heavily associate toilets with sex segregation, apparently.

They also show their age: the symbol for currency conversion lacks the Euro and instead has a French franc!

<comment><USER9> > The symbol for "man" is the outline of an adult human. The symbol for > "woman" is the outline of an adult human, but wearing a dress. So, male is > considered the default.

I'm pretty sure the intent is that the symbol for "man" is the outline of an adult human wearing pants and a shirt -- that the variations like "arriving flights" and "customs" aren't, respectively, a nude figure with a brief case and a nude figure with a load-bearing belt inspecting luggage. If you want to critique the bias, its not "male as default", its "current gender- stereotypical clothing as the distinguisher between genders".

<comment><USER8> Where did I ever say they were an unclothed person?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Being a fairly recent parent, on a weekend trip abroad I was annoyed to learn that for some users (this was in otherwise-awesome Amsterdam's Schiphol airport), the "baby bottle" icon doesn't imply that facilities to actually heat baby food are present.

I felt like all it meant was that a baby-changing table was installed, which really has very little to do with feeding the baby. The two uses are temporally separated (most times).

We ended up going to a café and asking them instead, which of course worked fine but was more costly since it guilted us into having something too. :)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've been a fan of a webcomic that is nothing but these symbols (and others like them). It looks like XKCD, but with a more machined look.

[http://www.systemcomic.com/](http://www.systemcomic.com/)

</comment><comment><USER12> What would be a good symbol for innovation, other than a lightbulb? For makerspaces?

</comment><comment><USER13> I've been to 25ish countries and the bathroom symbol is not universal.

</comment><comment><USER14> These symbols are so successful. I'd like to to see sets of symbols for some other areas.

</comment><comment><USER15> It is interesting how the designers were not themselves authoritative.

<comment><USER16> Go on?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What was the problem with the baby bottle?

<comment><USER16> If you go to a feeding room, you're going to breastfeed, not bottle-feed. If the DoT don't want have tits in the pictogram, that's fine, but a bottle is not representative of the activity.

Babies are normally breast-fed, and should be breast-fed. Breastfeeding is one of the most important activities of motherhood. The bottle represents an unnatural and less-than-ideal replacement, and insults and cheapens mothers.

That's my take on the contemporary arguments. Modern arguments would have a slightly different feminist spin ;-)

<comment><USER18> This is a kind of weird objection. No one thinks about anything other than feeding a baby if you show them a baby bottle. No one would know what you were going for if you just had a glyph of tits, and anything more precise would be needlessly complicated.

<comment><USER16> Tits are nude beach; this would be a baby feeding on a teat, something like this[1].

[1] [http://imgur.com/QOwxiHp](http://imgur.com/QOwxiHp)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's a favorite short story of yours? - <AUTHOR> It's a lovely Sunday here and I'm on the hunt for some short-form reading.  I assume this crowd will lean towards scifi but that's not a requirement for this thread.<p>I'll start with AutoFac, a Phillip K. Dick story about living in a post-scarcity world where things get thoroughly pizzled: https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1955-11/Galaxy_1955_11#page/n71/mode/2up <comment><USER2> [https://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed- bandit/](https://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed-bandit/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The Swimmer by John Cheever and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula LaGuin are my favorite short stories. So much depth and feeling packed into such tiny packages!

</comment><comment><USER4> Robert Arthur - "The Marvelous Stamps of El Dorado"

Frederick Forsyth - "The Shepherd"[0]

[0] A great live reading from Al Maitland (aired nationwide across Canada on CBC every Christmas):

[http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/fireside-al-maitland- rea...](http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/fireside-al-maitland-reads- frederick-forsyth-s-the-shepherd-1.2472038)

<comment><USER4> Correction: Frederick Forsyth _e_

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like Salman Rushdie's "East-West," "9 June 2015" about people who never die from Alan Lightmans _Einstein 's Dreams_, if you like ghost stories I recommend JS Le Fanu's "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street."

</comment><comment><USER6> Eight O'clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson which was the basis for the movie They Live.

Read it here: [http://www.whale.to/b/eight_o.html](http://www.whale.to/b/eight_o.html)

The Egg by Andy Weir [http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html](http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> "They're Made Out Of Meat" by Terry Bisson: [http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html](http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html)

"Scroogled" by Cory Doctorow: [http://www.crimeflare.com/doctorow.html](http://www.crimeflare.com/doctorow.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Here a couple of my favorites.

[http://ficly.com/stories/1456](http://ficly.com/stories/1456) \- be careful what you wish for

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Beasts_and_Super- Beasts/The_O...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Beasts_and_Super- Beasts/The_Open_Window)

</comment><comment><USER9> I like Who Moved my Cheese - Dr. Spencer Johnson

[http://jef.mentalis.org/hersenspinsels/downloads/WhoMovedMyC...](http://jef.mentalis.org/hersenspinsels/downloads/WhoMovedMyCheese_DrSpencerJohnson.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> The Complete Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway >[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4625.The_Complete_Short_S...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4625.The_Complete_Short_Stories)

</comment><comment><USER11> I really like Different Kinds of Darkness by David Langford. [http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds- of...](http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of-darkness/)

</comment><comment><USER12> "The Outsider" by H.P. Lovecraft: [http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/o.aspx](http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/o.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER13> The Burning Chrome collection by William Gibson is always worth a read.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Chrome_(short_story_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Chrome_\(short_story_collection\))

</comment><comment><USER14> Zen Shorts is one of my favorites [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Shorts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Shorts)

</comment><comment><USER15> It's Monday but if I have think of a non sci-fi short story for a lovely Sunday, it will have to be anything from Eggs, Beans and Crumpets by P.G.Wodehouse for me.

</comment><comment><USER16> The A&P by John Updike

[http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/](http://www.tiger- town.com/whatnot/updike/)

</comment><comment><USER17> The Last Question by Isaac Asimov is a classic one - [http://multivax.com/last_question.html](http://multivax.com/last_question.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> much of O. Henry, "The gift of the Magi", and "The Last Leaf" are really good. Also virtually anything by Borges, "The Library of Babel" is a nice place to start.

<comment><USER19> You're probably already familiar with it - but for those who are not. A form of the Library of Babel exists online [0]. Also includes an image form of every image that has ever existed and ever will exist (at a specific size/resolution). Mostly noise. :)

[0] [https://libraryofbabel.info](https://libraryofbabel.info)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Borges

All of them.

But one of my favorites: A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)

</comment><comment><USER21> The Euphio Question by Vonnegut is quite fun.</comment>


Virtual Reality Has Reached a "Tipping Point." It's Officially Here to Stay - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/virtual-reality-tipping-point/ <comment><USER2> "VR is in a tailspin, and the sales numbers prove it" [https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/proof-vr-sales- numbe...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/proof-vr-sales-numbers- sinking/)</comment>


Rural America has a serious internet problem - <AUTHOR> http://theweek.com/speedreads/706172/rural-america-serious-internet-problem <comment><USER2> They kind of do it to themselves on top of a lack of investment. The people in denser areas are there for network effects that include cheaping hooking large numbers of people up to actual networks. Many rural people like to be "away from it all" in simpler, quieter area. Well, that makes it expensive to connect them. They also favor private sector and capitalism in their politics which is what they're getting in terms of Internet service. ;)</comment>


Mubert. World's first online composer of electronic music - <AUTHOR> http://play.mubert.com <comment><USER2> The website requires that you provide it with an email address before you can hear the music it "composes". The result sounds to me like rather generic EDM style music, which I'm not interested in.</comment>


East Australian Humpback whale bounces back from near extinction - <AUTHOR> https://www.smh.com.au/environment/sustainability/superheroes-of-the-deep-humpbacks-bounce-back-from-near-extinction-to-help-fight-climate-change-20200528-p54xhq.html <comment><USER2> > _The ocean 's microscopic, single-celled plant known as phytoplankton > produces more oxygen than all forests combined, with marine biologists > estimating it contributes between 50 per cent and 85 per cent of the Earth's > oxygen levels._

Holy crap. I didn't know that part.

> _When there are not enough whales in the ocean, krill consume phytoplankton > at an unsustainable rate and threaten the global oxygen supply._

Unfortunately, "Burn krill, not rainforests!" isn't catchy enough for a bumper sticker.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't whales catch as much plankton as krill? It doesn't seem like they have a way to distinguish.

<comment><USER4> Whales fill their mouth wide open with water and spit it out through their baleens, a set of comb-like teeths that filter out everything smaller than a krill. Krills are 1-2 centimeters long and they feed on plankton much smaller than that, so it gets filtered out.

Interestingly there is no clear difference between krill and plankton. Krill are small crustacean animals, while plankton encompasses all organisms, animal or algae or protozoan (including jellyfish), that float passively in a body of water, as opposed to nektons, who swim actively. Altough most krills are nektons, some species, such as amphionides, are plankton.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I eat Jello I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth and squeeze the Jello through my teeth and imagine I am a whale filtering krill against my baleen.

<comment><USER6> I think that aspic might be a better gelatin-based analogy. Otherwise it's just mastication without chewing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whales do considerably more, like recyling iron to the surface where it's needed [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale's_faeces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale's_faeces)

I'd expect the narrow population bottleneck they've been pushed through (down to 150 individuals) would leave them with much less genetic diversity. That could be a serious and very long term problem (or not).

Irrelevant fact: whales can get flu (coronaviruses). Just FYI

<comment><USER8> Interesting, almost looks as if whale conservation, despite having been started for purely sentimental reasons afaik, has turned out to be saving our asses a bit in terms of climate change and overfishing.

<comment><USER9> Ecologists frequently focus public efforts on widely recognizable umbrella species. Humpback whales are widely distributed and touch many complex parts of the ecosystem. Making them the face of conservation efforts makes sense, because protecting them entails protecting the ecosystem they live in and rely on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is a little more complicated than that

Humpbacks and Sperm wales recovered. The later recovered because they do not eat krill.

Right whales recovered partially, the two species from the northern hemisphere still struggle to survive with total populations of around 410 whales and 23 whales. Yes, 23 animals. That would comprise like 12 females or so in total.

They are protected for the last 80 years if I remember correctly. And we are seeing the same animals again and again since this decade. Still not recovered.

China has wiped the yellow river dolphin and most probably also the vaquita, that was endemic from California and could be beyond repair by now. Maybe 5 or 10 reproductive females remaining and a single calf each two years. Coronavirus did more to save the american porpoise in this critical years than the current administration (and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise).

> The ocean single-celled plant known as phytoplankton

> when there are not enough whales krill consume phytoplankton at an > unsustainable rate

Both statements are wrong.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand the claim that they are helping fight climate change.

Is lack of oxygen in the atmosphere a concern at all? Is it a concern for climate change? I've certainly heard of methane and CO2 levels being too high causing problems, but not of Oxygen levels being too low causing problems.

<comment><USER12> Photosynthesis uses C02 to convert sunlight to energy which is used by the organism and oxygen, as a byproduct, which is released. The more phytoplankton there are, the more CO2 is removed and converted to oxygen. It's exactly the same reason rainforests are good, there's just a shit ton more plankton than there's ever been trees, and their photosynthesis is efficient.

[https://earthsky.org/earth/how-much-do-oceans-add-to- worlds-...](https://earthsky.org/earth/how-much-do-oceans-add-to-worlds- oxygen)

<comment><USER13> Rainforests provide a lot more than the oxygen of their trees. They provide habitats for countless species of diverse animals across nearly the entire spectrum of the animal kingdom, many of which can be found exclusively there.

As stated elsewhere in the comments on this article, oxygen in the atmosphere is not an issue for us. It's CO2 and the preservation of other creatures that should motivate us, amongst other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Timeline of Humpback whaling...

1700 - Early humpback whaling begins.

1844 - Invention of the explosive harpoon.

1904 - Whaling expands to the Antarctic. (massive decline in populations)

1966 - IWC banned commercial humpback whaling.

<comment><USER15> 1985 - Captain Kirk and his crew arrive from 2286 in a captured Klingon Bird of Prey to retrieve a breeding pair of humpback whales to repopulate the species and save Earth from a random probe that wanted to talk to them

<comment><USER16> Made my day :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales had anything to do with this.

<comment><USER14> Humpback whaling was banned globally in 1966, so no.

<comment><USER13> Banning != stopping, for what its worth. Greater awareness can put pressure on clandestine whaling efforts as well via funding for greater enforcement and related aspects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> New Title: Humpbacks makes comeback after reduction of whaling industry: there, fixed it for ya.

</comment><comment><USER19> Now if only the humans could somehow find a way to help...

</comment><comment><USER20> Ssssh. Don't tell the Japanese whaling ships, they'll find a way to justify killing them for science (sic).

</comment><comment><USER21> The humpback bump back will only last if we quiet shipping lanes.

<comment><USER11> Says who?

<comment><USER22> Let me Google that for you: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hump...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=humpback+whale+shipping+lanes&btnG=)

<comment><USER11> So let me get this straight, in spite of not quieting the shipping lanes, the population has exploded, which is impossible according to you.

Somebody forgot to tell the whales, apparently.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get coverage for a new app - <AUTHOR>

Me and my team will soon launch or first app for iOS. It is basically a native peer-to-peer translation service.
My question is how can we maximize our probability of getting coverage on the day of launch?
Media kit has already been put together along with background info about the app and us. <comment><USER2> Reach out to journalists for the media you want to be covered in. Be sure to tell them how this service will benefit the audience they are/will be writing for. They are all looking for stories that their readers will find valuable. So pitch your story accordingly. All the best!</comment>


Why Oil Is Finally Declining - <AUTHOR> http://wallstreetexaminer.com/2014/12/why-the-price-of-oil-is-finally-declining-and-why-it-will-lead-to-disaster/ <comment><USER2> Dont know much about geo-politics but someone is playing a huge dirty game .... could be OPEC or USA ... it deals with many issues at hand:

1\. Strangling Russian economy

2\. Straightening out Iran

3\. Disrupt Shale Oil production rise

4\. Create financial gap between cheap oil and other renewable alternatives ....etc...etc...etc...

It will be very interesting to see what happens in the countries where shale oil production is on rise .... somehow tax payers are going to pay because many shale oil companies may go bankrupt ... that means either you pay higher prices at gas pump & stores (b'cause oil is expensive) or pay for shale oil companies that cant sustain their economies.

<comment><USER3> It isn't so much as they are now playing a dirty game, it is more that OPEC has been playing a dirty game for a long time. Now its members are no longer in lockstep and it is causing a huge correction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is wrong. There is no evidence "malinvestment" exists at economy scale in any significant way.

Money is a government made artificial store of value made to make transactions and contracts easier. It has no intrinsic value in itself and it should not artificially keep value at a rate that makes it desirable enough so that it displaces private stores of value, such as private bonds, stocks, commodities, or even buying now what you will need later.

It is a sad state that a lot of countries currently let the risk adjusted value of their money have better returns than private market stores of value thus making people invest in fiat instead of in the real economy. This causes unemployment and low productivity.

When people, businesses and banks invest in government sponsored fiat instead of the real economy because fiat has a better return, it is a subsidy to economic idleness that jams the private markets. In Europe they desperately need inflation to overshoot a bit to unjam their markets.

Otherwise all this idle money that accumulates without sufficient production capacity to back it up will create problems in the future. Idle money that starts chasing few goods is a risk of spikes in inflation, that or painful corrective high interest rates. In general a little overshoot of inflation early in a recession prevents more inflation later by making money less desirable compared to private investments and preventing it from accumulating idly too much.

</comment><comment><USER5> This should illustrate why getting "off oil" should be such a priority. That doesn't mean totally phasing it out, which would probably take centuries, but it does mean getting to the point where oil is no longer the rate limiting reagent in the economy.

Right now our hopes, dreams, futures, and lives are pinned to the oil price graph. If it doesn't scare you, you haven't thought about it very much.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately falling oil prices puts a lot of pressure on alternative energy sources. We were _just_ getting to the point where the unsubsidized price of wind & solar was within spitting distance of oil.

Though replacing coal with natural gas is a net win for the environment, and that might accelerate with natural gas prices dropping through the floor.

<comment><USER7> Natural gas prices in the US should stabilize as the American producers begin exporting to the world market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _The central banks have been frustrated in their insane and misguided aim to increase inflation because QE and ZIRP actually foster the opposite of what central bankers expect. Central bankers and economists think that to get inflation they only need to print more money, not recognizing that the inflation that does result from money printing, asset inflation, leads eventually to consumer goods deflation._

Central bankers are wrong! Economists are wrong! This one blogger knows the truth!

Seriously, it makes me lose all faith in a writer if they so openly and freely trash-talk so many other people.

</comment><comment><USER9> Oil is declining because the Saudis are dumping it.

Their oil is cheap to produce because it is near the surface and plentiful and "good quality".

They probably figured they better halt development in other parts of the world by making it unprofitable for others to produce.

The question is how long they will keep it up.

Just imagine how much every extra penny on the cost of oil/gas squeezes out of the economy every day.

[http://i.imgur.com/hi9pTsQ.png](http://i.imgur.com/hi9pTsQ.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> Planet Money on NPR has a great story on this. [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/11/05/361424491/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/11/05/361424491/episode-580-the- other-side-of-the-pump)

</comment><comment><USER10> Last but not least tumbling oil prices is a convenient way to hurt russia.

Add this to "why" list.</comment>


Steve Jobs is giving the iPad keynote :) - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Why aren't they streaming it?</comment>


Almost Yahooed - <AUTHOR> http://jeichlersummers.tumblr.com/post/51074861604/almost-yahooed

<comment><USER2> Interesting read. I agreed with most of the build-up to the climax. Yahoo! does frequent my mind now! Yahoo! is doing some interesting things!

Although, after reading I did visit Yahoo.com on my iOS device's and I was greeted with a much more pleasant mobile experience than the OP. For example, swiping gestures flicked through headline articles, stationary search bar, and a hamburger menu icon that hid navigation to other areas of Yahoo!.

Maybe it was just the OP's device?

</comment><comment><USER3> So I downloaded yahoo's android app.

10 minutes later I was still unable to register for an account. No helpful errors, dead-end states. It was as terrible as terrible could be.

Then I tried signing in using my google account. Of course that meant that the login site would crash and would be unusable for the next 5 minutes.

So yeah, not a good first 15 minutes with flickr.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just went to the homepage on my Android device and tried with both default browser and chrome.

Both correct size and the chrome one also had swipe gestures enabled. <http://imgur.com/QYZElnq>

Might be based on location (I saw you were accessing from U K).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - I think it is to do with location. I tried out the UK Yahoo site on my desktop, and the US one and they are WORLDS appart.</comment></comment>


Volgograd: many dead in second explosion in Russian city - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/30/russia-second-explosion-volgograd

<comment><AUTHOR> Would anybody complain if Putin launched air strikes against the Saudi regime?

From August this year:

 _Prince Bandar pledged to safeguard Russia's naval base in Syria if the Assad regime is toppled, but he also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia's Winter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord. "I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us," he allegedly said.

Prince Bandar went on to say that Chechens operating in Syria were a pressure tool that could be switched on an off. "These groups do not scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role in Syria's political future." _

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilan...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/10266957/Saudis- offer-Russia-secret-oil-deal-if-it-drops-Syria.html)</comment>


How to Hire the Next Michael Jordan - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/node/36186/print <comment><USER2> Sigh, not another article on how to hire LeBron James. :p</comment>


What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk <comment><USER2> Love this video and bless his parents for being so supportive of a outrageous hobby! I'm going to shamelessly quote a comment from YouTube that always makes me laugh:

> "This young man has a screw loose. Kudos to his parents for not tightening > it!"</comment>


AFNetworking: A Delightful Networking Library for iOS and Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.gowalla.com/2011/10/24/afnetworking/

<comment><USER2> I haven't reviewed the implementation, but the API alone appears to be a significant improvement over the previously available options.

However, the use of non-prefixed category methods (monkey-patching) is an inappropriate design choice, given the fact that the likelihood of conflict is actually higher than 0 when using non-prefixed category methods.

Let's say you were doing a gradual migration from ASIHTTP -- you'd have a non- deterministic conflict on the -[UIImageView setImageWithURL:] category method.

Unfortunately -- and despite repeated advisements to not do so by Apple engineers and others -- AFNetworking isn't the only library to add such a category method, and in fact, a number of libraries and third-party code add different, conflicting -[UIImageView setImageWithURL:] category methods. It's not too hard to wind up with a conflict.

Category methods should always be name-prefixed to avoid conflict, if you're going to use them at all:

      -[UIImageView af_setImageWithURL:]

<comment><USER2> As a follow-up -- are there any of the authors here?

The implementation looks pretty good, but some questions.

It looks like you might be using -[NSRunLoop run] to spin a background runloop? That will return immediately if no sources are scheduled in the runloop, which will result in a CPU-heavy busy-waiting thread -- unless I'm missing something here?

I was also wondering about choices like the use of a single statically allocated serial dispatch queue for performing all JSON parsing, rather than using concurrent queues and letting GCD figure out how much concurrency to leverage given the application state and hardware available.

Also, it appears that all callbacks are directly dispatched onto the main thread. Is there any interest in adding support for allowing the caller to specify dispatch onto other queues, in the case that they don't want to hit the main queue for background processing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I'm the primary creator of AFNetworking.

\- As I understand threading and run loop scheduling, the run loop will spin up as needed when an NSURLConnection attaches itself to it, and back down again when no more connections are active. The dedicated network thread is there only to manage that run loop.

\- Regarding processing queues, like the JSON one, I thought it would be a good idea to isolate that from the global queue; it could always target another queue if needed. Also, unless I'm mistaken, those queues should be concurrent rather than serial.

\- As for dispatching to the main thread, this only happens it after all of the work in the operation is done. This just seems like good default behavior. If you wanted to, you could very easily override this by manually setting the `completionBlock` yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This library is described as "Insanely Fast", and performance feats on various connection types are described.

Is the implication that it performs some optimization that regular sockets could not do? Or is it merely faster than some alternative? I don't know terribly much about the i* ecosystem, but it seems like speed should be the least distinctive attribute for networking libraries; providing a helpful abstraction is the real concern, and only by considerably folly or cleverness would performance differ noticeably.

<comment><AUTHOR> AFNetworking boasts really fast performance in the way that it makes concurrent requests and processes them asynchronously. That, in combination with careful tuning of the stock networking libraries makes.

There are no hard performance benchmarks, but you'll get a good sense of how fast it is if you download and run the example app--I've yet to see any apps match the table view image loading performance.

FWIW, people who have switched from ASI usually report an overall networking speedup of 2-3x.

<comment><USER4> "careful tuning of the stock networking libraries" <\-- Care to expand?

I am skeptical about claims that simply changing how it makes concurrent requests will make it 'insanely fast'. Bottom line is, outside of some careful tuning that uses knowledge of iOS internals, there isn't any real way a library can impact how fast bits travel over the wire.

Here's some feedback - if you wish to substantiate this claim, it shouldn't be hard to write the same app using ASI and then extract some real performance numbers (bonus points for publishing your test code to get doubters like me to shut up).

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the most perceptible tuning AF does is turning on HTTP pipelining for image requests (which are off, by default). Other than that, it's just small steps to use HTTP correctly as much as possible. </admittedly vague cop-out>

I understand and respect your skepticism, since by using NSURLConnection, its performance is bound by the same thing most other libraries are (although ASI was wrapped the lower-level CFNetwork APIs, FWIW). It's the stuff around the network activity--the way the application interacts with the data that makes AF fast. I've gone out of my way to design a minimal API that is performant no matter how you (mis)use it.

But you're right: I'll have to get around to writing a benchmark app at some point :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've only experimented with converting over to AF, but the experience has been fairly pleasant. In particular, Mattt has been very receptive to talking a few things out with me and even sent me a follow up this morning when one of my complaints was fixed. Interacting with the community is important for this sort of project, and Mattt has a good start on that.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been using AFNetworking for a month or two, now, and I cannot say enough good things about it. Mattt isn't joking when he describes it as a 'delightful' library; it really is a joy to use, and the community that has sprung up around it is incredibly dedicated and _very_ responsive to suggestions and bug reports.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anyone know how this library handles caching?

<comment><AUTHOR> Rather than building cacheing in, AFNetworking is designed to work with NSURLCache. I strongly recommend Peter Steinberger's [SDURLCache](<https://github.com/steipete/SDURLCache>) fork, which includes disk cacheing on iOS.

<comment><USER8> That should be a great idea (I started down that path too), but have you run into the problems I describe with NSURLCache at [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7166422/nsurlconnection-o...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7166422/nsurlconnection- on-ios-doesnt-try-to-cache-objects-larger-than-50kb) ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great work!</comment>


Randonautica: Quantumly-generated Choose Your Own Adventure reality game - <AUTHOR> https://www.randonautica.com <comment><AUTHOR> Calling all interested developers to their Telegram channel:

[https://t.me/randonauts](https://t.me/randonauts)

This app somehow has 6M downloads since April, which is quite interesting to me. How did it avoid HN's notice this whole time?

Borrowing links from my comment on the HN post about The Atlantic article on Randonautica:

Browser version runs without app install:

[https://bot.randonauts.com/](https://bot.randonauts.com/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/randonauts/](https://www.reddit.com/r/randonauts/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h148J7ym7W](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h148J7ym7W)

What is all this anyway?

[https://medium.com/@TheAndromedus/randonauting-for- dummies-h...](https://medium.com/@TheAndromedus/randonauting-for-dummies-how- to-hack-reality-with-your-phone-using-quantum-randomness-5ce82f66c10e)

[https://archive.is/wOdvb](https://archive.is/wOdvb)

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi, my company randonauts LLC makes the app randonautica. AMA

<comment><AUTHOR> Can I get a pin?

I'm 070de71d36c2385780ad3a119a976712f197c1fd5e1e84f4131fe14d1564060a on Randonautica. I got the full unlock pack, because I support this kind of thing, not to brag. I won't miss that $20, or another $15 if you find another pin in the back room. ;) I'm on the Telegram channel, or DM me on Twitter, name in bio.

[https://www.randonautica.com/product-page/limited-edition- ra...](https://www.randonautica.com/product-page/limited-edition-randonauts- gold-pin)</comment></comment>


Elon Musk provides $423K to buy laptops for all Flint middle schoolers - <AUTHOR> https://www.mlive.com//news/flint/2018/12/elon-musk-provides-423k-to-buy-laptops-for-all-flint-middle-schoolers.html <comment><USER2> Awesome, but the water is still a mess. I am not putting that on Elon. He is just enabling damaged kids.

Right, good thing to do. Many of them will benefit.

As a nation, we are facing a priority discussion, Flint being only one of a painful, growing number of data points, each speaking to our basic priorities being very poorly aligned with "promoting the general welfare."

How can we improve that?

<comment><USER3> [https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state- watc...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state- watch/382050-michigan-declares-flint-water-ok-ends-bottled-water%3famp)

The water is fixed, but the trust in government is gone (rightfully so).

<comment><USER2> No it is not.

Still a lot of very dubious reports coming out of Flint.

<comment><USER3> Oh really interesting, it seems even more inappropriate that the Flint official lie again after the EPA testing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's going on with the water situation in Flint? Has that been fully resolved?

<comment><USER3> [https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state- watc...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state- watch/382050-michigan-declares-flint-water-ok-ends-bottled-water%3famp)

Water is fixed, but trust is gone in government.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's are the key differences between Pusher and PubNub? - <AUTHOR>

I know Pusher supports WebSockets and at one point PubNub did not. What are the salient details you used to choose one over the other? <comment><USER2> Phil from PubNub here. A few differences:

-Pusher sells itself as a WebSockets platform, whereas PubNub is a protocol-independant: it uses the best protocol and technique based on the environment you're using. That means you're protected from dealing with newer protocols on older devices. As techniques mature, PubNub gradually incorporates them into its architecture.

-PubNub is globally distributed in 10 data centers. Pusher is not.

-PubNub's performance is better than Pusher's, according to at least one customer. (<https://twitter.com/thfriendly/status/220152602917220352>) PubNub's codebase is as close to the metal as possible: written in C and with lots of kernel modifications.

-If you visit Pusher's website and click on the "Scalable" tab, it lists: "40 billion messages delivered". In June 2012 alone, PubNub delivered 44.2 billion messages.

-PubNub recently hit a peak of 1,000,000 messages per second. (<http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/13/pubnub-pulse/>) I'm not sure on this one, but I don't belive Pusher's numbers are anywhere near that.</comment>


Lego to cut 1,400 staff as decade-long sales boom ends - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lego-results/lego-to-cut-1400-staff-as-decade-long-sales-boom-ends-idUSKCN1BG0WK <comment><USER2> I recently got the Jimu MeeBot Kit [1] for my kids which sells via apple.com and costs $130. Two weeks later the Lego Boost launched on Aug 1, priced at $160 [2].

The difference between the two kits is night and day. Lego is leap years ahead in build quality, the app experience, programability and flexibility. It can fire a dart, has vision+color sensor, has a touch sensor and a servo motor. It support 5 different models including a guitar, robot, cat and so forth.

The Jimu MeeBot by contrast comes with 6 servos but no sensors and the build quality is fairly poor compared to the lego. There is little else to build with it.

However, Lego has done a poor job marketing the Boost. No one really knew about the Lego Boost launch, there was no one at the stores on launch day to get one -- it was a complete non-event. The product page for the Boost is a cookie cutter page. This is their biggest category launch in a long time -- electronic, programmable kit for kids with a new app to go with it -- and they failed have a dedicated product page with all the cool stuff it can do.

With all the rage around STEM learning and iOS apps, it's a shame to see the work force suffer for lack of marketing and awareness.

I have been through a couple of stem toys including the OSMO which I really love. Lego could give all of these segments a pretty good run but they just aren't getting their message out there.

[1] [https://jimurobots.com/product/meebot- kit/](https://jimurobots.com/product/meebot-kit/) [2] [https://shop.lego.com/en-US/BOOST-Creative- Toolbox-17101](https://shop.lego.com/en-US/BOOST-Creative-Toolbox-17101)</comment>


Power and Paranoia in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/power-and-paranoia-in-silicon-valley <comment><AUTHOR> Forget the diatribe at the top, read the update.

 _" Paul Graham responded to our email seeking comment. His response, in full:

"When I said I felt like I wild animal overhearing hunters, I didn't mean I felt afraid or persecuted or anything like that. I just meant it was strange constantly reading pundits saying that we ought to get rid of something and thinking "the thing they want to get rid of is what I create."

It's certainly true that being rich and/or powerful means you're ipso facto suspect to some people. Though to be fair also ipso facto credible to other people. It polarizes people. Frankly I'd prefer to do without both. I'd rather just have whatever I write judged for whether it's true or false and not who wrote it.

But there's nothing I can do about this. I'm not going to stop writing just because I know anything I say will be attacked. (Literally anything; the hardest of the hard core haters even attacked that essay I wrote about Jessica.) The good news is that I'm used to being attacked. Before Twitter even existed I used to get mauled on Slashdot for things I wrote. "Microsoft is Dead" caused huge outrage. So I have a pretty thick skin by now."_</comment>


Ask HN: Emergency, where can I find building footprints for Kent County, MI? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
We paid a county for some GIS data, thinking it would be great, but it's complete garbage. Now we have 11 days to deliver our product to a utility in Michigan but we don't even know where to find the data we need.
We need building footprints for Kent County, MI along with their street addresses. Primarily we're looking for Grand Rapids and some of Wisconsin, MI, but if someone had access to this data, we'd like Kent County entirely just to be safe.
Does anyone know anybody who would be able to provide this, or help us find someone that can? I know Google, Nokia, Bing and a bunch of other companies have the data, but I doubt they are willing to sell it to us. Although if they did, that would be awesome.
Any ideas? I'm trying everything.
Thanks in advance, Phil <comment><USER2> If you can do it with Open Street maps, that's probably the best (but do be prepared for the licensing terms), for buildings it seems like the building tag would be helpful <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:building>

EG <http://preview.tinyurl.com/bfc65yl>

If that looks about right, I'd get the Michigan extract [http://downloads.cloudmade.com/americas/northern_america/uni...](http://downloads.cloudmade.com/americas/northern_america/united_states/michigan) and use Osmfilter to pull out only the ways with a building tag.

If that doesn't look promising, you probably want to talk to Navteq (now part of nokia); they're a major source of the data that everyone else uses, it looks like there's some sample data here [http://sampledata.navteq.com/site/global/developer_resources...](http://sampledata.navteq.com/site/global/developer_resources/sample_data/p_sample_data.jsp) and probably you can find contact info from there somehow

</comment><comment><USER3> Based on the image for "Printable Maps" on this page:

<http://www.accesskent.com/YourGovernment/Departments/GIS/>

Kent County's GIS department has such data. However, the exercise of reading and interpreting their database schema is likely to range from non-trivial to well nigh impossible depending on the heritage of the data, the applications used to create it, and the quality of the available documentation.

Based on Kent County's requirement of Silverlight for viewing their interactive map online, there is at least some hope. It could have been AutoDesk Map Viewer.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've used EGS for this sort of thing before. Not sure if they cover that area.

<http://www.egstech.com/geodata/buildingheights.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> You can make them yourselves with Open Street map tools, good satellite images and Amazon Mechanical Turk. :)

Of course, you should definitely ask some of those map providers first.</comment>


Court Backs Snowden, Strikes Secret Laws (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-05-07/court-backs-snowden-strikes-secret-laws <comment><USER2> This article was published a year ago FYI.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would the two other courts ruling similarly keep the supreme court out of this issue? Is it for legal reasons or more of a practical matter for the government?

<comment><USER4> The Supreme Court doesn't have to take appeals and usually doesn't. One factor that inclines them toward taking appeals is resolving a conflict between the case law of the circuit courts, so the circuits ruling the same way would make it less likely for the Supreme Court to take a case on the issue than if they split.</comment></comment>


Opera 11.50's new "featherweight" interface packs a punch - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/software/reviews/2011/06/hands-on-opera-1150s-new-featherweight-interface-packs-a-punch.ars

<comment><USER2> I assume by the lack of a Linux screenshot nothing was worth viewing there. It's quite sad, but I think just about every browser I've used so far on Linux had a much crummier looking UI than it does on other platforms. When on a mac or in windows the browser feels custom tailored to that particular environment, when in linux it feels like a cheap port that was called "finished" as soon as it became functional enough.</comment>


Five-in-one: database design, visualisation and code generation for SQL and MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://dtbs.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> Nice idea but there is a mix of https/http requests and the browser blocks http so the demo/try page do not work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey mingodad, we have just fixed this issue, there were a few scripts loaded with http which are now https. hopefully it is ok for you now and you can try it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> in the future, I suggest placing the site/product name in your HN title so people can search on it easily.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome. Way better than any of the SQL designers I've seen.</comment>


ZMODEM - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMODEM <comment><USER2> > Introduced 1986; 30 years ago

Now I feel old. I remember when this was new and clever. Made downloading from BBS's much nicer over XModem. At 2400 baud or whatever was current then!

<comment><USER3> There were a bunch of different something-Modems around that time that fiddled around with window sizes, retransmission approaches, batch transmission, and so forth. In case anyone is wondering, there was a YModem (also developed by Forsberg) in addition to XModem and ZModem along with various variants.

I even interned for a small company one summer that implemented one of these for a timesharing service using Prime minis.

<comment><USER4> SModem was the best. You could chat with people while downloading files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember when we did our own zmodem implementation so we could bypass download limits. Large BBS' at the time had restrictions on how many KB you could download in a day, but they only counted completed file transfers. ZModem had a provision for restarting failed transfers, so it was normal for a transfer to fail before completion (call waiting!) and the user to come back later to finish it. Our implementation could receive the last packet successfully, then push the transfer back a few blocks (retries) and fail.

Shout out to the 519!

<comment><USER6> Leech zmodem, scourge of the 713.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's still hard to match the convenience of moving files to and from a server with RZ/SZ.

If your terminal emulator supports it, it will see the trigger sequence emitted and start the modem protocol over your ssh connection and save the file.

Since it runs over your current ssh connection it's perfectly secure.

It's so much easier then switching to a local terminal to use scp to get or put a local file. Sure, I know it's not the most efficient protocol but with the speed of todays networks the kind of files you're dealing with when doing administration or development are more quickly transferred by not having to do the context switch.

If there's a mac terminal that will do scp that has shell integration on the host. I'd switch to that, but I haven't found one. Is there?

<comment><USER8> I agree ... I forget to do this these days but in _relatively modern_ days I used to use sz/rz all the time ... circa 2000-2004 I guess ...

<comment><USER9> I _still_ use sz/rz on an almost daily basis, for doing embedded system development. The system I work with is only accessible over UART, so rz/sz is the only way to transfer files to the host PC (well, the only _convenient_ way; the other way is through JTAG, which is a PITA, and only useful for imaging, not just transferring some small data file from the running system).

<comment><USER10> Same here. UART isn't always the only option on my platforms, but if Ethernet, WiFi, or USB gadget is unavailable for whatever reason, sz/rz (from Linux) or loady (ymodem, from U-Boot) is usually the next best choice. Minicom makes using these fairly convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looking b ack at stuff like Zmodem, it's instructive to compare the computing culture then and now. Back then, everything was so _cryptic_. Documentation was hard to find printed books, code and config was extremely abbreviated ( _sometimes_ for legitimate technical reasons of storage capacity). It was all very off-putting unless you put w lot of effort into research, or ran in the social circles that already had data and knowledge.

Nowadays we have an embarassment of riches of information and community and expressiveness and usability (when the APIs aren't locked down by DRM and trade secrets)

<comment><USER12> The most striking thing to me was there was a huge amount of free-as-in-beer software powering the entire BBS "network" and lots of helpful communities but almost nothing was open source.

<comment><USER9> From what I could tell, it took a long time for the academic tradition of making the source available to work its way into the non-academic world. The academics were using UNIX and other mainframe/minicomputer systems, but non- academics at home didn't have much access to this stuff unless they got themselves an account somewhere they could access through modem. So everyone else was "raised" in the PC tradition, which came from MS-DOS and the 8-bit micros before it. There, there was a bunch of "shareware" and a bunch of freeware available on BBSes, but the whole idea of passing around source code so everyone could benefit or make modifications just hadn't even come up. I grew up on BBSes and the idea of having source code just never even occurred to me honestly, until I started hearing about it when Linux became popular in the early 90s. The first real open-source stuff (which was really Free software), which pushed it as a philosophy, had to be from RMS and his GNU project, but I never even heard of that until Linux came along, and I think it was mostly confined to the insular academic world before this. When Linux came along, the GNU project finally had a kernel and could be put together into an actual working OS, and at the very same time, the internet was really catching on outside the academic world (this is about 1992 remember), and the WWW was only a couple years away. I'd say it was the perfect trifecta: the already- existing GNU software and tools (glibc, gcc, etc. are really important for having a working OS and building stuff), the Linux kernel, and the new-found accessibility of the internet allowing global communication and collaboration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kermit was in the same space as Zmodem. I remember it fondly, as they were very progressive around "open source" way back in the early 90's, and probably earlier. They accepted what was essentially a "pull request" over USENET discussions forums from me to add a feature.

[http://www.kermitproject.org/ckfaq.html](http://www.kermitproject.org/ckfaq.html)

<comment><USER14> Except they were never open. You could download the code, but you were not allowed to distribute modifications to it.

The project was cancelled in 2011, and according to the web page it's open source now, and I think that the open sourcing didn't happen until then.

<comment><USER13> I did put "open source" in quotes for that reason. At the time, it what somewhat novel to be able to get the source code at all, and even more novel that the writers would accept code from end users to put back into the product.

<comment><USER15> >At the time, it what somewhat novel to be able to get the source code at all

Really? IIRC, in Jason Scott's excellent BBS documentary (you should go watch it. Like, right now. It's that good), Thom Henderson (from SEA. Remember them? I don't, because I wasn't alive. Which is why I have to rely on documentaries) said that it was expected in UNIX circles, which is where Kermit originated.

Or were you on PC? I don't know, I wasn't alive.

<comment><USER13> For commercial end users of SunOS, Ultrix, etc, most of what we used was closed source.

Kermit was not the only software you could get source code for. However, the entire ecosystem was much smaller than what exists today.

I'll concede it may have been different in more academic environments.

<comment><USER15> _shrugs_

Of course, in the early days of unix, you got the OS in source form, but those were long gone by then. AFAIK, a lot of independently developed utilities were distributed in source form, in part because it was common to have to edit the sources and compile yourself if you weren't on the exact same architecture as the author. But that's just what I've heard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Who remembers IceZmodem? A backwards compatible protocol that allowed you to play Tetris or listen to .MOD files while downloading... and if you were downloading from an IceZmodem capable host, you'd even get increased download speeds!

[http://textfiles.com/computers/DOCUMENTATION/izm-q&a.txt](http://textfiles.com/computers/DOCUMENTATION/izm-q&a.txt)

<comment><USER16> > IceZmodem (IZM) v1.1 Protocol-Chat,DOS,Editor,MORE!

> IceSoft Software presents IceZmodem, an amazing

> new Zmodem file transfer protocol with 100%

> standard Zmodem compatibility and many enhancements.

> While transferring files you can chat with the

> remote user, shell to DOS, edit a text file,

> play Digital MOD file Music, or play games.

> You can even get 2 pages of system information about

> the remote computer. Sysops can view the dropfile

> to find out who is using the BBS. It has one of the

> best status displays ever and includes a Screen

> Saver. TurboTrans, a Zmodem speed booster, has

> helped to get 99% efficiency on some file

> transfers.

> This amazing protocol simply has to be seen to

> be believed! Supports Sound Blaster or DACs

> for music.

\- [http://archives.thebbs.org/ra90c.htm](http://archives.thebbs.org/ra90c.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This submission is a ploy by the NSA and advertisers to further refine their demographic slot of "old hackers".

Kermit, zmodem, bbs, baud.

South Park's Member Berries are in full force here.

CoCo forever!

<comment><USER18> Or recruiters are adding everyone who responds to their 'too old/overqualified' blacklists.

I miss the BBS days. Very few non-geeks around. The internet just isn't the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Fun times. My first experience with modem file downloads was the ASCII Express protocol on my old Apple //. Cutting my teeth on modem init strings, and keeping current with file protocols helped me break into IT despite not having a degree in it.

For example: "What, your Xmodem transfer always fails on the same block... oh, you most have xon/xoff flow control turned on. Try swapping that &K4 with an &K3 instead."

At one wacky point in my career, I ended up supporting a program "SPC" (software protocol converter), that flipped zmodem over an X.25 network to SNA to a mainframe. It ran on an OS2/Warp box. I wish I was making that up. I really do.

</comment><comment><USER20> This immediately reminded me of GIFLink.

It was a layer over protocols like zmodem that rendered images as they downloaded. Think of that for a second. Modems were so slow that you could watch the image line by line render to decide if you wanted to continue on with the download. Yes they were porn images.

<comment><USER9> I remember the "porn" images from the BBS days. They were pretty laughable really, usually just pictures of naked women, frequently showing only their bare breasts and obscuring the rest. I think they were frequently just scans from Playboy, which was rather tame.

Compare to these days, where there's all kinds of crazy hard-core stuff available for free with a quick Bing search, in both still-photo and video.

<comment><USER21> No disrespect but you weren't calling the right BBSs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My impression of zmodem and kermit, from 13 years ago (remembering then from a decade prior's use):

[http://dmd.3e.org/2003/12/zmodem-vs- kermit/](http://dmd.3e.org/2003/12/zmodem-vs-kermit/)

<comment><USER23> Kermit's design accommodated connections that zmodem couldn't (half-duplex, connections that don't let one send some control characters. seven bit connections, or connections between systems using ASCII and systems using EBCDIC), and the basic protocol was easy to write. You could use Kermit to send data between your C-64 and a Cray 1 or Burroughs Large system--and it was used to send data from the International Space Station to earth. Later versions supported sliding windows and large packets where possible and let one selectively quote characters, while still providing backwards compatibility with earlier versions.

<comment><USER22> Well, yeah, exactly. Kermit was slow and careful and pretty well guaranteed to get your data across _correctly_ , eventually.

Zmodem was more of a fast motorcycle. Your data might not always make it there alive in a rainstorm, but it was quick and and had fun doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Surprised nobody mentioned BiModem in the comments (popular at least in Europe). Simultaneous up- and downloads, which was great to get keep those up/down ratios at their proper levels.

<comment><USER25> I loved BiModem. I used it to transfer files in both directions simultaneously while also chatting with the remote party. Very cool for the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> BBSes: Yet another technology I missed, because I wasn't alive. Ah well.

Speaking of things that I wasn't there for, did you know TinyTIM's still up? Sketch (perhaps better known around here as Jason Scott) hasn't actually killed it because it's so cheap to run. Mind, nobody's actually around anymore, but you can explore the relics of a once-great civilization over at [http://www.tim.org/](http://www.tim.org/).

</comment><comment><USER26> I was a little kid connecting to the US gov list of 800 number BBSes and always had fun choosing Kermit as my protocol, but ZModem was much faster!

<comment><USER27> The trick was to split. ZMODEM down (or YMODEM before that) and Kermit up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I remember trying out Zmodem early on, only to find that it obviously had some kind of bug in that it would reliably and consistently drop the line after a certain amount of data had been transferred.

Not so, of course - but unlike Xmodem and Ymodem which acknowledged every packet (and slowed things down), Zmodem would not constantly ack back to the host unless there was an error... So this triggered the modem's inactivity timeout, since despite the constant stream of data coming down from the remote system, there were no "keystrokes" or other packets travelling in the other direction. Hence, after X minutes... Line drop.

Easily sorted with a few AT commands, eventually. :)

</comment><comment><USER29> See also BBCP:

[http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~abh/bbcp/](http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~abh/bbcp/)

[http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~abh/bbcp/bbcp.git/](http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~abh/bbcp/bbcp.git/)

</comment><comment><USER30> The sheer joy of the rare sights of decent transfer rates and counting every single 'block' progress. Wew!

</comment><comment><USER31> When modeming into the university unix system, I really enjoyed being able to type `sz file` and bam the file is on my local machine, with progress meter and everything.

So I wrote rzh, "receive zmodem here". Navigate to where you want to receive files, run rzh (which gives you a subshell) then ssh anywhere. Bounce through six machines if you want. When you sz a file, rzh will receive it.

[https://github.com/bronson/rzh](https://github.com/bronson/rzh)

Haven't touched it much in a decade, alas.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think I used ZMODEM to pull a core dump off a McData FC switch a couple years ago. Used the core dump to recover the password for the switch.

</comment><comment><USER33> Just to add to the nostalgia, back in the day we used to use a protocol/app called BLAST[0] to grab data off of Data General mini-computers onto PC's back in the 80's. Hugely simple to use and damned reliable.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST_(protocol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST_\(protocol\))

</comment><comment><USER34> Zmodem's code is uglier than Kermit's IMO. Gods help you if you have to read either, but Kermit is written better and EK is almost understandable once you fold all unneeded #define's.

I'm surprised no-one mentioned the venerable UUCP. It has more variants than X/Y/Zmodem combined: at least 12.

</comment><comment><USER35> I had a small "brush with greatness" in ... ~1984, or so? I was on Compuserve at 1200 baud, and although I forget the circumstance, I had a cserve "chat" with Ward Christensen; the inventor of Xmodem. I can't even remember what we talked about, but he was surprised that I knew who he was just by his name.

</comment><comment><USER36> Ah, the good old days. I ran a BBS in Sweden with ProBoard. Anyone else used that for BBS'es here?

<comment><USER37> I ran TriBBS for years as a kid in the Maryland/DC metro area (301).

My OS of choice was OS/2 Warp. It could handle a full-time, two-node BBS and still allow me to do other tasks without skipping a beat -- all on a 486 with 8 MB of RAM!

I also remember being rather envious of how cool Renegade, WWIV and company looked. Not to mention the more exotic software powering the, er, rather more questionable boards: software with ominous names like ViSiON-X or Oblivion/2... But after trying them all, I eventually switched from TriBBS to PCBoard.

It was the right choice: I loved the flexibility of PCBoard's scripting language and C SDK. Adding functionality to my BBS is what prompted me to pony up for Borland's Turbo C++ and get serious about programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The sad thing is I'm stuck on a codebase that uses Xmodem for core operations and have to forgo such niceties as having file name, size, and timestamp automatically handled. I don't know why they didn't just implement Ymodem like they should have.

</comment><comment><USER39> My favorite was HS/Link -- upload and download at the same time with speeds superior to Zmodem? Yes please!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HS/Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HS/Link)

</comment><comment><USER40> We used this in the BBS days.

<comment><USER41> Still use this today, it's what you do with an embedded device when all you have is a serial line and need to get files on/off.

Slow as hell though, but then I didn't grow up with this stuff.

<comment><USER42> Screen[1] contains an implementation of zmodem (and is one of screen's advantages over tmux). I've used it before on VMs on which I had a serial console but no network connection or other way to get/put files.

[1] - [https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/](https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/)

<comment><USER43> Very cool! I didn't realize screen had this. I've always used sz/rz when needed. It's kludgy but comes in handy every so often. I have it installed on all my linux boxes for that special occasion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Zmodem was the first big leap forward. Interesting how efficiency is baked into the brains of so many folks who used to have to think about every byte they might transmit or receive.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm disappointed that the wikipedia article makes no mention of Yam. Which boasted of the worst user interface ever invented.

</comment><comment><USER46> I miss the days of ZModem and YModem.

</comment><comment><USER47> All the cool kids used SModem, which allowed for downloading and chatting at the same time!

<comment><USER25> Neat - I thought BiModem was the only one that supported that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Ahh, the BBS days. 513 represent!

</comment><comment><USER49> KERMIT is still used for deep sea beacon communications.

</comment><comment><USER50> Have a look at zssh.

... and shoutout to the 514 ;-)</comment>


Getting traffic for your newly launched startup - <AUTHOR> http://derwiki.tumblr.com/post/40523233923/getting-traffic-for-your-newly-launched-startup?utm_source=hn

<comment><USER2> Since you where collecting sign-ups, it would be really interesting to see registrations by marketing channel and calculate a CPA for each. In terms of building the "seller" or in this case, the "lens renter" side of the market, I'd probably do targeted facebook ads to photographers with messaging around "Make Money Renting Your Gear" or even more specific messaging "Make up to $20/day/lens renting your unused gear".

You could also try posting to various email lists/meetup groups/forums where photographers hang out asking for beta testers with whom you take 0% commission. Most likely, this is where you'll see the most success.

You could also go for the Chegg/Zipcar model, which obviously has much higher capital costs, where you own the inventory.

PPC could be a viable customer acquisition channel for you as well as "camera lens rental + city name" has decent volume, as does "lens name + rental" and "lens name + rental + city", so there's a long tail that you can exploit.

All that being said, there is quite a bit of competition in this market and it will be difficult to differentiate:

<http://www.borrowlenses.com/>

<http://www.cameralensrentals.com/>

<http://www.lensrentals.com/>

<http://lensrentalscanada.com/>

<http://www.lenslenders.ca/>

P.S. Glad to hear that 99designs ended up driving some good traffic to your site... I've also seen people list websites on Flippa.com (often with incredibly high prices) as a form of a growth hack when trying to reach internet marketers/affiliates, though we strongly discourage it.

<comment><USER3> Borrowlenses is pretty awesome, too, and has a formidable reputation.

<comment><USER2> Yep, so there's pretty good access/liquidity in this market.

I don't necessarily think that camera lens rentals is "biggest player wins" either, unlike crowdsourcing graphic design (you go to the site with the most designers) or selling websites (you go to the marketplace with the most buyers) or even engineering recruitment (you go to the marketplace with the largest number of VC funded employers participating).

Unlike the three use cases above, the end consumer will only care:

1.) is the site trustworthy

2.) is the pricing competitive with what else is out there

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a photographer who has rented lenses online I'd say your biggest issue is lens options. Especially under featured lenses.

The vast majority of people who need to rent lenses due so for a professional shoot where they cannot afford to drop $2k.

The lenses you need are popular pro lenses. The lenses you have can be bought for 3 weeks worth of rental. Basically no one rents kit lenses because they are so easy to buy used and are not very good relative quality.

You need stuff like: 70-200 f2.8 constant app

Go after getting people with those lenses and offer them insurance or some other comfort and you can prob ramp much faster.

Consider a very strict system for checking out the lenses and a very clear policy on what is who's fault.

Add in fraud protection of some type etc.

Then you will be offering a real service.

Eliminate lenses which are not a minimum of $300usd from your site

<comment><USER5> I don't even think 70-200 f/2.8L IS II is where the sweet spot is. If you shoot a lot, you probably have one of those (I have the 70-200 f/4L, but I'd upgrade sooner if I didn't just do wide angle and macro).

The expensive primes and superzooms and tilt shift and stuff are probably the market, and those are $2000-10000. I've got access to a lens lending program from a manufacturer, and I'd plan a trip around borrowing an evaluation 500mm f/2.8L.

<comment><USER4> My thesis is: Wedding photography is the biggest market for rental lenses and the lenses REQUIRED for wedding photography are fast lenses that range from $900-$2200. Additionally, there are many people who may shoot a limited number of weddings per year which do not have the cash to spend $2,000 on a lens.

\--

Once a photographer has a 70-200 f/2.8, a fastish wide angle and a prime or two, they really don't need anything besides strobes to shoot weddings.

Wedding lenses are important for your business for 2 reasons:

1) Non-pros going to weddings are a great market for rental lenses (1 time use, going to get some great shots).

2) It takes a while to transition to wedding photography fulltime and it is the only place to make real money down the road in most cases. During the transition from 1 weddding a year to 20 weddings a year people will need to rent lenses or not eat if they want to use what is basically required equipment for getting quality low light shots.

They will want to own the body first so that they know how to use it.

\--- I don't have data to support that the sweet spot is $2000, fast lenses, but I'd be shocked if I were wrong.

 _The expensive primes and superzooms and tilt shift and stuff are probably the market, and those are $2000-10000. I've got access to a lens lending program from a manufacturer, and I'd plan a trip around borrowing an evaluation 500mm f/2.8L._

I'm sure this stuff gets rented too and is probably rented more than bought, but the overall market size (in terms of days used) for people shooting with 500mm 2.8 is far less than the 70-200 f2.8.

\--- Additionally, those that own the lenses are likely to have them unused 20 weeks a year which provides the other side of the market.

<comment><USER5> That makes sense. I've never even been to a wedding (except one as security), but wedding photographers seem to be a world apart. It makes sense. It's also a particularly undemanding physical environment for a lens.

It would be cute to do it _just_ for the wedding vertical, to test this theory. Advertise specifically in the wedding market, and try to get weddings to promote "bring your own SLR! Bride's mom covers lens rental of 70-200s for canon or nikon!" Maybe add some other wedding-related stuff (like a free camera check before/after, classes on wedding photography, and resources to hire pros).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Less than 1000 visits and we're already going to start chalking up the wisdom that's been learned? This is way too early and the traffic achieved is well down into the noise.

CPC is mildly interesting, but what was the real conversion rate to something that yields revenue? That's the only one that matters, at least unless your site is going to be an ongoing destination for repeat visitors that will allow you to sell them at other times ones they get hooked.

And that's your next step: figure out how to make this site a destination for your intended audience that they come back to again and again for the great content you're publishing there. Don't count visits unless they buy something or sign up for your email list and become repeat visitors.

Building the MVP is the easy part. Establishing a sustainable growing level of traffic that matters is the hard part. Before I'd even bother with an MVP, I'd focus on a blog and see how successfully I could grow traffic for some audience along the way. The area you're interested in, photography, is ripe with content marketing opportunities.

What sort of content will attract the kind of people who want to rent your products? What other products will they sign up for? What are the SEO parameters needed to get you that audience for free instead of via paid advertising?

Those are among the key initial questions to answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it's too early to chalk up wisdom learned -- but the main point of writing this was to get a discussion started and see what feedback people had. In my experience, blog posts do better if you offer something in them. In this case, I was sharing what the first two weeks of launching a site and trying to get traffic were like, for all the readers who haven't done it yet but want to do it some day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice break down of what you did, I have a couple of similar stories of launching something (after fully building it) and then getting very low traffic but a fairly high conversion rate(as in, user arrives, uses the site to do thing I designed it for and maybe comes back in the future). I seem to struggle with growing traffic though.

I have heard StumbleUpon is great for traffic, especially paid discovery, but each time I apply to paid discovery they turn me down on a "Lack of content" issue so I guess they safeguard what they present on Paid Discovery.

I have found, for other projects that I no longer run, that "offline" buzz works well - so press releases getting picked up in local media and that kind of thing works well, you just need to know which reported to sweet talk I guess.

My current side projects are <http://oneqstn.com>, <http://efficientthings.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> Are sign-ups intended exclusively for people listing their gear? Perhaps you can have sign-ups for people trying to rent, too, and request additional information that would help you hone the site, such as equipment sought. For example:

Email: email@example.com

Equipment Sought: <text field or drop down listing camera lenses>

This could be done under the guise that you will send them an e-mail notification when the requested equipment is posted to the site. This would help identify whether:

1\. Users are camera-savvy at all or are indeed random people "stumbling" upon the site

2\. Get more detailed user needs

</comment><comment><USER9> Not related to the post, but I think it might be worth trying to target a slightly different demographic for the rentals: casual photographers who don't necessarily have nice cameras. As one my self (I've never owned a DSLR), I'd definitely be interested in being able to 'rent' a nice camera for a vacation at the right price.

Just a thought.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would a 'rental package' suit you better? Something like, an SLR and one or two lenses that you rent for the weekend. What price would you be willing to pay? Especially considering you could get a new SLR and kit lens for ~900. $50/weekend? $100?

Thanks for the feedback! This is a suggestion I've been hearing a lot and may pursue.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that could be cool. Probably in the $50 range, maybe less, but I'm a poor college student.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You might want to fix the link to <http://www.cameralends/rent?promo=launch> to actually include the TLD.

Quick response: I would like to see a different color button from the default bootstrap info button.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Fixed. Any suggestions on button colors?

<comment><USER10> Pretty much agree with tobyjsullivan, I'm just tired of seeing that particular shade of blue ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some ideas:

1\. go offline. find photography specialty stores as well as 2nd hand camera equipment stores. Get them to list some inventory, as an additional revenue source, and perhaps you can post some handbills there. There's a little bit of conflict here, but the additional revenue might justify the risk and allow them to keep more/broader inventory while they're at it.

2\. Find their sites. If you can find photo equipment sites who'll list with you and link to you, even better

3\. Craigslist: respond to every buy request, autopost inventory etc

4\. Autoretweet everytime someone on twitter mentions a model of equipment that you carry (This last one might be spammy).

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe it's just me, but your site design doesn't really inspire confidence, which is probably hurting conversions.

\- The top navigation is left-justified, but "Peer to peer local camera gear" on the next line (also in the header) is centered.

\- Right below your call to action "Find a lens", you have very distracting social sharing buttons that should probably be in the header or footer.

\- The line spacing on the titles of your featured equipment is huge. The pictures down there being different sizes also bothers me, and they seem cramped in that frame (they look better on the rent page, so maybe just give them a little bit more padding).

</comment><comment><USER13> Well. Although I don't live in the area. Are there any physical boards. Perhaps at airports or sight seeing spots you can post paper based flyers too? Also offer for a small fee. Some kind of instructions for you to teach people basics of photography and or using this particular camera. Because although not a photographer myself. I'd imagine the nicer cameras being a bit harder to use properly and that would scare me away from renting it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I rented an 18-200mm Nikon lens for a week in England when we went away for Christmas. The process relatively pain free, it was posted in a very padded box, and I just posted it back when I was done. I think it was about 60 pounds all told.

I found it a great way to try a lens I'd always wanted but couldn't afford - good luck with your business.

</comment><comment><USER15> Facebook ads are going to be expensive, as you mentioned, but it takes time to learn the optimization needs of each channel. For example, your click through rate of .031% can be improved (image and copy performance is going to vary dramatically).

</comment><comment><USER16> Give users who list their gear a way to do some of the work for you (after all you both want more traffic to the site)... Maybe allow them to embed YouTube videos showcasing their gear on their product listing pages.

</comment><comment><USER17> thanks for posting the data. heads up: you left out the .com in the "price is free" link.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Aperture Science logo!

</comment><comment><USER19> nice post, but tell about free methods.</comment>


PC shipments slip 6.9% in Q4, as 2013 sees the worst yearly decline in history - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/01/09/gartner-pc-shipments-slip-6-9-82-6m-units-q4-2013-seventh-consecutive-quarter-decline/#!rQouV <comment><USER2> I've always built my own. I like being able to plug a box into a TV, or three monitors, or put on a different OS every week, use it for modern PC games, streaming multiple videos on multiple screens, or editing a spreadsheet.

I wonder if the big prebuilt companies are the canary in the coalmine here. It's hard to imagine in five years just putting a tablet in my living room as a media center, tomshardware and pcpartpicker going dark.

Looks like drive manufacturers are doing ok, but only by transitioning to higher priced models for enterprise: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2014/01/03/hdd- proje...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2014/01/03/hdd-projections- for-2014-and-beyond/)

I wonder if other part manufacturers are starting the same transition.

Sigh, maybe I should build that last PC this year after all...

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this has anything to do with ..... ..........?

<comment><USER4> One too many periods in the second group to match my best guess.</comment></comment>


6 Ways to Profit From the Falling Dollar - <AUTHOR> http://theinvestorreport.wordpress.com/2007/12/16/6-ways-to-make-big-profits-from-a-falling-dollar/

<comment><USER2> This is a gold bug article in disguise.</comment>


Sick of Your Shit, Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.stilldrinking.org/sick-of-your-shit-apple <comment><USER2> Post may start (and end) with a screed against Apple's warranty and repair policies, but in the middle there's what looks like pretty useful advice on cleaning out a MacBook keyboard.

<comment><USER3> With lots of cute details about how the author enjoys alcohol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do a bit of drinking and computing myself, and I've learned that pipe cleaners work better than cotton swabs for un-ruining things. They rarely leave stray fibers behind, and as a bonus, can be used to clean pipes apparently.

</comment><comment><USER5> I mean, hell, couldn't you have tried this before taking it to apple? I have a iphone 6 that apple fixed a year ago and I'm not sure how many samsung/pixel would do that? where do you even go to get those fixed?

<comment><USER6> Where you bought them, and they offer better warranty than some and don't delete your data for no reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I want to see that battery made out of baby rabbits and cocaine now.

</comment><comment><USER8> How are people still surprised about Apple's customer service practices? That's the real question.

</comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a foul-mouthed, unfunny tirade against Apple not fixing a clearly non-Apple related hardware issue. Why is it on HN at all?

</comment><comment><USER10> Apple is terrible, but this isnt exactly new information. The author also strikes me as someone who should have known better. Their whole business model is selling overpriced hardware and then nickle and diming users through adapters and bullshit care plans. This has been the norm for over a decade. They killed the iphone headphone jack 2 years ago. Stories just like this one continue to abound. Its one thing to have your employer buy an apple laptop and deal with all the nonsense, but why for personal use? Do people expect to be an exception to the rule when buying apple stuff? I dont get it.</comment>


3D Printer Comparison Chart - <AUTHOR> http://ryaneshea.com/3d-printer-comparison-and-buying-guide

<comment><USER2> I see the chart, but where's the buying guide?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah you're right, it's not really a buying guide. The comparison chart is sortable though.

<comment><USER2> Which is handy :)</comment></comment></comment>


Over 13% of the homes in Japan are abandoned - <AUTHOR> http://flip.it/XKsblo <comment><USER2> A modern Japanese man, working in tech in California, in his late thirties or early forties spoke with his parents back home in Tokyo five years ago about two houses the family owns, which are in desirable areas, well-maintained and currently occupied. The taxes and financing are such that there is no current scenario where the man could own one or both of these homes. It is simply too expensive. None of the people in this vignette are poor, they are all moderately wealthy people, who have fairly substantial income, and some savings.

Move the story to California. A three bedroom home in the San Francisco Bay Area, covered by Proposition 13, purchased by ordinary working people with good financial habits, around the 1970 time frame, and a working late- thirties, early forties person with some savings and good financial habits, cannot afford to take the home under almost any circumstances due to property taxes (cost of ownership) and competition for financing (loans not available in practice due to terms).

There is a lot of emotion on both sides of the Pacific in each of these cases. Individuals are quick to point fingers at the other individuals. It has been decades in the making, and the situation is not new. Many on both sides of the Pacific are renting at high prices (no accumulated capital) and deferring (or avoiding) having children.

<comment><USER3> I didn't know about Japanese property tax, a quick google shows there are a lot of taxes, 1.7% annually. 2% on registration. + some extras

[https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/guide-to-japanese- rea...](https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/guide-to-japanese-real-estate- taxes/)

<comment><USER4> That's about on par with the top ten highest property tax states in the US (~1.5-1.7% annually).

<comment><USER3> Agreed, just most countries in the world don't have any property taxes, so was surprised to see Japan as having them.

edit: I do agree there are some common property taxes globally, but they're just a few hundred or at most 1-2k a year, not like 1-2% in some of the US states (and Japan) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax)

<comment><USER5> most advanced countries in the world DO have property taxes. Why do you think that's not the case?

<comment><USER6> Some places they are capped rather then percentages, I believe this is the case in the UK.

<comment><USER7> The UK doesn't have a direct property tax. The closest thing is the council tax (which is linked to the notional value of your home in 1991), but that is generally paid by the occupants, not the owner (and may be discounted or increased if a home is left empty depending on the disposition of the local council). It also doesn't update as the market changes, because it's effectively frozen 30 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very short article. Unfortunate that it doesn't mention that the Japanese view older homes as inferior to new homes. [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan- reusabl...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable- housing-revolution)

<comment><USER9> They're not pulling the old home down and building new ones though, so your reason can't be the whole story.

<comment><USER10> They're moving to Tokyo.

Japans as a whole is losing population but Tokyo is increasing.

<comment><USER11> > Japans as a whole is losing population but Tokyo is increasing.

And even smaller cities are losing population much slower than their rural surroundings e.g. Wakayama mentioned in the article shrank by 10% (population wise) between the 2000 and 2015 census, but Wakayama-chi "only" shrank by 6% while rural Kushimoto-cho shrank by 23%, Susami-cho by 30%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The percentage for the American city of St. Louis is higher (around 19% last I heard). Here, take a look at what you can buy: [https://www.stlouis- mo.gov/government/departments/sldc/real-...](https://www.stlouis- mo.gov/government/departments/sldc/real-estate/lra-owned-property-search.cfm)

<comment><USER13> There's also the Detroit Land Bank: [https://buildingdetroit.org/?SID=od96l337m03770qo0gcsfta3h1](https://buildingdetroit.org/?SID=od96l337m03770qo0gcsfta3h1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Elsewhere:

> However, akiya owners are taxed more for empty plots of land than for having > an empty property, according to real estate expert Toshihiko Yamamoto. This > is a deterrent to razing a vacant home.

[https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/05/asia/japan-vacant-akiya- ghost...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/05/asia/japan-vacant-akiya-ghost- homes/index.html)

If true, this would go a long way toward explaining the 13% figure.

<comment><USER15> Weird. We have the opposite issue in the US; I've known several instances of people demolishing an intact structure because they didn't currently have a need for a barn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was an earlier post on here about municipalities in Japan offering abandoned houses for practically nothing. And I have to admit, ever since seeing that, the fantasy of building a retreat in "tropical" Kagoshima has been a constant in my mind ;)

<comment><USER17> From what I've been able to glean by reading, smaller cities and especially villages in Japan have vicious social ostracism, a lack of good jobs, and no remarkable educational institutions.

<comment><USER18> The sad part is really the social ostracism. Other factors can be fixed or bypassed, but culture is always the hardest bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I always wonder about these pot calling kettle black statistics. This is normal in the US too. Over 11% of US residential property sits unrented and unused.

[https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/41355854](https://www.cnbc.com/amp/id/41355854)

</comment><comment><USER20> Something doesn't add up. 20% vacancy in Wakayama but foreigners can't buy houses - [https://realestate.co.jp/en/forsale/wakayama](https://realestate.co.jp/en/forsale/wakayama)

<comment><USER21> Most likely an issue with that website/service in particular. Other sites list more properties, but still a limited number. So your point about something not adding up may still be correct.

[https://en.sekaiproperty.com/search/japan/wakayama](https://en.sekaiproperty.com/search/japan/wakayama)

In my experience, when looking at real estate in Japan, going to a local agent is really the best bet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This article is one paragraph with an additional three paragraphs of fluff padding. Why on earth did we collectively upvote it?

</comment><comment><USER23> This feels like a possible cascade failure waiting to happen across their economy and society.

</comment><comment><USER24> wouldn't that be a sign of a healthy housing market? (e.g. liquidity)

if 99%-100% of homes were occupied then it would reach saturation (hard to buy/rent homes)

<comment><USER25> That's still high for a "healthy" level of vacancy, and it's also assuming those vacancies are in areas where people want to live. In reality, most of this housing stock is in smaller towns people are leaving while available housing in Tokyo is not exactly plentiful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like they need to encourage immigration to occupy those homes.

<comment><USER15> They need to encourage immigration for several reasons, but they don't like immigrants.

<comment><USER27> What are the reasons? There is none in the article and there is no obvious reason to overpopulate a country with no natural resources.

<comment><USER28> The primary reason is they're suffering an inverted population pyramid.

<comment><USER27> And how is that wrong? Please bring in more details.

<comment><USER28> Hmm? This is well described stuff so I encourage you to do your own research. Here's a start: [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/world/asia/japan- confirms...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/27/world/asia/japan-confirms-a- decline-in-population.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I view it as a positive thing and wish it to happen in many countries.

Governments should stop thinking about population and gdp growth as a necessity. This is harmful when we're dealing with a planet with limited resources.

<comment><USER30> You don't see population shrinkage as necessarily bad, well I don't think population growth as necessarily bad. Overall in the modern West theres been a lot more propaganda against the latter. Risky business really, because I get the feeling decline is going to be a lot harder to combat than growth.

Its not really a matter of size as it is of quality. I personally wouldn't mind a lot more genius rocket scientist supermodels being born. Our best chance to stave off extinction is not to bury our heads in the sand and hope we last on this one rock but to expand. Growth is not in itself the evil, limited resources is and that is what should be tackled. If humanity had limited itself to the size that some people think is sensible from the very beginning you wouldn't be enjoying the comforts like your room and fancy computer that you are now.

<comment><USER27> Japan's population tripled in the past 100 years, they have no natural resources and live on imported oil, minerals and food. The population density is very high if you consider the geography (many mountains). A slight decrease is not a bad thing in such circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This, in combination with homeless people (or youth who still live at their parents while wanting to live on their own) is why I am pro squatting. If you don't use it, the land is up for other's use.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's surprising to me, since I have heard, that Japan is very, very densely populated.

<comment><USER33> ...in three or four metropolitan areas. Image search for "japan population density": When oil is super expensive and public transportation is well- developed, property scarcity around public transit centers is the choke point.

<comment><USER34> Even in smaller cities, Japanese urban design usually makes for much higher levels of density than for equivalent population US cities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> So can I get an airbnb for super cheap there then?

</comment><comment><USER36> whats with the flip.it url? it just redirects to short quartz article.

</comment><comment><USER37> Wow, 13% is a quite a lot.

<comment><USER38> It is. Flint, Michigan is at 16% vacancy, and I assume "vacancy" is a broader term than "abandoned".

<comment><USER39> I wonder if that would have anything to do with all the issues the city has though? According to wikipedia, GM went from providing 80 thousand, to 8 thousand jobs, high crime rates, they had a financial crisis, and of course the whole water contamination issues since 2014.

Seems likely that it's an outlier in this case.

<comment><USER40> Flint, MI is well known for this.

The intention was undoubtedly to say that Japan's abandonment rate has gotten so high that it's comparable to a disaster stricken city.

<comment><USER39> Ah I think you're right looks like I misread it haha.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>