Brython - Python to Javascript translator - <AUTHOR> http://www.brython.info/index_en.html <comment><USER2> I'm genuinely shocked that this made it to the top of hackernews. I would expect better. While the idea of having the Python interpreter in the browser is very likely better than having a compiler Python -> JS (if we care about Python), the implementation here is both half assed and really bad. It takes quite a bit of effort to create a python interpreter that can be called python. This is nowhere near there. On top of it double-interpretation in dynamic languages is very slow and I doubt someone is willing to pay that price here. A good example of low quality is here:

[http://code.google.com/p/brython/source/browse/trunk/py_clas...](http://code.google.com/p/brython/source/browse/trunk/py_classes.js#140)

this is both incorrect (exceptions are propagated, <http://paste.pound- python.org/show/28457/>) and has wrong complexity. It's not even a dict at all!

<comment><USER3> > has wrong complexity

Python doesn't specify the complexity of dicts, that they're "efficient" is a CPython implementation detail other runtimes happen to copy. Even a worse- than-linear time mapping that satisfies the protocol is still a 'dict'. Surprised you don't know this given your relationship to PyPy.

As for whether I'd prefer a 100kb "not quite Python" or sending a few MB of JS (that takes 10 minutes to translate for each change) to the browser just to handle a few functions in a cross-platform manner, I'm glad to see more options when making this choice.

I'm in the midst of evaluating a solution to running simple mathematical functions on a Python backend or in-browser (for graphing). In a case like this, a handful of crappy guarantees about the lowest common denominator arithmetic is all I need in a solution. It's easy to get wrapped up in correctness, but ease and practicality trumps it almost every time.

<comment><USER2> indeed, python does not specify the complexity, it's just what everyone expects.

Anyway, my problem is not with "not quite Python", my problem is with calling it "Python". As long as you call it "a language with Python inspired syntax", it's seriously left to the reader whether he likes it or not. If you call it Python, it's fine to have something incomplete, however provide a way forward at least. This seems to be incredibly far from supporting full Python, which might or might not be a goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you want to do this kind of thing on the server side, Python provides enough introspection to turn functions in a live Python image into JavaScript. Here's a minimal example I tossed together a while back:

<https://gist.github.com/50d706081074aed8fcf6>

I have a bunch of notes somewhere on translating a big hunk of the basic language, including how to generate continuation passing style code in JavaScript from less ghastly Python.

The difficulty is providing all the class semantics and the standard library.

<comment><USER5> I like the simplicity of that gist. Very cool hack.

However if I was to implement a Python to JavaScript compiler, would there be some benefits in transforming the Python AST into a JS AST first?

There are existing code generators such as escodegen that transform that AST to JavaScript code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow! This is so awesome. This has been tried before, but I don't remember why it never succeeded.

I wonder if this can get the appropriate community to make it a decent alternative compared with TypeScript and CoffeeScript - or maybe I'm missing something here?

<comment><USER7> Once brython gets some key missing Python features (classes, list comprehensions, lambdas), and some libraries for it, I think it has huge potential.

<comment><USER8> Indeed! Right now Coffee script offers more expressive power than this. So they should add these features _fast_ if they want this to succeed in the highly competitive world of compile-to-js languages!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Repl.it has supported python on the browser for a while: <http://repl.it/> (an an interpreter, not as a translator, though).

It also supports ruby, scheme, lua and others[1]

What made it impractical was the slowness. Emscripten seems to work fine for clang[2], not so much for interpreted languages. Maybe the translator path can solve this issue.

[1] <http://repl.it/#:languages>

[2] <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/bananabread>

<comment><USER10> > What made it impractical was the slowness.

Much of the slowness was because emscripten was immature at the time that repl.it worked on their port. If someone built python with current-day emscripten it should be much faster.

There is a better way, though. We could compile PyPy's generated C implementation and add a JIT to JS to that. That would be the best way to get fast python into the browser. If anyone is interested to hack on that let me know, I would assist from the emscripten side.

Note though that this would only give throughput speed, not startup speed. For startup speed, a method like pyjamas or bython will do better - at the cost of not fully supporting the python language, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks really nice! It seems like the other side of the Python-in-the- browser coin to Empythoned (<https://github.com/replit/empythoned>) used by repl.it (<http://repl.it/>).

(Ignore this...)The mime-type is wrong though, there isn't an authoritative mime-type for Python, so it should use a private subtype like text/x-python or application/x-python.

<comment><USER12> RFC 6648: Deprecating the "X-" Prefix and Similar Constructs in Application Protocols

"""Historically, designers and implementers of application protocols have often distinguished between standardized and unstandardized parameters by prefixing the names of unstandardized parameters with the string "X-" or similar constructs. In practice, that convention causes more problems than it solves. Therefore, this document deprecates the convention for newly defined parameters with textual (as opposed to numerical) names in application protocols.

This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community."""

<comment><USER11> Oh, neat. Thanks for the pointer!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> T-A Also worthy of mention in this context: <http://pyjaco.org/about> and <http://pyjs.org/>

<comment> lost-theory And <http://www.skulpt.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is amazing. I hope one day we'll have the option to use Python as a scripting language for the web.

I've messed around with Python turned on in Chrome, and I think it'd make a great alternative to JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is long overdue - The DOM is a great model of objects, but javascript is not the way forward. For all the admittedly great work that has been done to improve it, it's still a mess of a language.

Native support of Python would be my dream (I don't see why there's not 3-4 competing languages in the browser; though the complexity of such is a decent argument against), but this solution seems to be a great stopgap, as well as compatible with future in-browser python implementations.

</comment><comment><USER15> Good luck with compiling anything without having AST trees and proper parser infrastructure. In it's current state this thing won't fly.

<comment><USER16> They seem to have taken an interesting approach - it's a Javascript source file that translates the source for a restricted version of Python into equivalent Javascript constructs and then interprets that. A JS-based interpreter for Python-like text, basically.

I don't think I would've implemented it this way, because:

1\. It introduces the latency of having to download brython.js with every page load.

2\. It supports only a subset of Python, whatever the implementor has gotten around to implementing. That's a pretty small subset so far - no list comprehensions, and I doubt he got the class & metaclass semantics right.

3\. It'll run slowly because all the Python code is running through an interpreter, through a language that itself isn't blazingly fast.

I would've done this as an on-the-server compiler from Python to JS, using Python's built-in ast module to parse the source directly, translate to an intermediate representation, and output optimized Javascript. That seems to be the approach PyJS takes, which seems to be a much more mature and well- designed project.

<comment><USER17> The big advantage of Brython is that it has a very fast workflow, much like JavaScript. A server-side compiler approach would have a slower interactive workflow.

<comment><USER16> That's true, but you could probably get it to load & reparse the files off disk every request and serve the JS dynamically. If you've ever used Django or AppEngine, you just edit your templates and source files, you don't have to do a manual compile & load style every time you change things. There's no reason you couldn't set your PyJS serving URL to do the same.

In terms of absolute CPU cycles burned, it's actually faster that way, since parsing happens in C using Python's built-in facilities, and the amount of JS shipped to the browser is less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks really cool. And i love Python. However, I think the Python Syntax will make it hard to minify the code, which is probably not that important anyway when not in production. But for production usage it would be cool to have a real compiler instead of an interpreter.

But yeah. Cool stuff.

<comment><USER19> I guess you could just gzip your python code without minification, here's a little bench: <https://github.com/jch/gzip_vs_minify>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Python needs to be natively supported as a scripting lang in browsers. Google, MS, Firefox - make it so!

<comment><USER21> As much as I like Python, I don't think this is the right approach.

What browsers need to do is to have a machine-level bytecode, so that they can download whatever interpreters are needed to run the scripting code the page uses. Then pages can be written in whatever language the developer feels is best.

This is the real potential of something like Native Client - although it doesn't look like that potential will be achieved any time soon.

<comment><USER22> As much as I _don't_ like Microsoft, I actually think the .NET CLR would be an excellent choice for such a runtime. NaCl not so much; target architecture- dependent compiled code is a major downside.

<comment><USER23> What about pnacl?

[http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and- test...](http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-testing- portable-native-client)

<comment><USER22> I had no idea about that, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Once upon a time I wrote Oink, which generates JS from Python on the server: <https://github.com/alecthomas/oink>

It has support for many of the Python niceties: classes, list comprehensions, positional arguments, and so on. Interesting experiment, but I ended up thinking that Python is not the best language for the browser.

<comment><USER25> Because its syntax can't work with the DOM, or what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> OK, how about :

1) getting Python ==> LLVM bytecode

2) then using emscripten (<https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki>) to run LLVM in browser?

An option to perform the first step seems to be : <http://code.google.com/p/py2llvm/>

Or 'simply' getting CPython ported on emscripten?

Any opinions on this suggestion?

<comment><USER27> I've seen that done already, but the resulting Python interpreter has no visibility of the DOM or access to the browser. You have basically a Python console, which is quite useless if what you want is to substitute Javascript.

<comment><USER28> Just for reference, there's an example of CPython compiled to JavaScript using Emscripten running in the browser at <http://syntensity.com/static/python.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> While this is an awesome effort, I don't see myself using this without list comprehensions/generators/itertools/etc.

</comment><comment><USER30> What? This is insane. Python replacing javascript, insane as in that is super cool. If I could do the exact same things I can do in javascript/query but with python syntax, that would be magical.

</comment><comment><USER31> As a lover of Python myself, this is awesome.

However, as others are noting things that are missing that we pythonistas can't live without (generators, classes, etc)- I feel it is worth a reminder that Javascript 6 (Harmony) is going to have a lot of these built in.

Brendan's slides have a great overview of what's to come (and makes me hope writing JS outside of CoffeeScript will become more bearable since I'm so spoiled by Python:

<http://brendaneich.github.com/Strange-Loop-2012/>

</comment><comment><USER32> I think compiler is the wrong way to describe this. A computer program that translates between two different high level languages is typically called a _language translator_.

<comment><USER33> Not anymore, see Closure Compiler, CoffeeScript compiler, TypeScript compiler, dart2js compiler, and tons more: [https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee- script/wiki/List-of-lang...](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee- script/wiki/List-of-languages-that-compile-to-JS)

It's pretty common now to call these "compilers".

<comment><USER16> Yeah, a compiler is anything that translates from one programming language to another. The definition of a "high level language" is muddy these days - is C a high-level language? It's a compiler target for Scheme, Haskell, Goo, Python, and many other programming languages these days. It's also a source language for gcc, Clang, and numerous other C compilers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Looks interesting. Certainly a step in the right direction.

Are there any specs as to the speed of using this? Javascript can be a bit slow on most days, does Brython make it worse?

</comment><comment><USER17> Very nice. Can this approach be generalized to embed Clojure, Haskell, and other languages into the browser? I love the pervasiveness of JavaScript but I dislike writing it. This is a very good tradeoff.

<comment><USER35> There are already implementations of Clojure and Haskell that target JavaScript, but I'm not sure if that's what you meant. I don't know if there are any implementations that target JS using this specific approach but I don't think it's one to necessarily emulate; as nostrademons points out it is interesting, but not really optimal.

<https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript>

<http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_JavaScript_Problem>

[https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of- lang...](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-languages- that-compile-to-JS)

<comment><USER17> These are all neat, but they require some effort to bootstrap. The neat thing about Brython is that you can start writing Python immediately. I've played with ClojureScript and it takes a while to get the QuickStart to work.

I think Brython is cool, not from an efficiency or machine-performance point of view, but from a human point of view. It makes it easy to start hacking. The barrier to entry is non-existent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> No support for python classes?</comment>


Microsoft acquires Revolution Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/01/revolution-acquired.html <comment><USER2> dear HN - my team at microsoft did the Python Tools for Visual Studio project ([http://pytools.codeplex.com](http://pytools.codeplex.com)).

i would love to know if there is any interest in us providing an "R Tools for Visual Studio" product. think Project, Edit, intellisense, Debug, Deploy, linux debug, etc. support for R in VS.

if we did this, it would be a fork of PTVS (and free + open source of course).

thx!

<comment><USER3> If you get it to run on Linux or OS X, there would be no shortage of buyers, including the company I work at. R is our primary toolset. I spend 4-5 hours per day in R studio, & it could certainly use some beefing up - handling large dataframes without borking, simple Charts button rather than the ggplot2 ceremony, tighter integration with hadoop... My workflow currently is - run a bunch of Scalding jobs to mapreduce few hundred GB on hadoop, then pull the results into R, deep dive analysis, some ML ( CART & the like ) to see if we can influence customer behavior & improve retention & conversion. If I could fire up R in Visual Studio & do all this, I'd definitely spring for it.

<comment><USER4> honest question and I really don't want to start a language war, I just want to understand more. Why do you use R when you can use Python? I tryed R and I hate it because for me it feels like something all patched together, without a principles behind. Is it like that for you as well but you need all those libraries or it's just me?

<comment><USER5> For me, productivity. For maintaining large projects or building applications, I'd absolutely go with Scala or Python, but I cannot be as productive in other languages. R has performance issues, but once you know it, you can avoid them (see the recent dplyr benchmarks ~2x faster than pandas).

<comment><USER4> thanks for the reply. I'm really not bothered with performance, at the end the difference is not that much anyway, what really horrify me is how is it programmed. I remember I wanted to do a statistical test and I could get back the sample size or the p-value calling the same function but with different arguments. I am not a programmer (learned doing my job) but that really disturbed me, even now, writing this. I guess it's just me, as it seems that R is getting more and more attention.

<comment><USER6> In my opinion the majority of code in R is extremely well suited to its domain. That means it does not look like the python code you are used to, and I'd recommend learning more about why R works the way it does, e.g. at [http://adv-r.had.co.nz](http://adv-r.had.co.nz)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought Microsoft was kind of dead too: [http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html)

However, in the past six months they continue to become more surprising, interesting and relevant on many fronts every day. And the pace seems to be accelerating. I might dare say they're the most exciting "big" tech company in 2015...

<comment><USER8> The only part of Microsoft that was ever dying was their reputation in a very small circle of programmers (ie: us). It's a little frustrating to read such myopic views of MS (especially from PG) on an entrepreneurial website because there's such a huge focus on their appeal to us, and not at all on their actual success as a business, which has been huge. And yes, as much as we don't like him, this includes the Ballmer years. There is absolutely zero indication that Microsoft is actually dying:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=msft&oq=msft&aqs=chrome..69i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=msft&oq=msft&aqs=chrome..69i57l2j69i60j69i61l3.402j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8)

<comment><USER9> Have you been to a Microsoft Store? The employees usually outnumber the customers. Because it's not just developers they've lost, it's consumers. Microsoft are great at enterprise, but their consumer ambitions are going to be hard to realise.

<comment><USER10> Consumers are overrated. Do you really think Sysco is going to go under because the average guy on the street doesn't know or care about them?

<comment><USER11> Not sure if you actually mean Sysco [1] or Cisco [2]. Your analogy actually works for both, but this being a tech site I assume you mean the latter.

[1] [http://www.sysco.com/](http://www.sysco.com/) [2] [http://www.cisco.com/](http://www.cisco.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Got me thinking about what is means for SAS, and found:

R vs SAS, why is SAS preferred by private companies?

[http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/33780/r-vs-sas- why-...](http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/33780/r-vs-sas-why-is-sas- preferred-by-private-companies)

<comment><USER13> Code that was written for SAS in the 80s still runs today.

<comment><USER14> Code that was written for S in the 80s still runs on R today.

<comment><USER15> If it has any loops, almost as slowly and uselessly as it did then :)

<comment><USER5> Not really. All packages are bytecode compiled, so unless you doing something stupid, for loops are much faster than they used to be in R.

<comment><USER15> good to know...was doing something in 2013 that couldn't be vectorized (lots of portfolio simulation calcs where each element in dataframe depended on previous elements, ie portfolio value + market return - spending based on moving average of portfolio value) and it was pretty horrible, trying to use Rcpp and whatnot to speed it up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, jaw droppingly unexpected news. I mean, I knew they had done a lot of work to make r on windows work as well and parallel as r on Linux, but wow. I wonder if Apple is liking at R studio?

Also, congrats to the Revolution Analytics team!

<comment><USER17> Yeah, very interested to see where this leaves R Studio. They don't seem like a direct competitor to Revolution Analytics. R Studio focuses on front end usability and ecosystem issues. Their R Studio IDE has great market share, and they seem to be making progress with Shiny.

TIBCO is probably more concerned about this. Their TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R (TERR) [1] competes directly against Revolution R Enterprise.

The Microsoft acquisition positions Revolution Analytics in a much stronger position against TIBCO. Specifically, it will allow them to integrate with Microsoft's BI stack (Excel, PowerPivot, SharePoint) to compete against TIBCO SpotFire.

[1] [http://spotfire.tibco.com/discover-spotfire/what-does- spotfi...](http://spotfire.tibco.com/discover-spotfire/what-does-spotfire- do/predictive-analytics/tibco-enterprise-runtime-for-r-terr)

<comment><USER18> This will make a lot of companies uncomfortable. The undisputed leaders in analytics, SAS and IBM, most of all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very interesting to see. Quite unexpected, but compelling when combined with Azure Machine Learning.

I wonder if we'll see R support integrated with Office in the future. Native R integration with Access and Excel could be pretty cool.

<comment><USER19> Would be very interesting to see if they also integrate it in Visual Studio, and have a similar development environment to R Studio

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is very exciting and congratulations to the Revolution Analytics team! Even a few months or so ago, this would have been more worrisome news but I really (possibly just by a strong desire) do believe that Microsoft is moving in a much better direction in regards to both open source and in fully utilizing some of their more interesting R&D efforts (especially in development).

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a BIG step forward in further support of a language bashed on by certain people. I switched to R two years ago and it really has been a great fit for me and my work. Excited for Revolution Analytics and what positive things this could mean for R.

</comment><comment><USER22> I double checked my calendar to make sure that today is not April 1st.

Wow.

I mean

WOW.

Congratulations! A bright movement for both companies.

</comment><comment><USER23> TIL that MSFT used R to develop algorithms for xbox online matchmaking. Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER24> May be better match for Redhat since both seems to be similar DNA. But new microsoft may be ok.

Microsoft seems to be enhancing their products/services in enterprise while applying free/low-price on consumer side to compete with Apple/Google, balancing revenue and guidance to wallstreet. Search engine for Google is similar to Enterprise sales for Microsoft while both compete in consumer space.

It may make MS competitive to companies in data processing space like SAS/IBM ...etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> What is with the "joining" euphemism? ("Revolution Analytics is joining Microsoft," as the blog post puts it.) Is there some sort of growing unclean perception when a company is acquired? More often than not, these acquisitions are intelligently motivated and, aside from producing great economic outcomes for the company being bought, seem to me a real encomium to the founders.

<comment><USER26> Its not a "growing unclean perception". Euphemisms like X is joining Y, or X is joining the Y family, etc., have been common in corporate mergers and acquisitions for a long time.

The audience for the euphemism is mostly customers and employees, the impression that is sought to be created is that existing customers interests will continue to be served -- but even better by the new, bigger, stronger team -- and that employees are becoming part of something that includes their existing firm (and that they aren't going to be sacrificed.)

Of course, euphemisms alone can only do a limited amount to mitigate customer and employee concerns, but their cheap, and everyone has used pretty much the same ones for decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow! Congrats to the Revolution Analytics Team. I'm excited to see what they're able to accomplish with Microsoft's backing.

</comment><comment><USER28> Recently in this post (*) I was talking about an idea, openlag, I was suggesting a similar model for microsoft and Revolutions Analytics, It seems I nail it.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qilang/BPL- iRweRpk](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qilang/BPL-iRweRpk)

Microsoft loves linux, What about a new name: OpenWinds?

<comment><USER29> Interesting, I've been thinking about something like "openlag" lately. It _seems_ like an ideal compromise between the need to make money and the desire to open source everything.

When I've been thinking about it, I was considering a much shorter period of time than three years, though, something more like 3-6 month periods, so your competitive edge comes from the newest features, and anything older is Open.

I feel like it would work really well with a premium SaaS model- open source everything that's free to everyone, and have a reserved feature set that's only for paying customers. Paying customers get new features first, and _eventually_ , everyone gets them.

Of course, at some point, you might shoot yourself in the foot by making enough of the app free and open source that no one will want to pay for whatever you've been developing lately. You also, of course, have to always have compelling new stuff coming out to keep subscribers.

I definitely don't think it's viable for every project, or even most projects, but "openlag" definitely seems like it has a place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Cannot wait for this to be paired with Azure Machine Learning. The results will be quite interesting, methinks.

<comment><USER21> It already has happened.

Microsoft Cloud Platform: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt- cl=84503534&v=z-lsheCYtug...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt- cl=84503534&v=z-lsheCYtug&x-yt-ts=1421914688#t=12)

[http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/11/r-on-azure- ml.ht...](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/11/r-on-azure-ml.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is crazy and awesome. Can't wait to see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER32> Microsoft's new-found love for open-source products/ services and Github is disturbing. Looks like MSFT is about to acquire Github.

</comment><comment><USER33> Exciting news. Wonder what Google will do? Contribute to Julia development ;-)

<comment><USER34> Google prefers users upload data to the cloud for Google's custom software to analyze

<comment><USER13> >Google's custom software to analyze

So Google can analyse user's software too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Weird, this almost feels like a Mandela effect for me.

<comment><USER36> I started googling around to find a definition for "Mandela effect" and came across some people with some rather odd views on quantum mechanics. That was bizarre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Congrats! Can't wait to see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER38> Are the RA team ex-Microsoft?

<comment><USER39> I don't believe so, no. The initial team was comprised mostly of academics, since it was founded as a spinoff from academia. The current CEO & CTO are both ex-Accenture. The scientific team members have a variety of backgrounds, including academia and other statistics and data companies (ex-SPSS, Netezza, etc.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This should be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER41> Microsoft definitely has the most vocal fanboys among all the tech companies. I cant see this being a good news from any non-Microsoft perspective.</comment>


10" GoNote - The Touchscreen Android 4 Notebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.ergoelectronics.com/products/10inch-gonote-touchscreen-android-4-netbook-gnt10#.UDS8gKDLkXk

<comment><USER2> "Within minutes of using it, GoNote turns years of web browsing on its head, and you intuitively touch, swipe and pinch the web rather than reaching for your mouse. GoNote's resistive touchscreen recognises 2 finger inputs so you can pinch to zoom into webpages and get a close up with your digital photos."

This strikes me as incredibly naive. Since when is "reaching for your mouse" a bad thing when using a laptop? If adding touch screens to laptops was all anybody needed to do to improve our computing experience Microsoft would have run away with the tablet market _years_ ago.

Pinching to zoom is a pattern that makes sense on tiny mobile devices, not large laptop screens. If I have to zoom in on a webpage to make it usable on my laptop, it's time to increase my font sizes. Zooming into a photo perhaps makes more sense but why not simply support the pinch gesture on the trackpad like Apple does on it's Macbooks? Instead I need to gorilla-arm it every time I want to zoom into a photo?

Tacking multitouch screens onto traditional laptops does not a better computer make.

<comment><USER3> My arms already hurt just seeing that thing.

I don't get this 'stretch to reach the screen and swipe'. I agree with another user below that a gesture-enabled touchpad would be a better idea.

That said, does anybody know of any usabiltiy study concerned with this kind of interface?

<comment><USER4> I have no data or studies, but two people at work have Asus transformers and they use the touch screen all the time even when in laptop mode, and they don't seem to have any problems or complaints.

<comment><USER5> I can confirm this. I have a Transformer Infinity with the keyboard and have almost no problem going back and forth between keyboard and screen. I usually have the tablet/laptop sitting on my desk at a comfortable distance, so that I can keep my right thumb on the screen for scrolling. I never pinch to zoom on my tablet/laptop. Its screen is plenty big.

<comment><USER6> So can I, if my transformer lost it's trackpad I don't think I'd notice, reaching for the screen is much more natural and it feels much more responsive than a trackpad mainly because you're not manipulating an arrow in to position before you do anything. I'm not sure I'm ready to ditch the mouse on my desktop yet but for most day to day tasks I find the touch screen to be king.

<comment><USER5> ...and if I'm really feeling lazy I use the two finger gesture on the touchpad to scroll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's $235 which will make people pause.

Another direction is the sub-$100 new generation of dual-core android desktops - just add any cheap 1920x1080 monitor/keyboard/mouse. [http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/65596-this-dual- cor...](http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/65596-this-dual-core-android- mini-pc-has-a-90-price-point)

Amazing what android has done for decent, cheap computers.

I expect any HDTV over 32 inches in a couple years will have a full android computer built in for just a $40 premium.

<comment><USER8> Remains to be see whether any of them are _decent_. Cheap certainly, but they could be just as cheap running some random Linux build.

Don't most HDTVs these days have built in Linux-based computers? My new TV does (it shows ads on power-on, something not advertised on the box).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the bottom...

No GPS

No embedded 3G

No G Sensor – eg tilt racing games will not work.

No access to Buy or Stream Movies via Google Play

Also does not look like the screen will fold all the way back to make the device useable in an exclusive tablet mode.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's using the out-dated RockChip RK2918 SoC. This is a SoC from Shenzhen, China. RockChip mainly build their RKxxxx Boards for OEM tablets. AFAIK the RK2918 has a singlecore ARM Cortex A8 CPU with a max of 1.3GHz.

The successor is the RK3066 SOC with awesome specs: ARM Cortex A8 1.6GHz Dual Core MALI-400 Quad Core GPU 1GB RAM HDMI@1080p out, USB-OTG support, 802.11n

I have 2 unbranded tablets with the RK3066 SoC: The "McPad N90" and the "Window/Yuandao N101"

Why they don't use the RK3066? This SoC is about 90$ for OEMs. More info at: <http://armdevices.net/> which is an US correspondant for chinese ARM based SoC devices...

You can even buy 1000 RK3066 powered 10" tablets with android 4 for 150$ / pcs. This GoNote is crazy compared to this price!

</comment><comment><USER11> This is just close enough to what I want to be frustrating.

I want a Android/iOS-like notebook. Don't need touch. I need a browser, facebook, youtube, email, malware resistance & an app store with a handful of essential apps (eg google docs, games).

A substantial percentage of laptop owners can't reliably get a word doc in an email, edit it & email it back. They used to be able when they used Firefox which launched doc files in openoffice which had an "email as an attachment button." Now they use chrome which launches Word where they can't find "email as an attachment" and it wouldn't help anyway because it would launch thunderbird which isn't configured to use their email address.

I want a laptop for them.

<comment><USER12> Isn't this a chromebook?

<comment><USER11> I've never seen anyone in that category (bottom 30% on the "knows how to use a computer scale") using one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "We thought about this years ago we have done tons of user interface testing on this and it turns out it doesn't work" Steve Jobs - Back to the Mac 2010

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=ULZmlH59yKpqY&v=ZmlH59...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=ULZmlH59yKpqY&v=ZmlH59yKpqY&feature=player_detailpage#t=691s)

</comment><comment><USER14> I like the idea of a tablet/laptop hybrid with a touch screen, but I would want the "convertible" form factor.

<comment><USER15> Check out the Asus Transformer series, or the new range from Archos - a bit more than this though

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a nexus 7 and love it. I absolutely love my netbook and this seems very similar. I dont care about GPS, G or cell connection so this seems really great for me. A lot cheaper then the Transformer too. I guess I am alone though as the rest of HN seems personally offended by it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting, but with all that marketing, they fail to mention any advantages of actually having a touchscreen.

<comment><USER18> because there's no advantage of a vertical touchscreen. the lcd should rotate so you can hold it like a tablet.

<comment><USER15> There is no tilt sensor on this device, so i don't think it will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Two things immediately strike me about this: 1: Resistive Touchscreen? Really? 2: If the touchscreen is so great, then why does the device also have a trackpad? I would think a touchscreen should alleviate the need for a trackpad, freeing up space for a better keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yeah, yeah, cool and all, but... why so thick???

<comment><USER15> 9000mah battery? A base heavy enough to allow the device to not tip over when you touch the screen? To be able to offer it for £150?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How much?

<comment><USER22> At the bottom of the webpage there's this link:

[http://liliputing.com/2012/08/gonote-android-4-0-netbook- hea...](http://liliputing.com/2012/08/gonote-android-4-0-netbook-heading-to- the-uk-for-235.html)

which suggests it will seek for $235. If that's really the price I'd buy one today for my son.

<comment><USER15> Being released in the UK first at £150 (which is $240ish) - so they might be higher in the US at first with import costs. A great price though, and with HDMI would also double as a media centre for me.

<comment><USER23> If it's a UK company, I'm doubly amazed at all the editing misses on the main landing page. And I'm not a native speaker by far.

To be constructive:

        -Inch symbol missing in first sentence
        - Weird switch from "to work hard" to "and then relaxing"
        - Repeat of "to use" in first smaller paragraph (by the Android icon)
        - "its" instead of "it's" under Power and Portability
        - Weird ellipsis in the Play Store, should be "blah ..."/"... blah",
          not "... blah"/"... blah"
        - Missing opening parenthesis in the Ethernet port caption</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google in, Google out - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/21/google-in-google-out/ <comment><USER2> > They don't just want to remake the world in their image. They want to remake > our individual lives. Each Stack — bar Facebook, for now — offers the same > awkward bargain: _commit wholly & wholeheartedly to our ecosystem, and we > will better your life._

And it just might work, if any of the newer Google experiences worked on all Google accounts.

My experience as a Google Apps / G Suite user, is that few to none of the newer Google products and features are either available or offer anything more than a basic and perfunctory service.

"One account, all of Google", not if the account isn't a Gmail account.

It's the biggest thing that is broken at Google, and it's broken in every product department, every team, every feature.

It's also why I haven't purchased a Pixel (why? When much of the benefit I'm denied access to, I cannot even ask Google Assistant for my agenda), and I haven't purchased a Home (why? When again it is limited and locked down), and my Android TV seems to lack integration with Photos (which I assume is because of my G Suite account but maybe it's just crappy).

Google accounts seem to be driving towards 2 very different and polarised futures, a personal one and a professional one. Having only professional accounts means that all of the personal features are unavailable.

<comment><USER3> I'm developing a web app that can be installed via the G Suite Marketplace. They also have an 'Integrate with Google' button that we can put on our website so users can just install/grant permissions from there - sounds great - in principle. Except the users don't have any way of choosing which account it uses. So if they happened to log into their personal Gmail account before their work G Suite account, well, then they're just shit out of luck and can't install. I asked about a fix (e.g. a 'select account' box like you get when logging in) on StackOverflow and filed a report on their developer support site - of course, this being Google, there's been no answer more than a month later, and I doubt there ever will be...

Anyways, in the meantime, the only thing we can do is pretend that button doesn't exist and instead direct users to the marketplace to install. Except, since our app is only installable by G Suite admins, if you happened to log into your personal Gmail account first, our listing is not even visible...

Google's whole account situation is a dumpster fire - and don't even get me started on the APIs they have on G Suite, that seem to have grown organically out of an 'admins would like to script a bit with the data'-use case and only added 3rd party apps as an afterthought. I wonder if the G Suite team is just chronically understaffed and underfunded or if they just don't realize how broken the whole thing is.

<comment><USER4> >filed a report on their developer support site - of course, this being Google, there's been no answer more than a month later, and I doubt there ever will be...

Don't lose hope, we filed a similar request and then forgot about it. Several months later, we got a response and the issue has now been resolved. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > And yet. Like every I/O attendee I received a free Google Home device as > part of the I/O experience. (I attended as an engineer, not as press.) But I > don't want one; I'll be giving mine away. Sorry, Google. It's not that I > mistrust you. It's just that I don't want to have to trust any profit-driven > megacorporation quite that much. Not Apple, not Amazon, and not even you.

It is very interesting to me why certain microphones and cameras are fine, while others are not.

Almost everybody carries one of both in their pockets or in their purse. However, it is a no no to embed a cam in a pair of glasses. Building a mic into a speaker is not okay for this guy, but consumer satisfaction is quite high for these devices. I guess to have mics and cams in your car is fine as well.

If it's about babies or security (door bells) it is also fine.

Augmented stuff on your phone seems a necessary predecessor before Google glass can come out for people like this.

It's some kind of anti-sensor attitude that seems to erode over time. I don't think it's about privacy, it seems to be about control. Where's the button on that thing!?

<comment><USER6> Always on cameras, always on mics, that's a new low even for Google. Technically they are not yet uploading everything into the cloud, but who in his right mind is trusting Google on privacy anymore? From Google Maps the other day "New! share your location with your friends for an hour". Oh, by the way, give Google Maps permission to always track your location, forever. Wtf.

Camera and microphone on the mobile phone activate when I press the button to activate them. Furthermore, the photos and sound are ostensibly owned by me. Pics go to icloud, voice goes to the people I talk to. Not to a corporation that built a global web specifically designed to suck up every bit of personal information that they can possibly suck. "To provide me a better service", haha.

Mics and cams are OK in cars, because the car is not connected to the Internet. The data stays in the car. Baby monitors are OK, because they are not connected to the Internet. The data stays in the house. Notice a pattern there?

<comment><USER4> >Camera and microphone on the mobile phone activate when I press the button to activate them.

Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for just a moment and remind you that, should Google want to, they could just turn on your microphone and camera without letting you know. _Would_ they? Probably not, but they certainly could, and unless you're in the habit of regularly checking your network traffic, you wouldn't know.

<comment><USER7> Not if you don't use Android.

<comment><USER8> Yes if you use Android, and in particular yes if you've given an app camera access.

Proof: my phone (unrooted, OEM Android) can shoot photos whenever I want it to, even if it stays locked, without anyone noticing. It's a trivial Tasker job I set up myself (think e.g. shooting rear-camera selfies using your smartwatch), but it nicely demonstrates that any app with camera privileges could do that too.

<comment><USER7> I said if you _dont_ use android

<comment><USER8> Right. That's what happens when I comment just before going to bed. :/.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The thing that scares me the most about all the data I give to Google is not that I am putting lots of trust in present-Google. It's that I am also putting lots of trust in FUTURE-Google.

So far, history has shown that even the most dominant tech companies can see their power wane.

Imagine you are a VP at Google, and after a year of revenue shrinkage you are being pressured to get "creative" about new sources of revenue... You have everyone's ENTIRE history of data. At one point the "need for revenue" will outweigh the "desire to respect people's privacy."

<comment><USER10> That "desire to respect people's privacy" isn't just some form of benevolent corporate altruism though, it's also a legal agreement between Google and its users and something that's closely watched by regulators around the world.

It's hard to see because in America there are basically no laws regarding privacy but around Europe in particular, regulators have power and use it. See the "right to be forgotten" laws which were forced on Google as an example.

That's not to say that Google can't do things with your data later but it will need your consent and regulators will be paying close attention.

<comment><USER9> That's a good point, I have zero understanding of how privacy laws and Google's own TOS limit what they can do with old data.

To clarify, though, I'm not talking about Google straight-up selling my data, I'm talking about all the creepy in-between things like:

\- parsing out the fees I pay from my financial transaction emails and selling me in an "audience" to competing banks.

\- Parsing my e-commerce Return confirmations and selling it as an "ecommerce credit score" to ecommerce sites.

\- Monitoring brand mentions on Google Home and selling me in an audience to advertisers.

\- Selling my contact information to sites I thought I was just browsing "anonymously"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What we need more of is something like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Regulation (EU) 2016/679). Right now, Google, Facebook et al are luring their users deeper and deeper into their ecosystem by promising them a better future, which will never happen, the only thing that is happening are consumers handing over more of their personal data hoping tech will make good on that promise.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation)

<comment><USER12> Your premise is flawed. My future is already better than when I started using Google. It promised me a better future and I have _already_ received the benefit and there are many, many more benefits coming in the future. I no longer have to buy and maintain my own hardware for my files. I don't have to worry about losing my precious photos in a fire. I have found better restaurants by allowing my preferences to be known.

So they are not just gathering data and providing hope. There are tangible benefits today.

<comment><USER11> Sure, my concern are all the bad things that will happen when all collected data ends up in the hands of a future totalitarian state. Do you know if there is a kill switch in place ?

[https://www.wired.com/2017/05/googles-perfect-future-will- al...](https://www.wired.com/2017/05/googles-perfect-future-will-always-just- around-corner/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> On the topic of Google Lens, I don't really understand the hype around it.

People are talking about how it is able scan a bar code of SSID and password to connect to router. Isn't that ancient technology? And for other uses like overlay maps info, aren't those just running standard CV/ML algorithms on their mega-servers plus simple integration with other apps in their ecosystem?

<comment><USER14> I think it is that simple integration that makes or breaks the product. Because Google controls the OS, it allows for a more seamless experience: you wouldn't download an app just to scan and connect to Wi-Fi networks, but because it's a feature built into your phone you are much more likely to use it.

<comment><USER8> If only they did that. One of the things that annoys me the most about modern smartphones is that every single feature has a separated, isolated app for it (usually each from a different vendor), and none of those apps properly integrate with one another. The more they can integrate at OS level, the better for the user experience (though I'm not having high hopes - Google has a long history of dumbing down applications to the point of making them barely useful for anything).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is interesting that of the 5, Microsoft is still in the mix. Look back 10 years, or 20 years, and ask which companies you would have thought would also be present. MS may have made the list, but wouldn't a lot of others as well?

Apple is also surprising, but then again, that's what they were so good at. You expect someone to come out of nowhere, but MS just keeps on chugging when so many others failed out.

<comment><USER16> Microsoft's scale and early dominance gives them incredible staying power. Apple, at this point, too. Huge companies have the money to coast by in mediocrity for years, and can simply buy assets to fill in gaps in their product line.

Don't have a chat app? Buy one. Don't have machine learning yet? Buy a couple of those too.

Even if a company like Google lost most of it's income overnight, it could coast for years on pure cash reserves. The amount of money these big tech behemoths have to work with is incredible. As long as they strike gold once or twice every several years, they'll be fine.

<comment><USER17> _> Huge companies have the money to coast by in mediocrity for years, and can simply buy assets to fill in gaps in their product line._

True, though IBM may now have spent too long coasting by in mediocrity...

<comment><USER16> I don't know, Watson is actually one of the most publicly-recognized names in the AI game. If they leverage that correctly, there's a lot of opportunities there.

Especially since most people who want to use AI would view Google as a competitor because of the number of services it operates, and IBM is more likely to support someone's desire for on-premises solutions. (The on-site enterprise solutions Google had for search and Earth, for comparison, have been recently discontinued.)

<comment><USER17> Watson is actually the most heavily-advertized name in the AI game. It's invisible in IBM's financial results, which have now shown declines in turnover for 20 quarters in a row.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The author seems really concerned with privacy and surveillance. I'm no expert on the subject.

But, why all the concern? He said they're working really hard to keep that stuff private. Are there legal risks here? Will the government come after you if you say the wrong thing? I don't really get it.

I think the biggest security risk is just your email, if hackers get into that: that's where all the potentially financially devastating information is.

</comment><comment><USER19> There used to be a video called "Google Grid" that talked about a future where everything was Google. It was pretty cool, about 5-10-ish years old I think? But I can't find it anywhere.

<comment><USER20> This one by any chance?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is this guy quoting his own tweets in the article?

<comment><USER22> …and what is wrong with referring to what you have said before?</comment></comment>


Checkout my latest dotfiles for web development for OS X machine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gokulkrishh/dotfiles <comment><USER2> This would make a good Show HN post.

Rules: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

Show HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show)</comment>


Austin, Denver, Detroit: Good Places to Be a Software Engineer Looking for a Job - <AUTHOR> https://www.spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/austin-denver-and-detroit-are-good-places-to-be-a-software-engineer-looking-for-a-job <comment><USER2> EX Denver developer here. Colorado Native. Now an Austin Dev (I'm a senior / lead android dev) I can safely say that the job market in Denver is terrible. Yes you can find work, but the company culture are terrible. I found myself with brogrammers that had 0 engineering style hobbies or being asked to work 60 hours every week. There are a few gems.. But the Jobs you want, aren't hiring mobile devs because their offices are start up size. IE Uber, google, github. Those are all Boulder offices anyways, not Denver. In Denver you will get mostly Banks, and dinos like Comast / Aol. Sure some will get offers at Pivotal or Workday. But after that you aren't going to like what you can get.

Seriously the drug use is pretty Rampant in Denver too. Not a turn off to all, but given the places I did work, you wouldn't expect it. Texas is so much better. The job I have is so much better, My coworkers are actually nerdy. Honestly. Sorry I just have to laugh at the idea that desert is a great place to look for work.

Here in Austin we can't even find android devs to apply. Denver I interviewed maybe 20 and found most to be just okay.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Have been here for about 6 mos now, was hoping to have a good work / life balance (to me, that means running outdoors in open trail areas, not necessarily mountains - and not having a bad commute). I'm now working downtown and can not find any acceptable commute to a sparsely populated area. The W line to boulder is way too damn slow, I could probably ride a bicycle faster (it takes about 1:15 to go from boulder to downtown). The sprawl is larger than I expected.

I also notice it stinks pretty bad from whatever those smoke stacks are doing near Colfax & I25, and north of Denver - like some metallic smell.

In areas like North Thornton there is hydraulic fracking, so I'll pass on that, along with Arvada near Rocky Flats.

There is a lot of homelessness, but i read about 75% of those people have jobs - but can't find a place to live affordably. Rents might not be as bad as SF or Seattle but they are going up, apparently from the influx of people coming for legal weed and affordable housing shortage (luxury stuff is being built)

Oh, and avoid the 16th Street Circus. Centennial, Parker, Boulder, or Golden all look nice if you can find opportunities there - but the commutes from those (also nice to live places) are too much into downtown.

<comment><USER4> Send me a private message. I'm an engineer and my company is hiring and we are nerdy to a fault. Our stack is C++, Node, React, Python, and C#(we are phasing that out).

We are in Broomfield, since Boulder got too expensive after we grew enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Detroit engineer here.

There may be a lot of openings around here as Detroit industry continues to modernize and the startup scene matures, but salaries are still lagging.

Some of the large companies (autos, insurance, etc) will occasionally offer higher-paying gigs, but competition is fierce and interviewing (like everywhere) is a crap shoot.

I'm currently contracting remotely with a company in the Los Angeles area, and I don't expect I'll be leaving remote work anytime soon. I expect my clients will be in LA, SF, and NY for the rest of my career.

<comment><USER6> Last time I was in Detroit the roads were the worst I'd ever seen. You couldn't even call them pot holes, they were just scars in the earth. For a place nicknamed The Motor City, it was a sad state of affairs.

And that's the crux of it. It's not just the money, in fact it's never the money for me. It's a total quality of life scenario. Being across a bridge from Windsor Canada is cool, the Detroit museum is a great place, and the area has a great lineage for quality pizza. But Detroit itself is like a hostile environment to me, where I can't even travel around without risking breaking my vehicle literally in half. I'd have to me making great money there, just to pay upkeep on vehicle maintenance.

<comment><USER7> > and the area has a great lineage for quality pizza

What lineage are you referring to? Domino's and Little Caesars? (Both are headquartered in the area). They are perfectly edible, but I've never heard those described as representing a "quality pizza" lineage.

<comment><USER8> Detroit has great foods. For great places to eat, trust that you have never heard of them. Not nationwide chains. There are tons of random hole in the wall joint with amazing food. You just have to know them usually through luck or referral because you could walk past them many times and not know there's amazing food in there.

<comment><USER7> I'm from the area, so I definitely know that there is great food there, from little local delis to _the_ _best_ middle eastern food in the US.

I'm just not aware of a great local pizza tradition. And for me personally, Buddy's Detroit-style pizza (I grew up eating it) doesn't meet that standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have lived in Austin for 3 years now and I work in tech. It's a fantastic city. Great weather throughout the year (very hot though - not everyone's cup of tea!), lots of gorgeous outdoor environments within very close proximity to the city center, and plenty of nice people, many of whom are newly-arrived transplants and are optimistic about life and looking to make new friends.

I'm the organizer of a bouldering meetup[1]. We started back in September but already have 250+ members. I'd say more than a third of them work in tech so it's great for networking too. :)

[1][https://www.meetup.com/Bouldering-in- Austin](https://www.meetup.com/Bouldering-in-Austin)

<comment><USER10> Hey, didn't know you were in Austin! Definitely will check out the meetup. I'm an occasional climber.

Besides what you already mentioned: the food is one major factor that I like Austin. From BBQ (Franklin, Salt Lick etc.) to Tacos (Torchy's, Taco Deli) to ethnic Indian, Korean etc. this city has it all and new restaurants are opening all the time.

If you like beer and breweries, Austin has many of them too. Oscar Blues, ABGB, 512, Adelberts, Jester King etc. are just a few that come to mind. There are lot of brewpubs as well and new ones are opening all the times.

If you're young and into the nightlife scene, Austin has a lively scene and you can literally go out any night of the week and find something interesting. From live music to famous bands, to music festivals, there's ALWAYS something to do, which is really fucking amazing.

Generally I don't like to say too many nice things since I like to keep this amazing city all to myself. But maybe HN crowd is ok :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've lived in Austin for about 5 years. Grad school, not work. My programmer friends seem to have no problem getting jobs, and I have no shortage of male friends, but the gender ratio of singles is pretty heavily skewed towards men for introverted nerds. I'm a single male who doesn't have a lot of free time, so I gave up on dating in Austin. The city doesn't seem to attract many people I'd like to date. Particularly compared against where I lived previously. Many of the people under 35 in Austin seem to have been attracted to the city for the music festivals and relative lack of cold weather. I'm an introvert who finds the summer heat here worse than the cold on the east coast. As I said, Austinites are typically not my kind of people.

Something to keep in mind if you believe you might be similar to me. Austin is probably not worse than SF, but I don't intend to live there after I graduate either.

<comment><USER10> I haven't found that experience at all. In fact one of the reasons I refuse to move to Man Jose or SF is because I've heard of the famously skewed sex ratio. There is a lot more diversity in Austin, and as a single guy in his late 20's I've had a very healthy dating experience.

<comment><USER11> I don't doubt SF, etc., is worse. My experience suggests Austin is a step down from where I lived previously.

Perhaps you're more attractive or patient than I am. I also just realized that I forgot to mention that I'm a teetotaler, which seem to be a major turnoff to people here.

If you don't mind me asking, how do you meet single women here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't know why Bay Area companies don't open more in the East Bay. Many of their employees live there. Less commute. It's baffling why companies are so focused on the misery that is Mountain View or Palo Alto.

<comment><USER13> It is pretty astonishing how little tech companies there are in Hayward, Union City, Fremont, and Milpitas. Tens of thousands of available tech workers commuting to the Valley. Companies opening up there could drastically reduce the extremely constrained traffic, then residents all around the bay would allow for more housing. What's the downside?

<comment><USER14> Offices tend to be close to where the CEO lives. Where do CEO and founder types tend to live? West bay.

Also an informal poll of coworkers find most of them live in SF or the south bay today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can confirm that Los Angeles has wonderful supply of engineers and low demand for them. I would rather fight it out here and try my luck than move to Austin/Denver/Detroit though.

<comment><USER16> I lived in San Diego. That was worse than Denver by a lot. I think I got 1 interview at, oh Jitterbug? Went back to Denver, now I am in Austin.

<comment><USER17> SD is paradise for hardware devs, though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Detroit might be okay if you like long commutes, no transit, and (typically) conservative workplaces. Pay seems like its increasing a bit, if stack overflow jobs is any indicator.

It would be an awesome place for a startup with all the cheap property and rent.

People here are nicer than anywhere else I've ever lived

I miss biking and walking to work. And while thats possible here, it's not easy to find.

But Detroit's not an easy city and that's one of its charms. Heh, though people generally don't talk about Detroit's hardships in terms of biking to your tech job.

<comment><USER19> It's weird. The brain drain is constant though, and you have to put up with being the smartest guy in the room and the people you admire always leaving for, like, Phoenix or Pittsburgh. You can buy a mansion for like $50k and then who is going to attend your dinner parties? Your hot wife is a junkie instead of a doctor or pilot.

Cleveland rocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does the Dallas story (low demand for devs, high availability of devs) line up with the experience of those here familiar with the market? Based on just looking at job postings, it didn't seem like there was a lack of demand for devs in that area, but I know that postings don't necessarily equate to high demand.

Also if that's true, do alot of the Dallas devs in need of work go to Austin? Or is that not done for some reason?

<comment><USER21> Dallas guy here, also a very senior SW engineer. My last two hires were about 5 months or so ago, but high availability? hah! I can't necessarily speak for the demand, other than it must be high, because it is hard to find available devs. Also from working with recruiters in the past couple of years, good candidates are snatched up very fast. If you have good experience (and are not a contractor that jumps companies every 3 months), you should find a position within two weeks in Dallas.

As far as Austin, no. Only reason people go to Austin is more a lifestyle choice. More people come from Austin to Dallas simply because the number of available jobs. Last time I checked, Dallas has around twice as many developers as Austin as well.

Right now, people in Texas cities other than Austin are staying away too. Austin's infrastructure has not kept up with the growth and it is nuts. Dallas and Houston have done a much better job when planning ahead for the growth of the entire job market, whereas Austin took somewhat of a Boulder, Co stance and decided they really don't need to work on infrastructure to aid growing the population. That's a whole other story though.

<comment><USER10> > Austin's infrastructure has not kept up with the growth and it is nuts. > Dallas and Houston have done a much better job when planning ahead for the > growth of the entire job market, whereas Austin took somewhat of a Boulder, > Co stance and decided they really don't need to work on infrastructure to > aid growing the population. That's a whole other story though.

That's sadly very true but its not from a lack of trying. The city tried a couple of years ago to float a light rail proposal that was put up to a vote but shot down by citizens. Most of the infrastructure is still very road- focused. Although I'm hoping that the many downtown approach will easy the traffic somewhat (Domain, Mueller etc.)

<comment><USER22> Thought traffic on I-35 was pretty bad in the 90's when I lived in Austin and as bad as the worst parts of Houston, imagine it's much worse now.

<comment><USER10> Yeah its basically a parking lot at daytime during most of the week. Mopac is a lot better, I'm guessing because it has less truck traffic. I consider myself very lucky though since with a developer salary I can choose to live wherever I want and have flexible hours to avoid the worst parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just moved my startup(www.getpei.co) from Los Angeles to Austin for an accelerator and can attest that software is sprawling! There are tons of great meetups supported by a ton of great innovative companies and with amazing events like SXSW (which will be our first) they environment is growing for engineers.

The reason I see this happening is because I believe with the roots of live music in Austin, there is a lot of creativity growing around here. When you mix it with effective development and adventurous culture, there is a great mixture of support systems to really build a software-based community.

Weirdly enough, my company is actually looking for a CMO now in the area, and we are finding it difficult to fill the position at an early stage company. So shameless plug, if you are in the area ( which I am finding a lot of Austin is HN), please feel free to reach out!

</comment><comment><USER24> Two typical problems with this study:

1\. There is a failure to clearly specify what is meant by a given city. In this case, linkedin is at least kind enough to use the word "region". For "SF Bay Area", would that count Davis or Santa Cruz? For "Boston", would that count Chelmsford or Braintree? For "Washington D.C.", would that count Arlington or Annapolis Junction or Ballston or Dulles?

2\. Anything below a certain size is not considered. If the big city has 54321 people fighting over 12345 jobs, while the small city has 123 people considering 321 jobs, going for the big city might not be so wise. This is before even adjusting for quality-of-life problems in cities.

</comment><comment><USER25> For anyone looking for engineering positions in Austin, we are hiring at athenahealth ($ATHN). Senior-level positions in C#/.NET (+Azure), JAVA (+AWS), ReactJS/Native, iOS/Android.

Our Austin office is where a lot of R&D happens and there is a huge push to re-platform into micro services. athenahealth also owns Epocrates, a very popular mobile app used by more than 600K providers. That product team is based here, too.

Great place to work, beautiful office, downtown location with parking included, and a very mission-driven culture. Find me on LinkedIn or my Gmail in my HN profile. Happy to connect you with the hiring managers.

<comment><USER26> This is pretty ballsy considering the layoffs and push to offshore development going on right now at Athena... stock price is doing good though...</comment></comment>


How we read another's mind by looking into their eyes - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/how-we-learn-to-read-anothers-mind-by-looking-into-their-eyes <comment><USER2> Exactly why tracking and aligning eyes would dramatically improve communication and understanding in video chat.</comment>


Student Loan Debt: Who Are the 1%? - <AUTHOR> http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/student-loan-debt-who-are-the-1/

<comment><USER2> Wow, the article's presentation of statistics is abysmal and certainly intentionally misleading. The chart produced, by including each bar as all persons that have greater than the level of debt, rather than into bins, means everyone in bars to the right is also included in the count of bars to the left. Sure, she explains this, but it is completely different than normal convention, isn't going to be expected or realized but any but careful readers, and the result is to support her assertion that debt levels are not that high by massively misrepresenting the left side of the chart.

Then there is the issue that she is not even including anyone who graduated in less than 6 years! It's hard to imagine that if we saw those numbers they wouldn't skew the curve as well. The whole presentation reeks of cherry picked data classification.

<comment><USER3> > by including each bar as all persons that have greater than the level of > debt, rather than into bins, means everyone in bars to the right is also > included in the count of bars to the left. Sure, she explains this, but it > is completely different than normal convention

It's called "cumulative", and it is quite common, and not misleading. For this kind of presentation it is what you want because most people are interested in picking some particular debt level and saying "X% are above this debt level". If you don't do a cumulative chart, then you have to take all the bins above X% and add them up to get the number you want.

> Then there is the issue that she is not even including anyone who graduated > in less than 6 years! It's hard to imagine that if we saw those numbers they > wouldn't skew the curve as well. The whole presentation reeks of cherry > picked data classification

Yes--it skews the numbers toward _more_ debt and away from the point she is making it. This strengthens her point, not weakens it.

<comment><USER2> I'd appreciate citations to use of this form of graph in reliable related research that isn't clear propaganda. The graph clearly shows at a glance that the vast majority of debtors have a very small level of debt. The large font title of the chart "Percentage of Students with Different Levels of Debt" is misleading. The term cumulative appears in much smaller print at the bottom. Only careful thought reveals to most readers that the left most category is not that level of debt 0-$10,000 that its measure of 64% of students have, but it is that level of debt and all levels above it, (including $100,000, $1 million, etc) summed. The actual percentage of degree holders with 0-$10,000 debt, 64%-51% = 13%, is not shown directly at all. 13% is an extremely different number from 64% and can only be extrapolated from the chart by readers familiar with set theory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe the point of this article was not to trivialize college debt but to criticize the media's frequent citation of college loans in excess of 100k for an individual.

Part of the debt problem has been the dearth of students going into high demand majors (mostly STEM). We on hacker news know the benefit of a engineering/computer science degree and being even marginally good at it comes with great rewards.

<comment><USER5> > _"Part of the debt problem has been the dearth of students going into high > demand majors (mostly STEM)."_

STEM degrees are _expensive_ \- considerably moreso than, say, English degrees. This is _especially_ true for professional degrees like engineering.

So yeah, your odds of employment out of school are much better than the English major, but your debt load has increased significantly as well. Getting a STEM degree can _mitigate_ the effects of our ludicrously overpriced education system (i.e., you've got a shitload of debt, but at least you're chipping away at it, as opposed to not making your payments at all), it does not avoid it.

<comment><USER6> The tuition is exactly the same at the state schools I'm familiar with. Books were more expensive but were a small fraction of the tuition costs.

<comment><USER7> This is not the case with all state schools. Mine, for example, was contrary to that. Different colleges in the University had different tuition. Obviously Art, Theater, Music, and Engineering have different costs -- why should they all pay flat rates?

On top of that, majoring in something technical will also likely require more fees -- lab fees, computer fees, etc.

Oh, and your book costs will be higher. Textbook prices have tripled in the last ten years, so now an English Major is paying what I paid for Computer Engineering back in 2000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Even among recipients of bachelor's degrees, 90 percent manage to graduate > with less than $40,000 of debt.

This seems inaccurate to me. I graduated from a Canadian University (which are very cheap for the quality of education they provide) and accumulated ~30K in student loans for tuition and living expenses.

If I went to a school of similar caliber in the US, I would need more than that for a single year!

<comment><USER9> > This seems inaccurate to me.

The article is talking about debt after graduation, not total cost of the degree.

There are many ways to lower that debt, mostly by paying it off before graduating with: student's money, parent's money, government financial aid, school financial aid, school scholarships academic or otherwise, 3rd party scholarships, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wrote a long reply to this, but it was too big for HN. Now on my Tumblr instead.

[http://tibbon.tumblr.com/post/13839164804/i-am-the-1-of- stud...](http://tibbon.tumblr.com/post/13839164804/i-am-the-1-of-student-debt)

Its the perspective from someone that is in well over 100K of student loan debt- me.

<comment><USER7> I'm now following you so I can read it later.

<comment><USER10> Thanks. It is a bit of a wall of text, but I felt it best to offer a more complete picture over the simplification that some make of, "People go to school for stupid majors and take a ton of loans, then complain because they are stupid since they didn't go to school for engineering|law|cs"

<comment><USER11> Thanks for this. I read it and posted to fb. Assuming you already posted to reddit. I am in a similar situation and am also the 1%.

<comment><USER10> Thanks! I put up am AMA on Reddit, but no one has bit yet. [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/n303s/i_have_over_150k...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/n303s/i_have_over_150k_of_student_loan_debt_ama/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe it's just old-fashioned thinking (you know, like Henry Ford or J.P. Morgan) but I had always been taught "Don't buy stuff you can't afford!" kind of like this SNL clip: [http://www.hulu.com/watch/1389/saturday-night-live- dont-buy-...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/1389/saturday-night-live-dont-buy- stuff)

It's really too bad that students are sandwiched between the "Gimme everything now!" attitude and such a grim employment outlook, but since when should you not have to repay what you borrowed? It's almost like such easily available credit of the past few decades has caused us to forget what exactly a loan is: _borrowing_ money with the promise to repay it in the future.

<comment><USER13> It's easy to think this way if you aren't an 18 year old naive kid in front of predatory lenders and everyone else around you telling you that this is the normal way things work and you are worthless without a college education.

Unfortunately, you don't get a second chance. How many things did you have to sign at 18 years old that will haunt you to your grave?

As for when you should not have to repay what you borrowed, well, that is pretty common in business and no one plays the deadbeat card.

<comment><USER12> ...I am 18, well, almost 19. I _chose_ community college for 2 years while I save up for the university I plan to attend. Yeah, people tend to judge when you don't choose a "real" college at first. It seems unambitious to everyone in my family except my grandfather (coincidentally he's the financial guru who got me into investing), but knowing I won't be in debt when I graduate is more than worth it.

I completely agree that there is a lot of pressure to go straight into the most prestigious college you can. Between for-profit college TV ads pressing the importance of a degree, school counselors telling you to "aim high" and constant expectations of everyone around you it's much easier, socially at least, to go straight for the expensive university. It's nothing new, though; as Henry Ford put it, "Luring people into debt is an industry." Looks like that industry is still going strong.

I didn't mean to come across as arrogant with my first comment. It's certainly hard to go against the current, and I think the main problem is schools and parents not encouraging an affordable college, at least for the first few years, as a viable option. People just tend to be blinded by hype and expectations, not wanting to disappoint the family name. There's certainly a lot of that attitude where I went to school.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If anyone wants to get a hold of her and let her know just how wrong and narrow minded she is:

<http://www.tc.columbia.edu/academics/?facid=js3676>

</comment><comment><USER15> Note that the first graph is "Six Years After College Entry". So that's 1-2 years after graduation. BARELY any time (if any) for interest to accumulate (as it doesn't while you're still a student).

I'd like to see a graph of 5 or 10 years after college graduation.

Edit: I was misinformed about college loans, please read the comments below this post. It is worse than I thought.

<comment><USER16> Interest shouldn't accumulate as long as payments are being made.

If people are leaving school and jobless, then any debt is going to be rough on them.

<comment><USER11> This is not true. Interest does not start accruing on subsidized loans until repayment begins. Interest accrues WHILE you are still in school for unsubsidized loans. In both cases, interest is accruing as you are making regular payments.

<comment><USER16> That's correct. The original poster said lets look years out to see if someone had 100k in debt, but if they are repaying the loan the balance should not be getting bigger even with interest accruing (it's not _accumulating_ since a payment should cover current interest plus some principle). I wasn't very clear with my wording.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Always, always, always find a school that will pay your way. I racked up a "mere" $10,000 as an undergraduate (thank you, Bay Area, for your insane cost of living), and even that was too much.

As a result, money ended up being a big part of the graduate program I chose. This allowed me to actually _make money_ on graduate school. The lesson being: college is a system, and you should learn to game it.

<comment><USER18> This is good advice to give to specific individuals, but it's unrelated to the systemic debt problem. Your strategy can't apply to the broad population, or the universities wouldn't have any money with which to pay your way.

<comment><USER17> I'm not talking to individuals. I'm talking to a specific, highly motivated group of people, some of whom are pursuing undergraduate or graduate degrees, some of whom are _considering_ pursuing undergraduate or graduate degrees.

Downvote all you like, but I've learned a few things through three degrees at three different universities, and my advice remains the same -- particularly for anyone attending a for-profit school or graduate school:

If you plan on going to college, learn to game the system.</comment></comment></comment>


Rocket Lab Reveals Secret Engine and "Kick Stage" for the Electron Rocket - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a15854376/rocket-lab-engine-kick-stage-electron-rocket/ <comment><USER3> Not sure I get the significance. Isn't this a part that satellites would contain themselves in other cases? So the benefits of this is satellite makers don't have to add a part themselves to move themselves into orbit. Instead Rocket Lab gives them a standard part which will take care of precise orbit placement?

<comment><USER4> Not all bus manufacturers make their own engines quite often they would offer different options based on the specific station keeping and in orbit maneuvering requirements of the client.

There are also a few startups that develop solutions these days for extending the life of satellites in orbit by essentially grabbing it and using their own engine for station keeping.

While I don't know how much room there is in the market for more engines I would say that likely as long as you can have any usecase specific advantages you can probably find a customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Old article :(. I had hoped that by now, we'd have some details about the last stage - like, what are the engine's parameters and what fuel it uses exactly.

Still, great to see this happening. Electron fills an important niche in the launch market.

<comment><USER6> I'm guessing you already know this, but speculation is that it's Rocket Lab's patented thixotropic monopropellant, VLM, developed when they were working on propulsion tech for missiles and sounding rockets, before they started Electron

[https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLab/comments/7sg0vn/rocket_la...](https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLab/comments/7sg0vn/rocket_lab_launch_also_tested_new_kick_stage/dt4jegj/)

<comment><USER7> You know it'd be great if governments around the world started a patent pool of space-related tech in order to kick start the Space Age.

<comment><USER5> I'm usually pretty supportive of government involvement, when it comes to fixing up the failures of the market. But for now, I think government should stay away from space industry. The market there _isn 't broken_ (yet). Nobody is preventing competition through holding critical pieces of technology; companies are innovating different ways to reduce launch costs and increase reliability. The overall atmosphere is that of friendly competition towards the same goal, not cut-throat business. Governments don't have much to fix there.

(Some funding and less strings attached would be nice, though. For instance, NASA could be orders of magnitude more useful if the US Congress would stop micromanaging them and treating them as a large jobs program.)

Space Age is happening by itself, it's almost at the critical mass now - <USER2> hope nobody tries to _interrupt_ that.

<comment><USER8> It depends what you mean by 'stay away'. If you mean in the form of interfering by skewing the commercial incentives, yes ok, but we're nowhere near the point where current space technology development can survive without government support. I don't mean in the form of subsidies, those can be retired, but in the form of investment and contracts for commercial services. SpaceX launch manifest would collapse without NASA contracts and in fact the company wouldn't exist in anything like it's current form without them. The military contracts they're getting are very valuable too.

There has been talk recently, in military and security circles, that reusable rocket technology could give the US a decade or more lead over their rivals, in terms of technology and space infrastructure. It's possible the military and security contracts SpaceX are starting to get are part of a deliberate effort to funnel funds into this new technology. You could view that as interference, but equally you could view it as a well funded client supporting a supplier, much in the way Apple funnels funds into suppliers to bootstrap new technology for their products.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I meant heavy-handed skewing of incentives. Government contracts are absolutely crucial at this point, I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> so, if I understood this correctly, this would allow satellites to reduce weight by not carrying fuel required for orbit raising / changing maneuvers.., that would otherwise increase the weight & complexity of the satellite payload?

Sort of like, instead of releasing the satellite in GTO, from where the satellite expends fuel / reaction mass to reach GSO, in this case, the rocket uses a tiny secondary engine to move the satellite to the GSO?

<comment><USER10> I suspect that you can save some weight if you have multiple satellites going to the same orbit, or if you have a chain of satellites that can be dropped off into similar orbits as the kick stage can be stopped and started several times. But while each individual satellite doesn't need an engine, you now have to launch an engine and fuel capable of moving a batch of satellites together, so it's not like you're eliminating the weight entirely.

<comment><USER5> A serious satellite will still need an engine and some fuel for stationkeeping. But the extra stage would be useful for dropping various cubesats at different orbits, which is what I think is Electron's target market.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Isblankup – a fast and minimal website to check whether a website is up - <AUTHOR> http://www.isblankup.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> With this site, my goal was to make it as fast as a free Heroku dyno can get. I'm not incredibly experienced in development, as I'm still studying for my undergrad, so any feedback is appreciated.

You can find the source code here: [https://github.com/Meegul/isup](https://github.com/Meegul/isup)</comment>


Forget KitKat, Stay Away From These If You Are In UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.tutorcare.co.uk/disgusting-food-chains-2013/

<comment><AUTHOR> Significant amount of mouse droppings were found in a Domino's Pizza in London - on shelves, surfaces and under equipment.

The most disgusting fast food chain is Chicken Cottage

71 gang related crimes at Chicken Cottage in Ladbroke Grove

I wonder what Starbucks is like, I spend a lot of time there.</comment>