How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month - steve-benjamins https://www.stevebenjamins.com/blog/spotify-and-discover-weekly <comment><AUTHOR> In college about 5 years ago, I heard a presentation from some recording industry people who worked at a studio. They saw Spotify as the reason their industry would still exist in five years. I think at the time total recording revenues were still declining, but the streaming growth was really picking up.

Spotify has brilliantly convinced many people to spend $120 per year on music. The average CD-buyer spent much less than that. It's become normal and acceptable to have a subscription to this stuff. It was hard to imagine in the early 2000s when so many pirated their music for free.

<comment><USER2> It has always been, and always will be, about convenience first.

Pre-Spotify and pre-bandcamp, getting music you could play on multiple devices was _hard_. Piracy was the only reliable way you could have the same songs on your walkman, your mp3 player, your phone, and your computer.

Bandcamp is nice, in that it offers DRM-free music in high quality, but Spotify offers raw, unadulterated _convenience_.

And Convenience is King.

<comment><USER3> I've given up trying to understand this. For me, buying a physical disc, transferring the files to my computer, and either putting them into Dropbox or transferring them via VLC to each of my devices is so easy.

Amazon music downloads & Bandcamp downloads are even easier.

What's _not_ easy is needing to manage a subscription account, log in on multiple devices, and either manage caching music local to the device (and frequently needing to clear items out of the cache to switch with other items) or always use cellular data services to stream music.

I obviously cannot argue with massive consumer trends, but personally I do not understand how anyone thinks streaming services are more convenient. I cannot empathize with any use case where streaming would be more convenient.

Whether I'm discovering new music, sharing music, making playlists, or anything else, the absolute number one thing I need is the raw music files. Convenience starts & stops with that.

<comment><USER4> let's compare:

> _For me, buying a physical disc_

physically drive to a store, find the cd, purchase, etc. or buy online, wait days for it to arrive, etc.

> _transferring the files to my computer_

hook phone up to computer, extract files, load onto dropbox, and then finally have access

vs.

> _manage a subscription account, log in on multiple devices_

you literally click one button. that's all. And you login once and never again. no more difficult than logging into dropbox.

> _either manage caching music local to the device_

again, one button. on your spotify playlist / album there is a "download" button. click it. boom. done. listen all you want, without internet.

> _absolute number one thing I need is the raw music files_

you and about 1% of people. no one else does, hence why spotify is a billion dollar company and cd's are obsolete.

<comment><USER5> You forgot the part where you have to find a computer with a CD drive

<comment><USER6> I had this issue some time ago. My grandparents had some pictures their friends shared via CD. They asked me to show them and print them, but neither me nor my wife had a laptop with a CD drive with us..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I bet you'll get some new interest from this being on the front page of HN too. I just listened to a bunch of your songs and really liked them :)

I love Discover Weekly and get excited every Monday morning when I start work and remember there's a new playlist with music I'll probably like. I created a separate playlist called "Discover Favourites" and when I hear a song I like I put it in there, and it's got hundreds now. I've found so many artists I never would have heard of.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a great counterpoint to people complaining about how little they make from Spotify.

One thing that stuck out to me:

> Because you can only submit one song, it's best to space out releases. That > way you can have ten singles considered by Spotify editors— rather than one > single from an album for an entire year.

I've wondered why so many artists were releasing a ton of singles on Spotify. This seems like a gameable system.

<comment><USER9> Is it though? The author makes $400 a month, that's not even close to being a living. Mis metrics and revenue match up with my own experience with Spotify and they are very difficult to achieve. Now imagine that your musical project has 4 people instead of 1, now it's $100 a month per person. Except just kidding, because you'll need to pump all that money (and personal money from members) back into the band to keep things growing.

<comment><USER8> It's a success because he considers it to be one. Also he's earning more money from his music on Spotify than he was through other means.

He explicitly says he's not trying to earn a living from it.

> Of course that's not enough to support a full-time artist but that's not > what I'm trying to be. I don't tour, I don't sell merch and I'm not on a > label. I just want to make music and Spotify is making that possible.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, I should have been more clear. The 'Is it though?" is in response to saying it's a great counterpoint to people complaining about how little they make from Spotify. The author isn't trying to make a living of Spotify, but many people are. Spotify revenue isn't even close to enough for them even if you're extremely successful getting listeners like the author has been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to love the Discover Weekly, but now that I use Spotify most days when going to the gym any of my auto generated playlists like discover weekly kinda suck. I usually put on random gym playlists like the popular "Beast Mode" one. While I like this music for working out, I definitely don't normally enjoy listening to rap, hip hop, and EDM music however this is what most workout music consists of.

I wish I could have playlists that get ignored from Spotify's recommendation engine. Because I totally get it, Spotify thinks I'm into that kind of stuff so it's what I use Spotify for the majority of the time, however I have such a hard time finding new music to listen to on there :(.

<comment><USER11> This is the main reason why recommended content just doesn't work for me. Youtube, spotify, and many other services try to be clever but are just really dumb.

<comment><USER12> It falls on its face when you are just outside the typical use case. Sometimes I'll throw on an album and listen to it all the way through, or just really listen to one particular artist for a few weeks. Then the recommended content falls on its face as it doesn't know how to handle someone binging Grateful Dead one week and Kendrick Lamar the next.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Apple should have bought Spotify. They could've renamed it "Apple Music" if they wanted but they should have otherwise left it alone. They could've even gotten rid of the ad-supported stuff and made it subscription only, I personally wouldn't have cared.

But my point is that Spotify is everything Apple Music should be. I'm an avowed Apple fan owning and using many of their products and services for decades so when I say Apple Music is terrible it's not coming from a place of otherwise disdain that some have for Apple. Frankly, the whole iTunes and Apple Music teams should be embarrassed with what they continue to release. And if the Podcasts app isn't part of those teams it should be, because it is every bit as bad.

I hate to be negative but a spade needs to be called a spade in this case. Apple needs to be called out on those shoddy products.

<comment><USER14> When in an early iteration of Apple Music, the app 'accidentally' erased all of my music library except that which I'd explicitly bought from the iTunes Store; they burned me as a customer forever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is pretty awesome to read, and the charts are really telling.

> For an indie artist like me, the major difference between Apple Music and > Spotify is Discover Weekly. Apple Music has no equivalent.

This is just not true, Apple Music sends you 3 different personalized weekly playlists, two of which from Music you do not already have in your library. I have discovered tons of indie artists (many with < 100 followers on Twitter) through these playlists.

<comment> steve-benjamins Thanks for pointing that out— I just updated the post with a note about that!

<comment><USER16> Any idea why you're not getting featured on those playlists?

<comment> steve-benjamins None. Would love to know why but it's honestly all a black box to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's gatifying as a spotify user to think maybe someday soon there could be a population of artists that make a reasonable living uploading their own music and sustaining their efforts without the need for merch, marketing, or touring -- instead just quietly subsisting on doing something they love doing.

<comment><USER18> That seems unlikely to ever happen. Corporations have always been better than artists at maximizing their share of revenue. If such a population started to develop, Spotify would probably lower their percentage payout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm glad Spotify has opened up as a new revenue stream for musicians but it's a laughably small amount of revenue for how much work it is to compose/record hours of original music. Live music is still king for making money.

As an amateur pianist myself, $400 isn't a lot of money per month. I can pull $100/hr in an afternoon at a classy gig playing Classical/Jazz/Folk/Pop, you do that once per week and you're well over the $400 total for the month, without all the long history of recording/mixing/mastering/promoting that OP has done. This has allowed me to focus much more heavily on my musicianship and expanding my repertoire, rather than on recording tech/marketing. My ceiling for income is much lower this way-- I can't/don't want to find enough gigs to solely perform...but that's why I code to pay the bills.

<comment><USER20> The thing about recorded songs or videos is, the income compounds and has a chance to grow exponentially over time. The same is not true for you going around and playing music.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I make about $200/month thanks to Spotify listing my podcast. Their partnership with Anchor.fm has really helped push my pod forward because the new features on anchor, since the acquisition, have helped me pinpoint an audience.

[https://open.spotify.com/show/0jW7nOHQNi1Xlr3v7UMi2p](https://open.spotify.com/show/0jW7nOHQNi1Xlr3v7UMi2p)

</comment><comment><USER22> As an artist I totally loved this! Especially you talking about just wanting to make songs when you get home in the evening, not hustle on every single front. $400 a month is admirable for music creation!

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a great example of the opportunity created by 'the long tail' of web platforms. I'm glad that people can make money making music and that listeners have so much more choice. Very insightful.

</comment><comment><USER24> They bring up something interesting which is how streaming has changed how music is made. Albums are now shorter with more songs, that nets more plays and more money. They also focus on singles instead of full albums, which gives more opportunity for "playlisting". It's an interesting, albeit concerning, effect that technology is having on art.

<comment><USER25> Why is it any less natural than a vinyl album in the first place? For example the concept of A and B sides is simply because there are two sides to a vinyl record. I don't know much about the evolution of albums but I assume it's just arbitrary and a result of the underlying technology plus consumer expectations.

<comment><USER24> That's fair. It was mainly the constraints of the medium that lead to ideas such as rock operas. Now that the constraints of physical storage are lifted we've seen new concepts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I look forward to every Monday to check out my Discover Weekly. Cool to hear it's having a positive impact on artists.

</comment><comment><USER27> The insight to upload a single every 4 weeks is quite valuable. My songs are all done with pocket operators/an op-1/tone.js, theres a small soundcloud community that follows this type of dawless production but possible longer form ambient tracks would do well on spotify.

<comment><USER28> I'm curious to know how you use tone.js in a creative way, as I have seen it as a framework for developing musical apps, not a creative tool in itself. Also, do you sync the hardware devices with js stuff, if so how?

<comment><USER27> I have been at it for a very short period of time but I mainly think in terms of what cycles can i make that will rarely repeat themselves and result in interesting compositions.

Typically I start by defining a main loop, and then have a synth of my choosing randomly select notes and timings. I listen to this randomness until I realize what I don't like about it, then I change the parameter.

Something that helps is every time I instantiate a Tone object I make sure to copy paste the entire params from the Tone API, that way the code itself is the "knobs and buttons" I am used to fiddling with on a real synth.

This is a brian eno tip but I listen to the track at x2-x4 the bpm of what I actually want the track to end up being, it makes protoyping faster while still allowing complex composition.

I keep adding loops and chaining effects until I find something 'almost' complete that needs a human nonrandom touch.

Then I connect my PC output to my OP-1, record the output onto a track, and finish the song on my OP-1.

I plan on recording the midi output of my op-1 and feeding that into Tone so that I can record some more complicated key movements without having to literally program each key press and release. The path is OP-1 MIDI->MIDItoJSON->Tone.js

If you do know of a programming language/library/software like Tone.js but more suited to generative audio I am 100% interested in this field. I am looking to pursue creative coding once I am out of undergrad. I see it as an easy way to stay away from RDBMS which make me feel a sense of corporate dread.

<comment><USER28> Okay, nice! There are a bunch of langs/environments like chuck, supercollider, MAX. What fits best is mainly about style and preference. A nice way to learn about setups/approaches is to watch algorave videos.

<comment><USER27> Thank you so much for that list of tech to check out! There are clear limitations with tone.js (mainly me not understanding js syntactic sugar) . I'll check out algoraves too thank you again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It would be interesting to see the bump you get in listeners post HN front page.

<comment> steve-benjamins It's a nice uptick— I have ~60 real-time Spotify listeners right now (usually it's around 25 this time of day).

<comment><USER30> I love this article! Thank you for sharing, Steve. I have two followup questions, if you have time to answer. I used CDBaby and got a deal on uploading a full album, as long as it was under a certain number of tracks and the tracks themselves were under a certain amount of minutes. It was a very affordable way to get my band's music distributed throughout Spotify, Apple Music, Google, Amazon, etc.

If I wanted to trickle out a series of singles leading up to the release of our album to "prime the pump" on all platforms at once (like CDBaby), what service can you recommend that might be the most affordable to do this? Secondarily, what would happen when all these tunes are collected later to become an album? Would we have to pay again and re-upload the same tracks?

Thanks in advance,Steve!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For the machine learning enthusiasts, here is an old article on how Spotify classifies songs into genres based on what they actually sound like (input is a spectrogram) [https://outline.com/C3PVuU](https://outline.com/C3PVuU).

Most conventional methods used to recommend based on what other artists people with the same taste as you like. This method is biased against newer artists as there is no easy way to bootstrap them into the process. Their new technique circumvents this problem and as a result new artists get more exposure.

</comment><comment><USER32> I also use Discover Weekly (DW) as a listener fairly consistently and have had some success with it. I believe Spotify mentioned in their S-1 how transformative DW has been to music discovery at large. Side note: Spotify keeps making small UI changes that don't really seem to improve my UI usage. The changes don't even make it worse. They just keep moving everything slightly. I've run into this a few times while trying to find DW.

<comment><USER33> You can just add Discover Weekly to your list of play lists if that is helpful for you. I do that for DW and my Release Radar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is great but I worry that it's like when Google was sending search traffic to smaller blogs all the time... until they didn't. Everyone loves free money but it sounds like it could dry up at any time at Spotify's whim and there'd be no recourse and no explanation.

It is really great that Spotify is putting small to tiny artists into their mass-market playlists. Enjoy it while it lasts.

<comment><USER35> > Google was sending search traffic to smaller blogs all the time... until > they didn't

Is this actually the case / is there data to back this claim outside of generic google bashing? The sole reason I love my discover weekly is I find music I've never heard of, and I can listen to my friend's discover weekly to get new music from their genres. Only supplying big name music would defeat the purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A killer feature for spotify would be if they would tell each individual user how much they are contributing to each individual artist they've listened to. I think that could encourage users to subscribe to spotify and listen more to small artists. I suppose this too could be gamed, but the benefit might outweigh the risk.

<comment><USER37> Like in dollars? I think it would just turn users off seeing how little artists make off streaming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I would love to see an analysis of the artists I listen to on spotify. Last.fm tracks all the songs I listen to so someone would just need to scrape that, find info on each song/artist, and make some nice charts. I'd love to see which artists I listen to that are very small/unknown and send them a thank you.

<comment><USER38> Just after New Year I got some email from Spotify about looking at stats for exactly that kind of thing, it required giving access to a 3rd party (which I revoked immediately after), which suggests to me that it's all data that you can grab from the API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is interesting anecdotally but for those trying to make a living from their music, I would argue direct subscriptions seem far more stable and useful as part of your income. For example bandcamp or something like patreon, where I can subscribe to some artist I really like for $1-3/month or something and get access to everything they do. That's the closest model I've seen for non-huge-industry folks making a living from recordings -- which is of course usually supplemented by touring and a dozen other hustles. (for example mastering or teaching)

IMHO overall it doesn't feel like the situation has changed all that much in this era though. The same huge institutions remain magnets for a handful of lottery-winners (big labels, funded orchestras, etc) and everyone else is scraping by in myriad ways, though the ways are a bit different now.

</comment><comment><USER40> Thanks for sharing with actual numbers! I'll check out your music too.

Discover Weekly is how I find a lot of new music similar to my music, I _trust_ it more than most of the other playlists Spotify or Apple Music create. So far, I've probably discovered 300-400 new songs using Discover Weekly.

<comment> steve-benjamins That's awesome— thanks!!

<comment><USER41> Your welcome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Very cool writeup. I'm a big fan of Discover Weekly as it turns me onto new artists constantly.

</comment><comment><USER43> I find so much good music on Discover Weekly. It's one of the big reasons I stick with Spotify. I've tried all of the other services but none of them come close. And I am fully in the Apple ecosystem but Apples recommendations are not even close to Spotify.

<comment><USER44> For what it's worth, Google Play's Radio system and "I'm Feeling Lucky" (a terrible name for what it does in my opinion) works beautifully for me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Next figure out how to work the YouTube and YTM recommendation algorithm. I know I'm not the only one paying for premium and actively discovering small independent artists everyday through recommendations.

<comment> steve-benjamins Oh interesting— I haven't been paying attention to the YTM recommendation algorithm. I'll have to subscribe and see if I can figure it out.

<comment><USER45> The YouTube music equivalent of Discover Weekly is probably the "Mixtape" feature (with the main difference being repeats from your listening history are allowed which is convenient in the case of the offline Mixtape feature). A lot of my discovery comes from the new releases view on mobile and desktop. Sometimes I'm one of the first people to view newly released songs from artists I've never heard of. Which makes me think they can't be doing it all by some sort of cross referencing of listening habits to recommend songs that other people with similar tastes to mine liked. Maybe they do actually have a complex neural network trained on my listening history that can do decently well in deciding what I would like. I do actively like and dislike songs and have been doing so for years so that may be why it's working so well for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The main problem I have with discovery weekly now is that I primarily use Spotify for the gym but during the day I like to listen to a work playlist that mostly consists of non-vocal electronica.

So because I spend so much time listening to the work playlist it's began to influence the music on my Discover Weekly which I used to use to curate new hip-hop/metal music for the gym. It would be nice if Spotify gave you finer control over the type of music that hits your Discover Weekly because it really would suggest good music for me occasionally.

<comment><USER47> Sounds like a feature "power users" would appreciate, such as Circles in Google Plus, but most users would not spend the time to learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Everyone here is marveling at the thought that Spotify could launch someone's career. But there is already a service that does this consistently and it's called SoundCloud.

</comment><comment><USER49> Are you also on Tidal? I was looking for your music but I couldn't find it. I actually prefer their service and I hear they pay 4x the artists compared to Spotify.

<comment> steve-benjamins Huh. Maybe I'm not Tidal. I'm going to look into this— thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> From my understanding, Spotify's recommendations have a major flaw - they're based off other users' listening data. What this means is that if a song isn't listened to by very many people it'll never be recommended, and many songs on Spotify don't even have a single stream, let alone however many it takes to get the data to make it a recommendation.

<comment><USER51> Luckily, the author outlines the fact that many of Spotify's playlists are curated by humans and when you submit an album to Spotify, you highlight a single track for a human to listen to. It is very possible to catch the ear of a human at Spotify and be placed on playlists, which is a spark that ignites more listenership.

<comment><USER52> How does one land a job as one of these playlist curators?

<comment><USER53> They have a few openings listed on their job site, such as [https://www.spotifyjobs.com/job/content-programming- manager-...](https://www.spotifyjobs.com/job/content-programming-manager-kids- and-family-oy3n8fwg/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Wow, this is pretty informative. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER55> Anybody have stats on $ per stream? How does that number vary between premium/non-premium and on the region you're streaming from?

<comment><USER56> Varies depending on how much of your audience is ad supported vs premium and other variables (family plan, bulk deal through mobile operator, student deal) but blended it's safe to work on the assumption of ~$5 per thousand for Spotify.

Higher for Apple Music as they don't have a freemium audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I wonder if the $10/mo price of Spotify has anchored listeners to a low price that Spotify can't get out of. Spotify will need to pull more money in to be able to give musicians more money per stream. Even if they were able to increase revenues, musicians will need to be able to claim a bigger part of that pie.

<comment><USER58> This is an interesting point. Netflix has survived multiple price increases over the years, but they offer content that isn't available anywhere else. I think what will probably happen is one music streaming service will raise prices and the others will eventually follow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Nice write up, I listen to my DW playlist quite a lot.

I wonder if this approach is fraught with risk though, in the sense that if Spotify tweak the algorithm and suddenly his listener numbers drop. I guess in his case the snowball effect is already in motion, but a tweak could curtail that growth.

</comment><comment><USER60> Congratulations on your achievement ! Do you have your content on Bandcamp ?

As people share on this thread, convenience is winning the game but there's a rising market for other people that value supporting the artists directly.

Keep it up and great work!

<comment><USER61> [https://listentobamboo.bandcamp.com/releases](https://listentobamboo.bandcamp.com/releases)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I'm interested how you record your music. I see on your website that you have a producer. Do you record in a home studio? Pro Logic?

<comment> steve-benjamins I record in my home and Stephen Kerr ([https://www.sjkaudio.com/](https://www.sjkaudio.com/)) produces my music. Having a producer like him is hugely helpful to the sound— he brings so much clarity and polish ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> 12% conversion rate is very good. I suggest using more sale channels and spend some money on advertising.

</comment><comment><USER64> If Spotify is becoming for musicians what GitHub became for programmers, I say that's pretty damn cool.</comment>


Svgsus – Organize, clean and transform your SVGs - <AUTHOR> http://svgs.us <comment><USER2> I wonder why some developers using Electron decide to release an non-cross- platform application. Isn't that the purpose of Electron? To create cross- platform applications using web technologies? Otherwise, why not build it with Obj-C or Swift and get advantage of the native libraries?

<comment><USER3> Do the native libraries really provide that much? Is it really that hard to implement a scrolling list of images these days, or a toggle button?

<comment><USER2> Two unrelated questions. Native libraries would — at least — make the application faster, and considering this is an image-related program I don't want to imagine how slow it is being rendered via a hard webview instead of a light one powered by a native framework like Cocoa. On the other hand, if it is difficult to implement an scrolling list of images and a toggle button using either Objc or Swift, that is something I don't know because I have limited experience with those languages, but if you take the time to build a non-cross-platform application, why not use native libraries?

If they are planning to package this program for Windows, Linux, Others then good, nice release, but I would still criticize because they are using a technology that is supposed to be a tool to build cross-platform applications from the beginning, if they already have the HTML / JavaScript code for this, what is stopping them from packaging the Windows version for example? I don't see anything in the feature list that requires Mac specific hardware / tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the idea, to bring this cross platform as soon as we have a tool people like. But we do need to use some special tricks, more than Electron provides, to manage the macOS clipboard. I'd expect that we need to do similar tricks when we port it to Windows and Linux. That said, macOS seemed like a good starting platform as it it what we use ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If all you want to do is clean your svg files, svgo is the tool to use: [https://github.com/svg/svgo](https://github.com/svg/svgo)

</comment><comment><USER5> I hate that meme "let's make X great again".

</comment><comment><USER6> This is neat!

I wrote a similarish tool for converting SVG to code at Last Job™: [https://github.com/biowink/SVGeez](https://github.com/biowink/SVGeez) (though, it's questionable how well it works beyond the specific use case of the app it's for..though in theory it should work fine!)

(even the name is similar ;))

I bumped into issues when transforming complex paths into single paths. I suppose leveraging SVGO is a better plan for that. Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER7> Seems like an icon library rather than a general tool for SVGs.

<comment><AUTHOR> You may use it as a library, I know users who do. But you may select output needed, or drag 'n drop depending on if you work as an developer or a designer.

I suggest that you look on the videos on the site or read some tips and tricks at [https://medium.com/@DepartmentStockholm/svgsus-tips- tricks-b...](https://medium.com/@DepartmentStockholm/svgsus-tips-tricks- ba2de435fee0#.54lkshm94)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this pronounced S-V-Jesus?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm from Sweden and I pronounce it S-V-Gsus. According to google it sure sounds funny ;) [https://translate.google.com/#en/en/svgsus](https://translate.google.com/#en/en/svgsus)

<comment><USER9> I assumed it was ess-vee-gee-suhs ("S-V-Jesus"), too. But your pronunciation -- does it match google's (S-V-G-S-U-S)?

I think we need an .au file in the distribution with you saying "Hi this is Stonebranch and I pronounce SVGsus as 'SVGsus'".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So is it Mac only?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's currently Mac only.

<comment><USER11> App Store only too. God I hate the way the Mac app store wants my password even for free apps. I've got to switch to my browser, enter my nice long lastpass and copy and paste it into the app.

I've never got the non-browser lastpass working.

<comment><USER12> Have you tried changing the free downloads password setting? See [http://lifehacker.com/allow-free-downloads-from-the-mac- app-...](http://lifehacker.com/allow-free-downloads-from-the-mac-app-store- without-a-p-1755702066)

<comment><USER11> It's set and I just tried to download a free app - and it asked for my password.

It was only yesterday that I entered my password for another free app so it's not just a '30 day expiry' thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice, this will be helpful for these times when I need to import an svg from the material spec.

I am still waiting for the graphical tool that will allow me to animate an svg (creates 2 different but compatible paths) though.

<comment><USER14> Adobe Animate CC (previously Flash CS) plus: [https://github.com/TomByrne/Flash2Svg](https://github.com/TomByrne/Flash2Svg) will create SVG animations.

<comment><USER13> Thanks,

I will try that ! I had a look at pretty much all the svg tools I could find and was very surprised that the best option is to write the paths yourself in a text editor -_-

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What do you mean by clean?

<comment><AUTHOR> Svgs usually contain a lot of redundant and useless information. We clean the svgs using SVGO, [https://github.com/svg/svgo](https://github.com/svg/svgo) (and a few of our own plugins) to get more beautiful svg files. The output often gets bloated by apps like Sketch, this way we end up with a better output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is beautiful electron work. Any plans to support eps import?

</comment><comment><USER17> Great. How to clean up a whole set of SVGs?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is currently no way handle multiple icons at the same time. I mean you could still make a copy of each icon by just dragging them to a new folder in finder. We have multi-selection handling in our roadmap. Follow us on @svgsus on twitter and I'll make sure to ping you once we implemented it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Could someone edit the title to match the title of the website? The submission sounds like this is an online service, the website title makes it clear that this is a GUI app for macOS only.

I'm on Linux and all the designers I work with use Windows. I know this isn't the norm for most people on HN but the title is still misleading and the submission guidelines would seem to agree.

<comment><USER19> Yup, looks like a moderator fixed that one a while ago. Submitted title was 'Svgsus – Let's make svgs great again'. Not sure if that implied an online service but it was too baity for an HN title.

<comment><USER18> Yeah except the fixed title doesn't resemble the website title which (at the time of this writing and when I commented) is:

"Svgsus - Easier SVG handling for Mac"

This clearly defines this as macOS software even if it doesn't elaborate on "handling" like the current submission title does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Am I the only one who almost threw up in my mouth when he dropped that icon and got a wall of text? SVG, le sigh...

<comment><USER20> Yup, its just you. That XML is one of the key advantages of SVG over other formats such as PNG for certain applications.</comment></comment>


28% of Europeans Can't Afford a 1 Week Annual Holiday - <AUTHOR> https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/EDN-20190731-1 <comment><USER2> A vague statement. For the expense of staying in a private room and eating out for 2 days in Amsterdam, you can spend a week in Croatia.

This, and the popular news heading you see about Americans not having enough savings are all meaningless. I find the Big Mac index to quite useful. I'm working on a new web site that we try to list a similar a metric (affordability of traveling to each country, factored by the traveler return rate, etc). Comparing EU with countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, France, etc vs Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, is orange vs apples.

<comment><USER3> > and the popular news heading you see about Americans not having enough > savings are all meaningless

What? How is it meaningless at all? Because other countries are cheaper?

Edit: To elaborate (since OP hasn't responded yet)... Implying that it means nothing to have no savings because other countries is IMO just wrong. Moving to another country (especially from the states) is difficult and _incredibly expensive_. It's the same argument for within the states. "Well why don't you just move to somewhere cheaper?"

Because moving is super expensive and if you have no money, and no savings, how are you going to move?

Just pack up all your shit and move to Mexico, right?

<comment><USER4> > if you have no money, and no savings, how are you going to move?

If you have no money, and no savings, you probably have nearly no stuff too. That means, if you can get a days work at minimum wage, you can afford the cheapest bus trip to almost anywhere on the same continent.

If you want less risk, and can get 3 days work at minimum wage, you can afford a return bus trip incase you can't find work at the destination.

People don't move because they don't want to lose friends and family, not because they can't afford to.

<comment><USER5> Family and friends are a part of affordability. They can provide housing, food, childcare.

Also, how long do you expect it would take to find a job in a new place? You'd need to cover living expenses until your first paycheck, which is an extra 2 weeks after you've successfully found a job.

<comment><USER4> The kind of job that people new-in-town-with-no-money get typically pay cash.

Being a cleaner for example, garden work, etc. That sort of job you can knock on doors and get there and then, and be paid for 3-4 hours each time. You can probably earn enough to pay for food in the first week (while sleeping under a bridge), and food and a hostel the 2nd week. Proper housing is far harder to get, because it typically requires a big deposit and proof of employment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FTA: "it is estimated that 28.3% of the EU population aged 16 or over could not afford a one-week annual holiday away from home in 2018"

Surely including 16 year olds is skewing these numbers.

<comment><USER7> That's true of most of the stats you see.

For example looking at incomes. If you're a college kid making $5K over the summer, you're counted as being below the poverty level.

<comment><USER8> Except if you're Danish, students are always excluded when counting who's poor or not. Technically students are poor (mostly), but it's viewed a temporary, and therefore they're not included.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1\. When I was 16 I couldn't afford a slurpee at 7-11

2\. I had to stay in the UK (London) for weeks a few times (looking for work) and you can stay in a hostel for around 20 pounds a night, get a boris bike/bus or walk for like 5 a day and shitty food for less than 10 a day. Not exactly a 'fun vacation' but it's also one of the most expensive cities in the world.

3\. What an arbitrary unit to measure wealth in. That's like asking how many pairs of jeans can you afford - well, are they from the thrift store or are they from the Armani Exchange?

<comment><USER10> Well, I'd say anybody that can't find a fun vacation staying at a hostel in Europe and walking around the middle of pretty much any city must surely have no imagination and/or also hate life in general.

<comment><USER11> Seriously, hostels are the most fun way to visit any first-world country (if you're young, at least). Meet new people every day, with an obvious instant common topic to talk about. Super easy to schedule ad hoc adventures with your fellow hostellers.

As compared to a hotel, which will generally be just like every other hotel in the entire world, and you might as well have just gone to a hotel in your home city. Or the usual tourist traps, where you'll compete with a giant mob of people too busy checking off items on their checklists to chat or adventure.

The only way a non-hostel vacation makes any sense is if your #1 goal is to post selfies to make yourself look rich and successful.

<comment><USER12> >As compared to a hotel, which will generally be just like every other hotel in the entire world, and you might as well have just gone to a hotel in your home city.

What? If I'm trying to see the Louvre, a hotel in Paris is hardly interchangeable with one in, say, Chicago.

>The only way a non-hostel vacation makes any sense is if your #1 goal is to post selfies to make yourself look rich and successful

Or really any goal that isn't "hang out with strangers and sleep in uncomfortable beds".

You seem unreasonably certain that what you want is the only thing any sensible person could possibly want, which is utter nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Or conversely, "Nearly 72% of Europeans can afford a week long away vacation, up from only 60% six years ago."

In the US I suspect it's more like "[some percentage] of Americans can't afford to miss a week of work."

I intentionally avoided the 40% stat tempting because of the assorted '$400 unexpected expense' stories because as Bloomberg and others note it's partially due to sloppy reading of statistics. [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-400-emergency- expense-story-is-wrong)

</comment><comment><USER14> > could not afford a one-week annual holiday __away from home __

You get in Europe around one month of paid vacation time. What people can 't afford is to travel. The title of the article misses that point, but, it's clear in the article itself.

I'm surprised that Italy, 44%, is in such a bad position. Worse than Poland (35%).

<comment><USER15> I can't express how much the association between "not travelling" and poverty angers me. (Greta, help me here.)

Some people choose to live in a stressless small town, work less, commute by bike, pick up their kids from daycare earlier and have a great time gardening at home. If your surrounding already feels like holidays, why the heck would you get your ass stuck in traffic or a narrow cylinder?

Oh right, talking about the horror of being stuck in an airplane for 15 minutes makes a better story when returning to work.

<comment><USER16> But the study did not ask how many traveled for holiday. It studied how many could afford to do so, regardless if they actually traveled or wanted to travel.

<comment><USER15> So 28% of Europeans either (a) have little disposable income although they work hard, or (b) do not buy into consumerism and minimize working time. (a) is a problem we should fix, (b) is a very healthy lifestyle, both for oneself and the planet.

We are giving no indication how large is (a) and (b), but the tone of the article wants us to believe there is problem.

Why not look at more important stuff like: do you have decent living conditions, enough space, fresh air to breathe, good teeth, respectful working condition? Oh right, fixing air quality in Paris is more challenging than sending people away for a week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While studies like this are valuable, it's important to always consider context around data; highly recommend this article that explains why we should be skeptical [1].

In this case, the data is given to Eurostat by EU member states, who presumably collect income data for the purpose of taxation. This can create an inherent issue, as nobody would overstate their income, but many people would understate their income.

As a result, the percentage of Europeans who can't afford a 1 week annual holiday is likely lower. "By how much" is hard to tell, but it would be interesting to see if there's any anonymous income data collected for non- taxation purposes, from which we may get more accurate answers.

[1] [https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-data-is- neve...](https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-data-is-never-raw)

<comment><USER16> The data is collected with questionnaires; I checked one of them and it had literally the question "Could you afford a week's annual holiday away from home? Yes/No"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure not being able to afford a holiday away from home is such a bad thing- a staycation is much easier on the environment, not to mention the wallet. One does not need to travel away from one's home to relax and recharge, and requires no burning of fuel on trains or airplanes.

<comment><USER19> Vacation is probably mostly tired to short term rental costs, or price of a mobile home, or if you prefer camping, a camping place.

If you limit yourself to 3+ star hotels it will be interesting, but not enlightening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What does afford mean in this context? Does it mean people self-report that they can't afford to go on holiday or does it mean they did not go last time or is it a function of disposable income?

Without knowing the methodology this statistic isn't really that useful at all.

<comment><USER16> > Does it mean people self-report that they can't afford to go on holiday

Yes. See page 4 on this pdf

[https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/1012329/8658951/Hous...](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/1012329/8658951/Household+data+-+Material+deprivation.pdf/5f81bcd6-8b37-498b-ab06-b53b43d2bb87)

(linked in [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/income-and-living- conditio...](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/income-and-living- conditions/methodology))

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The American reward credit card "game" has made it really easy to travel at near zero cost. Since 2012 I've applied for, on average, about 5-10 new cards/year that come with extremely generous hotel, airline point, and travel cash rewards. I've taken international first/business class many times for free and stayed in very nice hotels that can average $500/night+. I seriously can't remember the last time I paid for a flight or hotel unless it was a very good deal.

The US is different in a lot of ways, but the insane generosity of rewards credit cards over the past 8 years or so (post recession) is something to behold. I can't imagine it will last forever, but grateful I've caught it as a young adult.

<comment><USER22> A household must first have the disposable income to utilize those types of cards in order to get the rewards, which makes your plan a complete non- starter for millions of Americans. Not to mention the required level of organization and financial savvy required to not let that type of credit card wheeling and dealing bite you in the ass.

<comment><USER23> As another credit card churner, there are a couple of notes I can add: 1\. Always pay your card in full on time.

2\. Signup bonuses are the only aspect of churning that is worth it to most people. If you can manage to spend $3000 on a credit card in 3 months, you can get signup bonuses that are definitely worth your time. $4000 or $5000 levels in 3 months exist as well and are better. Typical signup bonuses can be worth $500 at the $3000 level, representing a 16% discount on everything you buy.

3\. You can pay your federal taxes on a credit card for a 2% surcharge, and most state taxes as well for a similar charge. This is best done as estimated quarterly taxes. Minimize your withholding at work to maximize the value of this. You can pay your utility bills ahead of time for free as well.

4\. If you don't go for airline miles, the other option is cash back rewards.

5\. An easy way to keep track of the cards: every time you apply for a card, take screenshots of the date and bonus criteria from the signup website. Save this in a google drive folder with the date in YYYY-MM-DD as the start of the folder name. Now you can easily track cards by date, and cancel them as needed.

Well now I hope I've made a few people a bit more savvy.

<comment><USER24> It's hard for me to believe (3) could be worth it. Do any cards give more than 2% in cashback?

<comment><USER25> This is about churning, not regular rewards. Sign up for a new card, pay taxes on it among other things to meet the spending requirement for the signup bonus, get "free" $$$ for things you have to spend anyway.

<comment><USER26> Except you don't get "free" $$$ for things you have to spend anyway...

You get points you can use for vacation or travel.

If you NEED to vacation or travel, it IS simply a smart transaction. But if you weren't spending money on travel before than it can still result in increased expenditure even if managed perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't know anyone who can afford a week annual holiday, I think... (Canada)

... or the people I know who can afford it probably are paid WAY above the "top 10%" income earners here.

<comment><USER28> That sounds very strange to me, I am Canadian too, I have several friends who take 1-2 week holidays who make way less than the median software engineer.

Do all of your friends have kids and expensive mortgages, or what?

<comment><USER29> It could be the case if you're not near a major airport and have to deal with a monopolist.

I'm near Toronto and flights to France on a flag carrier can be cheaper than domestic. Things are different if you're more secluded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When I was growing up, until I was about 16, my parents never, ever went on vacations (their only vacation in their life had been going on honeymoon, 1 week to a city 300Km away... and staying in a room in their relative's house).

Now, after working all their life, they can afford some middle range vacations every year.

This is what people that take responsibility for their life do, I guess, so I can't see any problem with 28% of people not being able to afford something that is basically a luxury.

<comment><USER19> You mean temporary rental and transport is a luxury? I suppose so, by some interesting standard... But then, so is having a TV set, or a smartphone.

<comment><USER30> No it's not interesting. You are not "entitled" to travel for holidays, even in a society with a good social security net that ensures the basic needs of its citizens are met.

<comment><USER31> we, as humans, define needs. air is most essential. water is second. food less so, but not having it will still kill. then there is housing, which isn't strictly necessary. healthcare, which will expand your expected lifespan. and this is where things start to differ: europe thinks healthcare is a need, in usa that's very much up for discussion. now in europe whether you have a need for travel is also up for discussion. here in nl there are foundations which sponsor the holidays of poor families, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Instead of waffling about 16 year olds, did anybody notice that the underlying data source was provided, and is a dashboard that can be modified?

The URL is absurdly long, so I won't post it here but it is right there in the 2nd paragraph.

If I change the "Household Type" filter to only show "Households with Dependent Children", the EU-28 rate is 31.2% in 2017, with the lowest in Norway at 7.3%. The 2018 numbers are estimates.

</comment><comment><USER33> There is a lot of information missing in this post. For instance, what is a 1-week vacation? Something about those numbers tells me it's using the average cost of a vacation in Europe, rather than a cost proportional to the income of a person in that country. Would help a lot if there was more to this article.

<comment><USER16> Data was collected using questionnaires, see page 4 of [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/1012329/8658951/Hous...](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/1012329/8658951/Household+data+-+Material+deprivation.pdf/5f81bcd6-8b37-498b-ab06-b53b43d2bb87)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> >away from home

I guess finding a nice location away from home is a lot easier for europeans, the continent is filled with holiday-grade spots.

I'm four hours apart from the next nice city in my country (talking about traveling by car).

</comment><comment><USER35> Wait until "996" hits Europe.

</comment><comment> lota-putty Even though the report seems speculative, a second study in the past/future with the same yard-stick paints a better picture.

2013: 39.5%

2018: 28.3%

That's an impressive circulation of money.

</comment><comment><USER36> I call BS. I am from Europe and I don't know anybody that cannot afford a week away from their home. And no, I don't live in a social bubble.

<comment><USER37> It sounds like you almost definitely do.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, parent's argument is one of the most interesting I've seen in a while: "I don't know _any_ poor people, and no, I don't live in a bubble, so poverty doesn't exist!"</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any good resources for learning back-end tech as a front-end engineer? - <AUTHOR> I've been a developer for a while, but many of the little details of what's happening behind the API remain a mystery to me. Does anyone have any favorite resources specifically aimed at helping engineers with front-end experience gain a deeper understanding of what's happening on the other side of the stack? I'm particularly interested what's going on closer to the hardware and the more arcane aspects of network infrastructure. <comment><USER2> You mentioned several different topics which would take a long time to learn. I could help you with a Ruby path:

\- Learn the basics of Ruby (what's happening behind the API)

\- Learn the basics of Rails (what's happening behind the API)

\- Read Ruby under a microscope (what's going on closer to the hardware)

\- Learn the basics of cloud computing (AWS for example for the more arcane aspects of network infrastructure)

You could pick other language and find similar resources for those. Also there's ton of material out there for all of these topics. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like Python, and Miguel Grinberg's blog has been really helpful and informative to me.</comment>


Business-class Lenovos ship with adware to inject ads into browsers - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Lenovo/comments/2l1w1e/lenovo_machines_bundled_with_visualdiscovery/

<comment><USER2> That's pretty bad for any laptop, but a Yoga 2 Pro is not a business-class machine.

</comment><comment><USER3> A hotel that I have used for years on business and personal travel started using a new ISP a few years ago. This ISP injected advertisements.

I know the manager of the hotel fairly well, and I told her that I thought this was a security problem and a generally rude thing to do. Within a few months they switched ISPs, so other people must have complained also.</comment>


Atari's New Console Sounds Like a Bad Idea - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/ataris-new-console-sounds-like-a-bad-idea-1796193721?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_twitter&utm_source=gizmodo_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow <comment><USER2> Not sure if the console itself is a bad idea, but the sad attempt at hype for it sure does look like one...</comment>


I've Uploaded a 187.4kB File on the EOS Blockchain for FREE with EOSfilestore - <AUTHOR> https://grigio.org/-ive-uploaded-a-187-4kb-file-on-the-eos-blockchain-for-free-with-eosfilestore-and-this-is-what-ive-learnt/ <comment><USER2> Let me explain to someone unfamiliar with EOS.

In contrast to Ethereum where user of a DApp pays for each transaction, EOS aims to make use of DApps free for end users.

It is achieved by shifting burden to DApp developers, so for each kilobyte of state a contract stores for a user, developer must buy "RAM" which costs $4/KB as of right now [1].

Price of "RAM" which is actually a permanent storage, is driven by market system which supposed to produce fair price, but currently is subject of high speculation [1].

EOS leadership stated that they don't plan to increase RAM supply significantly from current 64Gb, which led to 6x "RAM" price rise in a couple hours after that.

[1] [https://eos.feexplorer.io/](https://eos.feexplorer.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but I think some BPs will continue to be full nodes. The price of RAM is mainly speculation, i hope some stakeholders will fund RAM for value projects</comment></comment>


Ask HN: An older protest? - <AUTHOR>

I turned the background black on my website back in the mid 1990's as part of a wide protest, but now I can't remember what the issue was? Anybody recall? <comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_World_Wide_Web_protest></comment>


The Future of jQuery - <AUTHOR> https://tech.bellycard.com/blog/the-future-of-jquery/ My take on the jQuery/Native debate. What do you think? <comment><AUTHOR> Discussion around the logistics of the actual implementation and architecture: [https://gist.github.com/davearel/9254418](https://gist.github.com/davearel/9254418)

Migrated to: [https://gist.github.com/tbranyen/9255362](https://gist.github.com/tbranyen/9255362)</comment>


Show HN: Underscore.js using modern ES7 syntax - <AUTHOR> http://ankurp.github.io/underline/ <comment><USER2> I thought the main use (and the demo only shows map and reduce) was providing standard newer features like map, reduce to non-supporting browsers.

Why not just use native map and reduce here?</comment>


Facebook vanity URLs coming this Friday - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/internet/69063/facebook-vanity-urls-coming-friday <comment><USER2> Why is it such a big deal? It's a just user name. I don't get why it's such an important thing.

It's only a proof of incompetency when Facebook was built 5 years ago!

<comment><USER3> It definitely shows some incompetency - but it might be just another marketing plot to get Facebook on every site's front page for a few days!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pertinent not only on a personal brand level (Human readable URLs suitable for business cards), but it's also a good thing for startups stay on top of if they have a business page. You will certainly want to claim your company name if only to disallow it to be grabbed by somebody else.</comment>


Ask HN: Will an "as is" software license protect me for now? - <AUTHOR>

I have a software project that I'm ready to start charging some money for.
Some people are telling me that I need to incorporate or form an LLC before I start charging any money in order to protect myself from lawsuits. (I would incorporate in the United States.) My thinking was that I'd just license the software "as is" for now, and that would be enough protection until I actually had enough money to incorporate.
Who's right? <comment><USER2> In business law my professor said: "If I only teach you one thing let it be this: never ever, ever, do business as an unincorporated entity!" He went on for hours to elaborate all the problems of unlimited liability and de facto partnerships--if anyone else is involved in the business you could be found to have unlimited liability for them.

Just incorporate, it costs very little, some law firms will do if for free (I think Wilmer Hale is doing this) or you can do it yourself in very little time with several on-line services like Clerky. YC even has standard documents you can copy so that you're ready if you ever decide you want to run the VC race.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're serious about limiting liability, you also need a business bank account and to keep completely separate finances from your business. Once it can be proven in court that your company is in no way distinct from you, then you're personally liable.

I don't no the implications of selling "as is". It might vary by state.

(I'm not a lawyer, not legal advice)</comment>


Tell PG: Hacker News Looks Terrible on Webkit when page is zoomed - <AUTHOR>

On a webkit browser on mac (safari,chrome) when the page is zoomed in, the spacing between the article disappears. See screenshot http://i.imgur.com/u7LNz.png. As a temporary fix I     made a userscript which can be used with chrome http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/63270 <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links:

<http://i.imgur.com/u7LNz.png>

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/63270></comment>


Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-10/chinese-workers-abandon-silicon-valley-for-riches-back-home <comment><USER3> I am a Norwegian in Silicon Valley that have spent most of my career with Chinese colleagues, both in academia and industry, and my anecdata seem to indicate that my highly talented China-born colleagues are sadly leaving because;

\- China has great opportunities for riches

\- Getting a US VISA is hard and painful when you come from a populous country like China or India

\- My China-born colleagues seem to in general be more conservative, and Silicon Valley has become violently intolerant of anyone that holds an opinion different than the predominant view

Only the first reason is somewhat objective, while the two others cause stress in their daily life as their ability to provide can at any time be removed due to what is perceived as arbitrary reasons. Everything being equal, many of them have told me they would prefer the less crowded Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER4> > My China-born colleagues seem to in general be more conservative, and > Silicon Valley has become violently intolerant of anyone that holds an > opinion different than the predominant view

What exactly does this mean? Are they evangelical baptists, libertarians, reactionaries, nationalist, homophobic, misogynist, racist, anti-atheist, pro family-values, pro corporation, skeptical of global warming, pro fossil fuel energy, war hawks, or something else altogether? It's really quite difficult to interpret your statement as anything meaningful without clarification, and there are ten thousand different ways to be "conservative".

And to be clear, "conservative" is anything but a dirty word or something I'm trying to critique here--just a context-sensitive one. It could be a pejorative or a value.

Otherwise it doesn't add much to the conversation--it is itself a reactionary statement.

<comment><USER5> I'll try to take a stab at this. I'm Chinese-American and I feel the Chinese folks who come to the US to study or to work have very different mindsets.

I have a friend who is dating a lot in NYC and he told me he notice most of his Chinese-American friends are liberal as in we fight for freedom of expression and social justice. Whereas the girls he met who are newly from China are conservative and support Trump because they are pro-business and more money-driven.

Based on his observation and my own experience I would agree. Most new Chinese visitors or immigrants don't value social rights and freedom of speech. And to be a bit critical, I feel they are so used to having the government or authority telling them what to do that they are comfortable with authoritarian rules and don't understand the importance of having independent thoughts and diversity.

<comment><USER6> With the risk of being down-voted, I would like to ask does "fight for freedom of expression and social rights" really has to be the polar opposite of "pro- business and more money-driven"? To me, those are answers/attitudes towards two potentially orthogonal questions. To put it another way, is a "pro- business and more money-driven" a good predictor on a person's opinion on "freedom of expression and social rights" and vise-versa? Since there are so many potentially orthogonal questions to ask, it seems to me it tells more about those who ask those questions (which questions are more important to them), than those who answered.

<comment><USER5> Eh, so I would like to add I lean towards social democracy. And I admit I have a bias view. When I think of pro-business, I think of corporations valuing profit over people, of government valuing control over personal freedom, and of people who assume money can solve all their problems.

<comment><USER7> Most people who consider themselves "pro-business" prefer less government control vs personal freedom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is understandable why somebody would want to return to their home-country. The "Bamboo Ceiling" the article discusses is incredibly concerning. It's America's loss for sure.

I'm curious (1) how much of these people's education or experience was subsidized by the American economy and (2) how common the same situation is in China (i.e. US expats training up in China and taking that expertise back to the US).

If (1) and (2) aren't aligned, it could be one of the factors contributing to the growing sense that we pour a bunch of money into higher-ed without seeing much return.

I don't mean this from a US nationalist or political perspective - I'm merely speculating on the economics. Are the incentives for coming to the country aligned for both the person and the country? Many companies will pay for employees to go to grad-school but demand repayment if the employee isn't still with the company N years later. Would such a system for college/work visas make any sense to help keep talent?

<comment><USER9> We could keep talent if we just allowed people to work here. We don't. We only allow 65,000 people to work in large corporations, in specific industries, at the behest of the company, under constant threat of deportation and after gambling thousands of dollars on the chance at approval.

My friends went back to China because the US is incredibly unwelcoming to hard-working immigrants and provides no reliable path to citizenship or permanent residency besides fraudulent marriage. Why should intelligent hard working people put up with that? At a certain point dignity and a reliable future are more important than the chance at a higher salary. The more developed China becomes the less reason there is to put up with those hardships.

<comment><USER10> There is no denying the fact that it's hard to get permanent residency in the US. But immigration should be a two way street, if people decide to stay in the US they should try to assimilate. Is there a "bamboo celing", yes there is; so is a "curry ceiling" and what have you "ceiling". But if you do not push yourself to better your communication skills and other relevant skills required to be successful, you can't expect to shatter this ceiling. This was true for other immigrants too (18th/19th century Irish, Italian etc.)

It's hard not to overlook the fact that a lot of would be immigrants make no effort to assimilate and cluster themselves off from mainstream society; especially in a immigrant welcoming area like Silicon Valley. I bet if you were to go to China/India etc., no one's going to go out of their way to accept you.

(BTW, I'm an Indian citizen on H1B and I'm saying this, you can downvote my post but it doesn't change ground realities)

<comment><USER11> Indians do much better in SV/tech senior management positions than Chinese.

Also, what does assimilate mean in an American context? It's not like America really has a strong well defined culture in the first place, it's been like ever since the country was founded.

<comment><USER8> > Indians do much better in SV/tech senior management positions than Chinese.

Please be careful about making generalizations based on race - they're generally incorrect/unprovable and rarely provide any value to a conversation. You can rephrase this to be "I've seen more Indians do better..."

<comment><USER11> Huh? This is quantifiable. It's no big mystery to anyone who works in tech, and is not saying anything about abilities, just outcomes.

<comment><USER8> I've experienced the opposite in general, but I've seen some huge outliers in both directions on both sides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it's interesting that many of those same criticisms can be leveled at China. If you're not Han Chinese you'll never get far in any Chinese company. You will get far helping someone else get rich. Getting permanent residency is similarly stressful. In many ways, China is even less open than Western societies and far less accepting of doing things a different way. Might be great for returning Chinese but I'm not entirely sure they will be able to attract a global talent pool like SV has done. Add in censorship and you've got a pretty toxic environment brewing.

My guess is they'll run into similar (or worse) issues with their own SV.

I don't think that means any of what SV is doing is okay, just interesting that other nationalities there will face the exact same issues that they faced here.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's one important datapoint in this article: "The Bamboo Ceiling".

When the whole fuzz about gender discrimination started, Microsoft and Google published numbers, claiming women got the same pay at the same positions as men. Knowing there's discrimination from personal experience/feeling, I theorized, that women are discriminated in a different way: they don't receive promotions.

Under otherwise similar circumstances having children does not feel to be enough to explain why of 100 women hired in tech on professional roles less are promoted to higher positions, than of 100 men. That trend is (at least anecdotally for me) observable even before people become parents.

This "Bamboo Ceiling" shows the same effect for another potentially discriminated group of people.

<comment><USER14> This is the allegation of the Ellis, Pease, and Wisuri lawsuit against Google - that Google does okay at _hiring_ women, but slots them into lower positions and gives them fewer promotions than men. [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/technology/google- gender-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/technology/google-gender-pay- lawsuit.html) The NYT's report on the leaked #talkpay spreadsheet seems to show that pattern: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google- salarie...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salaries- gender-disparity.html)

The neat thing about this form of discrimination is that you can claim to be fixing "the pipeline" all you want and you can still maintain the discrimination, because the leak is after the pipeline. The dominant group isn't threatened by competition if they fund efforts to increase the number of underrepresented groups in grade school or college STEM education, as long as those college graduates aren't later competing for senior jobs on a level playing field.

<comment><USER15> Your post kind of assumes that a fair process would promote women at Google at the same rate as men. If reality is sexist, are we obligated to discriminate against men to fix it?

<comment><USER16> Curious - how would gender affect promotion rates?

<comment><USER17> Two reasons.

Women want children earlier (because menopause) and are more affected by them (because giving birth) than equally family-minded men. As a result, women are more motivated to prioritise having children/family.

In addition, men derive more advantage from more money/power than women, so they're more motivated to climb the corporate ladder (or take risks and fund companies) than women.

I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere.

<comment><USER18> > Women want children earlier (because menopause)

women _need_ to have children earlier.

I don't see 70 year old men eagerly having kids all that often. Most people want to live to see their grandchildren.

> I'm generalising, obviously, so "on average" everywhere.

"I have black friends"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can't say for everyone else, but from my observation, ppl from big china cities are more likely to go back while ppl from small cities are more willing to stay. The reasons is that moving to big china cities is as hard if not harder than staying in SV.

For myself, I'd like to stay here even I came from a big city like shanghai as I enjoy the freedom in US and agree with american values.

Besides, china is getting worse in every aspect I care about such as speech freedom, news freedom, human rights, food and air safety, etc, under Xi's administration.

Unfortunately the waiting time for a green card is too long, I don't want to sacrifice some of the most valuable years in my life just waiting here while I can achieve more if I'm able to work on my own project.

So I am moving back as well in the near future and hope someday I can make an achievement and get back to US.

</comment><comment> le-mark Last paragraph is terrifying, does China not have privacy laws at all?

 _More interesting than prospects for some may be the sheer volume of intimate data available and leeway to experiment in China. Tencent's now-ubiquitous WeChat, built by a small team in months, has become a poster-child for in- house creative license. Modern computing is driven by crunching enormous amounts of data, and generations of state surveillance has conditioned the public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners. Local startup SenseTime for instance has teamed with dozens of police departments to track everything from visages to races, helping the country develop one of the world's most sophisticated and extensive surveillance machines._

<comment><USER20> Are you truly having a hard time understanding how life under a Communist dictatorship and a Representative Democracy would differ for the average citizen?

It's really confounding to me that the younger generations seems to have such a hard time with this.

Do they not teach comparative history in schools anymore?

<comment><USER21> In my experience as a non-American, a lot of younger Americans have adopted a sort of dark, distorted view of history that casts the US as a villainous entity. For these people, any suggestion that other states, particularly non- Western ones, are even more villainous is met with scepticism.

Maybe they understand the differences between a representative democracy and an authoritarian regime in theory but believe there's no real difference in practice. It's a deeply unfortunate type of cynicism.

<comment><USER22> Every generation goes through this; it's not just this one. It's naive idealism sparked by learned helplessness, fueled by a lack of maturity/experience and amplified by foreign influence.

It used to be every generation of Americans had its subset of youth who become infatuated with Communism, for example. They generally grow out of it and come to appreciate their global standing once they graduate college and accumulate some wealth.

Europeans are accustomed to being more mobile and studying abroad seems to be almost expected. America is a very insular culture by comparison; depending on academic program a lot of schools don't have meaningful study abroad programs ("let's go spend a week attending some lectures in London then go home") and support for things like working holiday visas is pathetic. We don't have anything like Erasmus. The only people I ever seem to meet who have traveled more than a few hundred miles from home have only done so on deployment with the military.

In aggregate we know virtually nothing about the rest of the world, so it's easy for disillusioned kids to be convinced that their minor dissatisfactions are on the level of human rights violations and that North Korea or ISIS-held Syria are favorable by comparison.

<comment><USER21> Yes, very true. I suppose the internet just amplifies something that's been around for decades. To add to your examples, it amazes me that people favourably compare Russia's fixed elections with the failings of the Electoral College.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't think this is just Chinese workers, although it's a more noticeable phenomenon just because of the numbers involved.

Many of my European colleagues have expressed a desire to move back to Europe soon (<3 years, much less for many of them). It's a mix of a number of things (for many, family is a big component), but really the biggest one is that they don't feel that the opportunities the US offers are worth the sacrifices they have to make anymore. A particular sacrifice that comes to mind is their spouse being able to work - the Green Card process has been a shit show lately.

In fact, many of them are realizing that the "American Tech Dream" that was sold to them did not live up to expectations - particularly when it comes to things like being able to afford a house, education for children, healthcare, etc. in the Bay Area.

I've been in tech, in Silicon Valley, for 8 years, and this feels like it's really influenced by the Trump presidency (the moment Trump got elected, I have a few friends who left the US). But it's probably been brewing for longer than that, and I was just paying less attention to it at the beginning of my career.

FWIW I'm European and intend on leaving the US in <2 years for similar reasons (namely, that I can have a much better standard of life in Europe, be closer to my family, and do work that is as meaningful).

<comment><USER24> "Many of my European colleagues have expressed a desire to move back to Europe soon (...) A particular sacrifice that comes to mind is their spouse being able to work - the Green Card process has been a shit show lately"

As another European immigrant, I can give you my perspective. Initially I was apprehensive about my wife not being able to work.

In practice, it was less than a year from the moment she arrived until she got an EAD card (work authorization after reaching a certain stage in the green card application). Certainly a sacrifice, but looking back it was worth it.

The green card process took ~1.5 years in total (received it early 2017), which pales in comparison to what people from China and (especially) India have to go through. Did it become much worse in the last year?

<comment><USER23> Yes. Current waiting times for the final step of the process is 12+ months (it was ~2 months before the current administration according to lawyers). I am currently 2.5+ years in, and late spring/early summer would be the best case scenario according to the lawyers handling it. Same for several of my coworkers. I work at a large, well known tech company.

<comment><USER25> It's never been 2 months for 485 maybe apart from exceptional cases. 6 months was possible though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Noticeable in our hiring pipeline across iOS/C#/Java stacks.

Used to be a pretty diverse mix across Asian and Eastern European candidates, with a rare white US person mixed in.

Now it is pre-dominantly Indian.

Really don't like single-ethnic teams, so hiring is getting even more challenging in the Bay Area. We've also opened dev centers in the US mid-west and Canada to help with this.

<comment><USER27> Are those indians americans or immigrants ?

And I am being downvoted...because ?

<comment><USER20> maybe because native americans would be the term and your question sounds purposefully obtuse and perhaps even discriminatory?

just a guess.

<comment><USER28> I would have interpreted his question as whether they were East Indians with US citizenship or not.

Also, I believe First Nations tends to be the preferred term over indigenous, aboriginal, or native american.

<comment><USER29> I've only heard First Nations used in the context of Canada - Native American I believe is still the preferred term in the United States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why would they stay? China is seeing a huge boom in the tech industry and it's only the beginning. The future is there, not in SV. I'm kinda jealous of my friends who learned Chinese in college and are now working there.

<comment><USER31> Being only part chinese, I can tell you unless you are full han chinese, you will have a hard time on the mainland, regardless of how much chinese/mandarin you know.

Edit: Im not going to share personal stories, I dont want my relatives there to suffer for anything that gets reported back.

<comment><USER6> I heard the other side of the story that ABCs could have a hard time in China, because they look just like full han Chinese, but when people find out you are not really "Chinese Chinese", attitudes/expectations/behaviors change.

Edit: I guess I should say "attitudes/expectations/behaviors change, for the better or worse"

<comment><USER32> This doesn't seem super true in my opinion, but I could be wrong. I think that a lot of native Chinese actually lower their expectations around ABCs and are pretty interested in asking questions about American culture.

<comment><USER6> I think what you said just confirmed my point: Is "Lower their expectations" necessarily a good thing? Especially when we are talking about under a professional environment. "He's really an American, he doesn't really understand how to be a good manager for a team of native Chinese" doesn't sound like an advantage to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am curious what the definition of an 'AI engineer' is.

Is it:

a) someone with an undergraduate/graduate/doctorate degree in CS with specialization in AI/ML?

b) someone with a non-CS degree (Math/EE/CE/Other) who specialized in AI/ML?

c) someone who attended an AI/ML course on Coursera?

d) other?

<comment><USER34> Basically AI/ML is the new hot thing so everyone wants to be called an AI engineer.

If they previously integrated Nuance's speech recognition into a product, they were just an engineer, now they are an AI engineer. Worked on mapping product which does routing before? Well route searching is an "AI" kind of problem so they are an "AI engineer" too, and so on.

AI/ML is the new "big data" basically. As soon as "big data" appeared, nobody was doing just "data", they were all of the sudden doing "big data".

<comment><USER33> I do remember the days when a database in the 'GB' size range was considered a very large database.

But hey, why would you ever need more than 640KB memory?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This makes sense by the simple observation that, all other things being equal, most people will want to live and work in what they consider their homeland. For many people who have come to the US, they have come not to find a new homeland but rather to get wealthy and pursue opportunity.

This is an admirable thing. But as China develops and grows - <USER2> becoming more equal between the US and China - it's only natural that Chinese expats will find that they can seek "riches" in what they feel is their homeland.

There's nothing wrong with this, and in fact will be good for people of all nationalities as competition increases for talent.

<comment><USER36> > it's only natural that Chinese expats will find that they can seek "riches" > in what they feel is their natural and original homeland.

I can see your argument about returning to an "original homeland" (i.e. for reasons of cultural or social affinity), but "natural homeland"? There's nothing about the nature (air, land, climate, flora, fauna, etc) of China that is uniquely suited to a Chinese person any more than anyone else.

<comment><USER35> That's not what I mean by a natural homeland. I say "original" because it's where they're born and "natural" because it's the nation with the culture they're most familiar and presumably comfortable with.

<comment><USER36> > and "natural" because it's the nation with the culture they're most familiar > and presumably comfortable with.

In that case, the correct term is "cultural homeland", not "natural homeland".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > Of the more than 850,000 AI engineers across America, 7.9 percent are > Chinese, according to a 2017 report from LinkedIn.

850,000 sounds way way too high.

> While Chinese engineers are well represented in the Valley, the perception > is that comparatively fewer advance to the top rungs, a phenomenon labeled > the "Bamboo Ceiling."

American culture does reward asshole-behaviour a lot more than one can tolerate sometimes. It's definitely not just a conservative problem, so don't go blaming it on Trump.

<comment><USER38> Sociopaths tend to rise to the top in every organization, sadly.

<comment><USER39> I guess you mean psychopaths, Sociopaths are anti-social, so my guess is they are not charming. It's a generalization but you do not get to the top without being persuasive at decent level and to stay there, you better be good.

<comment><USER40> You've got it backwards. Psychopathy is a particular variant of Antisocial Personality disorder and is characterized by a complete lack of empathy. The brain wiring literally doesn't exist.

Whereas sociopathy is a learned willingness to completely subvert empathy to serve personal goals. They do have brain wiring for empathy, which is what makes them effective at subverting it.

High-functioning psychopaths generally have to create a 'mask' in order to pass for normal. The mask is quite cognitively expensive and so they tend to prefer solitude. Low-functioning psychopaths tend towards criminality due to poor self-control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Money is the king. Seriously there are people that prefer their own familiar environment but a logical explanation is if you can get significantly more money elsewhere why not to go ? After all you can retire early and live wherever you want. You would be surprised how many brilliant engineers work have small coffee shops around the world not caring about money anymore.

</comment><comment><USER41> Shanghai is "smog-choked"? The AQI is the same as San Francisco.

The score is easily 10x worse in other cities but specifically Shanghai seems overblown.

<comment><USER11> Look at the history: shanghai dipped orange and red multiple times in the past few days, while SF just dipped into the yellow.

[https://aqicn.org/city/shanghai/](https://aqicn.org/city/shanghai/)

[http://aqicn.org/city/california/san-francisco/san- francisco...](http://aqicn.org/city/california/san-francisco/san-francisco- arkansas-street)

Keep in mind it's also night in china ATM while it is noon in SF.

Shanghai is much worse than SF on average. It dips into the red zone more often, retreating when it rains. Shanghai is much better than the rest of china barring Shenzhen, Xiamen, and maybe Kunming, but it would still come across to an American visitor as smoggier than they were used to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > "850,000 AI engineers across America"

Seriously ?

<comment><USER43> It's like they counted up the number of people who know what a linear regression is, and called them all 'AI engineers'.

<comment><USER44> In fairness a regression is about the extent of a large number of "machine learning" efforts ever get to (often with good reason, actually).

It's worse than what you write, though. I've seen the "AI" and "machine learning engineer" labels applied to jobs where the developer is basically copy-and-pasting some sklearn snippet from an ipython notebook written by an actual ML/Data Science engineer into his "production" pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think it's not just Chinese, but pretty much most immigrant have a stronger desire to go back home. Speaking as an immigrant myself,i don't think most of us came to the US because we loved american culture, we came for the opportunity, and as more and more opportuinity open up in culture closer to our native cultures, going back make more and more sense.

The other aspect i didn't see mentioned is that dating for an average immigrant man (which are still the majority of the immigration in tech) is a brutal experience; between the skew gender ratio, the ruthlessness of modern/app based dating and increasing intolerance against "conservative values" etc... for anecdotal sample, a large population are just leaving to escape the loneliness and try to start a family

</comment><comment><USER46> No surprise from an opportunity standpoint. Certain research fields are now much better funded in China. That said, reasons for moving home are most-often individual/personal.

Throughout this thread, I see a lot of solid reasons for a Chinese Expat in SV to give returning to China thoughtful consideration. That said, one hard negative moving from non-China into China is the availability of modern, standard-practice develop tools. Replicating the tools/DevEv within China is certainly possible, but requires effort and is often frustrating. VPN hot potato is getting more frequent & homegrown China DevEnv tools are often dramatically different from the tools common to non-China business.

</comment><comment><USER47> What is this bamboo ceiling in tech that they are talking about? The last time I checked the CEOs of Microsoft and Google weren't the stereotypical ethnicity.

<comment><USER48> The fact that some South Asians rise to high ranking positions in tech in the US does not mean that Asians in tech overall are not disadvantaged in practice in advancement in the field in the US.

(I have no real opinion about whether there _is_ a bamboo ceiling effect in tech, not having done any study of the question, but the two examples you point to are far from even a strong reason to doubt the effect.)</comment></comment>