Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase - <AUTHOR> https://react-etc.net/entry/real-world-4g-lte-vs-5g-test-benchmark-14x-bandwidth <comment><USER2> Without more details on the test setup, it's hard to evaluate it.

5G can be deployed with much more spectrum than 4G can be. Deployed with 60-80MHz of spectrum, US carriers have shown off LTE north of 700Mbps. The article said that they were using the 3.5GHz band, but they didn't say how much spectrum they were using which makes the comparison incredibly suspect. Do an image search for "T-Mobile gigabit" or "Sprint gigabit" and you'll see plenty of tests in areas where the companies have a lot of spectrum in a small area doing very high speed.

AT&T and Verizon are planning on launching 5G with hundreds of MHz of spectrum in millimeter wave bands. That spectrum won't travel far and will have difficulty going through walls, but will have lots of capacity given how much they have.

By contrast, LTE deployments are usually in the range of 10-80MHz. Given the low 50Mbps speed of their 4G test, it seems like they didn't use much spectrum at all for 4G. If they had a reasonable LTE setup with 80MHz of spectrum in 4xCA, 256QAM, and 4x4 MIMO, they should easily beat 500Mbps and probably get closer to 800Mbps. The low LTE speed makes me conclude that they're just looking to promote Elisa (the wireless operator that worked with the newspaper to do the test) and set it up to just make for a good article.

What I want is a comparison between LTE and 5G NR that uses the same amount of spectrum in the same band. 5G NR is likely to have new applications with millimeter wave and very high order MIMO, but that won't work at the lower frequencies that are used to create broad coverage. In the 500-2,000MHz range with the same amount of spectrum, how much faster is 5G NR?

Now, 5G NR is said to have some great benefits in terms of latency and power use for low-bandwidth devices on top of bandwidth increases, but people aren't showing off real comparisons yet.

Also, just to see how bad a test of LTE this was, average speeds at the super bowl were over 50Mbps for three carriers: [http://bgr.com/2018/02/05/t-mobile- vs-verizon-fastest-networ...](http://bgr.com/2018/02/05/t-mobile-vs-verizon- fastest-network-super-bowl-2018/). I mean, T-Mobile was able to top 120Mbps in a real-world situation. They couldn't beat 50Mbps on an unloaded LTE network? That just sounds like they gave it very little spectrum. Heck, Ookla notes that _average_ nationwide speeds are 31.58Mbps for T-Mobile, 23.83Mbps for Sprint, 24.39Mbps for AT&T, and 28.21Mbps for Verizon. That's an average that includes places with bad coverage and such. 50Mbps is a very low LTE performance number in a lab which just makes it feel suspect.

Now, it could be that 5G NR, like UMTS in its early days, has a lot more room for improvement. UMTS launched at 384kbps which wasn't extremely faster than EDGE and 1xRTT, but did have big latency benefits. A little later, it was pushed further and eventually got as high as 42Mbps (theoretical). Sometimes they kinda exaggerate the early tests because the technology is really better over the long run, but it will take some time to get there.

<comment><USER3> I would really like details on latency. Bandwidth is all very well, but it's high latency that is so often the real limiting factor in browsing performance. I live in a rural area, and my wired connection is very slow (~ 12Mbps). 4G competes well for bandwidth, but the latency (and the fact that the latency is highly variable) makes 4G unsuitable for general purpose internet use.

If 5G could be made closer to WiFi for both mean latency and latency stability it would have a potentially huge impact on broadband access in remote regions (assuming it's easier to deploy 5G there than fiber - which I think is true for most regions).

<comment><USER4> Isn't the latency mainly determined by congestion / bandwidth saturation on either the radio network or operator's backbone?

IIRC the actual technological latency of a 4G link is just ~2 ms extra; the problem is that you have to share the link with many people, so if the network is overloaded you may get unstable latency. In this regard, anything that increases capacity would automatically help with latency as well.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but also retransmission that happens at the physical/link layer to mask lossy links from higher layer protocols, such as TCP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> T-Mobile austria did the same a few days ago. They achieved 3ms latency to a drone which they were remote controlling and 2Gbit.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/t-mo- austria/sets/721576693479...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/t-mo- austria/sets/72157669347988299/)

[https://newsroom.t-mobile.at/wp- content/uploads/2018/02/1802...](https://newsroom.t-mobile.at/wp- content/uploads/2018/02/180209_TMA_PA_5G-Showcase_englisch.pdf)

<comment><USER7> It is indeed an impressive feat, especially compared with racing drone pilots that usually fly with around 0.5 to 1 ms delay between our video transmitters and receivers on the 5.8Ghz band (the cameras however adds a delay of 20-30 ms, but that is unrelated in this comparison).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone, primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the mainstream.

<comment><USER9> And related to that, how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift the bottleneck from between handset & tower, to the tower's own infrastructure.

Mobile vendors won't mind because your phone will say "5G" in the status bar and they can charge more. But in reality your phone to web-site performance (particularly outside of artificial benchmarks) may not improve substantially.

<comment><USER10> Most sites have fibre backhaul now. And then point to point wireless can do 10gig+ these days anyway to a tower that does have fibre backhaul.

<comment><USER11> Even with fibre, it wouldn't take many users on the theoretical capacity of 5g to saturate the uplink.

<comment><USER12> 5g is shared bandwidth from ~20Gbps download 10gbps upload, increasing the number of users over a minimum does not increase peak bandwidth just utilization.

Considering multiple carriors would each have 20gbps and there are ~200,000 cell towers in the US we are talking massive bandwidth in aggregate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What standard is this now? Last time I tried to read up on 5G, it was described as a collection of ideas for a new standard rather than one specific technology. IS this still the case (i.e. different companies work on competing technologies) or does 5G by now mean the same for all companies?

<comment><USER14> No, all these deployments are considered "pre-standard" 5G.

<comment><USER15> No, the 5G NR standard was finalized in december of 2017.

<comment><USER16> Do you have any link with more information on that?

<comment><USER15> [https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/12/20/16803326/5g...](https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/12/20/16803326/5g-network- specification-standard-3gpp-nr-official)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Faster speed is great, but what about bumping the data caps?

I was able to hit ~70mb/s over 4G several years ago (in ideal conditions). That's enough to burn through most bandwidth caps in a couple of minutes!

Even most "unlimited" plans still throttle you after some point.

<comment><USER18> T-Mobile has 50gb throttle limit that's only enforced during congestion.

<comment><USER17> Well, that's an improvement. I liked T-Mobile when I lived where they had coverage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what kind of technologies are behind 3G, 4G and 5G.

From a consumer perspective, upgrading the number means "the same, simply better and faster". (just like an iphone :)

The truth is probably more complex than that.

From my experience, 4G was much more reliable that 3G has ever been. May be the service providers have improved. But I have the feeling that 4G is a fundamentally different technology from 3G. In that case, is 5G fundamentally different from 4G?

<comment><USER2> 3G technologies used CDMA while LTE uses OFDM so it is a different way of encoding. However, wireless carriers in the US have often increased their number of cell sites substantially - possibly doubling. The amount of spectrum that carriers have has increased substantially - again, more than doubling in some cases. Plus, with the rise of data, consumers now have a way of testing the quality of their link (ie. a speed test) so it's easier to verify under- performing phones. That probably has an impact on device manufacturers. LTE's decreased latency can also make it seem more reliable. Slow ping times mean that downloading a web page can become tedious and seem like it's not working as a script blocks and you're waiting on a 400ms round-trip between the 3G network and getting to the server. Even things like the rise of cheap CDNs like CloudFlare mean that more content is located near you.

5G NR is still OFDM based.

<comment><USER20> At least on the research side there has been work on GFDM (Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing) as a possible modulation technique for 5G. I don't follow the standardization enough to know what are the chances of it making it into a standard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice, soon 500 word articles like this one be able to have 30.2MB of Javascript frameworks and ads instead of just 2.2MB and load in the same amount of time!

</comment><comment><USER22> Soon, people will be able to max out their monthly data plan in less than 10 seconds. After the first glorious 10 seconds, their bandwidth will be artificially reduced to 256Kbps.

</comment><comment> gene-h Frankly I'm wondering if 5G will ever take off. One problem with 5G is that it uses higher frequencies, which carry more bandwidth, but don't go through obstacles so well. So you need much more hotspots, which A is creating zoning nightmares and B is an expensive proposition. Really performance is similar to that of wifi. So the question is why not just use wifi? There's a bunch of wifi hardware already installed, we can assume in the future that more will be installed, and that wifi will continue to improve. Really the big problems with building a wifi based cellular network are incentives, software, and ISPs. We need a way to incentivize people to open up their routers so that strangers can use them and software so that the people using these routers aren't getting snooped on by the people who own the routers. Software and incentives aren't that hard to fix and could be an interesting startup opportunity. However, ISPs could quash any company that tries to do this.

[0][https://www.fastcompany.com/40468468/the-debate-over- neighbo...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40468468/the-debate-over-neighborhood- zoning-could-hold-up-fast-5g-wireless-for-years-to-come)

<comment><USER23> Because WiFi sucks.

If I'm riding a tram and leave WiFi on, the continuous connection and disconnection of networks (I pay for a WiFi service with a bunch of hotspots) makes my internet useless.

If it wasn't for iOS's restrictions on some types of data usage I would never turn on WiFi on my phone.

> we can assume in the future [...] that wifi will continue to improve

WiFi has gotten faster over the years but none of the fundamental problems have been solved. Heck, WiFi routers still hijack your DNS and HTTP connections just to show a ToS or let you log in! Why is this not an adopted part of the standard?

<comment><USER24> Wasn't RADIUS supposed to allow this?

<comment><USER23> There are lots of standards I'm sure, but one problem with WiFi is the implementations are usually complete crap. With 3G/4G stuff, at least the operators have some minimum QA standards that force the manufacturers to up their game, but for WiFi anything goes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "4G vs. 5G" What a marketing BS! Let's say it straight: we increased radio frequency by N multiplier to get larger badwidth with RF penetration capabilities tradeoff -- now we should put radio transmitting stations at a distance of 30 meters between each other and behind every corner, cause radiowaves at this frequency cannot pass through even a plywood sheet.

</comment><comment><USER26> Has everyone settled on one 5G or will the 5G landscape in the US still be split between GSM 5G and CDMA 5G?

<comment><USER23> Qualcomm figured out that they make more money by patenting everything they can think of in 4G/5G and collecting that from everyone instead of selling their own hardware to a handful of operators who adopt their closed standard, so CDMA is dead (their "CDMA 4G" was never adopted by anyone, everything worldwide is LTE/"GSM 4G")

<comment><USER26> I didn't know we'd already centralized. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Since 4G came out i have never had to think about the internet speed of my phone. Only when it has been connected to wifi abroad.

What we need is not speed or bandwidth, it is penetration and range.

*It is probably a regional thing i can image that 4G could be quite slow in the midst of Tokyo.

<comment><USER10> TBH LTE800/LTE700 covers the range and penetration quite well. A rural macrocell can cover 20-30km. 5G isn't going to solve the underlying physics here.

There's also LTE450 which could do absolutely ridiculous distances (used in Russia and Scandinavia I believe).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I remember when I tried LTE for the first time and was blown away by huge speeds. Thing is none of this matters when plenty of clients use the same system and the provider decides to throttle all of them.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well, here's your last-mile broadband competition!

I hope we will see the major four cell carriers plus Comcast bringing broadband choices from one to three-five options for most of the country.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've never really needed more than 4g and from what I read 5g has severe problems with penetrating solid structures.

We have a tiny screen on our phone how much more bandwidth do we need? You would probably have to hold the screen directly to your eyeball to need 4k videos on your phone.

</comment><comment><USER30> 5G is brand new tech that's not used by anyone. 4G was also supposed to be 50-70 Mbps when it launched. It was at most 12 Mbps, in the beginning, and then it dropped to much less than that as more people got onto the 4G network.

</comment><comment><USER31> Unless data plans increase alongside this, it just means most people will just reach their caps dramatically quicker. At least for me, speed isn't currently the big limiting factor; the data cap is.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is just going to end up like the race for the thinnest phone. Nobody really cares past a certain point, but jeez, they'll keep trying.

<comment><USER33> The operators care, because faster traffic means more customers per megahertz of spectrum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Obviously the more speed the better for PC and residential internet connections, but for me and probably a lot of other people 4G is more than fast enough for what we need on our phones.

In fact, I have the AT&T "Unlimited Choice" plan on my phone, which caps my bandwidth at 3Mbps and it's been totally fine. I never find myself wishing I had a faster cell phone connection.

</comment><comment><USER35> Do you think this means streaming high end games like OnLive tried to do will become a reality?

</comment><comment><USER36> Of course. Nobody's on 5G yet.

</comment><comment><USER37> I talked to a friend who is a part of R&D 5G team. He is completely terrified. Pointing a high energy stream of photons to peoples phones, creates a risk of signal interference resulting in burning people (yeah, lasers).

I don't know much about mobile tech, but when I heard that from a person who sits in the lab doing it, my feelings about 5G are a little mixed.</comment>


Show HN: Top Free Mobile Apps for Text and Data Analysis - <AUTHOR> https://elearningindustry.com/top-8-mobile-apps-for-text-analysis# <comment><USER2> I think this is not an article for a ShowHN, it's a blog post, not some kind of project.

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

> _What to Submit_

> _Show HN is for something you 've made that other people can play with. HN > users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread._

> _Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can 't be tried out, so they > can't be Show HNs._

You have a previous submission that looks like a possible example of a ShowHN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12509106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12509106) . My critique of that project is that I found it very difficult to get to the online trial version [http://demo.intellexer.com/](http://demo.intellexer.com/) For a ShowHN it's better the trial version or a landing page with some information and a direct link to the trial version.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. I'll consider this critique for my future submissions. Did you try [http://esapi.intellexer.com/Summarizer](http://esapi.intellexer.com/Summarizer)? It's free online version of the service mentioned in my previous post [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12509106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12509106).</comment></comment>


First intelligence gene discovered  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/5515/intelligence-gene-found

<comment><USER2> The most important quotation from the article for establishing context on what the latest finding means: "It is generally accepted that genes, a good education and environmental factors combine to determine our intelligence. 'If people wanted to change their genetic destiny they could either increase their exercise or improve their diet and education,' said Thompson. 'Most other ways we know of improving brain function more than outweigh this gene.'"

And it's important to remember that the study here is based on data-mining

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

and has the usual defects of unreplicated studies of this kind.

</comment><comment><USER3> My professional field is statistical genetics. I don't actually want to bet, but if I did I'd give odds of three to one against this replicating, and ten to one against it having anything at all to do with the genetic architecture of human intelligence. My money is on the result reflecting population stratification.

</comment><comment><USER4> Id just like to point out the gross disparity between the title "First intelligence gene discovered" and the psychologist quoted in the article who was "a little wary of thinking in terms of a gene for intelligence."....

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm sure it's just a matter of time before people look for correlations between this gene and race.

Boy is this going to open a can of worms.

<comment><USER6> This is something that cannot and should not be avoided though ... I remember reading this article in GQ magazine, many many moons ago, about fast twitch fibers being found more readily in people of West African Descent which is what makes them better sprinters (this is why your 100m, 200m races are dominated by people from America, West Africa and the Carribbeans) ... naturally I started to discuss this with a African American Studies Professor I was friends with at the time, and the response wasn't that the research was incorrect, but that it shouldn't be talked about because white supremacists, or other racists would seize upon it to make an argument that since athleticism could be so advantaged by race then intelligence could too.

It makes me sad that America's racial history makes things like this way more fraught with all sorts of dangers than it needs to be, but eventually we do have to do these kinds of research and find out how these things are related to our ancestors ... I for one, think we'll find that skin color has vanishingly little to do with these sorts of things ... I mean, in the matter of fast twitch muscles fiber, it turns out that not all black people have that advantage, only a small group of people from West africa

People will always try to describe things according to race in this country, but I think that as long as we're reasonably careful/responsible with the way we carry out the inquiry, it will benefit us in the long run.

<comment><USER7> Sprinting does not have the same global impact as intelligence,which is why people get so testy about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This may be the first intelligence gene discovered; however, it also may be yet another study [1] that is contradicted by attempts to replicate it [2]. I don't know much about Cosmos Magazine, but it's a bit disappointing that a 'science' magazine would cite a single study as conclusive without waiting for peer review.

1\. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17160701?dopt=Abstract>

2\. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17160701?dopt=Abstract>

<comment><USER9> I think you may be confused about the term "peer review", as the study referred to in the OP article certainly underwent peer review in the process of being published in _Nature Genetics_.

<comment><USER8> Granted. I meant "replicating experiments" to further validate the findings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Original articles:

[http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2250....](http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2250.html)

[http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2245....](http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2245.html)

[http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2237....](http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2237.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> "People who received two Cs from their parents, about a quarter of the population, scored on average 1.3 points higher than the next group - half of the population with only one C in this section of the gene. The last quarter of people, with no Cs, scored another 1.3 points lower."

I'm sure it's a significant step in cognitive research finding a gene that correlates to differences in intelligence but is a 2.6 point spread that big a deal?

</comment><comment><USER12> Too bad the article didn't mention the specific SNP.

<comment><USER13> rs10784502

"In addition, the C allele of rs10784502 is associated, on average, with 9,006.7 mm3 larger intracranial volume, or 0.58% of intracranial volume per risk allele and is weakly associated with increased general intelligence by approximately 1.29 IQ points per allele."

[http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2250....](http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ng.2250.html)

[Edited to provide a more useful quote]

<comment><USER14> Just tried and at 23andme it is possible to check this gene, at least with the latest version of their chip (v3). Just got to "Browse raw data" and put "rs10784502" on the right of "a SNP:" and press "Go".

p.s. CT here, the most diffuse variant (the "best" one according to the article is CC).

<comment><USER15> Where is the "Browse raw data" link?

Edit: Ignore that, found it. Under the Account menu in the top nav.

"No SNPs matching 'rs10784502' found in the data from your chip."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps also interesting in this context is the fact that the human brain has been shrinking over the last 20,000 years: [http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans- smart-...](http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why- brain-shrinking)

</comment><comment><USER17> So this is a switch. I wonder if this is a pure improvement, or there are deficiencies common to carriers; perhaps in co-occurance with another switch (like malaria resistance/sickle cell anemia). Perhaps increased incidence of autism/asperger.

<comment><USER16> I guess you are implying that we don't all have the "smart" version of the gene for that reason.

But the brain accounts for about 25% of glucose consumption in your body. So for genes which enlarge the brain, evolution would have sought the optimal trade-off between increased intelligence vs increased metabolic cost. There may well be no "deficiency" other than that increased cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anton's Key?</comment>


Curebit apologizes for theft, but leaves something out - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/30/curebit-apology

<comment><USER2> From the comments on the article:

>As I mentioned in the last article, we are in discussions with Random Rab regarding licensing to try to find a license/price that is mutually agreeable.

Um, you do this before, not after the fact. Seems like this company is taking "better to ask forgiveness than permission" a bit too far.

<comment><USER3> You forgot the other part of that gem of comment.."we are reviewing all assets and removing things not ours.." that implies that the in fact was very bad habit of stealing..pr-wise firing Grant would have been cost effective

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mental note: avoid Random Rab. He would rather fuel a shitstorm than take the video down with 4 clicks and send a private email.

Edit: and VentureBeat</comment>


Are titles important in a startup? - <AUTHOR> http://georgesaines.com/2010/11/15/are-titles-in-important-in-a-startup/

<comment><USER2> If they are then you're doing it wrong.</comment>


Should the frame be recognized as an art form? - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/it-time-recognize-frames-independent-artform-180975184/ <comment><USER2> When I worked in an art gallery in Union Square in SF, we had a client coming in from China to look at an original Chagall. The problem: the crate was arriving from Switzerland only an hour before the client. When it got there we raced to unpack everything. The piece was huge - the extremely ornate gold frame must have weighed 80 pounds. And there was a stray nail sticking out of it! We only had a few minutes so I laid it down flat on the floor and unscrewed the back to take out the art.

I'll never forget the feeling - when I lifted the canvas out of the frame, it was as light as air. All those millions for this piece and it could have floated out of my hands. It was a beautiful feeling I've never forgotten.

We got the nail out out of the frame, patched it up, put the art back in, and sweated through the client viewing. They bought it, of course. It wasn't even that great of a painting. But somehow the framing adds so much to the aura of the piece. It's more than an art form to be honest - for most art out there it's the one thing that adds weight. For art that is valued at whatever someone will pay for it... the framing is everything.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have an ornate frame hanging on my wall. I picked it up for like thirty bucks at a used furniture shop. It's a big chunk of molded plastic with gilt paint here and there on it, and it frames an empty space on the wall.

Or, more precisely, it frames the empty space on the wall that my projector is aimed at. And it has a special power: everything displayed in it is, most assuredly, Art, because why would there be a frame around it otherwise?

With this simple act, I have settled the "are video games art" debate forever.

</comment><comment><USER4> My brother is an artist who has invested a big chunk of his career in getting the technical details right. He does a fair amount of carpentry and his frames are amazing. Very simple "four pieces of wood" but the wood is straight, the box is deep and sealed, the corners are tight, the "glass" is typically coated plexi, and the piece is mounted within at the proper proportions. I personally consider them art on par with some of the pieces they contain.

</comment><comment><USER5> When I was a kid my grandparents still lived in the house where my mom grew up - a huge, old, beautiful home (built in the '20s, I'd guess?) deep in a forest. When it was torn down to build condos (to pay my grandfather's debts, I'm told) one of the things we were able to keep was the handmade crown molding. My wife took a few pieces to a carpenter which they used to create a frame for an original painting we had purchased (online, but directly from the artist as I understand - from a daily-deals style art site called artsumo, anyone remember that?) It's probably my favorite piece of art in our home.

[https://photos.app.goo.gl/pm5gECPMQEecAMf88](https://photos.app.goo.gl/pm5gECPMQEecAMf88)

</comment><comment><USER6> Shameless plug, but if you ever need to crop out the frame/surroundings of a bunch of photos of art: [https://artsy.github.io/blog/2014/09/24/using- pattern-recogn...](https://artsy.github.io/blog/2014/09/24/using-pattern- recognition-to-automatically-crop-framed-art/)

<comment><USER7> Nice

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I taught myself framing earlier this year for some antique maps that I own, and it is surprisingly hard. Cutting the passe-partout, the glass, picking the right kind of frame, getting the proportions right. Even something simple as getting 45 degree corners is really really difficult as the required precision is really high. In the end I did some decent ones that I'm happy with, but I'm still a one-trick pony with the (basic) materials that I used. Love working with my hands though, and it saves a bit of money compared to getting it done professionally.

<comment><USER9> Do you have any pointers to resources on how to learn? I'm a zero-trick pony and I'd like to learn :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How could it not? [https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/holy-family-known-as- the-d...](https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/holy-family-known-as-the-doni- tondo)

</comment><comment> PCI-eX16 Putting aside philosophical discussions around what art is, I feel like frames are much like many other things recognized as art in museums, including Smithsonian museums.

 _While four pieces of wood would suffice for security, frame makers delighted in the gilded and polychrome curves of Baroque frames, the asymmetrical Rococo peak and the stepped geometry of Art Deco casing._

You can say the same things about furniture or even fashion. Not every frame is art, sure, but you also won't see a Raymour & Flannigan sofa in a museum any time soon either.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, there's a reason people specialize in framing and can charge a lot of money for their talent. It's both a skill and an art.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is this seriously what constitutes an article premise these days for the smithsonian?

<comment><USER13> I remember seeing a crackerjack toy collection at the Smithsonian when I went there 30 years ago. Ephemera and everyday objects are a big part of what the Smithsonian archives, preserves, and educates about. Did you really not know that, or are you just compelled to greet every single item that enters your field of view with the same vacant knee-jerk reactionary sneer?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> frames are like file extensions

<comment><USER7> Frames are like iframes</comment></comment>


New Class Of Nanoparticle Brings Cheaper, Lighter Solar Cells Outdoors - <AUTHOR> http://www.ece.utoronto.ca/news/new-class-nanoparticle-brings-cheaper-lighter-solar-cells-outdoors/

<comment><AUTHOR> The mentioned paper "Air-Stable N-Type Colloidal Quantum Dot Solids" published in Nature Materials is also available here:

[http://www.light.utoronto.ca/edit/files/nmat4007.pdf](http://www.light.utoronto.ca/edit/files/nmat4007.pdf)</comment>


Raising capital - The 50 or so things you should read first - <AUTHOR> http://jonbischke.com/2009/11/08/raising-capital-the-50-or-so-things-you-should-read-first/

<comment><USER2> 51) Do I need capital in the first place or can I bootstrap my startup?</comment>


Tell HN: There's two separate products on the front page, huginn and hugin - <AUTHOR> Huginn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7585605<p>Hugin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7585703 <comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure people can see that for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> And it's only Monday. Might as well be Wednesday.

</comment><comment><USER4> is it a coincidence or opportunity?</comment>


D-Day's hero: Andrew Higgins..cursed a lot and built the boats that won WWII - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/06/d-days-hero-andrew-higgins-loved-bourbon-cursed-a-lot-and-built-the-boat-that-won-wwii/ <comment><AUTHOR> In celebration of D-Day.

"By September 1943, 12,964 of the American Navy's 14,072 vessels had been designed by Higgins Industries..."

"You're the only man I've ever met," President Franklin D. Roosevelt told him, "who has done all the talking."

See also: [http://www.americanheritage.com/content/man-who-won-war- us](http://www.americanheritage.com/content/man-who-won-war-us)

His motto was "The Hell I Can't," and he always far exceeded expectations.</comment>


Bespin 0.4: Stop, Collaborate and Code - <AUTHOR> http://labs.mozilla.com/2009/08/bespin-0-4-stop-collaborate-and-code/ <comment><USER2> just tried it out... very cool project. My only concern is that you can't check out a project bigger than 10 mb. Which would be find except that in mercurial you ALWAYS checkout the entire project :(

Maybe they can add support for only pulling the data when you actually use the file for something?

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks very promising, first I have seen of it. Seems to be missing import and export though currently?</comment>


Show HN: Bitgold - <AUTHOR> https://www.bitgold.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm hoping this is real and good and will not be destroyed by any State.

But I really think you should disclose better who you are and why should we trust you.</comment>


Things that are illegal to build in most American cities now - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/CascadianSolo/status/1204306278173958145 <comment><USER2> >Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs,

I read somewhere that the lack of rooming-houses significantly contributes to homelessness.

They fill a gap between an individual apartment and your car or the street.

It's too bad these aren't allowed any more. I know those populations can be hard to live with, but it's better than having them live on the street.

<comment><USER3> It could even be the driving cause behind the cycle of homelessness, mental and physical health problems and addiction are often the result of or severely aggravated by living in such deprivation. It's nearly impossible to get a job without a fixed address and proper facilities for daily hygiene. I'd imagine that a communal living environment would also have pro-social effects since there is an expectation to keep yourself and your space clean and meals would take place in a shared eating area.

As others have pointed out, rooming houses weren't only for the dispossessed. They were a low rung on the ladder for young people trying to make a start, for people between jobs or starting over in a new city, for the vulnerable escaping bad marriages, for new immigrants and the elderly without support systems. It's interesting that this list closely mirrors the precarious stages and situations in life that can often lead to homelessness.

<comment><USER4> There was a long essay in the New York Review of Books way back in the mid '90's that argued the point. SROs and casual labor are essential to combat homelessness.

We lost SROs but we also lost casual labor. Business are criticized for not providing full time positions with benefits. The idea that someone could walk in and get day work helps folks who really don't want to or can't work full time.

<comment><USER5> I mean, I would argue casual labor should be fazed out because corporations lobbied to make benefits (specifically healthcare) tied to employment. You can't have your cake and eat it too, if we want a flexible workforce then life-necessities cannot be tied to permanent employment.

<comment><USER6> Life necessities became tied to permanent employment because of income and tax policy, not some corporate desire to control heath-care.

<comment><USER7> The tax code is totally corporate dictated and to their interests - the huge bias against self employment is evident of that, whereas in a more competent economy policymakers would acknowledge the strong growth potential of incentivizing small business creation.

<comment><USER6> This was policy makers dictating to corporations, not the other way.

It was a product of (1) intense focus on wage freezes during the labor shortage of World War II, and (2) the growth of unions, which focused on winning concessions from management, not government.[0]

I agree it's a terrible policy. Corporate management now accepts and exploits it. But it was _not_ a decision by 'capital' to spite labor or self- employment. It is the consequence of 'progressive' tax, regulation and labor policy.

[0][http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/ArtWeb/67493CA6B8...](http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/ArtWeb/67493CA6B837EDF285257B160048DD49?OpenDocument)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I own and live in a two family house built in 1924. It's one step up from an English row house in that you have windows on all sides. These, and New England "triple-deckers" are pretty good. In Worcester MA you could buy an 1890/1900 triple-decker for $30k in the early 90s.. if only I was smart enough to buy one then.

These are wealth generators in that renters are paying your mortgage.

My grandparents lived in a Queens NY row house (until 1970s white flight). I have early memories of it, was a cool house. It had lots of fireplaces, varnished wooden gates, wall sconces and shared back courtyard. My parents lived in a 1950s single family house, but we gen xers rediscovered cities.

New houses around Boston are mass Lego block low rise apartments. They all are corporate owned, which means they are expensive, and the rent goes up automatically, but they sometimes have nice ammenaties.

SROs: I want to live the way Sherlock Holmes did. Mrs. Hudson cooked, cleaned, answered the door.. did people really live like this in late 19th century London? How much was the rent?

<comment><USER9> I was kinda shocked to see Worcester mentioned here in the top comment. I and some other students are currently paying $4350/mo for one of these triple deckers that you mentioned.

I really prefer the zoning laws and building style present in Hanoi. Our house is five stories tall, and some of our neighbors have houses with six stories. Although they are not very big per floor (they may only have 2.5 rooms per floor), they are very space efficient which allows for tons of amenities to be within walking distance.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure what houses look like in Hanoi but if they are kind of like the 3-5 storey houses in some parts of East Asia those are not great designs. They're like twenty feet wide and forty feet long with steep stairs connecting the floors. To me the layout is awful. It wouldn't be bad for one off where the lot was oddly shaped but to have that as a default for attached homes isn't great.

<comment><USER11> Twenty feet wide and fourty feet long is like 6x12 meters per floor.

That's as big as my entire house, and we can fit 4 rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom in there.

2.5 rooms per floor would be the height of luxury.

Why do you say these are terrible?

<comment><USER12> I would say it because I've spent time on crutches, I have a parent in a wheelchair and another one that just wouldn't have the energy for a staircase much of the time, and staircases are a pain in the neck with small children and make it harder to move appliances and large items of furniture in and out. As a default form of housing, living across four floors is actively excluding many people with disabilities and massively reduces the ability of aging seniors to manage unassisted living.

<comment><USER11> These sound like complaints against any house with stairs. I think that disqualifies like 95% of all stock regardless.

I think we'd find that the number of people that need single floor apartments fairly closely follows the available supply.

<comment><USER13> If the first floor apartment had ramp access then wheelchairs could get in. Elevators are another option but somewhat expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That first one, the single family homes with a shared courtyard?

We need more stuff like this! Backyards in Brooklyn used to be treated more communally (before my time) which created a large shared space safe from cars where children could play.

Now I just stare out my window and watch people basically never go in to their yards.

What a horrible waste.

<comment><USER15> I have a hunch it's the bit about the parking that is illegal. To be honest, the whole post rubbed me wrong- like an industry shill or something trying to start some grass-roots anti-building-regulation discord.

<comment><USER16> Uhh, have you heard about the housing affordability problem in many states? The zoning regulations have created cookie cutter cul-de-sac neighborhoods that have contributed to unnatural sprawl. It's very difficult to even innovate in housing and commercial design due to these restrictions.

<comment><USER17> In Houston, the same thing has happened without zoning. Have you perhaps considered that there is a massive market for "cookie cutter" suburban housing? HOAs have also largely taken the place of zoning, on a hyper- localized level. Furthermore, lots of other stupid rules apply, aside from zoning, that limit the ability to build new housing.

<comment><USER18> That market was deliberately stoked by FHA and mortgage lending restrictions. The thread itself points out that these issues are not soley the result of zoning.

> While single family zoning was reserved for homeowners (read: White), multi- > family housing was seen as being for renters, (people of color).

> State, federal, and local governments all conspired to limit homebuying and > lending to whites for decades.

<comment><USER17> You're not providing any causal link. You are effectively positing that a whites-only neighborhood will spontaneously organize into suburbia, but an integrated one will not? Would you please provide some evidence or background reading to support that?

<comment><USER16> I won't speak to the race issues but as a former realtor I dealt with FHA loans and they have asinine restrictions on them. I had to get local ordinance exceptions on a number of issues to get a loan approved for some buyers. It was a mess. They required certain lot sizes and certain dimensions. And while FHA has lost its luster a bit over the decades, it used to be a much more common type of loan, as it was one of the few ways to buy without putting a lot of money down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How to solve the housing crisis: get the government out.

Nobody should be forced to have an electrical outlet in the garage for an electric car and the government has no business requiring that.

This is just my favorite example of thousands of silly regulations that are put in place to keep the poor from becoming owners.

No poor person can afford a Tesla, yet: [https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to- require-n...](https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1095076_ca-to-require-new- buildings-to-be-wired-for-electric-car-charging-stations)

<comment><USER20> I upvoted you, but it's not black and white.

The government prevents someone from opening a lead smelting plant next to a school (hopefully). They also force homes to have two exits from every room in case of fire, etc.

But they also discovered manufacturing housing scarcities and _also_ making massive, lifelong loans available for housing are a GREAT way to keep your population working really hard to just barely keep a roof over their head. Want to work part time and pursue art? Want to stay home and watch your child grow up? Too bad, there's 10 more people who'll outbid you for your house, so you have to design your life around income maximization.

These scarcities are created with zoning, parking minimums (maybe the most horrible part), green space (aka yard size) requirements, ridiculously large streets, density restrictions, etc.

The escape is to leave the city and work remote (honestly it's amazing what having no mortgage and no rent does to your sense of agency) but that's an option open to rather few people, and probably not for long as it becomes normalized and wages adjust as a result.

<comment><USER21> > They also force homes to have two exits from every room in case of fire, > etc.

That can't be true? That makes 90% of existing homes illegal to build again.

<comment><USER22> It's not true, but not for this reason. 100% of old enough buildings couldn't be built again in exactly the same way. Codes evolve over time.

<comment><USER20> Why isn't it true? My understanding was rooms where people are likely to sleep require two means of exit (e.g. door and a window).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there any possible way to break the American addiction on housing as the primary investment / wealth for a family?

As long as existing homeowners are incentivized to drive up the price of their home, none of our housing supply woes are likely to change. And who can blame them? For most people their house is worth more than all their other possessions and investments combined.

Besides the incentive issue, the fact is that most increases in home value are not created by the homeowner. They're created by the city who provide streets, infrastructure, security, etc. They're created by small business owners who make a neighborhood attractive to live in. They're created by nearby employers who bring in wage earners who create demand. The new bathroom the homeowner puts in is a minor matter. Yet all of the value (minus property taxes where applicable) is captured by the private home owner.

<comment><USER24> > As long as existing homeowners are incentivized to drive up the price of > their home, none of our housing supply woes are likely to change.

I'm not sure it's that logical. If you own land and tomorrow it's upzoned to allow more density, the value increases immediately. Once the density creates enough foot traffic to support cafes and restaurants in a walkable space the value goes up again.

People are stuck on the idea that urban means blight so they need to zoning rules to keep out "the riff raff".

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It looks like the author might be in the NW. I'm curious whether they would be optimistic about the zoning changes ([https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon- single-family-zoning...](https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-single- family-zoning-law-effect-developers)) here ([https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2019R1/Measures/Overview/HB...](https://olis.leg.state.or.us/liz/2019R1/Measures/Overview/HB2001))

<comment><USER26> Yes, he's from Oregon. HB 2001 is good news, but we need to allow for more variety, and it'd be wonderful to also allow light commercial by right, so that, say, you can walk to a corner store instead of getting into a gas guzzling SUV just to do something people in many countries can do on foot.

<comment><USER27> > allow light commercial by right

Is this a US-specific term? What does it mean? (Only really found [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_light))

<comment><USER26> "By right" means that you can just build it without having to apply for any specific exceptions, go through hearings, etc...

"Light commercial" means things like small corner stores, barber shops, local restaurants, stuff like that. There are legit reasons to not want, say, a tannery right next to housing.

<comment><USER27> Ah, right, indeed. Related to the thread, I don't see how banning "#5 Live/work units of ground level retail and second and third story housing" makes any sense. These can be a game-changer for local town life.

<comment><USER28> The only bad thing about them is that they tend not to be accessible for people who have difficulty climbing steps... which is fine as long as there's lots more available housing which is accessible.

I lived in an apartment over a specialty supply company one summer; it was a great bicycle commute to work, walking distance to a supermarket, and nobody was actually in the ground floor at the times I was home, so they certainly didn't care if I played music loudly or thumped furniture across the floor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> No citations are provided to support the "most American cities" claim, and many of them are common even in the places best known for anti-development NIMBYism, so I suspect that their association with the thread title is frequently inaccurate.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, this tweet-complaint list is simply not true. SRO/Tenements are obviously not legal (for good reasons, imho). But the other examples in the tweet thread are legal in most cities, and these get built all across the US _literally every single day_.

In my small-ish Michigan city alone, we have multiple examples of #1, #3, #4, #5, #7, and #8, all of which have been built this decade. The same is true in Minneapolis, and Portland, and Seattle, and Chicago, and others.

<comment><USER13> I think you are missing the point if you think the author implies that they are completely banned. They are obviously not all banned. The issue is that they are banned in certain places. Most cities strictly regulate where you can build different things and have restrictions on setbacks and parking for all of those things. In my midwestern town, I could not tear my house down and build an apartment. It is zoned for 'single family 2nd density residential.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anything to make new housing as expensive and complicated as possible so NIMBYs don't have more housing inventory to attack their valuations or more neighbors too close to them. The consequences of this selfishness are more expensive rents, more expensive housing and more homelessness.

</comment><comment><USER32> There's something really beautiful about streets without setbacks like this [1]. I can't put my finger on what it is but they're all over Amsterdam and Japan, and they always make me so happy to walk though. Does anyone know what it is about these?

[1] [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELaN6w_UUAAQbOC?format=jpg&name=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELaN6w_UUAAQbOC?format=jpg&name=medium)

<comment><USER33> No cars?

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

More seriously, my guess is that you enjoy those streets because there's so much more character to them. They are generally part of an older, more storied urban core, so the streets are more imbued with a "there"ness of the community.

Contrast this with the experience of walking down a recently-gentrified street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US? It's relatively popular way of living in Finland. It's something between a highrise apartment and your own house.

I've always wondered why US seems to lack those and that neatly explains it.

<comment><USER35> I spent some time in Philadelphia, where nearly all of the housing in the city core is rowhouses or apartment buildings. It's _fantastic_. It makes a dense, walkable city, and people still get the amenities of their own house with a little tiny backyard (big enough for a fire pit or grill). Also better for the environment when heat doesn't radiate off all four sides of a house.

They've been building some of what they call row homes in the PNW, but these are still detached houses (no adjoining walls). It's better than it used to be, you can fit three houses on the space formerly reserved for one or two, but go the extra mile and connect 'em together.

<comment><USER36> I think you really should have enough room for scaffolding. How are you going to take care of a wall that is physically touching your neighbor's wall? That wall ought to get inspected at least. It might need paint. If one house starts to collapse onto the other, then both have problems. You're also at a higher fire risk, even if the walls in the middle can't burn, because embers can more easily go from one roof to the other.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, the Philly MOVE incident led to 64 other buildings burning.

<comment><USER35> I think the scope of that fire is better attributed to: the police dropped _a bomb_ from a police helicopter on the home where people were living, and it was a poor neighborhood that may not have had firewalls between dwellings. I've seen fires there where the shared walls are brick, and those firewalls do work.

<comment><USER38> They also deliberately didn't put the MOVE bombing fire out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> At least in the bay area the retail on the bottom, housing on the top is now quite commonly built. There are new units in Mtn View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose. And maybe if the courts don't stop it, Cupertino :-)

</comment><comment><USER40> > 5 Live/work units of ground level retail and second and third story housing.

> The US often doesn't allow inclusionary zoning like this unless development > is denser.

4+1s are fairly common now. Most new development in chicago has this.

<comment><USER41> They are popping up everywhere in LA. A lot of parking is still required, however, which ups the builds cost and moves those businesses and apartments into another economic class. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, but the only places cheap enough to buy and raze are places currently occupied by the working class, who will still have their jobs in town but will end up with longer commutes to affordable neighborhoods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > #2 Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, which have multiple people sharing a room, > or individuals getting small rooms, with shared kitchen and bathroom spaces, > for short to medium term living.

Aren't there a few startups doing this and marketing them as communal living for young techies?

<comment><USER43> SROs don't _have_ to use communal bathrooms. A family member lives in what's classified as an SRO, but in the ritzy Cow Hollow neighborhood. It's a tiny unit but has its own bathroom, including shower, and a very tiny kitchenette (sink, no stove). It's probably smaller than most of the more modern SRO'ish units that have recently been built around SOMA, even though some of those rely on communal spaces.

Other than the size of the units, it's a typical apartment building--office workers, teachers, retail workers, and even a dentist with a house in Marin who keeps a unit so he doesn't have to commute during weekdays. It was probably built in the 1940s or 1950s, before zoning laws stopped construction of such buildings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> It would be nice to know the why's for each of these laws. I'm sure some seemed at the time, or maybe still do have legit reasons.

Houses, or rather apartments with a shared kitchen and maybe shared bathrooms are still a thing in Japan.

There are "share houses" of which maybe the most famous/notorious is Sakura House that has many locations and caters to visitors.

There's also [https://www.social-apartment.com](https://www.social- apartment.com) which is targeted more at locals. I've thought about joining one for the social aspect. I think there would be a market in other countries, especially if there was an activity director making sure events happened. I didn't know it would be illegal in the USA.

There are also high end apartments that have an activity "roof top". A friend lives in one. The rooftop has a restaurant, live entertainment, indoor and outdoor areas, a pool, and rooms you can reserve for private parties.

Tangentially, lots of old USA movies show characters living in boarding houses, having a room to themselves but sharing meals. Seems nice in the movies. No idea how it was in real life.

<comment><USER45> Mostly: Poor people live in these, or even worse, poor black people.

Most of the zoning laws were not written recently, and they do carry a heavy burden of being both anti-poor and racist.

<comment><USER2> > Most of the zoning laws were not written recently, and they do carry a heavy > burden of being both anti-poor and racist.

It's not accidental either, they were written that was as a neutral way of implementing racist policies.

Just like the war on drugs was a smokescreen for Nixon to attack the hippies and peace protestors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Key sentence:

 _> Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons._

</comment><comment><USER47> The problem with all these regulations is that it completely stops all innovation. Imagine what the internet would have turned out to be if, from day one, it was heavily regulated as housing. Imagine if every company or every developer had to get a permit before building any website and every website had to look a certain way with certain margin. We'd be nowhere.

Housing, desperately needs permission-less innovation (completely regulation/zoning free). Maybe not everywhere. But, come on, CA has 163,707 square miles, can we just carve out a couple of those, even if it's just 100 or 200 or so (with enough economies of scale to attract serious VC money), in an area that has no NIMBYs, for build whatever you want and let builders and innovators innovate. We can take what's working and slowly apply it other areas.

At the current rate, the way things are, we're never going to see any progress in housing.

<comment><USER48> People should pay for the costs of the negative externalities they impose on others, something that seems to be missing in the town you imagine. This is one thing I think YIMBYs constantly miss. "Build, build, build!" and when someone criticizes they say "you're just afraid to lose money on your house, housing should not be an investment" and I think that captures part of it, but it's not just that a $800k house is now worth $700k, it's that the entire character of the house is changed when it's in the shadow of a skyscraper for 6 hours a day. In this case the homeowner has not just lost money, they may have lost what made them desire the house in the first place - a calm neighborhood, a sunny garden, a beautiful view, easy parking, a neighborhood populated by similarly wealthy individuals. Now you probably take issue with at least one of those, but there are others that are perfectly reasonable and until YIMBYs confront the massive negative externalities they wish to unleash on people they'll continue to look on in disgust as entire communities show up to their council meetings and shout and howl and kill YIMBY proposals.

<comment><USER49> Agglomeration economies lead to _positive_ externalities on balance, not negative ones. And YIMBY isn't arguing that one should build skyscrapers next to single-family houses. One can increase density in a rather gradual way, and a few skyscrapers here and there don't even give you a density advantage compared to building a far greater number of mid-rise and high-rise buildings.

<comment><USER50> This is very true. Vancouver has a huge housing issue because the main options are single-family homes (which are inaccessibly expensive) and ~20 storey condo towers (which are also inaccessibly expensive).

Then you end up with people opposed to densification because they only way that we can get sufficient density is to take this one small space and build 20 storeys of housing on it. If we wiped out one single-family neighborhood and replaced it with mid-rise residential with ground-floor commercial, it would be much more of a _neighborhood_ and fit a lot more people sustainably.

Instead, they fight against any densification and argue that a three-storey walk-up is going to "change the character of the neighborhood" (because people who can't afford to buy homes will be able to live in their neighborhood) and now everyone is screwed (except the people who own).

<comment><USER51> That is definitely not why Vancouver has a housing issue. We all know why Vancouver's housing market is distorted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Most by what metric? A great many cities in the US permit most (all?) of these things.

None of them are popular to build now, however, where they are allowed.

<comment><USER53> Examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> The setbacks complaint seems mainly to be that locals can't privatize, or otherwise restrict usage of, public spaces.

<comment><USER55> How does having my house near the street on my lot restrict public usage of the street?

<comment><USER56> The sidewalk. And the street right of way extends beyond just the physical street in most places.

<comment><USER55> This comment is pedantic. Yes, there are special regulations about homeowners in some areas having to place and maintain sidewalks along their property. (In other areas, they are owned and/or maintained by the city.) That's very distinct from setbacks, which prohibit construction for a depth much further than the width of the sidewalk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> For what it's worth, I recently bought a new-build condo-ownership model townhouse in Silicon Valley that is effectively a row house. Six units in a building, three stories each. It's not quite the same, but it seems to be cut from the same mold.

<comment><USER41> How is the shared wall? I used to live in an old brownstone sorta place and that thing was like a tomb in terms of noise.

Now I live in new construction which is timber framed, cheap drywall, and cheaper california insulation, and I can tell what specific video game my neighbor is playing along with his bowel schedule. Once this lease is up I'm running for the oldest heaviest looking building I can find.

<comment><USER57> Remarkably good. We were worried too but we hear almost nothing through the walls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Houston is one of the only cities in the US that I know of that does not have any zoning laws. All of these would be possible to build with zero-lot lines, no commercial or residential zones, and no height restrictions to speak of.

<comment><USER59> This is a myth.

Enormous chunks of land surrounding the three airports have actual zoning.

The rest has de facto zoning. It just isn't called zoning. This is why Houston looks pretty much like any other city with zoning.

A lot of what can and can't be built is covered by deed restrictions, which are enforced by the city. (i.e., a developer may put a restriction in the deed stating that only residences can be built, and no commercial activities.)

In addition, there are gazillions of 'land-use' ordinances that control the height of buildings, lot size, parking, etc.

While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example.

[https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve- heard-h...](https://kinder.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youve-heard- houston-really-does-have-zoning-sort-of/)

[edited to supply link]

<comment><USER60> > While it would be kinda neat -- as an experiment -- to see how a city would > develop without zoning, Houston sure as heck isn't that example.

It seems to me that Houston is a great example of that experiment: in the absence of a formal centralized zoning system, the vacuum of limiting who can build structure x in location y is filled by informal and labyrinthine arrangements.

<comment><USER59> Indeed. This idea always comes to mind when I hear people wonder out loud what a true 'anarchist' society would look like... I privately answer, "Pretty much exactly like what we have now."

<comment><USER61> Reminds me of a famous essay in the anarchist literature: "Do we ever really get out of anarchy?" by Alfred Cuzán

[https://uwf.edu/media/university-of-west- florida/colleges/ca...](https://uwf.edu/media/university-of-west- florida/colleges/cassh/departments/government/cdocs/II.A.1.-Cuzan-1979-Do-We- Ever-Really-Get-Out-of-Anarchy.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> #2 does not seem to be true in some cities. There are a lot of new "pod" apartment buildings with shared kitchen facilities. There's one right across the street from me in Denver.

<comment><USER55> Sure, housing regulations are hyper local, so there will be exceptions. The fact that some many localities have converged on banning the same stuff is still remarkable, and evidence that it's being driven by the same forces rather than being a tailored response to details of a particular community.

<comment><USER63> How is that remarkable? Local governments governing locally sounds completely normal to me.

<comment><USER55> Local governments are widely acknowledge by political scientists to be be lower quality than national governments, believe it or not, and to have significantly less oversight. The argument for giving them huge power to dictate what people can and can't build on private land is that local regulations can be more tailored to local details. But if all the local governments are, e.g., setting high minimum plot sizes, this is not them responding nimbly to local details; it's just a way to keep out poor people.

<comment><USER64> > Local governments are widely acknowledge by political scientists to be be > lower quality than national governments

Since you're invoking authority here, I'm gonna say [Citation Needed].

> But if all the local governments are, e.g., setting high minimum plot sizes, > this is not them responding nimbly to local details; it's just a way to keep > out poor people.

Or, it could be as simple as a locality copying what seems to have been successful in other nearby localities, with not enough people speaking up with compelling evidence to the contrary.

Believe it or not, not everything bad that happens to poor people happens out of malice directed their way. Sometimes, bad shit happens to poor people, because, being poor, attempting to change conditions to make less bad shit happen would further strain their already stretched-to-the-limit resources. And there's one resource that anyone who wants to participate in local policy making _must_ spend without exception, one which those struggling to make ends meet will tend to have the least of: Time.

There is no Machiavellian mustache-twisting involved in keeping the poor out; the poor never show up to give their input on the policies that might adversely affect them. It's kinda hard to even know about the 90 day advance notice postings in town hall when you're working 2.5 jobs to keep food on the table and the heat on during the coldest winter months so you don't freeze, and the public bus routes you rely on don't even go near city hall. Never mind having the time to think about the Nth order effects of such proposed policies to figure out if they'd adversely affect you, or then getting down to city hall for the planning meeting to give the council or committee your 2 cents. I mean, some localities are better than others about giving all of their local socioeconomic strata sufficient advance notice and a fair chance to provide input, but there's a limit to what's reasonable. Eventually, time for input and comment will have to be ended so a decision can be made, otherwise nothing would ever get done.

If the above sounds sucky and unfair, well, you're right. It does suck and it is unfair. But if you want the conditions of the poor to suck less and become more fair, you're going to have a hard time being effective if you are too quick to ascribe results to malice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204306278173958145.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1204306278173958145.html)

</comment><comment><USER66> Cronyism. Outlawing building types like these hurts middle and low class individuals. They take advantage of the public by citing "safety" reasons but really this just lines up the pockets of larger real estate developers and their political cronies. I imagine it is more correlated with left-leaning cities but wouldn't be surprised to see cronies on the right too

</comment><comment><USER67> I think a lot of this is due to people in the neighborhoods not wanting the neighborhoods to change. It's this way in the USA precisely because of citizen control. Single family home neighborhoods are some of the nicest places to live in America. Why shouldn't the people who have invested in the community get to decide how the neighborhood evolves?

<comment><USER68> That would be perfectly okay if they didn't invite more workers to their cities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> There is also the building code related things, you can't build a texas dogtrot, or in many cases middle eastern compound style houses (thick walls, high concrete fence) anymore either. Never-mind outhouses, despite them being all over parks/etc these days under the name "composting toilets".

</comment><comment><USER70> Come to the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Tons of new rowhouses. Live/work units are increasingly common.

</comment><comment><USER71> A family friend was the proud owner of the last outhouse in Boise city limits. All things considered, I'm not too shocked at this omission...

Also it's illegal to build chicken coops in many cities. Not sure how common that one is, though

</comment><comment><USER72> I don't think you can build new trailer parks in most of the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER73> Minimum housing size regulations (which is really what the source is about) has similar impact to minimum wages. It gives lower middle class people bigger homes / higher wages but increases homelessness / unemployment.

<comment><USER74> Maybe I'll try and find the talk again. But saw one where the speaker showed slides of various housing units. They varied from a very nice looking art deco style apartment in Redwood City at something like 220 units per acre. And single family homes in Los Vegas built and zoned for 4 units per acre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Meanwhile most of these are what you get in England

</comment><comment><USER76> What a sensationalized title. These are urban regulations and they exist in every city.

<comment><USER77> I'm on edge whether the title is sensationalized or not... It does state the fact that it is illegal to do these. I would even see it as a better reflection of the current status then perhaps stating "Urban regulations prevent building these types of buildings."

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> When there is so much regulation there is a point where the only real law becomes "have you sufficiently annoyed someone"

<comment><USER79> Most zoning laws are the result of a group of politically-connected individuals saying, " _they_ shouldn't be able to do _that_ " and using their influence to stop such behavior.

Some are really just there to ensure that developers don't cheap out on the stuff in the walls in order to cut costs. But I don't think people are really complaining about requirements for the species of wood required for framing or the number of electrical outlets per square foot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Some of these were removed from zoning because they weren't fantastic housing. I've been in a bunch of those old boarding houses (several existed near my university) and they were relatively terrible structures with minimal privacy and universal rodent issues.

<comment><USER81> But they were cheap. Which is a really great thing when you are broke but still want to go to college.

<comment><USER82> If the health situation is bad enough, it's just making externalities via health risks for everybody those residents interact with, since they're now vectors for whatever diseases crop up.

<comment><USER83> Unless the health risks are greater than those for homelessness, we shouldn't care.

Absent additional research, my prior is that homeless disease vectors are _probably_ worse, since people in that position have fewer shelter options from the elements and more direct exposure to the public.

Houses don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than what we have right now. I mean, even in a bad situation... there are rats on the street. It's very difficult for me to imagine someone in that condition looking at a house and saying, "no, the street is cleaner."

Maybe there's an extra perspective I'm missing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons.

Is this really true for all of them? I see in the thread that

> Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons.

Some of the ones who are not NIMBYism or the above I can absolutely see how they could be motivated in an effort to slow down/hinder certain socioeconomic dynamics.

> #2 Bunkhouses/Roominghouses/SROs, which have multiple people sharing a room, > or individuals getting small rooms, with shared kitchen and bathroom spaces, > for short to medium term living.

In a poor environment and/or when housing is scarce, these easily become hosts for abusive or exploitative relationships between landlord and tenants or shitty housing.

> #1 Bungalow Courts. Single family homes with shared walls and a communal > courtyard. And no car parking requirement.

Aka gated societies

EDIT: Downvoters, why? Care to reply? Is this question ignorant or irrelevant to the conversation? I'm not defending any of these or claiming that they actually have the desired effect.

<comment><USER84> I don't think this is an insane question. My take:

#1 -- gated communities are way bigger than a bungalow court and are much easier to isolate from the community around them. I think this correlation is a misapprehension. Here's a highly renovated example: [https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/4/4/17200290/pine-street- cot...](https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/4/4/17200290/pine-street-cottage-for- sale-rsl)

See how it faces the street like any other house, but there's a little private shared area in back? It's not self-contained like a gated community can be.

#2 -- yep, there's the potential for abusive relationships. There is no rental model that works without strong protections for tenants and, yes, landlords. So that problem isn't inherent to rooming houses. However, the power relationship is usually tilted towards the party with more money and that's likely to be accentuated in this type of housing. You gotta be careful.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Don't Be Evil, A Chrome extension based on the Focus on the User script - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/AndrewGuenther/Don-t-Be-Evil

<comment><USER3> Why would I want a facebook like button on every one of my search results page? The only place facebook can't spy on me? And in all fairness, why doesn't this script puts a +1 button on facebook search results?

</comment><comment><USER4> Just some honest feedback for the project owners. The logo change (<http://i.imgur.com/U8WOI.png>) was off-putting for me. You're probably better off if people install this extension out of curiosity and then forget about it entirely. This feels too much like a wink every time you search saying, "hey, some extension is mucking with these results, remember?"

<comment><USER5> Didn't even notice it until you brought it up.

The biggest issue for me was a massive, "so what?" I installed the extension and did some searches. A few G+ results, nothing else. Okay, I'll search for things I know some of my friends on facebook have talked about lately. Nothing. Alright, I'll search for "deadmau5". Nothing. What's this? 80 personal results? Sure, let's check those. Hey, a twitter link!... to someone I have on G+.

Really not sure what the authors were trying to prove, here. In the end, I got a snarky logo and the same damned results I would have gotten from Google, anyway. Removed.

Note: this is not a failing of the extension's author; I just went back and tried the same searches with the original script and had the same results. No, I didn't Google "movies" as they suggested, and nor has anyone since 1999. When I google "SOPA" without the script, I get a mix of Wikipedia, EFF, and some relevant links from G+. When I repeat the search with the script, I get the same thing and a snarky logo.

Instead of chastising Google for not including results from networks that don't want their social graphs exposed, these "independent engineers" might want to focus on doing social search themselves. Why aren't we complaining that facebook doesn't include G+ in _its_ search results? Might it be because this entire issue is a tempest in a teapot stirred up by companies that wanted to dominate social search, but were beaten to the punch by a company that dominates (surprise, surprise) search?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Any difference from the existing one on this page?

<http://www.focusontheuser.org/extensions.php>

<comment><AUTHOR> I honestly hadn't seen that that was there. Thanks for pointing it out!

I guess the only real difference is mine is available through the Chrome Web Store and has the full extension source hosted.

EDIT: Checked with a few people, no one remembers seeing the extension link earlier today. Can anyone confirm when they first saw it? (I saw the post around 10 this morning and decided to write the extension. Just want to confirm my efforts weren't totally in vein)

<comment><USER7> Jesus dude, I searched for two guys who essentially live in Google Plus - <USER2> Ratcliff and Guy Kawasaki.. and your extension returns everything but their G+ profile pages on the first page of the search result?? I know it is hip to be anti-Google now but this is ridiculous.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not trying to be anti-Google at all. I searched both of those names and both of their Google+ pages came up on the first page.

The extension only adds more social links the "Related People and Pages" sidebar. Even then, it only adds links, it doesn't remove the Google+ pages. Your regular search results are not modified at all. Try searching for "movies" to get a better feel for what it actually does.

<comment><USER7> The profile URLs are:

Trey Ratcliff: <https://plus.google.com/105237212888595777019/posts>

Guy Kawasaki: <https://plus.google.com/112374836634096795698/posts>

Neither of them show up after I install your chrome extension because the "Show Personal Results" is enabled by default. Your extension does show those G+ profile pages ONLY IF I switch to "Hide Personal Results". This is a problem with the original bookmarklet as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will look into this and try to modify the original script so that Personal Results remain untouched. Would you be willing to post a screenshot comparing the results with the extension on and off? I can't seem to reproduce what you are seeing.

<comment><USER7> This is the only way I could share the screenshots - sorry if they take a little long to load. Else ping me on Twitter with the same handle and I can attach using yfrog

Search results with your extension ENABLED and "Show Personal Results" selected: <http://www.quick-markup.com/edit/4f1e4698e51f6>

Search results with your extension ENABLED and "Hide Personal Results" selected: <http://www.quick-markup.com/edit/4f1e487c9ac72>

Search results with your extension DISABLED and "Hide Personal Results" selected: <http://www.quick-markup.com/edit/4f1e47b4f0723>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I will look into this more and keep you updated on any changes I make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I honestly think you should give this a read: [http://gigaom.com/2012/01/23/dont-be-evil-is-not-a-slogan- no...](http://gigaom.com/2012/01/23/dont-be-evil-is-not-a-slogan-nor-a- browser-extension/)</comment>


Tim Ferriss on Why He's Leaving the Bay Area - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7erct8/i_am_tim_ferriss_host_of_the_tim_ferriss_show_and/dq6zrh1/ <comment><USER2> I found this reason to hit quite close to home:

 _5) Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading -- a peculiar form of McCarthyism ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism)) masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I'm as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley. These days, people with real jobs (unlike me) are risking their careers to even challenge collective delusions in SF. Isn't this supposed to be where people change the world by challenging the consensus reality? By seeing the hidden realities behind the facades? That's the whole reason I traveled west and started over in the Bay Area. Now, more and more, I feel like it's a Russian nesting doll of facades -- Washington DC with fewer neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified. It's weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really dangerous. There's way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable. If no one feels they can say "Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but I think there's a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine..." we're headed for big trouble._

<comment><USER3> The minority head of diversity at Apple being replaced by a majority member because the minority former head said something that goes against the received narrative is unfortunately what we've come to expect --what she said isn't even controversial, but it does go against a certain narrative where everyone must fall in line or else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Tim%20Ferriss%20silicon%20vall...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Tim%20Ferriss%20silicon%20valley&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)</comment>


How Swift 5.3 enhances SwiftUI's DSL - <AUTHOR> https://www.swiftbysundell.com/articles/how-swift-5-3-enhances-swiftui-dsl/ <comment><USER2> I'm starting to learn macOS development and I'm a bit torn on SwiftUI. As someone who's primarily done web development the last few years, and comfortable with React, SwiftUI is pretty appealing from the standpoint of being a similar mental model.

On the other hand, it doesn't quite feel ready. SwiftUI seems to be missing enough components that I end up needing to know how to use the existing AppKit stuff with autolayout, or know how things work under the hood to debug SwiftUI oddities. On top of that, there are few resources out there for learning macOS dev specifically — tons of stuff for iOS, which sorta translates, but not perfectly. I've been learning from the Hacking with macOS book, which is very good, and plenty of trial and error.

The other ding against SwiftUI for Mac dev seems to be that it's only supported in Catalina, and it seems an awful lot of Mac users have held back from updating, so the user base might be diminished.

Most of these seem like temporary problems, but as a newcomer to this world it's hard to tell if it's too early to commit to SwiftUI.

<comment><USER3> > _The other ding against SwiftUI for Mac dev seems to be that it's only > supported in Catalina, and it seems an awful lot of Mac users have held back > from updating, so the user base might be diminished._

The majority updates fast - even more so when a 2nd update (Big Sur) comes out, few will hold to before Catalina.

With macOS it makes no sense to "hold out" from upgrading long. You are either prepared to get on with the program and move on, or you're left behind, worse than e.g. on Windows etc.

On the other hand, this makes the platform faster to move forward, adopt new things, and keep a more consistent UI doing so (Windows still have 5-6 UI layers from previous APIs/decades, depending on the app you use -- even for internal MS apps, e.g. you can still open an ancient version of the control panel from within the current one).

<comment><USER4> What you describe is the case for every MacOS upgrade _except_ Mojave to Catalina, since that particular upgrade means losing access to all 32-bit apps.

I'm normally a pretty quick upgrader, but the MacBook on which I'm typing now will remain on Mojave until the day it dies.

<comment><USER5> In retrospect however this move made total sense. When they will start deploying custom silicon next year every application that run on Catalina will be able to run on the new ARM Macs.

From Apple perspective it's way better that Catalina take all the blame and not the new products and the technology they are betting on for the next decade.

Also developers that care about MacOS platform were even more incentivized to finally upgrade to 64-bits after the 10+ years deprecation warning so that more Apps will be ready on day one for custom silicon.

<comment><USER6> The deprecation warnings started in 2018 with 10.13.4, not 10+ years ago.

<comment><USER5> While maybe true 64bits was available for more than 10 year with Snow Leopard (10.6) being the last OS supporting 32bits architecture (and dropping PowerPC support At the same time). So let's say you could have seen this coming.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I am a bit upset is how Apple approaches SwiftUI / Combine, as these two to me, are foundational pieces to the Swift language ecosystem. Particularly:

1\. There is no way to bundle SwiftUI / Combine to the app so you can ship to earlier iOS versions, making development exclusively done on newer OS version. More over, for any bug fixes on SwiftUI / Combine, you have to wait for the OS updates for the fix. Just updating your Xcode is not enough.

2\. While the SwiftUI required language features are all upstreamed to Swift language, and core developers have been patient to articulate why. If SwiftUI / Combine development was done in public (i.e. open-source), bug-fixes and language improvements will be much smoother.

To Apple, point 2 probably is a big leap. But they've done Swift open-source release, and it works relatively well with a sizeable open-source ecosystem on other platforms now.

<comment><USER8> I missed WWDC 2019, was working in an entirely different field. And wow, I can't believe I missed this.

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/combine](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/combine)

Unfortunately my client's App still requires iOS 11.

<comment><USER9> If you are interested in Combine but need to support older versions of iOS, you might want to check out [https://github.com/OpenCombine/OpenCombine](https://github.com/OpenCombine/OpenCombine)

<comment><USER10> CombineX was more complete last I checked.

[https://github.com/cx-org/CombineX](https://github.com/cx-org/CombineX)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These are good changes. "View builders" are quite powerful but it was always strange to be able to get so far so fast and then be hit by a weird limitation involving fairly basic logic. Fortunately, there are work-arounds.

I've ported a few different AppKit interfaces to SwiftUI "1.0" on the Mac and the tech is pretty impressive; I am looking forward to exploring the Big Sur version of it.

The biggest problem they have right now is that subtle but important _behaviors_ are being lost in the SwiftUI versions of controls, and they need to add them back. You start to notice how maybe keyboard focus isn't quite the same, certain key bindings don't work, tooltips aren't present, etc. and it adds up. It is really quite easy to get something _working_ in SwiftUI right now but it is really hard to _polish_ it to the standards that Macs used to have.

</comment><comment><USER12> The amount of compiler magic used by SwiftUI is staggering. By itself it's not a deal breaker, but closed source makes it almost impossible to understand what is going on.

<comment><USER13> Weren't UIKit and AppKit before that closed source?

<comment><USER14> They still are, and so are SwiftUI

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really wonder where this is going.

Swift had to interop with objective-c right from the start, which itself had to interop with C. SwiftUI feels like a wrapper over UIKit (or at the minimum CoreFoundation).

All in all, it seems impossible that so many layers of compromise over so many years, can lead to anything clean in the long run.

<comment><USER16> It wraps UIKit in some instances. But not most.

<comment><USER17> I would say that most SwiftUI controls instantiate UIKit views under the hood.

<comment><USER18> UIKit or WatchKit or AppKit depending on the platform

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Love the ability to remove AnyView, that was a really confusing one for me the first time I saw it.

I'm really impressed by SwiftUI, it seems like Apple took a couple hundred really good UI engineers and threw them at this. Coming from a web background it's really refreshing to have these APIs. Swift as a language is part of it, changes to _JavaScript_ like those mentioned in this article would be hard to come by (for good reason!)

<comment><USER20> > it seems like Apple took a couple hundred really good UI engineers and threw > them at this

Like all Apple efforts it was crafted by a small, tight knit cross-functional group of stellar engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Really welcome changes! These small quality of life improvements really make a difference.

</comment><comment><USER22> Honestly, I think Swift UI's mess of syntax really makes the case for lisp. Four different function calling syntaxes? Trailing function calls? Jesus Christ.

</comment><comment><USER23> very good intro, builder are more more used in framework public APIs, until this new DSL approach it was all about protocol fighting :)</comment>


The Unix Pestilence - <AUTHOR> http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/freebooks.html <comment><USER2> Those who deny Unix are forced to re-invent it -- badly.</comment>


Chinese man buys 99 iPhone 6s to propose to girlfriend - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/chinese-man-buys-99-iphone-6s-to-propose-to-girlfriend-on-singles-day--only-to-be-rejected-9853953.html

<comment><AUTHOR> There was an article that commented: maybe she likes Android.</comment>


Actor and director Richard Attenborough dies aged 90 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-28923074

<comment><USER2> Good night Jurassic Park, you shall never be the same!</comment>