Ask HN: Who's doing Java and what skills do they have? - <AUTHOR>

I am at core a Ruby programmer, other than that I have wide horisons. I have been asked recently to warp my mind into java "enterprise" projects for document management (Alfresco anyone?) business inteligence and so on. The worst puddle untill now has been transparency (compared to ruby's readme driven development). By transparency I mean accesing knowledge on issues that seem best practices (say Spring) is hidden behind a gruesome "complete to access the docs" forms, information pourposely hidden and twisted to urge you "buy the enterprise version", "buy support" and so on.. One alfresco book I've read is half about "what a good and pro DM I have on front of me" and the other half only manages to scratch the concepts I'd like to know about.
This is my attempt to gain some inside knowledge and evaluate my competences on the matter.
1. Are you doing (server side) java?
2. What java skills do you have? How did you learned them? What (java topic) would you want to learn further?
3. On what (enterprise) context tho you use theese skils (DM, ERP, EIS etc)? How big is your team?
4. Do you think another platform whould make the above (3) easyer? <comment><USER2> I'm doing Grails and have been doing so for 3 years. I'm usually a team of 1, and didn't have much Java before this - primarily PHP, Perl and ASP/VBScript. Learned via brute force.

Grails may be an easier transition in on the web side if you know some Rails already. Grails is using Spring, so you can delve in to that if you want to. You can use as much or as little pure Java as you want to, but as a transitionary process, easing from Rails in to Groovy/Grail to get in to Java would be a path to investigate (as would JRuby).</comment>


Ask HN: Rate my new iPhone app Locurious - <AUTHOR>

My new app Locurious just got approved on the App store. It's a location-based iPhone app for finding deals and events in San Diego (more cities coming later). It's a little rough around the edges right now, but I'd love to get some feedback or ideas from you guys about the app and/or the website! http://locurious.com <comment><USER2> Looks very nice and I think it's an idea that will take over the market pretty soon. The old ways of finding out these deals were through websites and that meant you had to google for that information, get ads and pop-ups when now it can be aggregated on your mobile phone.

One recommendation is that you could also include a community vote, so that people that are using this application can also give their impressions on the different restaurants and vote up or down different places.

I have a couple of technical questions as well, to which hopefully you will give me an answer: What is the architecture of your application? What architecture do you use for the client-server communication in the application? Do you use any cloud services? What is your method of transferring information from client to server (JSON, SOAP)?

Thanks and good luck with it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, the backend is Rails 3 with a JSON-based API. The backend is hosted on Heroku and images are served from Amazon S3, with logs saved to MongoHQ. The app itself is written with Appcelerator Titanium, but we're switching the iPhone version over to native Cocoa/Three20 because Titanium for iOS 4 is pretty unstable right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The web site looks nice, though I would have liked a few more screenshots.

The app looks like it would be useful, though it all depends on how many businesses you get to partner with. (Since it's only for San Diego, I haven't actually downloaded it. If it comes to my city I'll give it a try.)

I assume you have lots of competition in this space (location-based deals and events). Do you know who the big players are and what your "niche" or main advantage over them is?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have some local competition from an app called Tip City, but we think we can do better. There are also a good number of competitors based in other cities, and it's pretty much a race to see who can expand to other cities faster. We're focusing on direct relationships with the businesses and really taking their feedback into account when developing features. Plus we have some "special sauce" in the works that none of our competitors have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> clickable: <http://locurious.com></comment>


Baltimore and Maryland weigh getting hacker insurance - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/as-florida-cities-use-insurance-to-pay-1-million-in-ransoms-to-hackers-baltimore-and-maryland-weigh-getting-covered/2019/07/06/d1c0dc16-9f77-11e9-9ed4-c9089972ad5a_story.html <comment><USER2> As a general rule, non-MD medical care providers DO NOT answer questions about whether they carry malpractice insurance, because the question of whether to settle or contest a malpractice claim is one the insurance company will make (even though it drives up rates for the insured and goes on their record as there having been a malpractice claim). The rule of thumb: if people don't know you have the insurance, they aren't as likely to file a frivolous claim that your insurer will settle to make it go away.

I'm not in the insurance business, but I would think it prudent to put a clause in a hacker insurance policy that if you publicly announce that you have the policy then you're in violation of the agreement and the policy can be voided... because you've announced to the hacker world that they will be paid if they succeed in hitting you with effective ransomware.

Or is ransomeware a separate policy and this is more like insurance against electronic terrorism/vandalism/arson?

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't that be the most convenient way of all to get a claim voided?

Have the insurance company call the insured and weasel out of them that they have insurance when they aren't supposed to admit it, and after gathering that artifact, have them hacked.

I guess you don't remember those days when a company would work you to death and then put life insurance down on you so when you did die, they'd profit.</comment></comment>


Why is Hacker News losing popularity? - <AUTHOR> https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F05zpmc6 <comment><USER2> Maybe most people have bookmarked the site by now and aren't searching for it anymore? I've never put much stock into Google Trends.

<comment><USER3> Probably a lot of Duck Duck Go users on here too.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does job advertising for new grad is age discrimination? - <AUTHOR> Job ad like this "New Grad Machine Learning Engineer (PhD)(https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/1499352217/)" blatantly discriminate by age. Is this legal? <comment><USER2> New grad doesn't discriminate by age, it discriminates by experience which is very common on almost every job ad. for example, I didn't graduate until I was almost 30, but I got hired on for a new grad position.</comment>


Httpie: A cURL alternative - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jakubroztocil/httpie <comment><USER2> It looks cool, but I don't really want to wait half a minute for it to do anything.

      $ time curl cs.marlboro.college
      <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">

      <title>301 Moved Permanently</title>

Moved Permanently

The document has moved here.

      <address>Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Server at cs.marlboro.college Port 80</address>

      real	0m0.269s
      user	0m0.004s
      sys	0m0.005s

      $ time http cs.marlboro.college
      HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
      Connection: Keep-Alive
      Content-Length: 321
      Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
      Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2018 18:04:17 GMT
      Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
      Location: https://cs.marlboro.college/
      Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu)

      <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">

      <title>301 Moved Permanently</title>

Moved Permanently

The document has moved here.

      <address>Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) Server at cs.marlboro.college Port 80</address>

      real	0m30.553s
      user	0m0.437s
      sys	0m0.052s

<comment><USER3> On my computer httpie took 0.775s, and curl took 0.105s, so not much slower.

<comment><USER4> 7 times

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you like httpie, http-prompt is a good add on for it, it lets you navigate through a rest API as if it is a filesystem (using cd for navigation), and lets you configure the arguments to pass to httpie for future requests.

</comment><comment><USER5> Depending on what you are doing, Perl's LWP::Simple[1] and plain old wget[2] are sometimes handy.

[1] [http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=168684](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=168684)

[2] [http://www.editcorp.com/personal/lars_appel/wget/v1/wget_7.h...](http://www.editcorp.com/personal/lars_appel/wget/v1/wget_7.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm just starting to get into Python and using the command line more after a lifetime of mostly sticking to GUIs, and I'm really digging the "software for humans" vibe I'm finding in a few places. HTTPie is a good example, as is ncdu, which I just discovered this morning. Also anything by Kenneth Reitz.

The command line can be great for commanding, when it's done right, but it's not so great for most kinds of visualization, so CLI software that recognizes that and tries to compensate really helps.

</comment><comment><USER7> I use httpie to view request and response headers. Very handy when you want to check something without worrying that a browser is caching something for some reason (like a redirect).

      $ http --print Hh http://news.ycombinator.com

</comment><comment><USER8> HTTPie is awesome, the only thing to watch out for is if you use it for large JSON responses, it can take a while to parse, process and display the response. In that case cURL is still handier, but HTTPie is the tool I generally reach for

</comment><comment><USER9> Love Httpie! Such an awesome cli with easy to remember, natural syntax. When installing on new boxes I wish it wasn't depending on python though.

</comment><comment><USER10> Httpie is my version of Postman and similar services, curl for humans is spot on imho.

</comment><comment><USER11> wuzz is nice too. [https://github.com/asciimoo/wuzz](https://github.com/asciimoo/wuzz)

</comment><comment><USER12> HTTPie is great! I've replaced curl with it in my daily workflow

</comment><comment><USER13> Could we all just agree to stop using the adjective "modern"? It's such a weasal word. If there are advantages to your program, describe them. Simply being "newer" or in the currently trendy style does not make it automatically better.

I'm not saying that this is a bad project. But "modern" doesn't tell me anything about why I might want to use it.

<comment><USER14> Well, i use it daily, because it has:

\- much more sane command line syntax

\- automatic formatting and highlighting of json/xml/html

\- automatically show received headers

\- reverts to unproccessed output when redirected

PROTIP: use 'cat' to type the body manually:

         cat | http post https://someapi.com/somenendpoint Authorization:sometoken

You can then start typing the message body. When done, press ctrl+d (EOF) and the request will send and the reply will be printed.

And if you already have the body in a separate file, just pipe it through:

        cat mybody.json | http post https://someapi.com/somenendpoint Authorization:sometoken

<comment><USER15> Don't need cat for the last one, can you redirected input

      http post https://someapi.com/somenendpoint Authorization:sometoken < mybody.json

<comment><USER16> And if you are like me, you use cat because it can go first in the command line... Until I discovered that file redirects can too!

<mybody.json http post [https://someapi.com/somenendpoint](https://someapi.com/somenendpoint) Authorization:sometoken</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pythonist's thoughts on Clojure after 3 days of learning and coding - <AUTHOR> http://sayspy.blogspot.com/2010/10/my-thoughts-on-clojure.html

<comment><USER3> I'm a Pythonista working on Groovy (and Grails) and I have a similar complaint about the error messages given by the Java stack. Groovy is one hell of a groovy language but the Java error output that it gives is comically long, and overall pretty useless. I rely almost exclusively on log output and step debugging.

To J_Baker's point, no you don't get used to that kind of thing, it's still annoying after 3 months to have to scroll through 2 pages to find a single reference to a method you were working on, and then it's not even the line where you had the problem.

<comment><USER4> I work in Plain Old Java most of my day, but have side projects in both Clojure and Python. I agree with the consensus here about the error traces in Clojure, but I'd like to point out this is not inherent in the platform. When I'm programming in Java, I find the stack traces to be a massive advantage in diagnosing issues, as they present a lot of detail right down to the location of the problem (Python is similar in this respect). Irrelevant plumbing may bloat the traces a bit, but usually quite separated from the important lines, and having too much information is rarely an issue for me.

I think the problem with Clojure (and perhaps Groovy too), is that the compiler/runtime for the language invades the traces. If you look at the example given in the original post, almost the entire trace is Clojure plumbing. That's the real issue, and it's not the fault of the Java stack.

<comment><USER3> There's probably truth to that. I don't remember Java error output being that bad back when I worked with it years ago. It does seem like many of the lines in Groovy output are groovy plumbing, like which closure was called.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are very valid criticisms, especially the error issue. That's probably my biggest gripe about clojure. The huge error tracebacks for trivial mistakes almost brings back memories of C++ templates.

I mentioned one of these particular instances on the mailing list once but didn't get any response. Perhaps it just isn't that big a deal once you work with the language a lot.

<comment><USER6> It definitely is a big deal and I can't say for sure why your particular message was ignored -- maybe it was lost in the haze. In any case, there is an active effort to make error messages more coherent and will get better as time progresses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Scala can give out some pretty elaborate and useless error messages, too - <USER2> example, recently I tried to import a Java library in the REPL, and received a 45 lines traceback which culminated in the interpreter exiting.

</comment><comment><USER8> The author writes:

> Scheme comes with too little in the language to use easily for much beyond > teaching programming.

This commonly-cited reason seems to ignore implementations that include much more than what the standard specifies.</comment>


Jakob Nielsen: World's Best Headlines: BBC News - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html

<comment><USER2> I love the BBC just because it's publicly funded — they don't even need to grab your attention to make a profit from you!

It's a tax I can honestly say I don't mind paying!

<comment><USER3> I'm conflicted about this. It's actually a very regressive tax, you pay the same whether you are rich or poor, whether you have 1 television or 20.

It's also enforced in an incredibly harsh manner and we (the taxpayers) are actually footing the bill to send people to jail who get caught without a license and then can't afford to pay it (though an outrcy in the House of Lords massively reduced the number being imprisioned down from 200 to 20 (roughly) a year.

On the other hand, if it came up for debate and reform, certain political factions would basically kill the BBC, which I love.

<comment><USER4> The place where I work was sent a payment notice (we don't have any TVs there). There was a strict instruction that failure to respond was a terribel thing and bad things would happen to us. There were lots of ways to respond if you wanted to pay or wanted to claim you already had a license.

There was no way to tell them you didn't need a license.

The next step is [they say in the letter] that they send an enforcement officer to your address.

If they just had a general phone number or a "we don't have a TV" phone number they'd have saved themselves at least the cost of sending someone out to try and hassle us ... and I'm sure a lot of other people.

It's not my job to chase up their failure to provide contact details on a demand for money.

OT: We got a parking fine when I took my wife in to have our baby last week. The number to call to pay the fine is the wrong number ... gah! I'm just not sure if this is malevolence.

<comment><USER5> Congratulations on the new born :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure if there's much truth to it, but I read that the BBC news headlines are so short as there is some central system that provides them to Ceefax too (which can only display 24 rows of 40 characters).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceefax>

<comment><USER7> That was actually mentioned in the article...

        So why is the BBC so good when most others are so bad? Maybe it's in the BBC's blood: The news
        organization originated as a radio station, where word count is at a premium and you must communicate
        clearly to immediately grab listeners. In a spoken medium, each word is gone as soon as it's
        uttered, so convoluted exposition confuses even more than it does in print.

        Ceefax (one of the few surviving videotext services) also helps instill conciseness in BBC's journalists.
        Text on low-def televisions has horrible resolution and only allows for a minute word count (somewhat
        like mobile).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> BBC articles in the "latest headlines" RSS feed that comes with Firefox tend to be poor - they often don't match the article itself and tend to be link bait type titles. The alternative is when they give too little information.

</comment><comment><USER4>
        * Italy buries first quake victims
        * Romania blamed over Moldova riots
        * Ten arrested in UK anti-terrorism raids
        * Villagers hurt in West Bank clash
        * Mass Thai protest over leadership
        * Iran accuses journalist of spying

2 of those are poor for one of the criteria given IMO.

* West Bank clash, villagers hurt * UK anti-terrorism raids, ten arrested

These front-load the headlines better so that if you know you don't like "West Bank" articles you can skip the other ~20 characters and jump to the next line. I don't think they are less readable either.

I have to confess I lengthened a headline from "Spiders reanimated" to "Spider Nightmare: Spiders resurrected from the dead" the other day ( [http://digg.com/general_sciences/Spider_Nightmare_Spiders_re...](http://digg.com/general_sciences/Spider_Nightmare_Spiders_resurrected_from_the_dead) ).. it felt so dirty and multiply redundant, and didn't get me any Diggs as National Geographic pipped me by 14 minutes with the story.

<comment><USER9> One of the guidelines nearly every publication practices for its headlines is that each one should have a verb (one thing that the BBC also does well in the above examples). The verb enables a reader to quickly grasp the "action" in the story and gives people a better understanding of the central point of the article.

Your rewrite does little more than remove the verbs, making the headlines less clear, in my opinion.

<comment><USER10> Actually, he removed the prepositions, not the verbs. I wouldn't mind the front-loading as much if he didn't remove the prepositions, but to me those two rearranged sentences sound awkward regardless.

I wonder if the journalists who write the articles choose the headlines, or if the BBC has a `Headline Phraser' job.

<comment><USER9> Good point -- it doesn't remove the verbs entirely. However, it removes them from their natural place in the sentence and puts them somewhere where they're likely to be missed entirely. By front-loading the headline with only the nouns, he puts what is arguably the most important part--what _happened_--at the end.

But you are right that the awkwardness is mostly due to a lack of prepositions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> His site has different priorities than a newspaper, but I've always been fond of Khoi Vinh's titles on <http://subtraction.com>, which have been consistently good even since before he started working at the NYT.

</comment><comment><USER12> BBC News Low Graphics Page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=565470>

</comment><comment><USER13> No, the world's best headlines are on Wikipedia. Each article is titled exactly what it is about.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In the phrase "every word works hard for its living", every word works hard for its living. What would you call that, a meta-sentence?

<comment><USER14> I think we would need to consult Douglas Hofstadter about that one.</comment></comment>


Show HN: AprilApril.js – mess with your visitors on April Fools' Day - <AUTHOR> http://svarden.se/aprilapril/

<comment><AUTHOR> These April Fools' things are so cliché, I know. But I'm still learning and this was a fun little project to work on. Comments on the code are greatly appreciated.</comment>


Sergey Brin has a mutation of the LRRK2 gene. - <AUTHOR> http://too.blogspot.com/2008/09/lrrk2.html "Individually, our genes and experiences are lost in a sea of statistical noise. But, taken together they become a high-power lens on our inner workings." <comment><USER2> After coming back to the light background of the Hacker News web site, I have a mutation of my eye sockets.

I know this is completely irrelevant to the linked article, but using white text on a dark background is such a significant violation of readability and visual comfort (unless you're reading several such articles in a row) that I can't help but be completely distracted from the article at hand.

<comment><USER3> The alternative school of thought is that staring at a white screen is like staring into a light bulb.

<comment><USER4> Unlike most light bulbs, a monitor has a brightness setting that can be set to a comfortable level.

Also the metaphor of ink on paper is still with us in a big way. Dark text on a light background is the norm, light on dark is the exception.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, many people have their terminals and editors in a light on dark scheme because they got used to it from the legacy days when they had no choice. However, I agree that most people probably aren't used to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=308623>

<comment><USER6> Was there a specific reason this story got reposted to the front page?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow. I personally would not want to know. But... If I had the means to fire- hose money at researching this problem the way he does, I would want to know. Something really good could come of this. I wish him luck...

</comment><comment><USER8> I am seriously considering giving 23andMe a try. But since it's purely out of curiosity, I am not sure if I _really_ want to know that I have an elevated risk of Xxx and how exactly this knowledge is going to affect me in a long run.

Has anyone gone through this sort of testing ? Care to share the thoughts ?

<comment><USER9> I'm in the same boat. Would definitely be interested to hear others' experiences with 23andMe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.thinkgene.com/media-induced-confusion-about- lrrk2...](http://www.thinkgene.com/media-induced-confusion-about- lrrk2-discussed-in-23andme-forums/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like someone is trying to drum up business for their spouse's company...

<comment><USER12> Man, that's a terribly nasty thing to say.

Try to have some compassion: the man just discovered that he has a substantially higher than average risk of developing Parkinson's. He's dealing with that knowledge by blogging about it, just as millions of others have blogged about their personal lives as a sort of public diary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Before its replaced, can we guarantee it was not responsible for page-rank?</comment>


Implementing foreach in C++ (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.artima.com/cppsource/foreach.html

<comment><USER2> Well... that article is made completely obsolete by the latest C++ Standard.</comment>


Home ownership is the West's biggest economic-policy mistake - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/01/16/home-ownership-is-the-wests-biggest-economic-policy-mistake <comment><USER3> That had to be one of the most half-baked articles Ive seen out of "The Economist," and Ive read their stuff on and off for years. They identify the symptoms correctly, and then spend 1000 words misleading you on the cause, so they can sell you "The Fix."

Here's the real problems:

1\. Rent-seeking behavior by the land-owning generation, seeking to retire and live off rental income and a reverse mortgage, instead of building generational wealth.

2\. Rent-seeking behavior by local councils and cities, all but demanding bribes and kickbacks; they hold up permitting for building anything beyond single-family dwelling.

3\. Rent-seeking behavior by the majority holders of capital - the banks. Because a majority of properties are subject to mortgage, this has allowed for massive speculation, in funny money, on limited amounts of real property. This drives up prices.

4\. Rent-seeking behavior by all levels of government. Property taxes are the most efficient means of destroying wealth.

To be brief, the rents are too damn high! Theres no law you can write that will fix these issues, either. It will bloat and overheat until it collapses like a cake in the oven.

<comment><USER4> The phrase "rent seeking" is a technical term with a meaning.

How can the government be accused of it? When private entities engage in rent seeking, they are manipulating the government for profit.

And when private entities do things that do not involve manipulating the government, then how can it be rent seeking?

Rent seeking does not mean literally, simply, "seeking rent". I know people like to say the meaning of words change, but you have to be talking about the same thing as other people using the same word.

<comment><USER5> As far as I understand it, rent seeking means increasing your share of existing wealth without creating any in the process. Raising rent generally on physical properties is one way of doing that, as is mucking about with government to get tax dollars and whatnot coming your way.

As I see it, governments themselves are often rent seeking operations. By increasing taxes, they increase their share of the wealth of the nation, and depending on how that money is used, it could very well be considered rent seeking. Usually the term is used for business sectors interacting with government to get those tax dollars, but I don't think that's the only valid use.

<comment><USER4> In order for a concept to be meaningful, it has to have things that fall within and outside of it.

If the normal functioning of the government is rent seeking, then everything is rent seeking. If everything is rent seeking, then the term doesn't distinguish anything in reality from anything else.

You can't have a discussion about rent seeking without the context that there is such a thing as legitimate government that functions in such a way as to provide public goods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Housing is only expensive in (big) cities but we all need to go there because of jobs. Good hobs are only created in (big) cities because that's where the talent is. Solution is to build more cities and provide seed / anchor jobs. Government could do that easily.

Rural land is cheap. Government could build a "starter pack" of 1000 homes and move one of their offices from a big city there to provide employment. Borrow / print money to do this instead of QE. Heck, with the current prices the whole thing could be financed by leasing or reselling gov owned buildings in "old city" cenres.

<comment><USER7> There's plenty of affordable housing in America where people do want to live as well:

"According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, lightly-regulated Houston has seen its civilian labor force grow by 20 percent in the last decade, compared to the San Francisco metro area's 16 percent. Some 21 Fortune 500 companies have their headquarters in Houston. What's more, for every job the Houston metro area has added, it's also permitted another unit of housing. As a result, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $841, and home prices are below the national average."

From here :

[https://reason.com/2019/11/05/bernie-sanders-blames-apple- fo...](https://reason.com/2019/11/05/bernie-sanders-blames-apple-fo..).

It's not rocket science. If you want affordable housing make it easy for people to build and increase supply. It's remarkable how Silicon Valley is all about solving big problems for the world but demonstrates with Bay Area housing that some problems don't need technology, they just need reasonable government and if you don't have that, well, things don't work.

To be fair, this problem is global. Many places that are doing well that haven't allowed enough construction like London, Sydney, Stockholm, Melbourne, Paris and other places demonstrate the same failure to enable enough housing construction.

Posted the same comment earlier this week.

The Economist's take on housing this week isn't up to their usual standard. They ignore the parts of the US where houses are still cheap and there is economic growth like Texas, Atlanta and other places. The special is worth reading though, there are interesting facts about how around the world supply has kept up with demand.

Home ownership is compatible with cheaper housing. It's just that rules need to be made to ensure that you can keep supply going. That means rezoning things on a regular basis to keep housing affordable. Also probably a land value tax would help.

<comment><USER8> Have you ever looked at Houston on a map? I'm not trying to be sarcastic. It's enormous and the sprawl is incredible. The metro area dwarfs the size of every major city in California, combined. People drive an hour to work each direction on one of many 12 lane highways.

The "special thing" that Houston has done is have virtually infinite land, a giant ocean port, and absolutely zero care or concern for the climate or the future.

<comment><USER9> Greater LA: 33,954 sq mi [0]

Greater Houston: 10,062 sq mi [1]

For the combined statistical area population / metro area, houston is actually even more dense than LA at 715 versus 553 people per square mile.

Not disagreeing with your main point though especially in regards to the bay area. There's just no land left to sprawl there and people don't want to build up so it'll forever remain unaffordable.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston)

<comment><USER10> Greater LA includes a lot of stuff like Ventura/Oxnard/Riverside/San Bernadino that while on the fringes of the LA metro area, shouldn't fairly be considered LA proper. This skews the square milage of LA up, and the density down, where in reality if you take a more realistic view of "Los Angeles" it's definitely more dense and concentrated than Houston. I say this as a former resident of both places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the US the present order of economic policy mistakes is:

Federal spending[1] > Healthcare costs[2] > Energy investment[3] > University degrees[4] > Infrastructure investment[5] > Home ownership > New vehicles

[1] Economic output grows by 4%, spending grows by 12%. Entitlement costs go up, taxes go down. Military spending. $900b (3.x% of GDP equivalent) per year in debt interest costs projected for 2028 (CBO), most of which shouldn't exist and should be going to infrastructure, healthcare, Social Security, and so on.

[2] Not healthcare unto itself, healthcare costs. Spending $3.6 trillion on healthcare nationally when we should be spending $2.4 trillion or less (the UK equivalent ratio would be more like ~$1.5 trillion).

[3] Not building a lot more nuclear. Not phasing out coal fast enough. Not building an obnoxious amount of off-shore wind. Not upgrading our grid to widely distribute from large output centers better (the central wind corridor can probably eventually export vast wind power to the coasts). Not better preparing our grid for the all-electric consumer vehicle future that is inbound. Etc.

[4] Pushing the notion that you absolutely must get at least a four year degree is akin to the dogma that you must own a home. A subset to that is the notion that you should spend a particularly absurd amount of money when you could get a degree of similar outcome effectiveness at half the price from an in-state public school.

[5] Lack thereof. Including not building high-speed rail (even if only regionally) and not aggressively going after the vast urban deployment of electric buses. Maybe we can't build cheap subways or rail anymore, however we can buy relatively cheap electric buses and dedicate routes to a lot of them and we can do it damn easily.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why should home owners give up their way of life just because a particular city is now hip and everyone pushes into the new hyper-dense zones? I demand space for living, a little bit of nature, and privacy. So go build some effing infrastructure instead of pushing everyone to live like a chicken in an egg factory, ffs.

<comment><USER13> IMO, apply a flat 1% property tax on the value of a property ignoring zoning restrictions and as long as you pay it feel free. However, understand that tax actually represents paying for physical infrastructure and actual costs people are paying so nobody gets a tax break on it.

Because what's valuable is not the house but the infrastructure around it. Low density housing requires more infrastructure and higher transportation costs such as longer commutes.

However, I realize everyone loves a hand out, especially when they can pretend it's not a handout. So, I don't see this changing any time soon.

<comment><USER12> Bullshit. Infrastructure and transportation have generally always been paid by the owners. There may be cases where residents have successfully lobbied their community to build something for them, but that's not how things work where I live.

But even if there was such a support for honeowners, a property tax would be nothing else but theft. Charge the real cost of you want but then leave the people in peace.

<comment><USER14> > Charge the real cost of you want but then leave the people in peace.

And thats the problem. Infrastructure has not been priced correctly. A lot of towns are still paying the bond on initial construction. Leaving very little for maintenance and replacement. And then when the road/sewer/water system needs to be replaced voters don't have the appetite to pay for it. You see this in older towns in the northeast. Water and sewer mains are corroding. taxes go up to cover it. And the residents flee for newer, cheaper developments. The town eventually becomes insolvent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You really do have to wonder about the sincerity of such an article, especially coming from such a prominent publication as the Economist. Why don't they just admit what they are instead of using subtle propaganda to influence people into their political ideology? Even more concerning is how half or more of the people in here seem to actually agree with it.

"Demoralization now reaches such areas that previously, not even comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans; thanks to a lack of moral standards. As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized, he is unable to assess true information, the facts tell nothing to him. ... Only when a military boot crashes into his fat bottom, then he will understand."

The Western world has maybe 20-30 years left before serious political upheaval turns our way of life on its head. Call me a cook conspiracy theorist or make fun of my old quote from a kgb agent being pushed around in dubious circles today.

<comment><USER16> I think most informed Economist readers already are aware that they are, to some extent, being influenced by the "subtle propaganda" of the publication. I believe it's part of their "thing".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would argue that failure to adequately address the power of the wealth- income feedback loop is the West's biggest economic mistake, and that this is at the root cause of rising housing costs. Housing is consuming a bigger and bigger share of median income because growth in housing is not keeping up with growth in income of the top tiers of the population, who can afford to pay disproportionately more than the median, and the trend is accelerating. While it's true that increasing supply would help relieve some of the pressure, it would have to skyrocket to keep up with the meteoric rise in income of the top 10% of the population. All the well-meaning housing policy in the world can never speed up supply fast enough to keep up with the rate at which the wealthy are giving themselves raises.

<comment><USER18> If large amounts of 1- and 2- bedroom condos or apartments are built in a fairly densely-populated city, how much are the very rich going to want to buy or rent these? They may want to own them and rent them out, but if they can't make a profit, I don't see why they'd want to do that.

Luxury condos attract investment from richer people all around the world, but imho, fairly standard 1 and 2 bedroom apartments likely wouldn't, especially if they have to be rented.

Could that be a way to combat the inequality?

The biggest problem I can see: developers love building luxury condos since the profit is much higher than building non-luxury places.

<comment><USER19> What exactly is the difference between a luxury and non-luxury condo/apartment? I think it's mainly a few cheap cosmetic features like countertops and stainless steel refrigerators. Of course developers label everything new luxury because why wouldn't you spend an additional 1% of your investment on these types of things?

The cost of building a "non-luxury" building is almost identical. In either case, you need investors to put up the money to pay for construction and maintenance of the building until enough units have sold/rent to be self sustaining. So even if you build a slightly less cosmetically appealing building, you still need investor capital / "the rich" to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> About 37% of homeowners own their homes free and clear. The other 63% have mortgages that require regular monthly payments. The mortgage payments are in addition to regular payments of property taxes.

The result is that the burden of debt and property taxes motivates young adults to work hard and progress economically. This, along with the continual stream of purchases for the home, is the mainspring of the American economy.

<comment><USER21> How is a mortgage payment different from a rent payment. In one you rent the money to spend on bricks, in the other you rent the bricks directly.

The only difference occurs if asset/land prices rise - which is nothing more than a transfer from the have nots to the haves and should be dissuaded by policy. In any functional economy houses would depreciate as they age - <USER2> like cars. And you lease depreciating assets.

<comment><USER22> If someone is smart, they make a small mortgage on a small house and pay it off in 10-15 years minimizing their interest overhead.

Knowing you don't have to come up with hundreds or thousands of dollars every month in order to live is an amazing feeling. You can then set aside that same money every month and upgrade to a better house. Unfortunately, most people decide they can't wait and take out 30-year mortgages that wind up costing them almost twice the value of the house.

With proper maintenance, a house can last with continuous use for a hundred years. With average use, you would be hard-pressed to have a car for more than 15 years before the cost to maintain greatly outstrips the cost to replace.

<comment><USER23> Buying small is the wrong financial decision in a rising real estate market. By taking a giant mortgage and buying more that you could otherwise afford you're essentially investing on margin. And interest rates are even lower than they seem if you take tax deductions into account. If you buy at the right time & place and property value increase a lot (which has been true in a lot of places the last decade), you get the gains. And as a bonus you get to live in a nicer house that whole time (unlike investing that money elsewhere).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have driven a couple of times between Phoenix and the East coast of the U.S. and the spaces between cities, particularly in the Southwest, are simply vast. You can drive for _hours_ without seeing a human structure beyond perhaps a signpost or U.S. Geological Survey marking. There's room for the entire world's population to fit into Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas. The only limitation is availability of water, and that's solvable with technology (desalination, atmospheric capture). When existing cities become too congested, sprawling, or unaffordable, the clear solution is to build new ones. You can drop a megalopolis or two into the badlands and house an additional 20 million people in comfortable, modern neighborhoods with home ownership as the norm. The Economist has a eurocentric perspective that there's little available land, but not so in North America.

</comment><comment><USER25> So I see this article extolling the virtues of being a nation of skyscrapers and flats.

Then I smack into a paywall.

Looking around at my nice, rural century home that has a monthly mortgage payment still far lower than the cheapest local rent...I'm not going to bother trying to find the article elsewhere. Living in a skyscraper is just not for me. Even the apartments I've lived in previously were comfortable ranch-style ones out in Nevada that weren't very densely packed.

I have no need or desire to move to Manhattan or Silicon Valley for the time being let alone Cleveland or Pittsburgh. That shouldn't be problematic yet the current crop of economy optimizers might not leave me that choice. We shall see in due time.

</comment><comment><USER26> With brand new vehicle "ownership" right behind.

<comment><USER27> Struggling to see the connection. You won't see existing vehicle owners going to great lengths to push up the price of new vehicles.

<comment><USER28> Seriously? The cost of used Toyota's (Avalon, Camry, Tacoma, tundra) and jeeps (wrangler/gladiators) are completely disconnected from reality.

Regardless, the industry is rife with bad actors exploiting an imbalance of information.

The advertising on vehicles is designed to make you feel bad for not owning the best. Get slammed with that enough and you won't even realize you just bought that $90k coupe that will cost $10k in maintenance/yr to keep running to show off how wealthy you are while you hunt for a mate. Then if you have kids you'll take a bath on it for the dealer to make a profit when they resell it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A big and diverse public housing system is the only solution that makes holistic sense. It'a the only way we can be sure people can go to where jobs are without risking homelessness.

<comment><USER30> The solution to bad government housing policy is less government housing policy.

I like the model of forcing new construction projects to have some units setup for public housing while private owners buy or rent the rest.

It takes people from lower socioeconomic parts of society and pushes them to mix with folks who are on top.

Church used to do this before religion started to retreat from society.

Lack of mixing of classes is killing civil society in America.

<comment><USER28> The solution to bad government housing policy is reversing policies set by bad actors in bad faith (E.g. nimbys). Disallow speculative investment into housing markets by putting heavy taxes on:

second+ homes,

all rentals that cost more than 30% average area take home (with the top 10% of incomes removed). Scale said taxes with the cost of living in that area. Double the tax on short term stays in 'rentable units'. (E.g. airbnb).

Everyone deserves a place to call home that is safe, insulated from the elements, has plumbing, electricity, and internet at a fair price. I simply don't care if that makes housing speculation, land ownership, and utilities, unprofitable. Making a profit off of necessities is obscene. Eg everyone should have access to a basic internet package that costs around $10-30/mo for ~25mbps. Same for everything else. Everyone should get the minimum, and if they want more they need to find a way to earn more in a way that isn't extracting value from the vulnerable. Extract from the rich instead, or don't. You shouldn't starve to death under a bridge if you can't compete in a society that needs less unskilled labor every day.

<comment><USER31> You seem to think housing can be just created from nothing. That is fatal mistake in your thinking as no value is created from nothing. There has to be incentive for somebody to build housing in order for it to be built.

Taxes will not discourage housing investment - they will be paid by renters as housing is driven by supply/demand. Why do we pretend we can regulate markets when all individuals (except unproductive government layer) benefit most if they are less regulated?

Deregulating house development will encourage many developers to build housing as there is huge demand for it. How come you offer looting other people before you offer removing obvious pillars for the developers?

<comment><USER28> > You seem to think housing can be just created from nothing. That is fatal > mistake in your thinking as no value is created from nothing. There has to > be incentive for somebody to build housing in order for it to be built.

That's not what I said.

>Taxes will not discourage housing investment - they will be paid by renters as housing is driven by supply/demand. Why do we pretend we can regulate markets when all individuals (except unproductive government layer) benefit most if they are less regulated?

Maybe tax is the wrong word. Fines might be better. These speculators consume wealth without doing work. When someone would rather leave units vacant than charge rational rates they hurt the market. When an entire industry does this they are extorting the most vulnerable. People without the means to move. People on fixed incomes. The disabled, the sick, minorities, etc. This is unconscionable behavior that should be illegal.

Are you in the business of home building?

The industry itself is _rife_ with bad actors. Code gets ignored to save 20 minutes or 20 bucks. Want to report it? Snitches don't get work. Deregulation will only hurt people. Housing code is like osha. There are graves behind housing codes.

Perhaps you're talking about zoning regulations? Yeah. I'm fine with telling nimbys to get bent and building a 50 story apartment complex in their ocean view so that people have affordable places to live.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


China erects 15 story hotel in less than 6 days (video) - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2011/01/25/china-erects-15-story-hotel-in-less-than-6-days-video/

<comment><USER2> I lived right next to a construction site a few years ago, and even "normally", some things move pretty quickly. The lot was a parking lot. One day, I looked out the window, and it was a pile of dirt with a fence around it. The asphalt was removed in a workday. Then the lot sat for a few months. Then a drilling machine came in, and they spent a few months doing something with that and some concrete, presumably some part of the foundation. Then when that was over, the workers got busy and constructed 7 stories of parking garage in a week. (That was when I stopped paying attention, because now the new building was blocking all light.) In another few weeks, the whole skyscraper was "finished". Then it sat around for a year, finishing the interior.

So my conclusion is that the hard part of building a building is not erecting the steel skeleton and pouring the concrete. It's the foundation and details that take all the time, and the article omits any details about how long that process took for this hotel.

</comment><comment><USER3> When you work with 'prefab' it's not rare to see a structure go up in an incredibly short time, I've seen a house 'erected' in less than a day. In the morning there was just a concrete pad and in the afternoon they were busy connecting the electrical wiring.

Still, that does not detract from the very impressive performance here. A carpenter from Canada once remarked that if a million guys all swing a hammer once that's a lot of work done. Throwing 200 workers at this likely didn't hurt either, the logistics and the choreography are what impress me most about this.

if you watch the video wait for the covering of the outside, it's like watching a slowed down flood-fill but with real life hardware. In spite of the 'no work injuries' reported some of the stills had me cringe, I'm pretty sure that a building inspector or safety officer on a crew from the US or Canada would have had a heart attack on the spot.

<comment><USER4> I wonder why prefabs houses aren't more common.

A friend of my parents was building a house. I asked him if he considered prefab, he had no idea what I was talking about.

<comment><USER5> Prefab has a bunch of hurdles and it's kind of a chicken and egg problem right now.

A friend of mine used to work at Michelle Kaufmann's firm in East Bay, and what would happen is that there is such a low volume of prefab orders that they can't get the costs down enough to justify building prefab. Plus it's not standard "from scratch" construction, etc. It's really sad, and the firm shut down for a while in 2009 (I think they're back now though).

<comment><USER4> Can you explain why "not from scratch" construction is a bad thing? AFAIK most houses these days are built from cookie-cutter plans.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, yes most houses are built from cookie-cutter plans. I guess I meant from scratch in that they're mostly built up with wood framing (simple to do), vs a lot of prefab which may require welding and more specialized skills to assemble the panels (harder to do, or at the very least less conventional).

<comment><USER3> In the US yes. In Europe most new houses use a concrete inner structure with a brick facade if they're family sized houses.

That makes them particularly well suited for prefab, a whole wall segment can be constructed including isolation, ducts, windows / doors etc and hoisted in to place by a crane in one movement. Because the brick is laid in the mould a bricklayer can work on a gantry under a roof instead of in the open air which means year round bricklaying instead of only when it's not freezing or raining (you can't lay brick in pouring rain).

Because the wall segments are made on a guaranteed flat surface a section is always going to be perfectly straight without any measurement at all.

Note that these are full bricks, not the typical 'slices' of brick used to give US houses a brick-like appearance over a wooden interior ('brick siding').

<comment><USER5> Ah that's great. I'm definitely slanted because of my experience in California, where earthquake regulations basically mean no masonry construction ever, and very rarely anything other than wood framing for residential houses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amish barn raising in one day...<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pg_vpy2mxg>.

It's all comes down to coordinated mobilization and logistical management. Seven cranes costs a lot of money, around the clock operations cost even more. Construction schedules are prepared to optimize the start of revenue streams with the cost of construction.

</comment><comment><USER7> Earlier discussion about the hotel construction at

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1901274>

<comment><USER8> And even earlier discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1895354>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lets just hope it doesn't fall over like that other one.

That said, it does remind me an awful lot of Total Annihilation when you get about fifty construction vehicles to make things damn near instantly.

</comment><comment><USER10> For an idea of how good these buildings actually are, check out this story about a 13 story building falling over in Shanghai: [http://gizmodo.com/5304233/entire-new-13+story-building- tips...](http://gizmodo.com/5304233/entire-new-13+story-building-tips-over-in- shanghai/gallery/)

<comment><USER11> I'd imagine after all the publicity that got, this one was built to higher standards. They claim to go well beyond the standards, and I don't doubt it for this particular project since they are using it for marketing.

The problem with the building that fell was obviously the foundation, which has to be done way in advance anyways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Someone sent this around the office recently in response to an email that the "coffee break room" renovation was going to be extended an additional four weeks.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's also a sometimes interesting webcam of a building being constructed (obviously not this one) in Hong Kong: [http://220.127.116.11:81/view/view.shtml?id=3418&imagePath...](http://188.8.131.52:81/view/view.shtml?id=3418&imagePath=/mjpg/video.mjpg&size=1)

</comment><comment><USER14> I picked up one of these from IKEA, it took me over 2 weeks to put together.

</comment><comment><USER15> So?

</comment><comment><USER16> Soon, humans will eclipse Hymenoptera in productivity.</comment>


Examining the Transformer Architecture – Part 1: The OpenAI GPT 2 Controversy - <AUTHOR> https://blog.exxactcorp.com/transformer-architecture-part-1/ <comment><USER2> WordPress instance is down:

> Error establishing a database connection</comment>


Google Play Instant feature plugin deprecation - <AUTHOR> https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/04/google-play-instant-feature-plugin.html <comment><USER2> Surprising that this is on front page. Even /r/Androiddev has less upvotes regarding this change. (that too its on /r/AndroidDev for much longer).

This is expected change to developers to move to app bundles. This helps in reducing app size while providing same instant app experience to end users.

<comment><USER3> The title can be a bit misleading. I'm guessing most people thought this means Instant apps themselves are deprecated, whereas it's just an older plugin being replaced by a better and newer way.

<comment><USER4> The title isn't misleading, people on this site are just way too eager to jump on the "Google discontinues everything" argument every chance they get

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I assume this is getting upvoted because the headline reads as if Google is killing off instant apps, which is not what this says.

</comment><comment><USER6> What a mess. Year 1: New android feature. Year 2: Nobody really uses said feature. Year 3: Feature removed.

<comment><USER2> Not true.

Google is Simply nudging developers to use App Bundles to reduce the app size while providing same experience to end user. Its a win - win - win situation.

Win for Google: Reduces Bandwidth requirements for Android app downloads.

Win for Developers: Reduces uninstall rates due to reduced app size and increase in install rate (completion) due to faster downloads.

Win for End User: Reduced App download size resulting in reduced phone bill.

And somehow we find a way to make it look bad?

<comment><USER7> The main win for Google of course is using one library results in smaller downloads, and Google gets to say which library that is.</comment></comment></comment>


Homemade thermal camera - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/ir-eye/0 <comment><USER2> Even better: the Thermal Flashlight. Makes a cruder picture, but way cheaper:

<http://publiclaboratory.org/tool/thermal-photography>

<comment><USER3> PLOTS (Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science) is worth checking out. They're a group that's trying to put technology into the hands of citizens to make a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was under the impression alot if not all digital camera's had a filter for IR that on some is easier to remove than others.

Seen many a article on how to convert a common digital camera though have not tried any myself so for example this one [http://www.petapixel.com/2010/10/20/how-to-convert-a- cheap-d...](http://www.petapixel.com/2010/10/20/how-to-convert-a-cheap- digicam-into-a-night-vision-camera/)

Note that removing the IR filter the camera will still pick up visable light so you could add a filter to remove that so you just get IR or if the firmware is hackable then you can could see what opensource flavours are out. Though failing that most photo edit software will cater for that with after filtering. But you will be doing most IR in the dark to eliminate the sun factor, unless you want to see how much the sun warms area's.

I'm sure somebody has done this type of hack and can comment better with converting digital camera's to IR and what models are best for the price, possibly ebay 2nd hand DLSR's but who knows?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I modified an old CVS disposable digital camera to do this once. Those filters only block near IR (as mentioned in the article), basically light just outside our vision spectrum. You can use infrared LED's and a camera thus modified to make a cheap night vision camera (This is, I believe, how the night mode on old sony cameras would work).

Measuring heat, however, requires far IR, which won't be picked up by removing the filter.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Near and far IR are different beasts. Not only are the sensors different, but you need to make the lenses out of different material (or use mirrors).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting I didn't think it could be done.

From that I understand normal thermal cameras can't have a silicon CCD and need to be actively cooled.

<comment><USER8> Actively cooled IR sensors can achieve higher resolution and accuracy, but ambient temperature IR sensors have been around for a while. As long as the incident IR can drive the sensor element away from ambient temperature, then you can have sensing.

<comment><USER6> IR sensors don't work by detecting heat changes. They convert infrared photons directly to electrical current.

Now I don't actually know jack about IR sensors, but I would assume that increased temperature means increased noise, as it does with visible-light CCDs. People refrigerate visible-light CCDs too, for taking low-noise astronomical photos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Posting this because some people seem confused about IR.

I'd just like to point out here that infrared is a really wide chunk of spectrum. It goes from 0.74µm to 300 µm (according to Wikipedia), which is a factor of about 400. By comparison, the visual spectrum has a width of about a factor of 2, and yet our biology still gives us four different sensors crammed within that little sliver. Imagine if you had a rainbow with red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and 50 more colors which were just as distinct from each other, and you get an appreciation of how big IR is.

Near infrared is the stuff used by artistic IR photographers (film and digital), remote controls, and night vision cameras. Regular CCDs designed for visible light also pick up near IR, so most cameras have a built-in filter which blocks it out. This is what you remove to turn your camera into an IR camera, and it also accounts for why some things just show up wrong in some digital pictures. Maybe you've seen a fireplace with purple flames -- that's because the IR filter isn't getting rid of all the near IR.

Near infrared is really just light that you can't see. Most things don't emit near infrared unless they're very hot (like fire) or designed to do so (like LEDs).

Far infrared is used in thermal imaging. It is a completely different beast, with much longer wavelengths.

1) Thermal infrared is low-resolution. The resolution of an imaging system is limited by the aperture of the lens relative to the wavelength of light that you are using. A proficient photographer with a nice prime lens and a tripod can come close to the resolution limit of visible light with no trouble, but the (much) longer wavelength of far infrared means that the relative size of a lens is much smaller. You simply cannot get a sharp picture of thermal infrared due to the increased diffraction.

2) Thermal infrared requires different sensors. Your standard CCD simply does not pick it up, you need something like HeCdTe.

3) Thermal infrared requires different lenses. Far infrared does not pass through glass like it does through air, you need to use a different material to make the lens, or just use a mirror.

4) Thermal imaging is more sensitive to thermal noise. That's why you cool the sensors. All sensors have thermal noise, even visible-light sensors. You will get cleaner pictures by refrigerating your visible-light CCD too, but it's a much bigger deal in far IR.

5) Atmosphere absorbs IR. Well, not all of IR. But the atmosphere is fairly opaque in some IR bands. If you build a sensor at 6-7µm you might as well submerge the thing in pea soup, the atmosphere is that opaque.

So [near] IR photography and [far IR] thermal photography are completely different beasts.

</comment><comment><USER9> So they built basically an IR tracker. Talk about dual use.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice, happy ghost hunting everyone!

</comment><comment><USER11> Very cool, however I would not fix the cold air spots as they help a lot to prevent indoor air pollution.

<comment><USER12> AFAIK, most houses (not apartments) in the US have forced air circulation systems along with heating. Basically this means a fan will suck air out of the house and push air from outside, even with all windows closed.

So your advice is likely wrong for a lot of people. YMMV.

<comment><USER13> Forced hot air systems get their air from inside the house via the "cold air return", then they heat it or air condition it then pump it out the vents. Nothing comes from outside.

IMO A few air leaks is not a bad thing as they provide some nice fresh air.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Classic Engg.</comment>


SeatGeek Raises $35M - <AUTHOR> http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/the-next-five-years/

<comment><USER2> Used SeatGeek the other day to find concert tickets, the interface is fantastic.

They also maintain an interesting code+design blog [http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/](http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just wanted to point out, we at SeatGeek are of course hiring. Plenty of positions in quite a few places: [https://seatgeek.com/jobs](https://seatgeek.com/jobs)

Especially if you're an Operations Engineer or Android Developer, get in touch. My email is in my profile :)

</comment><comment><USER4> They also have a really nice API: [http://platform.seatgeek.com/](http://platform.seatgeek.com/)

I've been working on a predictive model for concert ticket values using their data as a training set.

<comment><USER5> That's really cool! Do you expect to have something out soon?

<comment><USER4> Not eminently. There's a few key feature sets I still need before I'm happy with the model. I'll be sure to make a Show HN post when I get something up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I go to concerts and sports events pretty often and I always use Seatgeek to get an idea of prices and pick up tickets at the last minute. It's a slick app with an overall great experience.

</comment><comment><USER6> I only heard about SeatGeek after reading this great blog post from them: [http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/high-performance-map- interacti...](http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/high-performance-map-interactions- using-html5-canvas/). Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm all about Gametime.co for sports but looking forward to trying this for a concert.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good for them. A couple of them are on the CakePHP team and when I was big into that, they were more than helpful. Smart eng team.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice - congratulations! I remember when you guys were in the Dreamit office and trying to decide on a name.

<comment><USER10> Plus one for DreamIt!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Jack and Russ are relentless founders and I'm continually impressed by them. The ticket buying experience through SeatGeek is so easy and is particularly delightful on mobile. Excited to see what they're able to do with this funding.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is great news, my soon to launch startup will be leveraging their fantastic API heavily for a date planning tool for couples in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER13> Really well done app. Another solid NYC startup!

</comment><comment><USER14> I was just at their HQ yesterday - really friendly and open team!

<comment><USER15> _waves_

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cool!

Anyone know how I can add my own convention to SeatGeek?

<comment><USER17> do you mean you run a convention and want to use them to sell the tickets? or just listed?

they don't seem to act as a retailer but more as an aggravation and tracking of secondary markets

<comment><USER16> Cool, thanks. Just listing, we have ticketing covered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Congrats Jack and Russ!

</comment><comment><USER19> Great news for the founders! It's a bittersweet experience for me, I had an interview call a year ago but they cancelled because I needed work authorization :|</comment>


Nvidia Makes Arm a Peer to x86 and Power for GPU Acceleration - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/06/17/nvidia-makes-arm-a-peer-to-x86-and-power-for-gpu-acceleration/ <comment><USER2> They own Mellanox now, and they have their own ARM core.

I could imagine them coming out with a Network GPU that has nothing but 100GbE/200GbE and power.

The ARM core doesn't have to be super-fast if it's just setting up RDMA transfers, of data and command buffers.

</comment><comment><USER3> "There are no GPUs in this system because there are no European makers of GPUs"

Cough cough. Mali. Imagination. Even Apple.

<comment><USER4> Well, I guess they count Mali ( ARM ) and IMG as UK and not EU ?

<comment><USER5> Last I checked, Europe is a continent, not a bureaucracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The beauty of Arm is that it is open. You can you can add all sorts of interesting technologies that will be beneficial to supercomputing, such as being tightly integrated. By marrying an Arm CPU with a Tesla GPU...".

The essence of it. NVidia is so close that it makes development very painful. At the moment it's the required path for deep learning, but hopefully it'll change a bit.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does x86 maintain any real advantages over ARM at this point, other than the ability to run legacy software? I'm genuinely asking; all I know is that ARM devices can be really powerful these days and they're also much more power efficient.

<comment><USER8> I'm also curious how fellow HNers think x86 will fare in the next 10, 20, 30 years. Will we still be using x86 as the most common option in laptops by then?

<comment><USER9> FWIW, all my laptops are currently arm-based (chromebooks), for the simple reason of price + battery performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Given that they're trying to push their Tegra platform for automotive and robotic uses I'd hope so.</comment>


Scientists Find a Way to Predict U.S. Heat Waves Weeks in Advance - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/science/heat-wave-predictions-weather.html <comment><USER2> [http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2016/anomnight.3.2...](http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2016/anomnight.3.28.2016.gif) \- Here's relevant ocean temperature anomaly map. Predict away.</comment>


What Most People Don't Understand About How Startup Companies Are Valued - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2016/02/14/what-most-people-dont-understand-about-how-startup-companies-are-valued/#.VsEMglFUsrA.twitter <comment><USER2> I'm not so sure I agree with Mark on this one.

He asks how Sequoia's 'RIP Good Times' did at spooking the market, well...[http://vator.tv/news/2015-01-13-venture-capital-sees-best- fu...](http://vator.tv/news/2015-01-13-venture-capital-sees-best-fundraising- year-since-2007)

The funds themselves were unable to raise as much until 2015. So, yes, the market dropped considerably from 2007. Of course, we also need to consider not just the VC environment but what was generally happening in public markets at the time. But yes, the market dropped, Sequoia or not.

I think what Mark isn't mentioning in this article (from my understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong) is that venture funds have to invest the money they are given within a specified time frame. So the irrationality is driven, in some ways, by an excess of money in the VC pool which is looking for good investments. Everybody tries to pile into the few that will work give positive returns. Which raises the amounts raised for those businesses, where we're seeing $100 million rounds in late stage.

In earlier stage investments, the VCs are likely trying to spread the load across as many businesses as possible, except, here again, you have multiple VCs and Angels trying to get in on the market.

As Mark said, it is a Market. He does benefit from having lower prices, and convincing other VCs that prices should be lower is the better strategy than trying to convince the start-ups themselves that they should be taking less.

It's like buying a house at auction. It doesn't matter what you tell the homeowner the house is worth, they're waiting to see how much they can get when people get excited about buying. But convince the other potential buyers that the market is going to go down and people are spending too much, and they all start second guessing their positions.

Have I contradicted myself enough in this comment?</comment>


Don't Waste Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.carsonified.com/life-tips/dont-waste-time

<comment><USER2> The problem is that I have a lot of things I'm _passionate_ about. Probably too many. And none of them really make money in and of themselves:-/</comment>


The clock is ticking for Dropbox, valued at $10B more than a year ago - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/t-rowe-price-marks-down-holding-value-of-dropbox-shares-by-51-2016-1?r=US&IR=T <comment><USER2> The title as I write this is "The clock is ticking for Dropbox, valued at $10B more than a year ago". This title is not that used in the article, nor is it a meaning I can grasp from the article.

Nowhere is it suggested that Dropbox will fail, merely that it is overvalued for its current (and expected) business model, and that the price demonstrates "declining investor confidence".

<comment><AUTHOR> It was the title when I copy-pasted it and submitted the link. [http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-clock-is-ticking-for- dropb...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-clock-is-ticking-for- dropbox-2015-4?r=US&IR=T)

<comment><USER2> That's a different article from 8 months ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Stopped using Dropbox when I discovered MEGA would give me 25x the space for free</comment>


Google Compute Engine Incident #19003 - <AUTHOR> https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/19003 <comment><USER2> related post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077421)

<comment><USER3> Comments moved thither.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Startup idea, no design experience - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys, let me introduce myself. My name is Bryan and I'm a current college student in NC. I have what I would want to call an amazing idea for an web business. My problem, I have no design experience other that 2 semesters on basic HTML.
From my understanding about getting funding, one has to have some sort of model or working demo to present. With that said, a lot of you have a different understanding of what it takes to get a business like this started. Little warning, I don't know anyone with extensive design experience and don't have a ton of money to hire a firm.
Is there anyone here who can point me in the direction as far as maybe finding someone or examples of people who were probably in the same boat as me? <comment><USER2> The smart thing to do is build it yourself, learning whatever you need to learn as you go along. You don't need anyone's permission or expertise to get something up and working. At the very least, try to build just enough of your idea to get the right people (developers, designers) excited.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Just to clarify. design and code are two different things so I hope you realize the difference.

2\. Figure what your value proposition is and possibly find a cofounder (or two) to help build the business together.

3\. Find ways to make money so you can hire someone to build your prototype for you.

</comment><comment><USER4> Design is important, but don't get ahead of yourself.

What stage are you really at right now? Is it just an idea? Have you got people using it, testing it?

You might say 'of course not, I can't build it', but you can usually do some sort of test market with friends without getting too deep into technology.

Build a 'low-res' product to test with. You're in university, so maybe you can get some help from somebody in the CS department. But really, if you can do it on paper or with static HTML, that can help you refine your idea in the early stages.

But as wrrice says. You can learn to build the whole thing yourself, and even if you have no desire to be a developer in the long-term, understanding the ins and outs of development will be valuable to you in the long-term (this project or others).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys, I think I will learn to put something together myself because I do think it's very important to be able to get my hands dirty in any situation. Any suggestion for languages.</comment>