Wall Street Profits by Putting Investors in the Slow Lane - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/18/opinion/wall-street-brokers-rebates-kickbacks.html <comment><USER2> Heh. My second project at my first employer out of college (back in 2006) was building a system to detect violations of this rule (Reg NMS, if you're curious). We found that there were trade-throughs happening on a daily basis, it was so common that it appeared to be just how the markets worked.

Tried to sell it to the SEC and they weren't interested.

Then we pivoted to try to sell to traders, so they could prove to clients that they were getting the best execution possible (or occasionally better than the best possible, but that gets washed out of the aggregate stats). They were _very_ interested, until the data showed that most of the ones who don't already have a proprietary version of this were actually doing terribly on their trade executions. Then they weren't interested at all.

I ended up leaving the company - and the financial industry - at that point. My take-away from the whole experience is that the game really is rigged. I remember reading a non-mainstream economics paper in college that modeled the world not in terms of price equilibria or value-add, but assumed that all actors were basically bandits who would try to take whatever they could by force or deceit. It was horribly depressing at the time, but it actually seems like a more accurate model of how the world really works, the remarkable part being that democratic capitalism has managed to channel the impulses of those bandits (while still being utterly crooked) into a system that on a macro- level basically kinda/sorta works.

<comment><USER3> I disagree that it works--it's just that it hasn't utterly failed yet. Big difference. If you look at failed states, the bandits won. Argentina comes to mind, maybe Venezuela. Brazil is headed there.

<comment><USER2> Having "not utterly failed" for 240 years is a fairly big accomplishment, precisely because the lifespan of many other societal organizing principles is about equal to a human lifespan (~80 years).

<comment><USER4> Uh it kinda failed big time in the '20s and '30s

<comment><USER5> The results were War, big ones at that. So a pretty bad failure mode for millions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this is well known. The real problem is that the traders are much smarter than the regulators, and their ability to obscure far exceeds the regulators' ability to untangle. Incentivise your regulators better and you might end up attracting some real talent who can unearth the tricks the crafty traders pull every day (I am an ex trader, from a bulge bracket IB, and trust me, what some of these guys do is not at all kosher).

<comment><USER7> Or we can just ban anything insufficiently transparent and be done with it. After all, the point of a market transaction for pricing is its ability to convey transparent, accurate information to other market participants -- _right?_

<comment><USER8> In theory, sure.

How's that working out for us?

EDIT: Meta, I will never tire of hearing people be all, "But _markets_!" as if they aren't just as corruptible as any other human institution — if not more so.

<comment><USER7> Well, I agree that it's not working out very ideally for us. This is why I think all those hyper-complicated trades don't necessarily have much real economic value, and banning them is unlikely to be very harmful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Remember when Sanders proposed a small fee on every trade on Wall Street to discourage high frequency trading and to recoup some value from the market? Remember how he was widely pronounced deranged for suggesting that there should be a fee associated with trades? How it would destroy the market?

Funny, that.

<comment><USER10> Fees on trading would not meaningfully discourage high frequency trading and would just be passed on to buyers and sellers of stock in the form of larger bid/ask spreads.

<comment><USER11> I think that's about half right. A 0.5% tax on all equities trades, which is what Bernie was proposing, would put a bunch of HFTs out of business basically overnight and at the same time dramatically increase costs for investors via 1) the tax (obviously) 2) wider spreads 3) reduced liquidity.

<comment><USER12> 4) increased volatility 5) less efficient price discovery

The HFT shops put millions of dollars into research to attempt to ascertain correct prices (e.g. ETF pricing, derivatives pricing, etc). If they are disincentivized from trading in the equities markets, they will no longer be a conduit of relevant pricing information from other global markets into the equities markets. That means investors (big Wall Street firms catered to by IEX) and retail (you and me in our individual accounts) are more likely to be trading mis-priced markets.

<comment><USER13> What is the value of trading at increasingly marginally more accurate prices? And more importantly, what is the _cost_?

You seem to take it at face value that trading at accurate prices is an unalloyed good. But for the extremely overwhelming majority of retail investors — whose only sane strategy is buy and hold — buying at a few tenths of a percentage points closer to the most-accurate possible price is worth nearly nothing (and has negative worth half of the time, practically by definition).

On the other hand, Wall Street has been raking in tens if not hundreds of billions in profits from this service. What value we get from more accurate pricing may very easily be offset by these costs a hundredfold.

<comment><USER10> You are drastically overestimating how much money HFT market makers earn. Virtu Financial (one of the biggest firms in this area) earns about 100 million a year.

I think you are also underestimating the costs to retail investors to not getting accurate pricing. Shaving a few tents of a point off of every trade will have a huge effect on the lifetime earnings of an individuals.

<comment><USER14> > earns about 100 million a year.

They made 147M in the first quarter of this year. 197M in the first quarter of last year. They might only make 100M/year after costs, but that doesn't represent the 600-900M they take from the market.

<comment><USER15> That's not the point. The point is that the industry is vanishingly small compared to Wall Street proper, yet it has an outsize target on its head due to FUD and emotional appeals like the ones presented in the article.

Furthermore, in exchange for "taking" that money from the market, they enhance liquidity, which is _directly_ helpful for price discovery and facilitating trading among both retail _and_ institutional investors.

People are continually moving the goalposts in this thread and others like it. If you're going to talk about Wall Street and fraud, _high frequency trading is not the place to start._ All of the _legitimate_ arguments against high frequency trading _have nothing_ to do with fraud, they have to do with the dangers of runaway algorithmic trading that coalesces into the same market movements.

But we can't reason about _that_ issue while half the people talking about HFT (almost none of whom actually have experience with trading whatsoever) still think it's front running, or believe it constitutes some sort of fraudulent con over "the little guy."

<comment><USER16> Liquidity is willingness to make a trade others aren't. To be useful, it has to linger in the order book for a long time. If you're winning a race by _milliseconds_ , you are trying to interpose yourself into a trade that was already going to happen that day.

<comment><USER15> _> If you're winning a race by milliseconds, you are trying to interpose yourself into a trade that was already going to happen that day._

This is an inaccurate framing of how high frequency trading propagates liquidity in an otherwise illiquid (or strictly _less liquid_ ) market. The claim is not that liquidity is contributed on a strictly trade by trade basis, but rather than the low-latency activity has meta-reactive effects owing to enhanced price discovery that increase overall participation by drawing in other traders at different time resolutions. For example, where there may a stagnant order book on one equity (and consequently, few human traders able to fulfill orders without significant pricing penalties), the same order book may draw in competing market makers. They attempt to predict the next price movement - some win and some lose on the immediate sequence of trades, but the consequent activity narrows the bid/ask spread by heightening local participation in the order book and improving the pricing confidence. This has practical ramifications for "human" time resolutions, because the human traders now have a better opportunity to fulfill orders without overpaying. This in turn reduces overcautious traders from participating, and so on and so forth.

For what it's worth, your line of argument has been rehashed for years now on Hacker News, going back to when Chris Stucchio wrote his HFT apologia. Instead of lazily linking to that thread, I'll do one better by walking through research on the subject. Fortunately there is a handy paper that explicitly examines the question, "how does the interaction of these traders in the millisecond environment impact the quality of markets that human investors can observe?"[1] The data is constructed using NASDAQ TotalView with equities in the S&P500 in periods of varying volatility. Both reactive and periodic trading algorithms are reviewed.

Here are a few critical passages:

 _By tracking submissions, cancellations, and executions that can be associated with each other, we create a measure of low-latency activity. We use a simultaneous equation framework to examine how the intensity of low latency activity affects market quality measures. We find that an increase in low-latency activity lowers short-term volatility, reduces quoted spreads and the total price impact of trades, and increases depth in the limit order book._

 _IV.B. Results Panel A of Table 4 presents the estimated coefficients of the pooled system side-by-side for the 2007 and 2008 sample periods. First we note that the two instruments have the 25 expected signs and are highly significant. Specifically, the coefficient a2 indicates that when liquidity off NASDAQ is higher, our NASDAQ market quality measures show higher liquidity and lower volatility. Similarly, the coefficient b2 is positive in all specifications, indicating that higher low-latency activity in a specific stock in an interval is associated with higher low-latency activity in other stocks on the NASDAQ system. Second, the estimated b1 coefficients tell us that low-latency activity is attracted to more liquid and less volatile stocks._

 _The fact that low-latency trading decreases short-term volatility and contributes to depth in the 2008 sample period where the market is relentlessly going down and there is heightened uncertainty in the economic environment is particularly noteworthy. It seems to suggest that PA activity creates a positive externality in the market at the time that the market needs it the most. Panel B of Table 4 presents roughly similar results from the estimation of the system with SpreadNotNasi as the instrument for market liquidity._

 _It is possible, however, that the impact of low-latency trading on market quality would differ for stocks that are somehow fundamentally dissimilar, like small versus large market capitalization stocks. Table 5 presents system estimates in subsamples consisting of four quartiles ranked by the average market capitalization over the sample period.22 There is not much pattern across the quartiles in the manner low-latency activity affects short-term volatility in the 2007 sample period. The picture in the 2008 sample is different: It appears that during more stressful times, low-latency activity helps reduce volatility in smaller stocks more than it does in larger stocks._

 _Lastly, Table 6 shows summary statistics for the stock-by-stock estimations. The results suggest similar conclusions concerning the effect of low-latency trading on market quality. In particular, an increase in low-latency activity decreases short-term volatility, decreases quoted spreads, and increases displayed depth in the limit order book. This is true both in the 2007 and 2008 sample periods._

_______________

1\. [http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhasbrou/Research/Working%20Pape...](http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhasbrou/Research/Working%20Papers/HS10-11-10.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Someone will call this a submarine article for IEX but I don't think this is far, it was written as an oped by Dave Swensen, the famous head of Yale's endowment fund.

Just so the issue is clear, almost all hedge funds don't do active/passive also called maker/taker, but rather they pay a flat fee per share traded to their sell side broker.

The sell side broker will then collect/pay the exchange fees. This means that the sell side broker has an incentive to post the order to a market that pays them the largest rebate rather than the market with the shorted queue.

The buy side clients are not getting worse prices necessarily as you still need to fill orders at the NBBO.

So the argument would be, why not post on the exchange with the shortest queue always. And the response would be that

1) markets move fast, and what is the shorted queue when the order is dispatched may not be the shortest queue when the order arrives.

2) Other markets may be more active, ie more orders routed to them first so the shortest queue may not be the best place to route at all.

To be fair its not a consensus that the IEX approach is better than maker taker, there is no clear consensus as to what the correct approach is even when you take out the HFT opinions.

In case anyone wants to see here's a link to the BATS cash equities execution quality page.

[https://www.bats.com/us/equities/market_statistics/execution...](https://www.bats.com/us/equities/market_statistics/execution_quality/)

<comment><USER10> Worth noting that the head of Yale's endowment fund and IEX's interests are aligned. The business model of IEX is to convince naive investors that high frequency trading is somehow screwing them and that they should choose to route their orders to IEX in order to avoid it. They then facilitate trading between these naive investors and large institutional investors (like Yale) who want to move large blocks of shares before the market moves against them.

<comment><USER17> Parent is correct. Uninformed order flow is what HFT wants to trade against: people buying because they have cash and selling because they need it. HFT doesn't want to trade with people moving prices at the old prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem with this essay is that it conflates the needs of a large institutional investors like Yale with the needs of small investors (like you and me). In many cases these needs can be inverted.

Yale wants to buy and sell large blocks of stock without the price moving away from them.

I want to buy and sell stock at the best possible price with all of the latest information transmitted to the market as fast as possible.

This is why Yale would prefer to trade in "darker" exchanges like IEX and most retail investors should prefer other exchanges.

<comment><USER18> > small investors (like you and me)

Uhmm, maybe you, but definitely not me. Most people I know (I agree though, I live outside NYC or any big financial center) don't give a rat's ass about where the market is going, which stocks are good and which are bad. We invest a lot into our 401(k)'s and the rest we put in index funds. So my interests are definitely aligned more with large institutional investors.

BTW my personal investment strategy is not to get some kind of windfall during retirement. The only thing I really look for is that if I saved well, I will have enough to retire on (i.e. not ask for others for monetary help). I just want my funds to not fail.

<comment><USER10> That makes you like me. You aren't buying and selling based on proprietary information about where you think the market is going, but because of your cash flow situation (You save $1000 a month now, and hope to withdraw $5000 a month in retirement or whatever).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I realize this in the op-ed section of the paper, but where the issues are complex and most people are totally unfamiliar with them, printing one side of the story feels a lot like endorsement.

When Flash Boys came out there was extensive discussion here on HN about IEX's claims. I was convinced that Lewis at the very least exaggerated the benefits of thier speedbump model.

On the issue of rebates, I'd keep on eye out for other takes (especially from Matt Levine at Bloomberg) before forming any firm opinions.

</comment><comment><USER20> More generally, consumers have been fleeced and left out to dry over the past 10 year economic cycle. Take a look at a graph of the S&P500 from 2009-2017, then look at consumer interest rates of 0.5% (in a 'high yield' savings or CD account). It simply makes no sense. We simply cannot build wealth any longer. Baby boomers had _CD_ rates of >10% [0]. Think about that for a moment.

[0] [http://www.forecast-chart.com/rate-cd-interest.html](http://www.forecast- chart.com/rate-cd-interest.html)

<comment><USER21> > Baby boomers had CD rates of >10% [0]. Think about that for a moment.

My aunt and uncle (who happen to be baby boomers) bought their first house in the early '80s when inflation was rampant. Their first mortgage had something like an 18% rate. It should be obvious that a 10% CD rate is worthless if inflation is nearly as high or higher.

<comment><USER22> > It should be obvious that a 10% CD rate is worthless if inflation is nearly > as high or higher.

Well, yes, that would be useless, but that's not what happened for most of the time with high CD ratee. The period of CD rates ranging from just under 10% to over 17% in the 1978-1984, saw inflation peak at 14.8% and spend much of the time below 5%.

 _Recently_ CD interest rates are not only low but for many years below inflation most of the time; in the period of high interest rates and high inflation, CD rates were still above inflation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Although the harm suffered on each trade is minuscule — fractions of a cent > per share — the aggregate kickbacks amount to billions of dollars a year.

That's the money quote. 99% of retail investors should be buying stock infrequently, maybe once a month when the paycheck comes in. Ideally you're buying one or a few index funds, so the total number of transactions is small. If you're in that boat, this order-of-fulfillment tax really doesn't affect you and can be entirely ignored.

Your returns are really only in danger of being dragged down by this thing if you're executing many trades per day. But if you're doing that, you had better be a sophisticated investor anyway, or else you're definitely losing money.

<comment><USER24> This is true, but incomplete. Such unsophisticated investor has to control his frequency of trading, and also the frequency of trading of his etf or mutual fund. Any fund needs to do trading, re balancing, etc. So there's a double layer where ppl get charged 'the vig'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whenever I see these IEX articles, I think it is useful to point out that they generally describe 3 types of traders: 1) Retail - you and me, who make money through asset appreciation 2) Institutional (IEX's client-base) - big Wall Street firms, big money managers, big pensions, who make money by charging fees 3) HFT - small technology firms, who make money through trading

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading further: this really feels like PR for IEX.

</comment><comment><USER25> I see no social benefit that accrues from allowing trading (vs. investing) in the stock market. The usual arguments that traders make in its favor are just a plain attempt at legitimizing their stealing from market participants who are less sophisticated and resourceful.

1) Efficient price discovery - Individual stock prices often move 20,30,50%+ in short periods of time, prices can't be efficient with such high volatility. Trading more likely causes inefficient pricing due to speculations, margin calls, trigger orders.

2) Liquidity - Sure they do increase liquidity in the market but as long as sellers can find buyers I don't see any benefit from increased liquidity other than (3)

3) Bid/ask spread - I'll admit that lower spreads are desirable and traders to play a vital role in keeping it so, but I'll question how important it is for a long term investor if has to cover a spread of an extra 0.1% and then weigh that against the social cost of tens of billions of dollars worth of wealth transfers from retail traders to some HFT shops in New York.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a quasi-inevitable side issue. Generally, investors eat transaction costs and aren't party to decisions that affect them. There are related issues in many 3-party systems. In medicine, doctors, insurers and other people tend to decide on (prescribe) products and services. The consumer eats the costs (sometimes it's a 4th party) and decision makers have an incentive to take kickbacks.

The regulator could do stricter rules/policing, for a partial fix.

</comment><comment><USER27> Every article I read on the topic has a plug for IEX, an exchange that "refuses to pay kickbacks" which make me think that these peices are basically advertisements. Either kick backs serve no purpose and IEX will thrive especially in this environment where where investors are clamoring for yield. Or it does have some purpose or is not significant. Putting in regulations would likely lead to more complexity and regulatory capture

<comment><USER10> Kickbacks to brokers that are sending out retail flow allow those brokers to reduce commissions on trading. These reductions have gone all the way to zero in a lot of places.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Kickbacks to brokers that are sending out retail flow allow those brokers to > reduce commissions on trading. These reductions have gone all the way to > zero in a lot of places.

I think you are wrong here. Most consumer orders are active meaning typically the broker would pay the maker fee instead of collecting a kick back. I mean, inverted exchanges are a thing but do very little volume.

Now pay for order flwo from wholesalers like Citadel is a big win for brokerages and does help to reduce trading fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Some of the underlying data here [1] on the effective spreads of the various market centers. Bats also publishes the definitions of these metrics [2]. They seem to be difficult to game, since they're derived from actually executed trades compared to the midpoint NBBO (that is, the national best bid/offer -- by definition, at that time, cheaper than any exchange to buy, and more expensive than any exchange to sell).

The low volume numbers make it slightly more difficult to determine significance, but the effect does appear to be real, which I found slightly surprising.

[1] [https://www.bats.com/us/equities/market_statistics/execution...](https://www.bats.com/us/equities/market_statistics/execution_quality/)

[2] [https://www.bats.com/us/equities/market_statistics/execution...](https://www.bats.com/us/equities/market_statistics/execution_quality/definitions/)

</comment><comment><USER29> So lets say they extend Reg NMS to require sending the order to the NMS exchange with the shortest queue at the BBO?

I can imagine some potential ways that could be gamed as well...

</comment><comment><USER15> Articles like this are so mind-numbingly frustrating because they completely muddle the water for any reasoned debate about the true advantages and disadvantages of high frequency trading.

 _> Wall Street has developed a new way, clouded in obscurity, to fleece the hundreds of millions of Americans who have money invested in company pension plans, mutual funds and insurance policies._

Well, that sure is a _neutral_ way of presenting it, isn't it?

 _> Instead, brokers routinely take kickbacks, euphemistically referred to as "rebates," for routing orders to a particular exchange. As a result, the brokers produce worse outcomes for their institutional investor clients — and therefore, for individual pension beneficiaries, mutual fund investors and insurance policy holders — and ill-gotten gains for the brokers._

"Kickbacks"...that's a strategic word to use. Technically true, but more importantly, _emotionally loaded._ "Kickback" is not often associated with positive sentiment. "Union leaders receiving kickbacks"..."politicians receiving kickbacks"...

More importantly, this claim is neither axiomatic nor defended by the article. How _precisely_ do these rebates harm investors?

 _> The diffuse harm to individuals and the concentrated benefit to Wall Street create yet another way in which the system is rigged, justifiably eroding public confidence in the fairness of the financial system._

What the hell? The rhetoric is so heavy-handed - is there no _attempt_ at an unbiased presentation here? I understand this is an opinion piece but _come on._

 _> And yet, brokers choose longer queues hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times a day. Publicly available trade and quote data show that the queues to buy or sell stock are considerably longer on exchanges that offer kickbacks. Even though the queues decrease the likelihood of getting a trade completed and impair the price performance after the trade is executed, brokers still direct trades to these places because of the kickbacks they receive._

Yes, that's interesting. But how does that correlate with the liquidity available on these exchanges? If you have reduced liquidity, do you want to be in a smaller queue with less price competition? This isn't even addressed.

 _> One exchange, the IEX, refuses to pay rebates. Created by Brad Katsuyama (whose odyssey to defy the ethos of Wall Street was told in Michael Lewis's "Flash Boys"), IEX has a speed bump that prevents high-frequency traders from front-running ordinary investors. (Yale University, where we work, has a de minimis exposure to IEX through an investment by one of the university's external managers.)_

Okay, so we have blatant hero worship _and_ the claim that high frequency trading is front running _in 2017._ And this article has reached the front page of Hacker News.

 _> BATS (a rival stock exchange founded by a high-frequency trader) posts data on this measure of execution quality for the major exchanges on its website. According to our calculations, in the six months before IEX's arrival, Nasdaq led the effective spread rankings in the widely used Standard & Poor's 500 index, with the number of top ranks ranging from 169 to 216 stocks._

Okay, _where_ are these calculations? What is the point of making the claim if you don't quantify it whatsoever?!

<comment><USER30> >More importantly, this claim is neither axiomatic nor defended by the article. How precisely do these rebates harm investors?

The rebates are effectively being taken out of retail investors' money. If the rebates did not effect brokers' behavior, there would be no point in offering them. If the rebates do effect brokers' behavior, then it means brokers are willing to accept a marginally worse price for their investors in order to get the rebate.

<comment><USER15> The money you lose in the cost of rebates being passed on is _less_ than the money you gain through enhanced price discovery (so you overpay for securities less often) and enhanced liquidity (so you can actually fulfill your trades more often).

<comment><USER31> There is no neutral comparison being run. You should be comparing against a market where every trade is happening on lit exchanges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can't practices like these not be considered in the same way as "hacking" and thus made illegal?

After all, hacking = influencing electronic systems to make them function in ways they are not intended to function. Replace "electronic" by "legal/financial" and there you are.

<comment><USER33> One immediate problem -- this is how these systems are made to function. It's not like the kickback is happening behind the back of the operators of the exchanges. It's not "hacking" to follow the rules as they're laid out.

<comment><USER32> So you are saying these systems are bug-free by design/definition? That's quite a statement :)

<comment><USER34> That's so crazy far from what he is saying.

If you enter a building through a front door, you are not "hacking", you are entering the building in the way the designer intended.

If you enter a building through a window, you are "hacking" because you are exploiting an unintended ability that the designer did not intend to give you.

Just because the comment you replied to said that "kickbacks" are a front door intentional design, you can't then claim he said that the building has no windows. He has said nothing about windows. He just said don't call that door a window, because its not, its a fucking door.

<comment><USER32> Yes, it's a door, but they told the regulators it was a window. That's a bug in the spec.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > IEX has a speed bump that prevents high-frequency traders from front-running > ordinary investors.

Anyone care to explain, in precise terms, how a high-frequency trader front- runs ordinary investors on a typical exchange and how putting a delay on all incoming orders prevents it?

<comment><USER12> Michael Lewis and Brad Katsuyama misuse the term "front running," either willfully to stir people up or out out of ignorance. Front-running refers to the practice of a broker holding customer orders, but trading for their own accounts at a better price before executing their client's orders (i.e. using privileged information for their benefit). Katsuyama's uses "front running" to describe a practice where if an HFT sees a price change happening (i.e. trades are being reported or a level is going away), they quickly go and remove liquidity before others have gotten a chance to react to this new information. An HFT with faster technology will beat an institutional trader in this race (even though all market participants must always send bona fide orders that they intend to have filled). IEX solves this problem by slowing down incoming orders to give special orders on the exchange (D-pegs, which automatically change prices as the prevailing market price changes) an opportunity to reprice. The HFT has put millions of dollars into fast technology, whereas the institutional investment firms have presumably put millions of dollars into long term research. IEX allows institutional investors to outsource this technology investment to the exchange, which puts an artificial delay to give its matching engine time to reprice special orders during market moves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Taking aside the speed bump that IEX provides, how it is meaningfully different from Liquidnet?

</comment><comment><USER37> Don't get me started by putting out warnings of stocks they are shorting for no reason. It's despicable.

Not only companies, but also countries. While America will always be aaa</comment>


Obscure C++ Features - <AUTHOR> http://madebyevan.com/obscure-cpp-features/ <comment><USER2> Made even more obscure by using dark grey on black.

I didn't know you could overload the comma operator that way. The comma operator was for use in C macros, for when multiple expressions were necessary. It should have been deprecated in C++.

The comma operator has different precedence inside and outside square brackets.

       tab(1,2)

is a function call with two arguments.

       tab[1,2]

is an invocation of the comma operator. You can't overload "operator[]" with multiple arguments and simulate multidimensional arrays.

</comment><comment><USER3> Placement new isn't obscure or strange, it's in all those red books.

You may not use it, but you can appreciate it's very useful if you want that fine grained control that you're using c++ for in the first place.

Most of the other examples are just pure weirdness that you should never use. The kind you find in online employment exams.

</comment><comment><USER4> Meh. Some of these are no longer problematic in recent versions of the language. Braced initialization obviates the most vexing parse, for example.

<comment><USER5> That is true, but there is still some ambiguity with initializer lists[1]

[1] [http://scottmeyers.blogspot.com/2016/11/help-me-sort-out- mea...](http://scottmeyers.blogspot.com/2016/11/help-me-sort-out-meaning-of- as.html)

Discussion on hackernews about that blog post by Scott Meyers: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13014429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13014429)

<comment><USER4> Some decent discussions there, I missed them before, thanks for pointing them out.

Overall I disagree with some of the commenters who take one look at {{}} and cue the syntax bashing. I've found that many of the new syntactic conveniences in the language have brought a net positive to expressiveness and elegance.

<comment><USER5> Don't get me wrong. I agree that the new syntactic conveniences have improved the overall developer experience of using C++. I know how difficult it is to improve things in C++ while still maintaining backward compatibility with the huge history it has. C++11/14 was a step in the right direction and i'm looking forward to what will come with the new, more rapid release cycles they are trying to adopt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These are features covered in every C++ book and if you don't know them you can hardly call yourself a C++ programmer.

Furthermore, the first 'C++ feature' is not even a feature. It is merely the result of the preprocessor translating a[b] to *(a+b). C has it too.

<comment><USER7> Idk, I knew most of these, but the alternate operator tokens, ref-qualifiers, comma operator overloading, and function try-blocks were all new to me. What book do you know that covers those?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one that just cringed reading the keyword replacement section? To me the example given seemed absolutely crazy. Can anyone validate this usage of the "feature"? It just seems so off.

<comment><USER9> It's kinda useful for testing private functions and accessing private variables during testing. However using something like the `GOOGLE_FRIEND_TEST` marcro in Google Test is probably a better way to get around private functions/members.

<comment><USER5> Wouldn't testing the public interface that calls the private code, be enough in most situations? If they are few and simple I test them indirectly by testing the public interface that makes use of them, otherwise they can factored out to a new class/module where they can be tested directly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >Accessing an element of an array via ptr[3] is actually just short for _(ptr + 3). This can be equivalently written as_ (3 + ptr) and therefore as 3[ptr], which turns out to be completely valid code.

C++ standard defines the syntax of a postfix expression as this

      postfix-expression:
          primary-expression
          postfix-expression[expression]
          postfix-expression[braced-init-list]

[expression]primary-expression is not valid

</comment><comment><USER11> Avoid using these whenever possible. Readability is more important than WoahNeat Factor.

<comment><USER12> You don't think "bitand" is more readable than &?

<comment><USER13> More eadable as in "I can read english"? Yes.

More readable as in "I want to read code fast"? No.

I much prefer C style languages over Pascal style languages.</comment></comment></comment>


Why software engineers are declining your offers - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-software-engineers-declining-your-offers-katie-bowles <comment><USER2> _" Missing out on crucial information such as their reasons for pursuing new opportunities, what they're looking for from a career standpoint, and what other companies they're interviewing with can be a crucial indicator of whether or not they're going to accept your offer."_

Sorry, but if I'm interviewing with you, the list of other companies I'm interviewing with is none of your business.

 _" The companies with higher acceptance rates (from my own experience) have only offered a 24-48 hour deadline for the candidate to accept."_

Sorry, but if you want to pressure me into making a major life decision in 24-48 hours, I don't want to work for you. Remember, if I'm a good candidate, I probably already have a job, and I have to carefully weigh the benefits of staying in a fairly good job vs. moving into an unknown situation (and perhaps a physical move to a different city). I'd need to talk it over with my significant other. If accepting the job has legal ramifications (e.g., non- compete clauses, questions about intellectual property that I develop on my own time, etc.), I'll need to schedule a meeting with my lawyer first to review the contract.</comment>


Norway's electric cars zip to new record: almost a third of all sales - <AUTHOR> http://news.trust.org/item/20190102140559-ecsqp/ <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to know the regional distribution of those vehicles. Southern Norway has excess of energy and short distances and generative braking is particularly suitable to southern Norway... But Northern Norway does not have free energy sources (that is why they destroyed Alta river) and distances are long and winding but mostly flat.

</comment><comment><USER3> dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18806930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18806930)</comment>


Got a web idea ,cant code weblangs: How to pick 'em up - <AUTHOR>

Hey Folks,
I had been programming for quite some time, but I have coded most of the parts on C,C++ and Assembly(yes, assembly for ARM for coding crypto algos) So as you can understand, I dont have much experience in web based technologies.
So lets say, I want to be self reliant and start coding on my own. How do I start? :) <comment><USER2> Since you already know C/C++ I'm willing to wager you are able to pick up Python or Ruby in a few days if not less. Both have frameworks quite well suited to web programming (Django or one of the other WSGI frameworks for Python) and obviously Rails for Ruby. Personally I prefer Python's syntax and community, but other then that the differences with Ruby are fairly trivial.

I would recommend against going with PHP (especially) since you say you already have coding experience. As such the usual "PHP is easier to learn" argument hardly holds and I think the more consistent style of libraries is more pleasant for experienced programmers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks merijnv,thanks for the inputs.

To be frank,I never did start with PHP, but yes I did flirt with Perl. I know a bit of Perl,(though embarrassed to admit,I lost my patience with Perl midway)

As for Ruby, I strangely had the impression, that I can't attempt at it, without knowing PHP and others.

So anyway for RoR or Django, do I need to learn Ruby and Python respctively to start over, or can I jump straight to it. I have coded in C# and did some personal db work in MySQL . If that helps.

<comment><USER2> In my opinion it should be perfectly possible for someone with C# and C experience to start learning Python and Django at the same time (you can go over the tutorial at docs.python.org. in a handful of hours tops and that should be plenty to start), I personally have no experience with Rails, but I imagine the same applies.

(Also, the #python IRC channel on FreeNode.net is a truly excellent community!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The way I started on PHP was choose a basic project, like writing a simple CMS or forum. This will give you basic database and (if you do it right) OO experience. Also, don't buy I book for PHP. I've working freelance PHP jobs for about five years now and I've never owned a book. There's more examples online that you'll know what to do with.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am stunned. Is a simple CMS a basic project for PHP? I must admit I dont know much about it, but then Php looks incredibly powerful

<comment><USER4> PHP is powerful, it just isn't the new tool on the block, so it isn't as popular. Like what has happened to Perl.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This answer won't be popular here. If you're well-versed in C++, a jump to Java would be less of a cognitive leap than a jump to the dynamic / duck-typed languages that others have cited here.

Java has some excellent web frameworks. My personal favorite is Wicket, but there are many others.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean duct taped languages? Sorry for being pedantic.

Yes, I did hear many good things about Java as a programming language, right from my grad days. C++ is not a pure oops, java is a pure oops, and some other cool stuff.

As I understand, going to Java will be "grammatically" approach but Django and RoR will be a quick and dirty way. Am I right?

<comment><USER5> No, I meant duck-typed. A lot of languages popular with the HN ooh-new-shiney- language-of-the-month crowd use duck typing.

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

Also, Java is not pure OOP in any real sense of the word. It still has primitives, and plenty of other reasons.

All I was saying that if you're accustomed to statically-typed languages with pointer/reference passing semantics and limited FP usage, the manner in which you think is likely to mesh better with Java. And in that sense, you'd probably be more productive out of the gate with it than with Ruby.

Or maybe not - learning about servlet containers and how Wicket overlays it, and Wicket's own component-oriented stateful approach could be fairly steep.

This is not an easy question to answer, and is almost entirely dependent on your experience and disposition.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone feel Product Hunt drifted away? - <AUTHOR>

Product Hunt used to be a place where you would discover cool startup products/projects. Now it seems so random, like the front page is just a bunch of random software's and sites.Does anyone feel the same? Did their mission change from being startup oriented products/projects to just any type of tech? <comment><USER2> I've noticed that the same sites/apps will be submitted several days in a row, which is irritating. And it doesn't help that the comments are so restricted. It's rare that you see anything other than "wow, this is fantastic"-type comments. Not a lot of real discussion happening there, which may or may not be the point.

It used to feel curated, and now it doesn't really feel that way. But maybe I'm just being old and stodgy. :)

<comment><USER3> I did see one comment that made me laugh on Emojis-as-a-Service (which is the epitome of how bad this site has become imo):

\- I find this to be wildly unappealing

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ProductHunt seems like one of those sites that get a lot more press/attention than they deserve. Nobody outside the tech bubble really cares about them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Absolutely. It used to be more signal than noise. It feels like the "growth hacker" community (I used to be one of them btw, so not judging) saw it as some "viral" platform for posting their products. It's a walled garden in terms of submissions too, so when I find something I really think is cool and helpful, I cant even submit it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Something I noticed is that anytime Ryan comments on the product or likes the product, it's usually the most-voted product. It seems to be heavily biased- often times, for two products that do the exact same thing, one gets to the front page and the other doesn't because it has the backing of Ryan or some other big name hunters.

</comment><comment><USER6> I totally agree, trying to be a very closed community never helps!! Now, they even shut down submission for users with no recommendation from one of their elite members!!

</comment><comment><USER7> I think PH as a community has grown - with more users, visibility and products added every day. And that means the only way to keep the community clean is by putting up some walls.

When you throw a few hundred great products, their makers, and thousands of tech enthusiasts into one place, it's not easy to strike a balance between "content policing" and "random garbage". Somebody IS going to be hurt...

Our product was submitted by a user and won well over 100 votes last year ([http://www.producthunt.com/posts/germio](http://www.producthunt.com/posts/germio)) - when it was still way too early for us to even dream of that kind of spotlight. ProductHunt was a great source of feedback and traffic then - as it is now, and I think this is one of the most beautiful tech communities alive today.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would agree, and I would say that there are way too many products on the page daily; it should really be curbed at 10 or perhaps even less. I also feel like there are too many books/guides posted.

<comment><USER9> I think a limit would increase exposure for the featured products, and reduce the fatigue in browsing them each day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yea - unfortunately it seems like only the 'elite' members get a say (and the ability to promote their product continuously).

Unfortunately, I have no idea what criteria they use to determine whether someone is elite or not. I'm one of the first 200 users on the site [1], had my own product submitted to the site (with over 100 upvotes [2]) and I STILL can't comment or submit posts.

[1] [http://www.producthunt.com/@taphangum](http://www.producthunt.com/@taphangum) [2] [http://www.producthunt.com/posts/myapptemplates](http://www.producthunt.com/posts/myapptemplates)

<comment><USER11> Hi, @taphangum! Sorry about that. :( We ask that makers tweet at @producthunt to get access if they can't already comment. My apologies if you already tried that but I've updated your account so you should be able to jump in the thread now.

<comment><USER12> He's not lying. I got the ability to post within hours of my site being posted by just Tweeting it. But the be fair, I also didn't know that's how it worked and had to ask Ryan on Twitter before it happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It used to be a cool site but now the top voted products on any given day are sites that just lists things like free stock photos, free icons etc...

It still has a lot of potential they just have to do a bit of quality control.

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree. I think the biggest issue is the type of audience that visits the site</comment>


IRC is dead, long live IRC - <AUTHOR> http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/04/24/irc-is-dead-long-live-irc/ <comment><USER3> I work at google campus in london, an office for startups. Many weeks ago, somebody suggested on our yammer (business social network) that we should set up an irc channel for the people who work here.

The general response was along the lines of 'that still exists?', 'hey, I heard windows 3.0 is being released', etc.

Shame, because I find irc to still be the best chat I've ever used. Their response was also weird, since, you know, these are tech startups...

<comment><USER4> My company is much smaller than Google but still rather large and almost 100% IT focused. We jokingly setup an internal VPN accessible IRC server a couple years ago to share links and just have a development/sysadmin chat room. As we started using it more we started setting up specific channels for departments like #dev, #ops, #random, #dba. Now we use it for quick communications between departments, trading links, sharing articles from online, discussing technologies in an open forum, discussing infrastructure changes or proposing changes. etc. We recently have actually configured various systems like IDS, syslog, etc. to also dump to dedicated channels and use it as a throw away log dumping medium. Want to keep an eye on the db logs? #dblogs want to see how the live web cluster is doing #weblogs want to see IDS reports in real time #idslogs.

What started as a joke has actually become a staple of company wide team communication and systems monitoring... plus I get to slap coworkers with trouts.

<comment><USER5> I've determined independently that a IRC server fills a sweet spot in the collaborative toolset. A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it doesn't give you a shared history. Email is heavy and induces people to spend too much time per message.

Sometimes it's good to have a light/noisy feed, and IRC is just fine for that job.

<comment><USER6> > _A basic IM system isn't good enough because it doesn't have channels, it > doesn't give you a shared history._

Your shared history vanishes when you're off the network though. Skype has channels, _and_ preserves history, syncing your "rooms" when you log back in.

If it were as easy to pipe machine data (syslog, notices, tweets?) into Skype as it is to pipe it into IRC, it'd be perfect.

<comment><USER7> Eh, that's pretty much what BNCs or tmux/screen is for. The number of hours that I haven't been connected to IRC in the past 10 years is probably low- double digits. (I'm on several networks so a network outage won't knock me off IRC entirely.)

Plus with IRC you have the assurance that it will _never_ go away. Worse case scenario is you just write your own server and do it yourself. There is no RFC for skype though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I started an mIRC script site back in 1997. Young developers would email their scripts to me and I would write a very critical review of them. I did this for many months and the site quickly became one of the top IRC sites online. This momentum has carried the site all the way to 2013. While mIRC script traffic has steadily declined over the years there is still a strong community. We still have members posting mIRC snippets to this day. While I've been working hard to transition the site to more modern development platforms the mIRC posts keep coming. In fact I get a little embarrassed by all the mIRC content on the site. One thing I've noticed is that IRC is and always has been popular among very young developers. Many mIRC scripters are in their teens and some grow up to be professional developers. I've been watching them for 16 years and some come back and reminisce about their old IRC scripting days. IRC has been a major part of my life and has in many ways formed my entire development career.

<comment><USER9> Hey dude! You reviewed an mIRC script I wrote around 1997. It was called DynDNS and it was for updating your IP address with dyn.ml.org, that old service that would give dial up users with changing IP addresses a static DNS CNAME.

You liked it and gave it a positive review, and at 15, that was really huge for me and kept me hungry to keep coding.

So, thanks!

<comment><USER8> Wow, quite a testimony. Thank you! Is this it? <http://www.hawkee.com/view.php?file_id=205>

<comment><USER9> Yup, that's it! Haha, nice find.

<comment><USER8> That's a deprecated page. It says 2003 because I rewrote the site in PHP that year and had no dates associated with the scripts prior to that. The download link doesn't work anymore, but I probably still have the file on the server if you want it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm maybe an exception since I am and have "always" been heavily involved in IRC, but IRC is still a central part of my life. My irssi session is connected to around 120 channels on 16-or-so networks right now.

I've met my fianceé on IRC, got friends for life from all over the world through IRC, got jobs and assignments through IRC and I almost daily solve complex problems with the help of my community and network of friends and contacts through IRC! I've yet to find a tool that comes even remotely close to being as useful for me as IRC.

On QuakeNet we're regularly inviting companies to have developer chats, beta- key giveaways, and we have partnership with events like Dreamhack, for example.

On DALnet we've modernized our webchat (go to <http://www.dal.net> and give it a shot if you don't have an IRC client installed) using qwebirc (originally written for QuakeNet; but a lot of networks have chosen to use it) and also cooperated with mibbit.com and kiwiirc.com for allowing access.

At work I also run a smaller network with around 50 colleagues more or less actively chatting and using it on a daily basis. Digital office landscape working very well for people both at the office, at home or spread out over other cities.

A lot of applications, websites and services would benefit a lot by not having to reinvent the logic of messaging again by simply writing a frontend to an IRC server and have so so so much for free. Either on their own with an IRC server, or by setting it up towards one of our existing networks. If someone is interested to discuss such ideas, please just ask here or privately!

TL;DR: IRC still kicks ass! :)

<comment><USER11> How do you keep up with 120 channels? Doesn't stuff just scroll by? Do you keep logs or is the chat traffic paginated? Or do you just read what's on your screen when you switch to a certain channel? Or what IS your system for keeping up with so many channels?

<comment><USER10> I have a dedicated message window on part of my screen where all private messages aswell as notifications matching my defined hilights end up.

Other than that irssi has a pretty good activity tracker; and combined with a script to allow me to filter out things/channels that I don't want to trigger activity (joins, parts for example, and certain channels I just don't care as much about). On top of this I just have a hotkey bound to "/window goto active" that basically takes you to the windows with the highest activity and the lowest identifier. These ones combined does most of the trick.

But its obvious I can't read and keep active track of 120 channels, often I just briefly glance through things, if someone has lots of activity and/or mentions of me I appear and can keep track. Except that its just manual choice of what channel I want to use at the moment. :)

Not a perfect system, but works for me.

<comment><USER11> @ahnberg Thanks for sharing that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm permanently logged in to over a dozen channels. They're all related to some open-source project or other.

In my experience, IRC today is a godsend if you want to talk to techie types, and largely pointless for anything else.

So it'd be no surprise to me if most of the people reading HN use IRC all the time, whilst the majority of the rest of the world considers it dead (if it's heard of it at all)

</comment><comment><USER13> IRC was, at least for me, one of the main reasons that I pursued tech and started programming at a young age. A friend of mine introduced me to a local Irish group of Linux enthusiasts/sysadmins/engineers who put up with my foolish questions long enough for me to learn something. While some channels are very quiet now I still find it one of the best resources when I'm troubleshooting a problem.

<comment><USER14> If it wasn't for one irc channel, I don't think I would have made it through the first 2 years of programming. Didn't bother them to much (i hope), but just to understand pointers and that at the start, with C, and other things, really helped. 12 years on and wouldn't wanna do anything else.

<comment><USER15> ##C on freenode?

<comment><USER16> For sharpening your axe ##C is amazing, but beginners are regularly mocked and burned at the stake there.

> "How do I allocate a string?"

> "But what is a string?"

> "You know that thing with letters in it. Seriously how do I allocate a > string?"

> "Sorry we don't know what a string is, you'll need to define it for us > first"

> "OK it's a contiguous chunk of bytes in RAM"

> "Sorry C has no concept of bytes or RAM."

That kind of impractical nonsense.

<comment><USER17> In C, there is no stack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are a number of HN people who hang out on #startups on Freenode. It's quite informal, rude at times, and entirely off the record.

Interesting that IRC actually predates the web. I find it very useful at times.

</comment><comment><USER19> This story reminds me of a funny story of how I came to learn Unix and found my future career.

In Fall 1993, I was a freshman at Vanderbilt and I was sitting in a computer lab, working on a CS assignment. There was an upperclassman guy sitting next to me, chatting on IRC. I'd never seen this before but I was intrigued. I was an avid BBSer and FidoNET sysop (LOL) and the idea of pan-Internet chat was fascinating. I asked him how I could use this program and he showed me how to launch the client on our school's VAX system. I was hooked and began to spend my weekday nights at the lab, chatting on IRC.

A month or so later, I got a call from my father and he was pissed. He had gotten a bill from the school for $800 of "computer time". As it turns out, the school gave every student a small amount of CPU time on the CTRVAX system to register for classes and send e-mail. I was a VMS rookie and I wasn't aware that I had to exit the IRC program when I was finished. I'd just been closing the telnet session and that left IRC running, eating up CPU time. It was like a cell phone data plan: you had your quota and everything over that was very expensive. After I got the call from my dad, I went to the people who ran the VAX and begged them for mercy on this bill. They were merciful but suggested that I find another system to IRC from. They suggested the Sun Microsystems desktops in the CS lab. The Suns were great because there was always a wait to get an open PC in this busy lab but the Suns were unpopular and always available. I'd never used SunOS before but some guy in the lab helped me get started with it.

These SPARCstations were very bare-bones. They had the Sun C compiler and of course OpenView but that's about it. I didn't know anything about compiling OSS back in 93 so I used a popular method to get a client installed. There was a server, sci.dixie.edu, that you would telnet to:

% telnet sci.dixie.edu 1 | sh

Yeah, I actually piped the output of a telnet session to sh(1). Unthinkable nowadays but this is how most of us got started. A few minutes of compiling later, I was up and running with a SunOS IRC client. Over time, I learned more about the Sun workstations and eventually because a Sun sysadmin.

I was a steady IRCer (terrapen on EFnet) until around 2003 or so, when the juvenile politics and fighting got to be too much.

</comment><comment><USER20> Everything I know about computers and software is largely due to IRC. This is where I started to love hacking. So many great memories.. mIRC (A popular IRC client on windows) really got me started on programming. I learned "ifs", "for", "functions", "widget dialogs", "@window animations (and a base for game creation!)", "sockets".

I remember once I had built a IRC-server running in my mIRC, with all the robots (registering or protecting a channel) also from my mIRC. And then, on top of that, I had made a custom IRC-client with custom @windows.. We were averaging three users on my server, but oh my, that was cool at that time.

I even remember (I was very young at that time) that internet got shut down.. but I was still connected to my server. And I thought I had found a bug in Internet ;-) Obviously, I was just connected to localhost.. but the "What!!" moment was very funny.

<comment><USER8> I've been running an mIRC script site for 16 years. I wonder if you ever posted. You'd recognize my username if you did.

<comment><USER20> This nickname indeed rings a bell. I remember going mostly on mircscripts.org and scriptsdb.org toward the end of my time on irc. I spent most of my time on a french server and on undernet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> IRC dead? I use it everyday.

IRC and Email is the only sane ways to communicate online at the moment. (In my opinion)

<comment><USER22> Try reading beyond the title?

<comment><USER23> or even reading the title, as typically "___ is dead, long live ___" doesnt mean the ___ is dead

<comment><USER24> Well, it _does_. The second part is implied to refer to a different incarnation of it. Eg the original use "Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!" ("The king is dead, long live the king") refers to the previous king dying and a new one ascending the throne.

As such, I believe the second part of the title refers to an adapting ("new") form of IRC. As mentioned in the article, projects to add video chat support and the likes. The old IRC is dead (well, dying at least by the looks of it), a new adapted version is the future. [According to the article]

<comment><USER25> Ah, thank you! I came into the comments to ask what "X is dead, long live the X" means, but you've saved me some time :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> After googling, IRC is the first place I go to, to ask a question regarding some tool/framework/language/design. Long live Freenode.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's such a terrible protocol and a pain in the ass all the time.

Sadly, there is no other wide-spread protocol with good multi-user chat clients. XMPP might be the best replacement, but there are almost no dedicated multi-user chat clients and irc networks (like freenode) would have to join the two protocols during the transition.

<comment><USER28> Having written an IRC client and several bots, I actually like the simplicity of the protocol.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, the simplicity is a godsend. Lets you pump out a minimally viable client/bot in minutes with whatever language you like, without having to mess around with an existing framework or library.

<comment><USER29> I'll second that. For example, here's a bot that logs every channel you invite it to...in 50 lines of shell. How big would the equivalent XMPP bot be (libraries included)?

<https://github.com/acg/logbot/blob/master/bin/logbot.sh>

<comment><USER7> 50 lines of _clean comprehensible_ shell code even! Written with the traditional code-golfed style of shell scripting I bet you could half that without even trying. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> IRC is still the best chat system. Anyone can get up and running in seconds, there are tons of Web GUIs and its fast as hell.

There are tons of alternatives, but none with the simple ubiquity of IRC.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have to go against the grain of my colleagues here. Our company uses IRC, and I hate it. Our small group, on the other hand, uses primairly Skype, and it works well for us.

IRC fails for me for a few reasons. First, I have to set up a SSH tunnel to use it. It's inconvenient, doesn't always start & restart automatically, but it's required because we want our communications to be private, and we're a distributed company.

Second, I have to set up special configs just to be alerted when my name is brought up. I can't keep up with IRC and actually get any work done, so I have to figure out my current program's implementation of an address book/macros/whatever in order to just be alerted when someone's trying to get my attention. It's also another venue I have to go into and manually mark myself as AFK (something most modern communication programs handle automatically).

Third, its interface is arcane. I never got into IRC when I was younger (and it was in its heyday), and so I don't have the plethora of commands at my fingertips when I want to get something done. Opme? Couldn't tell you how to do that, sorry. I'm sure I could learn, but for something so niche (even within our company), it's not worth the time.

Finally, there are just better programs out there for communicating amongst small (and not so small) groups, that don't require you to idle in a chatroom to ensure you don't loose anything.

[EDIT] As an addendum, there's a lot of mention of IRCs utility in open source. I can't count the number of times I've downloaded software and joined an open source chat with dozens of people in it, just to find out that everyone's idling, and the chances of getting a (useful) response before I could look through the code myself are tiny.

<comment><USER32> I'm sorry to say this, but all issues you describe are instances of PEBKAC.

<comment><USER31> Can you suggest a client which:

1) handles ssh tunnels for me after being configured

2) Automatically handles notifications that I'm being talked to

3) Can retrieve chatlogs from when I'm offline

4) Handles afking automatically

5) Encrypts chats between people

for the mac? It would be really useful.

<comment><USER7> 1-4) Long-running irssi in tmux. Throw a shellscript onto your desktop that pulls up a terminal with ssh, and runs tmux when you click it (should be just 1 line).

5) Use PGP/GPG and email if you don't trust your IRC server. If you do, just use SSL. Since this is presumably an internal server, why wouldn't you trust it? There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if you think you need one you are almost certainly Doing It Wrong(tm).

I don't know any Mac specific clients, not sure why you would want one.

<comment><USER31> > Long-running irssi in tmux. Throw a shellscript onto your desktop that pulls > up a terminal with ssh, and runs tmux when you click it (should be just 1 > line).

Which doesn't resolve issue 1 (since the server is not available outside of 127.0.0.1 on the ssh host), or issue 3 since it can't see what happened when I was offline (though the bouncer idea is a good one, if fundamentally flawed in that it requires its own full time connection to the IRC server). My computer travels with me, and can not maintain a full time connection to the internet.

> There are of course encryption plugins for all the major IRC clients, but if > you think you need one you are almost certainly Doing It Wrong(tm).

Why? Not everyone in the company needs access to client data. Why would I not want encryption options? The marketing folks don't need to know the internal hostnames of a client. The sales folks don't need a copy of customer chats while troubleshooting an issue.

> not sure why you would want one

Seems like a trip into OS holy war territory that I have no desire to get into.

<comment><USER7> Wait... _what?_

You can only access this IRC server from the machine it is running on... but anyone in the company has highly priveleged access to it? But you can't run a client on the machine itself? And why would you be running a BNC locally? Who the hell set this system up, and do they run your mail system like this too?

There are so many PEBKACs here they are hard to count.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Using it daily since 13 years back (half of my life) as the sole medium for communicating with most of my friends. First we had a channel on a public network but now we are on our own server since 4 years back. MSN had a stint as the way of communicating with my less tech savvy friends, it is now replaced by Skype. IRC feels kind of impossible to replace though.

</comment><comment><USER34> "What IRC channels are you on" is a developer interview question here.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is quite interesting. Citing the reasons of the decline of IRC makes it a more attractive prospect if you ask me now. Time to dig out irssi again :)

I was a user of IRC around 1998-2002 (I was a quakenet op) but I got lazy and bored of the politics and switched to MSN messenger which was vastly more popular as well.

The fundamental simplicity of IRC always rocked.

</comment><comment><USER36> Imho it is not that dead at all, I'm surprised how often used it is. For open source support, but also by gamers for games.

</comment><comment><USER37> I really attribute the existence of IRC to what I've been able to achieve in the past few years. Since starting my own network back in 2006 when I was in sixth grade, I've met numerous users who I've been in communication with for years, learned how to setup and manage a Unix server, how to deal with the occasional trolls and denial of service attacks. It even lead to me learning how to code, as I hung out with quite a few devs. In fact, my first online business was a result of some brainstorming on IRC.

Fortunately, for me, most of my friends that I met through IRC are my age (+/- a year or two), which I always found to be pretty neat. The conversation is always active for the most part, and most of the guys are in the US and UK, so it's usually active all day. Over the years, we merged/linked with other networks, welcomed new people, hosted channels for various open-source projects, but just as the article states, usage has definitely declined. I can recall back in 2009-2010 when we had servers in three continents to reduce potential lag when things were really going well. Now, the IRCd hub and services run comfortably on a Linode 512 without links.

Part of the reason I think we're still alive and well is because of the admins (NetAdmins, IRCops, etc). You'll notice that on most networks, admins are arrogant and very strict when it comes to messages per second, or banned words/topics. As long as nothing illegal was being discussed nor transmitted, we don't do anything. In all honestly, I can't recall the last time I used any commands to ban, Gline, Kline, and so on. This is what contributes to a network's longevity.

It's comforting that IRCd(s) are still being actively developed, but I would really love to see its popularity pick back up again. It's really an amazing tool for communication, whether it's used for collaborating with coworkers, discussing open source projects, or even for a casual chat.

If you find yourself looking to connect and need a client, you might want to download Textual (for OS X only, available through the Mac App Store or Github).

</comment><comment><USER38> I am 18 now and have been irc daily for the last two years (mostly open-source dev) i knew about it for a long time but back then was a windows user so couldnt find a good client+ didnt understand the commands. Now i have completely shifted to Linux and cant imagine open source development without irc.

</comment><comment><USER39> I am currently connected to 7 channels on Freenode!

<comment><AUTHOR> I also use a lot of IRC. But it just seems that most of the networks are already rather quiet. Though Freenode, galaxynet and some others, I believe, are still growing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I am surprised not to see mentions of SILC here. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILC_(protocol)>

Especially when running your own server this would be a more secure alternative.

</comment><comment><USER41> here's a question - if I want to setup a company wide IRC server, which (super easy to install) server should I go for ?

Do note that I will be hosting this on EC2, so some semblance of authentication/security would be welcome.

<comment><USER42> First, consider XMPP instead.

<comment><USER43> Or do yourself a favor and don't. For casual group chat IRC blows xmpp out of the water. Every experience I've had with xmpp group chat has been subpar and frustrating.

<comment><USER42> Sure, but if it's company-linked, then you can use it for event alerts, automated contact list sharing when employees come and go, and other interesting features. The popular clients easily integrate with single sign-on type stuff on most platforms. You can point non-technical users at it and they understand. IRC is not like that.

<comment><USER43> Event alerts on IRC? Check.

Popular clients integrate with it? Check.

Single Sign on? Check.

Non-technical user? They sign in, they type, they see what others type. What's not to understand?

The only thing you mentioned that IRC doesn't have is automated contact list sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I use IRC every day, its basically one of the most useful communication mediums for me. IRC will never die, but people will always try to change it and fail; Its best as a simple communications medium.

</comment><comment><USER45> One of the weirdest hold outs of IRC I know about is the collegiate academic competition (or quizbowl) community. Serious quizbowlers across the country still hang out in #quizbowl on Freenode every day, shooting the shit, discussing a novel or philosophical treatise, discussing tournament shortcomings, or just playing a round of the game, shoehorned into the IRC ecosystem. There's a great moment when you think that you buzzed in first, but really a netsplit is about to occur, and the moderator never even noticed you trying!

</comment><comment><USER46> As the article mentions outside of freenode and tech departments / company's who are tech oriented IRC is dead or atleast declining.

Back in the day you could find a server to talk about your favorite band or hobby or tv show. Meet like minded people and make friends.

Today Twitter or Google+ is probably the closest alternative but are lacking the essence of what IRC was.

At scussion.com we are working on building realtime chat to be integrated with these communities (interest based communities).

I would love to just have a hangout to chat about sci if or sport like IRC was back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm also a big fan of IRC; I've probably been on EFnet since ~1993 and met a lot of great people there.

The weird thing for me was seeing how extensively the military uses IRC (for tactical communications relay -- various headquarters use it to relay information about operations, and they run structured channels for different levels of the organization). Sadly, mainly with mIRC as a client.

</comment><comment><USER48> I stopped using irc about 4 years ago, and came back to it a year ago. It's like an old, faithful, trusty friend. That said, it does seem like a lot of people have abandoned it for pastures new, but everything old and boring becomes new and exciting again at some stage so who knows, we might see an resurgence.

</comment><comment><USER49> I stopped using IRC several years ago. There are so many features in a multi- person chat that's lagging behind.

Jabbr (<http://www.jabbr.net>) is a good replacement for IRC, with features such as offline history, and embedded content (for code snippets, etc.)

<comment><USER50> URL doesn't work. Also I consider IRC's decentralized nature to be superior, just as it's simple protocol and established communities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I really would like to find good browser based IRC client that remembers me.

<comment><USER52> Are you aware of <https://irccloud.com/> ?

(some of my friends use it and seem happy with it, I have not tried it myself).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I absolutely love the #Python channel. For that alone I will love IRC.

</comment><comment><USER54> I used IRC for 7 years at my old job, even in an office.

At my new startup we're using www.hipchat.com which is a pretty good replacement (simpler, no IRC server to setup), and its cheap.

</comment><comment><USER55> I hope IRC isn't dead, I'm hoping to productize my replacement for cia.vc ( <http://elfga.com/notify> ) for startups

<comment><USER56> Hey, me too :) <http://n.tkte.ch> | <http://github.com/TkTech/Notifico>.

Care to chat?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I love IRC. I picked it back up after around 9 years of absence and couldn't be happier. If you're interested, you should join freenode #startups, #ventures, #sfhn.

</comment><comment> muuh-gnu IRC died for the same reason Usenet died: some old authoritative farts thumping on some ancient, bizarre rules they set during their youth, some kind of "trve" tech Islam, stopping any kind of progress and scaring away new blood.

They could enforce that kind of bizarro rules during the time IRC and Usenet were the only game in town, but everybody sane jumped off the moment remotely usable alternatives (anything web based like phpbb, _shudder_ ) appeared on the horizon.

So you cant really say that IRC and Usenet died some kind of natural death, they were simply slowly suffocated by the deranged "get off my lawn" incumbents.

<comment><USER58> Well, except IRC isn't dead...

<http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2012>

<comment><USER59> When I click through the years, I see its slow decay.

<comment><USER58> Yes there has been some decay since 1998 (unsurprisingly), but in the past years it's been nowhere near as dramatic as it may seem at a glance - <USER2> charts are just difficult to compare due to the jumping scales and colors.

Freenode, for example, keeps growing steadily since 2007, many of the smaller networks show pretty much a flatline or cross-shift in the same timeframe.

As it stands the networks still serve ~500k daily users; seems a bit early to call it "dead".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I was really into IRC 10 years ago and even though have not really been using it lately, I was about to go back to it. Miss those 'slaps'

</comment><comment><USER61> IRC is the main way I communicate with my friends. I am both an IRC and Freenode lover.

</comment><comment><USER62> i spend years on Quakenet a decade ago when i was still a gamer. Good times :)</comment>


Fossilized Tropical Forest Found – In Arctic Norway - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/52868-fossil-forests-norway.html <comment><USER2> "actually"-department: It's Svalbard / Spitzbergen, islands far north towards the pole. Technically Norway as it's on the Norwegian side of those islands.</comment>


Wikipedia white-washers beware: Virgil Griffith is watching you.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/2008/07/19/security-hackers-internet-tech-cx_ag_0719wikiwatcher_print.html <comment><USER2> >> widespread corporate meddling on Wikipedia

I noticed the opposite flaw on Wikipedia. Why a corporation, organisation or an individual can't legally edit its own wikipedia entry, and why it is called "meddling"?

<comment> dan-kruchinin Agree. Wikipedia's "philosophy" implies neutrality of each article. If someone finds in article some kind of propaganda or any facts that seem to be false, he can easily remove/change doubtful data after checking its origins. But on the other hand when you read some article on wikipedia, you just haven't enough time to verify each origin or even to think about the truth of the article.</comment></comment>


African swine fever keeps spreading in Asia, threatening food security - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/african-swine-fever-keeps-spreading-asia-threatening-food-security <comment><USER2> Arguably the main issue here isn't the swine flu itself specifically, but the fact that currently dominant animal farming practices are fundamentally unsound and are excellent places for pathogens to evolve and spread quickly. Also, while China is particular bad in this respect many of the worst and riskiest animal farming practices are common globally including in Europe and the US. We really need to rethink animal farming if our goal is to have stable meat supplies, but then there are many reasons for that with environmental sustainability being possibly an even more serious related issue.

<comment><USER3> Found this video about China's overuse of antibiotics and how its now kicking them in the butt:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ9bP6wo8rA&list=WL&index=49...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ9bP6wo8rA&list=WL&index=49&t=0s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like an opportunity to shift eating habits towards vegetables/vegetarian if possible?

<comment><USER3> Perhaps if you live in China?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In 2012 there were numerous occasions of swine fever in western Russia. I am not sure if it was the same kind. They also struggled to keep it under control.

</comment><comment><USER6> How can it threatens food security? People are only eating pigs?

<comment><USER3> Pork is the largest amount of meat consumed by the Chinese market.

<comment><USER6> Yeah but there are other forms of food other than meat, so I still don't see how this would threaten "food" security.

<comment><USER3> When you take away about half of the food supply from China, do you suppose a few people are going to go hungry?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to become a 10x data scientist - <AUTHOR> https://www.keboola.com/blog/how-to-be-10x-more-productive-than-the-average-data-scientist <comment><USER2> brother. one more 10x post... I am gonna do a rage rant</comment>


This is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Massage (1967) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL_9JKKj-xE <comment><USER2> So many quotable quotes in this video. Thank you HN'r dang for submitting it.

Marshall McLuhan was the man. I really liked his blend of truth-seeking mixed with his helping attitude. He was completely open, willing to tell anyone his views. A very brave man because he was unafraid to sound foolish. He struck out on his own path and spoke up, even though he suffered from stammering, but he knew enough words and handy phrases to bypass that verbal disability with ease.

I've read McLuhan's corpus, from beginning to end, yet every time I see him speak, his words, so carefully selected, become a revelation once again.

Can we have another McLuhan now, please? For our time? No. There's only one Marshall McLuhan. Just like there's only one genius of every type and age of their time, we'll not see his kind again for a long time. Thank goodness this man was with us, wrote so many books, was not unwilling to be recorded for posterity. A pioneer whose message has yet to be understood.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had never actually seen this video, and when seeing references to it, even as I clicked this link, my eyes always saw "Massage" as "Message".

Silly brain... subconsciously thinking "The Medium is the Message" somehow made more sense as the intended title.

<comment><AUTHOR> You were right the first time. "The medium is the message" was one of the pithy statements from _Understanding Media_ (1964) that made McLuhan's name. The other variants of the phrase are all just plays on the first.

It's typical of McLuhan that he pretended the word "massage" was by design when in fact it had just been a typo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL_9JKKj- xE#t=2m15s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL_9JKKj-xE#t=2m15s).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was introduced to McLuhan after I read Baudrillard's "America". Even though Baudrillard's written off as an obscurantist I still think the essay gives rich descriptions of the otherwise prosaic.

I mean, there's a part where he just talks about American deserts. He goes on to describe a gas station's lights always being on noting the temporariness of buildings like it.

<comment><USER5> Another writer that had a bead on the way we live now was Debord. I think it's absolutely worth thumbing through _The Society of the Spectacle_ [1] just as an exercise in contextualizing the modern life. Different writers/theorists for sure, but worthy of consideration.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here...

<comment><USER7> In case anyone is wondering:

Woody Allen says those words in a movie... and McLuhan shows up: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd very strongly recomment McLuhan's student, Neil Postman, and his books, _Amusing Ourselves to Death_ and _Technopoly_.

[http://www.powells.com/s?author=Neil%20Postman](http://www.powells.com/s?author=Neil%20Postman)

</comment><comment><USER9> I imagine most Canadians will know who Marshall McLuhan is simply because of the [Heritage Minute]([https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage- minutes/mars...](https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage- minutes/marshall-mcluhan?)). People often question government spending money on things like this, but the fact that I, and many Canadians remember it 20 years later tells me it works.

</comment><comment><USER10> On a slightly different note, the musical version is nice too: [https://vimeo.com/8022406](https://vimeo.com/8022406)

</comment><comment><USER11> Terrence McKenna's lecture on McLuhan is also excellent-

[https://youtu.be/9dROH6aOIUc](https://youtu.be/9dROH6aOIUc)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found via [http://dangerousminds.net/comments/this_is_marshall_mcluhan](http://dangerousminds.net/comments/this_is_marshall_mcluhan), which is worth reading for background.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the share. Really appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It is extremely worth pondering the different media we deal in and how they affect our use of them. The tools shape the user.

This is particularly relevant in the age of Medium, Twitter, and reddit. How do you pick apart each medium and understand how it impresses a certain modality of use and thought onto the creator/consumer divide? That is not a small question.

</comment><comment><USER14> Something that really opened my eyes to thinking about the design of everyday things was "Objectified" (2009), a documentary on industrial/product design.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E2D2PaIcI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E2D2PaIcI)

<comment><USER15> Could you expand on why this film came to your mind in this context. I also saw objectified but felt it was, to put lightly, a fluff self-glorification by designers.

<comment><USER14> We are immersed in the various mediums present in our daily life and being aware of the medium itself and what limitations or potentialities are available from that medium will demystify these otherwise mundane ubiquitous things we encounter everywhere.

In the context of "The Medium is the Massage", I brought up (industrial) design because physical products are a major part of our daily lives and I never really gave much thought as to how a tooth brush or a Macbook was developed and built. Yeah Objectified had a fair amount of self-glorification of the designer egos, but before I saw the film I had no real concept of who was behind all the stuff that I use in my daily life.

<comment><USER15> thanks for the clarification. design as a bi-product of human intuition and then an agent for influence back on it. got your point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I absolutely recommend people read the book. It's not a light read, but it's startling how well McLuhan anticipated the internet era.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's a great book, too.

</comment><comment><USER18> Don't underestimate "19th century factory style" school systems. I think it's dangerous how fast rote memorization is put aside, when it's the only reliable means of reproducibly teaching certain topics.

On the other hand, deep learning researchers now make their neural networks memorize and reproduce their input, in order to better understand and deal with the data. There's a lesson to be learned here!

<comment><USER12> You missed his point entirely. It is that a child cannot see the purpose/usefulness of what he/she is learning at school.

Sounds familiar?

<comment><USER18> Why does purpose/usefulness matter? Dumbing down and restricting a curriculum to what is obviously "useful" is equally bad.

<comment><USER12> It matters because if people are not motivated to do something, they will not do it, or best case scenario - slack. This is especially true for kids. The purpose of schools is for kids to learn, not for teachers to teach.

Perhaps we can put more effort into explaining to kids why they need to learn those things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Massage", really?

How could both the video poster and OP mess up this quote?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message)

<comment><USER20> Uh... did you read the article you just linked?

"McLuhan frequently punned on the word 'message', changing it to 'mass age', 'mess age", and 'massage'; a later book, The Medium Is the Massage was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title, which is said to have been a printing error."</comment></comment>


How to Deal with Fear? - <AUTHOR> http://hieunc.saltar.co/how-to-deal-with-fear <comment><USER2> Action is the only way to cure fear. As Nike says "Just Do it"

<comment><USER3> Agree! We fear what we don't know, and action will likely help to learn it. P/s: "Just do it" is my favourite quote</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Coworking Space London (31/7, 1/8) - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
2 of us will be working on our startup in London (online tutoring/education) on the above dates. Does anyone know the best place to find good working space with internet/etc. in London?
Is anyone involved in a start-up that might be interested in having us for a couple days?
I'm sure in future we'll be able to return the favour for others.
Cheers. <comment><USER2> I run Techspace London ([http://techspace.co](http://techspace.co)). We have coworking spaces for tech startups near the Old Street roundabout. Contact me through the website - we can probably accommodate you for a couple of days.

</comment><comment><USER3> Both Google and Mozilla have co-working spaces in London, you might try them:

* [https://www.campuslondon.com/](https://www.campuslondon.com/) * [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contact/spaces/london/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contact/spaces/london/)

There's a variety of other places around, especially in the Old Street/Shoreditch area. I'm sure there's a lot of startups who would be willing to host you too.

Depending on your needs, there's also places like the British Library which have wi-fi and quiet space to work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - I've signed up for Campus London. It looks pretty good. I could not see where to sign up for the Mozilla office space though.

<comment><USER4> Campus london is a good place to hangout, but you need to get there quite early to get a space in the cafe as it gets busy and therefore can also be quite noisy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are also three Impact Hubs, in Westminster, King's Cross and Islington [1].

If you have an eduroam account (most likely by virtue of being a student, not necessarily of a UK uni -- my Warsaw University alumnus account works), then the LSE library is also a very nice place to hang around. Cheap on-site coffee, too. (Edit: probably not good for a startup though as it's harder to talk freely.)

[1]: [http://westminster.impacthub.net](http://westminster.impacthub.net)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am a representative of Wimbletech [http://www.wimbletech.com](http://www.wimbletech.com) a community interest company offering affordable co-working space. We have desks available in our SW19 venue but places are limited. Please send an email to email@example.com for enquiries.

</comment><comment><USER7> You can find a list of coworking spaces in London with reviews on Good Coworking. [https://goodcoworking.com/cities/london](https://goodcoworking.com/cities/london) It also shows you who works from these coworking spaces so you can find spaces with a community that is of interest to you.

</comment><comment><USER8> Campus London has a kind of communal space downstairs but the coworking is through techhub: [http://www.techhub.com/](http://www.techhub.com/) Might help if you are going to be in and around Europe as a few hotdesk options... My fav place to work is Barbican library but not been there in ages.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's also www.jointheofficeclub.com, which is a short train ride (19min) from shoreditch, but very laid back and very friendly. It's also in Peckham, which has loads of fun stuff and good transport links. :) not your usual suggestions, but maybe that's a bonus.

</comment><comment><USER10> WeWork is opening a space in London. Check it out at [http://www.wework.com/location/south- bank/](http://www.wework.com/location/south-bank/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Have a look at Launch Pad Labs, a minute north of Old Street roundabout. Costs range from £0 - £200 dependent on circumstances and time per month. They also offer mentor and financial support.

www.launchpadlabs.co.uk

</comment><comment><USER12> My friends developed this website [http://www.tower10.com/](http://www.tower10.com/) which aggregates coworking spaces and offices in Shoreditch.

</comment><comment><USER13> Come and try Huckletree for a day. I'm community manager there. Happy to help out. [http://www.huckletree.com/](http://www.huckletree.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> There are enough coffee shops around Shoreditch with good. wifi and power sockets.

I'd recommend Guardian Coffee and the Ace Hotel.

</comment><comment><USER15> Timberyard is a great coffee shop near Old Street. It's quite usual to see many people working on laptops there.</comment>