The Silent Majority: Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives - <AUTHOR> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj133828.aspx <comment><USER4> This seems like the thread to confess that I still spend a lot of time developing in VB6, it's open on my screen right now. I do a lot of custom back-end corporate applications and still actively support many I did back in the 90's. One is a tailored project tracking system that manages one of the largest telecoms in North America, client/server, 350 users all day long. It just runs. At the time VB6 was the best way to get them out and if you were careful it was perfectly solid. Fast forward 15 years and here we are, these applications still exist, and until they clear budgets to re-develop them in something more modern, they will continue to be updated.

Now don't get me wrong, everything new is all web based product, but these older apps keep running and we keep updating them. Until they _need_ to be replaced entirely, well, there just isn't a business case for the expense. No doubt it'll happen... I've been mentally preparing clients for years... but most of them dodged expense of a .NET rewrite and will move right into Web apps when that day comes.

<comment><USER5> > _Until they _need_ to be replaced entirely, well, there just isn't a > business case for the expense. No doubt it'll happen..._

Ask those maintaining COBOL applications inherited straight from the 70s :) There are even people selling toolkits to convert 5250/3270 applications to web apps through "terminal scraping" (uuugh). No doubt in 20 years we'll have some equivalent windows+VB monstrosity :)

<comment><USER6> If you run into anyone still doing scaping, you might suggest Microfocus COBOL. It's a lot less painful to recompile for x86 and .NET than it is to deal with terminal scraping.

<comment><USER7> But that only solves the COBOL aspect. There's are many cases in which assembly, FORTRAN and who-knows-what-else is involved.

Terminal scraping is "universal" (it is language agnostic; it's much easier to get a system emulator working perfectly than multiple compilers/language environments).

<comment><USER8> FORTRAN isn't scary. C was designed to be compatible with FORTRAN so it just works in most situations. Most people don't realize that if you declare variables non-extern without a value in different compilation units, they actually have "common" linkage to be compatible with FORTRAN "common" memory.

      a.c: int a;
      $ cc -c -o a.o a.c; nm a.o
      0000000000000004 C _a <-- "common"

      a.c: int a = 1;
      $ cc -c -o a.o a.c; nm a.o
      0000000100001040 D _a

FORTRAN functions can be called from and call into C or C++ (extern "C"'d) without any issue. Simplified example:

      foo.f:SUBROUTINE FOO
      foo.f:CHARACTER*80 LINE
      foo.f:INTEGER*4 NUM
      foo.f:CALL BAR(LINE, NUM)
      foo.f:END
      bar.c:void bar_(const char *line, int *num, int len) {
      bar.c:    /* implicit length for string arguments, values as pointers */
      bar.c:}

      foo.f:SUBROUTINE FOO
      foo.f:END
      bar.c:extern void foo_(void);
      bar.c:void bar(void) { foo_(); }

<comment><USER7> Fortran isn't scary, but porting a system from one architecture to another, when that system includes Fortran, Assembly, Cobol and other parts IS scary, which makes emulation (and terminal scraping) a robust solution, and recompilation/porting an expensive one.

[And Fortran does have scary aspects: from the 25 year old hacker's test: "Did you ever change the value of 4? In a language other than Fortran?" - <USER2> literals in fortran aren't constant!]

<comment><USER8> I haven't seen many cross-platform issues with FORTRAN. (If you redefine 4 on any platform, it will be bad.) IMO, C is much more time consuming to port to a different platform due to system headers and inevitably different system APIs. POSIX helps, but certain parts of the system aren't covered by POSIX and so you wind up with #ifdef platform support where new support needs to be added.

<comment><USER7> > I haven't seen many cross-platform issues with FORTRAN.

Most fortran floating around is cross-platform fortran, and that is quite easy to port. However, legacy systems are usually very much platform dependent. I was once hired to port something in Fortran from a System 3090 (or was it 390? That would be more than 20 years ago now) to an SGI workstation, and it took several weeks of full time work.

And you're ignoring the subject under discussion: Porting a working system comprised of multiple parts in multiple languages (COBOL, Fortran, ASM, REXX, ....) is a much harder than the sum of porting individual programs - which is why emulation + terminal scraping is the cheaper, more robust solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This brings up a very prevalent false dichotomy and some interesting psychological issues that are holding back software development.

The false dichotomy is the idea that you can have either well engineered and powerful systems that are complex and difficult to program, or you can have poorly engineered, simple systems that are easy to program.

There is a conflict here which is a little bit like the inherent opposition of technology and business (most people aren't aware of this issue either, of course, but that's a whole other comment for people to dismiss). The tools which make software development easier and more efficient, both for experienced professionals as well as for beginners, also make software development more accessible, reduce the amount of traditional programming being done and therefore mean it requires less programming skill to accomplish the same thing.

This means that as new, more powerful programming tools appear, you can actually be fairly sure that the programmers who have only used those tools have less experience than programmers who use older, less powerful tools. Even worse, since everyone knows the tools are easier to use, there is a social dynamic and pressure warning programmers off of them: its basically cheating.

Many programmers are still acting like calligraphers in an area where the printing press has just recently been introduced. What self-respecting calligrapher uses a machine to print text? Its not even calligraphy.

I had to stop using Visual Basic anything just because I knew people would judge me as being a lesser programmer if I took advantage of the easier and more productive tool.

Peer pressure, pretty much at the level of 12-year-olds, is the main thing holding back deployment and advancement of technology in all aspects of our 'society'.

<comment><USER10> I argue that Silicon Valley startup culture's existence and profitability disproves the point you're attempting to make here. Haven't we all read pg's "Beating the Averages"? Haven't we all heard a hundred startup founders say "I used the tool that was closest to hand, and customers didn't care what I used as long as my service met their needs"? Haven't we all seen the companies with printing presses handily beating the calligraphers both in the Iron Age assembler-versus-C contest and the modern contest of web startups with FOSS stacks beating companies burdened with compiled languages and expensive licenses?

Peer pressure is certainly not zero - but hackers are pragmatists. If the tool really was easier and made a coder more productive, they'd be making money with it and that would be its reputation right there. The thing you call "cheating" is celebrated and encouraged. Better tools improve the whole community.

>>> " _I had to stop using Visual Basic anything just because I knew people would judge me as being a lesser programmer if I took advantage of the easier and more productive tool._ "

This says far, _far_ more about you than about the people around you.

<comment><USER11> >>> This says far, far more about you than about the people around you.

Not necessarily. In my MS past I also had to defend my VB.Net experience in interviews, being perceived as a low-threshold toy language. And peer pressure matters in your network: how much reach-out would you get, as self described VB wizard or a SQL master?

Fashion rules, as PL topics on HN show regularly. A PL survey [1] was linked from an article some hours ago; it shows interesting answers: just compare the language list of "I know many people who use this language" to "I would use this language on my resumee"

That said, of course you are right: If you stay out of the fashion circuit and produce some value with tools you know, then nothing else matters...

[1] [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/socioplt/viz...](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/socioplt/viz/rank.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a soft spot for VB6 - I learnt to code using VB6 back in school. I had loads of fun building these simple apps that I then distributed to my friends. The highlight was when a magazine (PCQuest? Digit?) distributed one of my apps on their CDs. Ah, those were the days.

I wanted to build GUI apps and wasn't fond of all the C/C++ books I could get my hands on just having console mode apps. People always find it funny that I started writing VB6 code and with every step, always seemed to move down the stack, to writing kernel mode code at one point - people usually move in the other direction.

The non-MSFT world underestimates the power of VB6 (as they do Delphi) - <USER3> could build some really complex apps and by calling Win32 APIs you could do a lot of what pure Win32/MFC got you.

MSFT completely messed up the move to .NET and fundamentally misunderstood what the VB6 devs wanted. I saw them try and correct this for many years internally but it never really worked. VB6 could have become PHP if Microsoft had played their cards correctly.

<comment><USER13> Same here, Visual Basic 6 was my entry point into programming. I had lots of fun coding and was able to learn a lot. Then they brought out VB.NET. It just seemed distant and bloated from VB6. After so many years of not touching VB6, it is interesting to know that windows still supports it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The thing that most people forget about VB6 is that it wasn't the language that made it succesful - it was the tools.

You could create a form in 30 seconds, drag a couple of buttons onto it, and start sticking code behind them.

It was _incredibly_ easy to go from nothing to an app that did something useful and was easy to use.

<comment><USER15> What is the web app equivalent of this? There must be several different companies trying to create a drag and drop web application IDE

<comment><USER16> The closest web app analog is (was) ASP.NET WebForms, which has pretty much been replaced by ASP.NET MVC.

<comment><USER17> WebForms wishes it was VB6, but sadly, the ViewState abstraction leaks complexity like a sieve for any but the most trivial case.

<comment><USER16> I agree wholeheartedly. Almost all of the abstractions in WebForms are leaky, and the think that it's abstracting... HTML, isn't so complex that it benefits from being abstracted.

It was a learning process for all of us :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For those who have never used it, VB6 syntax is actually very similar to Ruby. It uses English language words instead of braces, does not require parentheses, and uses dynamic typing.

VB6 is also quite fast, all things considered, and runs on lots of fairly old hardware.

Don't get me wrong, I'd never choose to use it, but for those who use it day to day it offers overall simplicity and flexibility that few mainstream languages can match.

<comment><USER19> Visual Basic was actually created as a combination of Ruby and Basic.

Not the famous Ruby language though, it came years later ;)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic#History>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The VB6 development environment from the late 90's is still better in some ways than my current development environment (IntelliJ+(JVM|ruby|javascript)).

A small example: in the VB6 debugger, when you hit a breakpoint, you can drag the program counter/execution point around willy-nilly in the method, while changing the code around. No hotswapping, no dropping call frames, no hitting refresh in a browser. Just change the code, drag the PC up a few lines, and step back over it. Amazing.

<comment><USER21> (You can do that in VB.NET and C# today, as long as you're writing a 32-bit application.)

<comment><USER22> There's some changes[1] you can't make in Edit and Continue without a full restart. This has bitten me a bit with NancyFx, as all of your routes are defined as lambdas (thus can't edit anything live).

[1] <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms164927.aspx>

<comment><USER23> IIRC, Edit and Continue in Visual Studio products (I believe it was there in VC++ as well as VB when it was first introduced) was a feature in at least one Lisp version (maybe Franz Lisp or another popular commercial Lisp product at the time) - before it was introduced in VS. I remember this because I had been trying out either or both of those Lisps at the time, and soon after that, I read about the Edit and Continue feature in the next-released VS product. I think I emailed about it to a friend at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Visual Basic 6 first shipped in 1998, so its apps will have at least 24 years of supported lifetime. Contrast that with the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.0 (2002), which is incompatible with Windows 7 (2009)."

Somewhat misleading, as the .NET framework is still supported and will run older binaries.

<comment><USER25> .Net 1.0 code will run quite happily on the latest framework.

We just pulled one of our apps up to .Net 4.0 and it took about 5 minutes. Not a small one either: 350kloc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think its kind of funny that Visual Basic doesn't inspire the kind of hatred that it once did. Now PHP has taken its place. Reading through the comments there seems to be a level of fond remembrance going on. In the past, if you used VB 6 or lesser, you were not seen as a real programmer.

Maybe we will stop the PHP hate as well and move on to a new language to kick around.

<comment><USER27> People have forgotten all the terrible language warts all over VB. (From what little I can recall, the hatred is slowly seething back upward.) PHP might lack any sense of style but it's nowhere near as bad as VB.

Of course, there were a lot of good things about the VB environment, and Microsoft could have straightened-out the syntax without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But the strategy was to legacy the whole heap of VB/COM/etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I started with VB6 Back in 2000. It was easy to pickup as my first programming language was gwbasic/qbasic. I really loved event driven development, IDE and easy Compile and run procedure.

IMO VB.net offers almost everything that VB6 has plus extra features of .net libraries. It can also do project conversion from VB to vb.net (upto extent) but as fellow commenters have mentioned there's cost of jumping from VB to VB.NET based windows app. Therefore VB6 will continue to thrive until corporation justify that cost.

</comment><comment><USER29> This resonates a lot with Spolsky's "How Microsoft Lost the API War": <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html>

</comment><comment><USER30> Dave Platt. The man who predicted the iPhone would be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld. [http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple- iphone-debut-...](http://suckbusters2.blogspot.com/2007/06/apple-iphone-debut- to-flop-product-to.html)

<comment><USER30> Not saying there is anything wrong with this article. I just remembered him for this and thought it was funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hackers who love to learn the latest and use the best often seem to be angered by this kind of thing. But isn't its continued existence evidence of its success? Maybe it's just hard to admit that a language's success doesn't depend solely on its quality.

<comment><USER32> It's not limited to MS either. Running "cc" on a modern linux box still accepts 35+ year old K&R code by default. The bourne shell has been officially standardized since POSIX 25 years ago, and as a practical matter has been backwards compatible much longer than that. Xlib code from 1987 still runs unmodified...

<comment><USER31> Yeah, and I don't actually believe in backward compatibility when it comes to programming languages. If you want forward compatibility, make a good cross compiler from _n_ to _n_ \+ 1. If you want backward compatibility, make one from _n_ \+ 1 to _n_ , if it's reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I spent a lot of time writing VB6... it took many years to get to the same level of just being able to sit down and make something with C++, but i'm happier being on more solid foundations now. I do have some fond memories of it but i don't miss the syntax (feels like a cross between Python and Excel).

Some things i remember about VB6: 50kb binary with a GUI that ran on anything from 95 through 7. Trying to modernise the UI even in the XP era (getting fast images in menu items without owner-drawing the whole thing, getting the default windows font on form controls, vbAccelerator controls, finding the right-looking tab control..). OCX deployment. Manually adding manifests for comctl6. IDE plugins to make DLL and console-mode projects that worked by relinking the compiled binary. Jumping through hoops to handle events for an array of objects. Using CopyMemory() to copy a pointer to a UDT. Not being able to get the AddressOf a class method without some assembly. No threads. Edit & continue becoming unsafe when subclassing your form window without some third-party dll.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Becoming a good Visual Basic 6 programmer took much less time than becoming a good C++ programmer."

I love this line because it implies that you can actually become a good VB6 programmer. Sure, you may not be able to sort a linked list, but you can still learn about encapsulation and ... actually, just start with encapsulation; that's going to make your code SO much easier to read :-)

<comment><USER34> That's probably because a good VB6 programmer would still be a terrible C++ programmer. There are too many ideas VB programmers will never encounter. In order to be a good C++ programmer you'd be a VB god (rolling out your own DLLs and OCXs).

I have done more than my fair share of VB programming from version 2 when it was new up until 98 or so. I even got my MCP certification on VB3... It was the quickest tool to build a Windows application at the time.

In fact, at least here in Brazil, the rise of Windows as a corporate OS coincides with a rapid adoption of VB for in-company development and the fall of Clipper under DOS. I saw it first hand because it happened while I was helping write a huge console-based app in Dataflex. The app is still used by more than a hundred municipalities in Brazil and I learned the master thesis of a colleague was about automatically porting it to something more modern (the project more or less failed).

<comment><USER27> > the rise of Windows as a corporate OS coincides with a rapid adoption of VB > for in-company development

Also true of at least one place in the USA. A few thousand Macs went into the dumpster so they could roll-out shiny new VB client-server applications to replace terminal stuff. (Ironically, they were rolling out Netscape 1.1 at the same time.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Funny that so many posts here are in the past tense. I still write brand new VB6 code every other day and I suspect that there are many thousands like me that have a large and old codebase that needs to be extended because the users keep asking for new features (and couldn't care less about how it is done).

</comment><comment><USER36> VB6 is a nice prototyping/quick app language. It's not suited for every job but you can optimize around many weaknesses and it complemented early ASP projects well.

Microsoft just dropped the ball by making it too hard to upgrade to VB.Net. For some projects, you could port to a different language for the same effort.

</comment><comment><USER25> We're still running vb6 code inside COM on win2k3. It's ugly but it works (just about)

</comment><comment><USER37> I've been trying to find a way to put in proper words why PHP is still this big in webdev and this article just gave me the explanation I was looking for all this time.

</comment><comment><USER38> Delphi is also still widely deployed in the enterprise world.

</comment><comment><USER39> I learned to program in c, then one time when i had this project to work in VB6, i am really impressived by how easy it is to put something on the screen. syntax check is very useful for beginners. and the UI is clean, no unnecessary parts. vb6 community loves sharing code and it is very easy to use other people's code too. no compiler hell to deal with.

a really great piece of work.

</comment><comment><USER40> Silverlight is the next VB6

</comment><comment><USER41> I do wish the silent majority would shut up occasionally. You hear them on the telly all the time, and read about them in print. Going on and on and on about how no-one ever hears them or allows them any airtime.</comment>


Live Google event about Google Buzz - tomh- http://www.youtube.com/feb0910googleevent

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahhh, so _this_ is why I couldn't make a 'buzz' label.

</comment><comment> tomh- This sounds exactly like Google Wave but better..

Update: they brilliantly integrated the product into another product millions of people are already using.

<comment><USER2> It's like Wave, but comprehendible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1.The permanent link to your message has your email id in it. Don't like that very much.

2\. More like friendfeed than twitter with the ability to comment on statuses.

3\. Seems like there is no character limitation.

4\. Gmail loves adding people to contact list. I do not want to add the email ids of people I follow (outside my social circle) to my contact list. Not yet sure how it works in that case.

</comment><comment><USER4> So, you can post automatically-geotagged status updates or links from within GMail, the Google mobile web site, and the Google Maps application for Symbian/WinMo/Android. The updates can have rich text, embedded images, threaded replies - closer to FriendFeed or Facebook than Twitter.

You automatically "follow" your Google Chat/GMail contacts, and you can make each post public or friends-only. You can also browse "nearby" buzz from strangers, by location.

They're saying that it will have open data / open APIs, and can aggregate your data from external services like Twitter and Flickr. They mention related standards that Google is promoting like PubSubHubbub, WebFinger, and Salmon.

</comment><comment><USER5> So they want to duplicate what Facebook does? Great for them, I suppose, but why would I as a user go to it? Any feature they add, FB can add. And FB already has the graph I want.

<comment><USER6> Well, they already have Google profiles. This Buzz thing just sounds like extra features on top of Google profiles. In fact, I posted on Facebook yesterday about how I was sick of it and did anyone want to join me on Google profiles. No one did, and mostly people hadn't heard of it. But I definitely see the appeal of attaching everything to my e-mail address.

Also, a great deal of the appeal of Facebook, for me, is as an address book. But all the people I contact are in my GMail contacts list, and it's annoying to manually enter in things like their phone number or address. Now with Google profiles I won't have to look that stuff up on Facebook, because it should be in their Google profile.

<comment><USER7> Attaching everything to my email address would be great if I could just change my primary gmail username. I'm a bit fed up of it now. I have secondary accounts (which are painful enough to manage in the light of Buzz etc), but I don't want to lose access to 7 years of email and contacts either. The only solution I can think of is setting up a new address and a forwarder...

<comment><USER8> If you have a some patience, you can copy all of your mail through IMAP. You can also export your contacts and filters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now the event is focusing on 'noise' over social networks, and they say they managed to some how, "solve it".

Update: They named it "Google Buzz", "A google aproach to sharing"

<comment><USER10> In light of your comment, I find the name very amusing. ;-)

<comment><USER11> I cannot be the only one who sees this name and thinks: 60hz.

<comment><USER12> Google Groundloop?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> \- now I know why they wanted to buy Yelp

\- the three big issues of twitter - noise, spam, and who to follow may be solved

\- I wonder if it overcomes the problem of FB - one way follows - you want to follow someone you've never sent an email

<comment><USER14> The "follow" model is the most broken of Google's social stuff. Most of the people I have sent or received email from are not people I want social updates from.

<comment><USER7> Agreed in a social context; in a business context, though, short status updates from the people I email most (and higher ups) are very very useful...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> here's what I'd like to see:

\-- Buzz interdependent with Gmail, with its own domain. (like with YouTube)

\-- I can delete my Gmail account without losing my buzz account

\-- I can link 1 or more Gmail accounts, but don't have to

\-- interdependent reviews site eg Google Local, on its own domain, populated with Buzz content and vice versa.

\-- third party ecosystem around Buzz

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd rather have one place to do all this stuff in. Having Facebook, Twitter and this seems like overkill. I guess I better hope everyone finally figures out which one they prefer :)

<comment><USER16> I'd rather have all of these things be interoperable, so I don't have to start using TheNextBigThing when everyone gets tired of Facebook.

Just think if email worked like social networks; I'd have to log into hotmail to send messages to firstname.lastname@example.com and yahoo to send anything to email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> They're saying something about standards compliance. Keep talking, please.

<comment><USER17> Feeds available as XML.

<comment><USER18> Is it 1999 already?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> facebook and twitter had a baby in gmail's bed.</comment>


Why the Scroll Event Change in iOS 8 Is a Big Deal - <AUTHOR> http://developer.telerik.com/featured/scroll-event-change-ios-8-big-deal/

<comment><USER2> Worth noting that this article is from 2014.</comment>


Keynes foresaw the chaos that would follow from the Versailles peace treaty - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/07/opinion/keynes-economic-consequences-peace.html <comment><USER2> > _The book was also wildly controversial for its assessments of the capacity > of Germany to pay the reparations demanded by the victorious Allied powers._

I don't think it's helpful for a review to make these kind of oblique references. It would be more helpful to tell the reader what that assessment _was_. I won't attribute intent to the author, but it _comes across_ as though the review is only intended to be read by people who have already read the book.

<comment><USER3> It's an opinion piece, not a white paper. Take what's useful to you and dive deeper to see if you agree with the author's conclusions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an excellent review. It's always amazing to me how some people seem to get the big picture right. Also, it's clear that the Americans learned from Versailles and did far better at reconstruction after WW II.</comment>


CGAL – Computational Geometry Algorithms Library - <AUTHOR> https://www.cgal.org/ <comment><USER2> libigl also has some wrappers around cgal.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is used by OpenSCAD for building meshes from boolean operations. It's awesome, but a bit slow if you do anything complex.

</comment><comment><USER4> It was a while ago now, but managed to get a Javascript build of this going with Emscripten: [https://github.com/marcosscriven/cgaljs](https://github.com/marcosscriven/cgaljs)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've used CGAL extensively in the past and found the implemented algorithms to be of fantastic quality. The major pain points for me were also the really sub-par Python bindings. Which are actually worse now, since they've switched over to SWIG from Boost.Python.

If anyone ever needs Python bindings for CGAL that make sense, check my little pet project out: [https://github.com/wolfv/pygal](https://github.com/wolfv/pygal) :)

</comment><comment><USER6> My experience with CGAL is that it's slow, clunky and very difficult to work with. I understand that it's the 'gold standard' of libraries but for the purpose I was using it for (2d polygon boolean operations, polygon offsetting), I found ClipperLib [1] to be far superior in terms of ease of use, stability and execution speed. There's even a JavaScript port of ClipperLib [2]. I highly recommend ClipperLib to anyone that only needs simple 2d polygon manipulation.

[1] [http://angusj.com/delphi/clipper.php](http://angusj.com/delphi/clipper.php) [2] [https://sourceforge.net/p/jsclipper/wiki/documentation/](https://sourceforge.net/p/jsclipper/wiki/documentation/)

<comment><USER7> > My experience with CGAL is that it's slow, clunky and very difficult to work > with.

I can't comment on the slowness and clunkyness, but in my very limited experience with CGAL I also felt it was needlessly difficult to work with.

Perhaps investing some work in the documentation would help shed this idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Python bindings for CGAL -- no subsitute for reading through the C code (or implementing your own crude algorithms)

[https://github.com/sciencectn/cgal- bindings](https://github.com/sciencectn/cgal-bindings)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is anyone working on Rust bindings?

<comment><USER10> I doubt it. The library seems very happy to exploit whatever C++ features are available, especially templates, to the point where I wonder how easy it would be to use from a language where templates are even slightly different compared to how C++ does it. Could you port the STL to Rust? I don't know Rust, so I can't answer that. But if not, then there's not much hope of CGAL bindings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the golden standard for geometric libraries. If you are building a geometric library and want to scale it up to enterprise levels you cannot do better than starting from this. It's built by a consortium of universities who have contributed many many years of research in computational geometry to its codebase. It solves edge cases that GEOS/JTS have not come close to solving.

If you need something to just do calculations for display on a Leaflet map, PostGIS/JTS/GEOS/Turf.js will do just fine. If you want to build something that needs to be rock solid, lightning fast, and 100% accurate in all cases, use this library.

<comment><USER12> Isn't CGAL a dependency for PostGIS? When would you choose to use CGAL directly rather than something built on top of it (e.g. PostGIS or pgrouting)?

My use case is mostly for routing and I'm currently using a heavily modified version of OSRM. If there's potential for even more speedup I'd appreciate any resources ou can point me towards.

<comment><USER13> You might be thinking of GDAL.

<comment><USER14> CGAL too, in the form of SFCGAL, that implements simple features on top of CGAL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My experiences with CGAL:

1\. Everything under the sun is implemented!

2\. Horrible build system, giant dependency (worse than Boost here)... I wish they had gone header only like Eigen or ViennaCL.

3\. Ugly license. Essentially a no-go everywhere I've worked, although still fine for academic projects.

<comment><USER16> How is dual licence ugly? It's not expensive for commercial use.

<comment><USER17> It's quite expensive, especially if you only need one feature from one package that depends on multiple other GPL packages (which is most of them). Everything included we got quoted over $25K for a feature which was decidedly non-trivial, but the cost was still well above the "let's license it instead of re-implementing ourselves" threshold.

<comment><USER18> Considering

[http://www.cgal.org/exact.html](http://www.cgal.org/exact.html)

I dare to say that 25K is not that much; if you had to do it yourself, it'd be probably very expensive (of course, I don't know how good you are :-) but you see what I mean).

(and yes, I did 2 years of R&D on quad trees with polygon intersections and "exact computation" is super tough to achieve, you need lots of testing)

<comment><USER17> For the application we were considering and the algorithms we liked from CGAL, exact computation wasn't really an issue. I agree 25K is peanuts if the choice is between developing yourself from scratch or licensing something from CGAL. But in our case the choice was between CGAL, using a simpler and possibly less advanced/less accurate solution, or using an alternative LGPL package. Especially considering the many dependencies most CGAL packages have on other packages, the value proposition for just using a small part of the library for a single algorithm quickly becomes a hard sell...

<comment><USER19> > For the application we were considering and the algorithms we liked from > CGAL, exact computation wasn't really an issue.

So it sounds more like you weren't trying to buy the right tool for the job.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook close to naming Sun Microsystems campus as new headquarters. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/01/facebook-headquarters-sun/

<comment><USER2> Ouch, Sun Quentin... That will be a hellish experience for people used to the previous locations. A startup I worked for was a couple of blocks away from there on Willow and the area is a vast wasteland. Good for Facebook in some ways though, since people will have a strong disincentive to leave the campus: there is nothing in the immediate area so you have to drive anywhere you might go, and it is located at a choke-point in a major commuter route so if you leave the office after 3pm the traffic will prevent you from returning before 5pm even if you just bounce to the old Facebook office and back.

<comment><USER3> I have worked in downtown Palo Alto and at "Sun Quentin" in Menlo Park.

I liked both locations very much. If you have ever lived in the desert and liked it, you might like what we used to call "New Menlo". I can see how others might be horrified at the idea of working in such an austere landscape.

Downtown PA is a popular after-work destination. The burden of work can seem very light when you can hear groups of people laughing as they walk by during lunch or in the evening. The parking and traffic are a tolerable hassle. The city of Palo Alto has done a nice job of providing parking over the years.

The Sun offices out on the edge of the bay were unlike many others that I have worked in. Although there were cubicles in odd corners, more than 95% of my building was subdivided into high-quality office space with doors that closed (and locked!). The views, the site arrangement, and the good offices felt right for sustained, intense concentration.

The neighborhood surrounding the Sun campus on the land side alternates between post-WWII low income housing and warehousing or light industrial parks. It's fairly bleak.

I would not hesitate to walk a few miles after work in downtown PA. The network of trails on the bay levees are a wonderful place to run or ride a bike. I always liked to take short walks out there in the daytime or early evening.

On the land side of New Menlo, I never walked beyond the edge of the parking lot. I didn't know anyone else who did either. In that regard, the place is indeed a prison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm interested in the HN feedback on this. Almost everyone agrees that when you have a small team startup that working together in an office is important. Then at some point it goes from everyone together as a good idea into a "corporate campus" and it seems a lot of people think the "corporate campus" is an evil bad idea. Is it really more about the company attitude than location?

<comment><AUTHOR> I`m actually curious as to what the campus looks like myself (interior). I have been searching for images with no avail. If anyone finds anything, link me?

<comment><USER5> I used to work on this campus in 1997. It kinda reminded me of an apartment complex in that there is a large open areas surrounded by free-standing buildings. At the time, there was a dry cleaners drop off, at least one small restaurant and an exercise facility. There's also a trail that rings the entire campus. In the building I had access to, the outer walls were built out with small offices that would fit 1-4 people and the middle part of the buildings had reception desks and labs. Everything was taupe and tan with the medium purple Sun color in contrast. The offices have nice large windows looking over the parking lot and the marshes beyond. There was plenty of nice break space, and I remember being surprised to find a room designated for women to pump breastmilk. But then, there were a lot of women on that campus.

ETA: if you click on the map link in the article and zoom in, you'll get a pretty good look. The building off to the left side of the picture that is most separate from the rest was the exercise facility. The building in the upper right is the one I worked in.

<comment><USER6> Did you feel like there wasn't enough outdoor space?

Comparing this (via aerial imagery) to working on the Microsoft campus in the late 90s, it seems like Sun campus is mostly indoors, as opposed to the "college" feel of Microsoft or Google.

I would think that Facebook would want to emulate Google's campuses more, with a larger number of smaller buildings to promote a more collegiate atmosphere. But this is all based on four 45-degree aerial shots, so I'm curious what your thoughts are on the place.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't seem like Facebook has much choice, really. Even Google had to take over an existing campus (SGI) that fit their requirements. Can you imagine the expense of building a completely new campus in Silicon Valley?

Apple's been planning to build a new campus for _years_. Even they had to buy an existing property (HP's old campus), and reportedly are planning to build an entirely new campus on the same land.

As successful and rich as Facebook is, they aren't Apple-rich. They probably aren't even Apple-picky about what their new campus is like--not that they don't _care_ , but it's hard to imagine anyone else having the same level of perfectionism as Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there any better metaphor for creative destruction than this? Google bought SGI's campus just as SGI died, and now Facebook is scavenging Sun's campus. The new rising from the ashes of the old, and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER8> Geez, it seems like just the other day they moved from downtown Palo Alto to that giant office way out past California Ave.

</comment><comment><USER9> The old Build vs. Buy dilemma

Facebook == Buy

Apple == Build

Apple is building a new campus, "City of Apple". Famed architect, Norman Foster, is designing it.

[http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/06/acclaimed_arch...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/06/acclaimed_architect_norman_foster_to_build_apples_new_campus.html)

<comment><USER7> Even they had to buy another company's old campus--even though they're rich and perfectionist enough to tear it down and build a new one on top of it. It doesn't sound like there's much room to develop new real estate in Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER10> Plenty of room here. It just depends where you want to be. For our last office space it was a choice between individual offices for everyone, but the 'wrong' side of the 101 in Menlo Park, vs desks in downtown PA. Downtown PA was very much a unanimous decision.</comment></comment></comment>


Writing correct code, part 3: preconditions and postconditions - <AUTHOR> http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/30/writing-correct-code-part-3-preconditions-and-postconditions-binary-search-part-4c/

<comment><USER2> A coworker and I were talking about this today. We think preconditions, invariants, and postconditions are less intuitive than recursion and base cases. We are aware that recursions and iterations are dual, we just seem to like the recursions better.</comment>


The American Concordes that never flew - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160321-the-american-concordes-that-never-flew <comment><USER2> The 2707 was the reason behind the naming of the Seattle Supersonics, and the cancellation of the project led to Boeing laying off 60000 people, leading to the famous "will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the light" sign. Wikipedia says the full scale mock-up is currently being restored at the Museum of Flight, I'll be in line to see it when it's ready.

<comment><USER3> The 2707's cancellation being the reason for Boeing laying of 60,000 people is a huge exaggeration. There was a general downturn in ALL airliner sales at that point in time in the 1970s, affecting the volume of existing subsonic airplane production.

[http://old.seattletimes.com/special/centennial/november/ligh...](http://old.seattletimes.com/special/centennial/november/lights_out.html)

Read more history about the 1970s oil/energy crisis.

<comment><USER2> The SST contract was cancelled in March, and the sign went up in April 1971, the same month that Boeing's workforce reached the nadir of 38,690. The energy crisis didn't really bite until 1973. [0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis#/media/Fil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_energy_crisis#/media/File:Nominalrealoilprices1968-2006.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember as a kid in the 70's having a book from Scholastic that had all the fantastic SSTs and vacuum, magnetic trains that would get us across the world in record time. It was amazing all the speculation about that and how little speculation there was about computers.

<comment><USER5> Those were the Usborne books, right? They were great. I had two or three of them and spent hours reading and re-reading them. When Hyperloop was announced, I'd assumed that it was that in-vacuum maglev train you mentioned finally getting built. :-)

<comment><USER6> I remember reading about bullet trains and supersonic jets in this one: [http://www.amazon.com/First-Questions-About-Transport- Faulkn...](http://www.amazon.com/First-Questions-About-Transport- Faulkner/dp/0340329041?tag=duckduckgo-d-20). Recently moved back to my home state and am thoroughly enjoying the slow process of stealing all my childhood books from my parents house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Obligatory recap of the same piece of history by Maciej Ceglowski (0:58 ~ 9:50 ) [https://youtu.be/nwhZ3KEqUlw?t=59](https://youtu.be/nwhZ3KEqUlw?t=59)

</comment><comment><USER8> Another unexpected irony due to the supersonic jet. Boeing had put their A engineers on the supersonic jet project while B engineers worked on 747.

Today there are documentaries celebrating the PM and engineers of 747. None for the cancelled project.

<comment><USER9> So you're a hot shit engineer and you come into work for the Monday meeting where the PM goes, "we've got 2 projects coming up: one is a supersonic jet, the other is an extra wide passenger jet that kinda resembles a whale." Somehow I don't see the best engineers, overwhelmingly, volunteering for the later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apparently, there is a Denver startup with a Mach 2.2 that wants to make American Concord a reality. [http://boom.aero](http://boom.aero) HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11329286)

</comment><comment><USER11> The SST project has another interesting legacy: the Space Shuttle.

Quite a few sources say that the reason Nixon approved the Space Shuttle was to appease voters who had been negatively impacted by the cancellation of the Boeing SST project.

</comment><comment><USER12> Isn't there some jet or jet like propulsion engine that was developed in the UK a couple years ago that may offer far more efficient and even harder thrust that could revive high speed air travel?

Is that what that boom.aero post was about? Sorry, I wasn't able to read into it.

Either way, when these things come up, I am always curious what happened to the realization that air travel is a multitude worse than any other type of air pollution because it essentially directly delivers harmful particles right into the highest strata of our atmosphere. Is that no longer a concern with the jet-setting, globe trotting liberals? Or is it too inconvenient to their lifestyle and therefore will simply be ignored? Or maybe scientists were totally wrong about fundamental research?

<comment><USER13> > I am always curious what happened to the realization that air travel is a > multitude worse than any other type of air pollution because it essentially > directly delivers harmful particles right into the highest strata of our > atmosphere. Is that no longer a concern with the jet-setting, globe trotting > liberals?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviation#Total_climate_effects)

"The IPCC has estimated that aviation is responsible for around 3.5% of anthropogenic climate change, a figure which includes both CO2 and non-CO2 induced effects. The IPCC has produced scenarios estimating what this figure could be in 2050. The central case estimate is that aviation's contribution could grow to 5% of the total contribution by 2050 if action is not taken to tackle these emissions, though the highest scenario is 15%."

So, it's a concern, but far from the largest. There have been pretty significant advances in fuel efficiency, lighter aircraft, stuffing more people into a single plane, etc.

<comment><USER12> I think the question is the proportionality, i.e., is that 3.5 or 5% impact a disproportionate one. The absolute percentages of even just 3.5% means nothing without seeing it in relative terms. If that 3.5% is caused by 0.0001% of activity then that seems rather significant. I don't see air travel being anything even remotely close to 3.5% of all human climate affecting activity so it strikes me that it really is actually a rather significant matter.</comment></comment></comment>


Heavy Dropbox and Email user? - <AUTHOR>

We are looking for feedback for a new personal assistant concept. You can sign up at www.sweetj.co. All we ask is your feedback. <comment><USER2> [http://sweetj.co](http://sweetj.co) clickable

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sweet Jane is an email personal assistant for sending and get files to and from Dropbox

</comment><comment><USER3> What does sweetj do for me?

</comment><comment><USER4> Inresting....will try it</comment>


Ask HN: What are the NEW hot topics for 2017? - <AUTHOR> Last year was all about AI, self-driven cars and VR. Is there any new trendy topic coming up in 2017 on top of the existing ones? <comment><USER2> Immigration ban probably.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually 2012 stuff...

[https://blueseed.com](https://blueseed.com)</comment></comment>


The New Yorker, or how *not* to set up a paywall - <AUTHOR> http://floodmagazine.com/2010/10/19/the-new-yorker-or-how-not-to-set-up-a-paywall-part-1/

<comment><USER2> Line 762;

lbl_txt+=' We apologize for any confusion and are working to streamline the process. Learn more here.)
';

I don't get it.</comment>


Why is it only enterprise or consumer internet story?  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bubbleideas.com/2012/07/2000-signups-per-day-but-confused.html

<comment><USER2> One thing that I've seen is that the English used on the Pricing page [1] needs some work, phrases like "^40 Team Size" don't mean anything to me or to enterprise buyers.

And the answer to the "Are there any discounts?" question is just plain odd.

If you're looking to sell to corporations, you're going to need to polish the pages they read more, or have an absolutely amazing product that they'll sign up to anyway.

Other than that though, I don't think 700 free accounts to 1 paying account is that bad - the real questions seem to be can you afford to run the website at that ratio of free to paying accounts, and can you convert a percentage of your free users into paying enterprise accounts?

[1] - <https://bubbleideas.com/plans>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, EwanToo we've received a ton of feedback on this. We'll update our app before day-break tomorrow. So you mean to say the language on the enterprise pages would be affecting the current sign-up rate.

I agree, so perhaps a little more time to experiment with better iteration.

[Edited for spellings]

<comment><USER2> I think it would affect sign ups, yeah - business buyers are generally very conservative, the bigger the company, the more conservative they become.

Selling to big companies generally means you have to behave in a very dry, almost dull manner yourselves, though there are a few exceptions to the rule.

Take a look at the Google Enterprise website [1], it's very different from a normal Google product page, with statements like "Maximize website ROI and internal productivity with Google-powered search for your website or intranet."

[1] - <http://www.google.com/enterprise/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well, it's hard to say. Do you have funding for a year or two?

With the consumer model, acquiring users is easier and monetization is difficult. With an enterprise model, getting users may be easy or difficult (depending on the product and target customers) but at least there is a plan in place for monetization.

However, the focus should first be on building a product which users like. Once you have users, things like funding or enterprise customers will start falling in place for you. So the answer really depends on your target customers, and the length of your runway.

</comment><comment> avlesh-singh It is a classic dilemma early stage companies face. I have seen a whole lot of founders stuck with this question. I am not trying to influence your decision here, but the ones that succeeded, did so by having a very clear cut focus. You either build a consumer internet company or an enterprise internet company. Trying to do both at the same time takes your focus away. I'd say stick to one.

<comment><AUTHOR> "You either build a consumer internet company or an enterprise internet company." This is true, and thus responses from current layer of mentors/experts tend to tilt towards it. But what about companies like Paypal or Dropbox who have done/are doing both consumers and enterprise face simultaneously? Like I am sure that ours is a consumer app with an enterprise use-case - so why shouldn't I be pushing it as a complete thing, and not just a consumer app? I have this karma thing going on in my mind.

<comment><USER2> Dropbox sell to some enterprises, but nothing like Box.com does, that's the difference in focus.

Both companies do almost exactly the same thing, but Dropbox is focused on end users, and Box.com sells to enterprises.

Take a look at the box.com user list - there's all sorts of massive organisations on it <https://www.box.com/customers/></comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb Files to Raise $850M at $30B Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-05/airbnb-files-to-raise-850-million-at-30-billion-valuation <comment><USER3> Not the first time this has been remarked here, but wow at these companies just continuing to raise more and more money over and over. When does it stop?

I mean, I don't fault Tesla because I know exactly what they're doing: enormous capital expenditures like factories and stores.

What does a website platform need _$850 million more for_?

<comment><USER4> Lobbying, I would assume. Airbnb has met a lot of legal opposition lately. They are dealing with regulations in jurisdictions all over the world. I guess that takes a lot of cash.

<comment><USER5> Google in total spends $16M in the US for lobbyists in the US and they want self driving car litigation. This seems like it would be used for more than lobbying .

<comment><USER6> No, _they 'd like_ self driving car litigation.

Airbnb _needs_ liberal rent-out-your-home litigation

<comment><USER7> rent-out-your-apartment* litigation. Afaik the only case where people have issues with AirBNB is in buildings with shared entrances/hallways.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely not the case.

Here in Australia city and state hospitality organisations are very vocal in opposition to airbnb. The usual argument is why should they be paying to meet licensing/safety requirements when airbnb hosts can rent out their home without regulation. I'd guess 90%+ of these premises are standalone homes.

In my city the local council just announced plans to limit a property to 42 nights of airbnb per year, or face significant fines. Not sure it'll stick.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, didn't know that. Speaking from my own experience living in cities like Philly and NYC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm late to the party, but here's what bothers me about Airbnb: It's being treated like a technology company and not what it is, a retail company. Which is bad because wall street hates retail, but not as much as venture capital hates retail. And when people are delusion thats when mistakes are made.

Look at this way, Airbnb is a broker for rental inventory that __they never own or control __. Since they don 't actually control the inventory, the owner of the inventory is free to take it anywhere they want. Airbnb has no secret sauce.

This leaves Airbnb's business totally unprotected and vulnerable to an unlimited number of competitors coming up. Eventually Airbnb will make a mistake, maybe they'll push hosts too far, maybe some catastrophic thing will happen to a guest, the point is something will happen that will shift favor to a competitor. Maybe not tomorrow or next year, but someday.

But it gets worse, Airbnb is going to spend a lot of their vc funds fighting lawsuits, lobbying, and paving the way for their __competitors __. If I were to compete with Airbnb, I 'd spend my time building a better platform and marketing strategy. Then wait for Airbnb to solve short-term rental legislation, then slip into those markets with a far lower cost to entry than Airbnb paid.

But what about technology you say? They've built a great platform that will take time for a competitor to replicate you say. Well if your business defense is solely based on having a complicated website, you're going to have a bad time.

They've hit on a great idea: home sharing. But they don't own the idea, they don't own the homes and those homes are free to list anywhere they want.

<comment><USER10> There is an entire blog dedicated to the topic of tech at Airbnb: [http://nerds.airbnb.com/](http://nerds.airbnb.com/). Perhaps you will still feel the same after reading this?

Peter Thiel's Zero To One described four pillars that were necessary for a monopoly. It appears Airbnb has most if not all of these.

1\. Network effects - this is usually more important than proprietary tech. They have this - global network effect. This is not a "retail company" any more than Amazon's 3rd party marketplace or Alibaba's is.

2\. Tech - read blog and decide for yourself. It's easy to imagine at sub- scale also being able to build Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Most of the challenges come at scale (and are protected by #1 above).

3\. Brand - the commenters seem to agree they have this.

4\. Economies of scale - they have this.

<comment><USER11> Why does everyone think that a competitor must be able to operate at the scale of Uber/Airbnb the day it's released? How many taxi commissions thought "oh no one can dethrone us, no one has 10,000 cars!"

<comment><USER12> Because I travel to paris one week and new york the other and seattle the other. If the listings aren't at all those places I discard the app and never use it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Correct me if I am wrong, but the infusions of cash into startups of this scale are probably historically unprecedented. If this is true, then nobody really knows what the outcome of this is going to be for the companies that appear sound: AirBnB, Uber, as well as for the whole Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. It may well destroy it for good.

<comment><USER14> Investors are not blindly giving these companies cash (insert tired Theranos joke here). They see far more information we do, and they do more due diligence than most investors do in publicly traded companies, including (and especially) during the first dot-com bubble. That ended rather catastrophically, and Silicon Valley was never in danger of being "destroyed for good."

<comment><USER13> Fundamentally, the underlying inspiration for these huge infusions is debt. On the microeconomic scale, it will take a long time for Airbnb to generate $3.5bn in profit, that has already been put into it. On the macro scale, tens of trillions of US debt make zero interest rates possible, which in turn creates a lot of fake money looking for returns on investment.

<comment><USER14> Fundamentally, the underlying inspiration is the growth of these companies. The fact that interest rates are so low, and that investors are chasing yield elsewhere, helps to enable it. However, these deals would still happen even if debt were more expensive. On the other hand, if the company weren't showing promising growth, then the deals would not happen.

<comment><USER13> Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's not that they need the money so much as investors want a piece of the pie, so why not? Going public just introduces a lot of paperwork and red tape. Uber is following the same path.

<comment><USER16> Ah, the IPO standoff: [http://avc.com/2016/04/the-ipo- standoff/](http://avc.com/2016/04/the-ipo-standoff/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Airbnb recently announced they have a hardware and software design lab... Maybe they're planning to introduce new strands to the business and that's what this money is for? [http://www.fastcodesign.com/3062246/an-exclusive- look-at-air...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/3062246/an-exclusive-look-at- airbnbs-first-foray-into-urban-planning)

</comment><comment><USER18> Airbnb might be trying to take on the entire travel industry. It's not that insane to raise this much capital if they wanted to try their hand at EXPE or HST's market.

<comment><USER19> It does seem insane to invest at a notional valuation of double Expedia's market cap (or nearly four times Sabre's) to try to build a business that can compete with them though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like that the article says that Airbnb has showed restraint by ONLY raising $3.2 billion dollars.

</comment><comment><USER21> Airbnb is currently under intense scrutiny in Vancouver as the city is struggling with a 0.6% (!!) vacancy rate. Some studies have suggested that around 70% of Airbnb Vancouver revenue comes from commercial operators that permanently rent out their condo units as a sort of hotel[1]. The city is studying the issue and seems in my opinion quite keen and ready to take action to end these sort of wholly commercially Airbnb operations. Airbnb would likely only be allowed for casual, infrequent renting.

Cities love to copy one another. Going forward it seems likely that if Vancouver is able to end extensive commercial renting on Airbnb, other cities would adopt the same approach.

If commercial operations are as important to Airbnb's revenue as these studies suggest, this would be a very significant change for the company. They'd have to grow quite a bit to make up for this.

[1] [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british- columbia/vancouv...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british- columbia/vancouvers-top-airbnb-earners-are-commercial-hosts- research/article30324477/)

</comment><comment><USER22> For a company to be worth $30B* it must either be making a lot of money or have extremely high probability of extremely high future earnings. Given that, if they need cash, why not just take a loan? Both lenders and investors suffer risk of default/company blows up, but only investors suffer a risk of "company is worth a lot, just not as much as we thought." Given that, investors should demand higher returns. So a company worth $30B should surely prefer to take loans rather than issuing equity, right?

Apparently not - what am I missing?

* I'm not convinced, but for the sake of argument...

<comment><USER23> You should consider that:

a) The company can always go tits up at any moment without prior warning, however unlikely it appears to be now. A loan will always be riskier for the founders (personal liability) even if they are printing money right now.

b) Investors want a shot at making 10x or 100x, even if that means a lot more risk. Handing a loan is safer, but you only get to make 1.4x at best; that's not the game they want to play.

<comment><USER24> > A loan will always be riskier for the founders (personal liability)

Can you explain? I thought that a major advantage of incorporation (rather than a sole proprietorship or parternship) was that corporate debts are separated from personal debts, so the investors (including founders) would only be liable for money actually invested in the company.

<comment><USER23> That's typically the case, but if you take a business loan from an old school bank, the bank will usually ask the founders to sign with personal liability on top, regardless the company status. It's a different kind of deal because with a loan the bank doesn't get to own a share of the company, so their profits depend exclusively on the company not going out of business until the loan + interest are paid out.

<comment><USER24> But surely this must depend on the size of the business?

I could imagine this happening when Uncle Enzo wants to open a little pizzaria as a retirement hobby/business, but there's no way Eric Schmidt and Larry Page are on the hook when Google wants to finance something.

Also wouldn't the bank end up owning a share of the company (or the company's stuff) if they did default?

<comment><USER23> Sure, my experience is that a bank will always ask for some sort of security with old fashioned loans, but I can't pretend I know what kind of deals would a billion dollar company get. But even if personal liability isn't on the line, things like having the bank seize your assets if you can't repay would still be an undesirable liability.

As for the bank owning shares, sure if you default they'll take over whatever they can get, as far as the contract goes, but it's not the same kind of deal. VCs or angels effectively buy shares to sell them later at a higher price, whereas the bank is just lending money and hoping to see it back with interests; the bank may take over ownership of the company if it goes bankrupt but it's not like they'd be able to sell it for much profit, if any at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hunkering down for those fines, I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting that this $30B valuation is only 25% higher than last year's reported valuation of $24B, whereas the year before their valuation leaped up from $10B.

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secret-math-of- airbnbs-24-bi...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secret-math-of- airbnbs-24-billion-valuation-1434568517)

I wonder how revenue growth has been this year. Perhaps it has slowed down further, given the relatively modest increase in valuation.

</comment><comment><USER27> Raise anticipating a downturn ... @pmarca and @bhorowitz have advocated for such. So, this plan makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm curious, what are the costs of running a company like airbnb? I'm still curious about what they need money for. Are they just hiring every programmer they can find? Are there a lot of customer service hotline calls?

It seems like it's a golden egg goose.

</comment><comment><USER29> Maybe they'll buy a stake in Tentrr.

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

<comment><USER30> The Sharing Economy finally pimps out natural splendor herself

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> During the hypergrowth years, frugality is not rewarded, the only KPI that matters is growth, i am sure there is a lot of growth but - for now - <USER2> cares?

</comment><comment><USER32> Can anyone explain why Airbnb's iOS app is 158mb? That's the same size as Pokemon Go.

</comment><comment><USER33> That sounds reasonable, although, shouldnt at this stage airbnb be earning a profit?

<comment><USER34> You don't want to earn a profit. You want to lose as much money as possible. The more money you lose the better. Earning profit implies that you already matured and stopped growing and the amount of profit will always be disappointing, lowering the value of the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> They'll be hitting severe scaling issues soon as they run out of good clients.

Hipsters and millenials are great customers, they're honest, trustworthy, logical, reasonable, friendly, loose with their cash, and easily verified. Everyone else not so much.

<comment><USER36> My 50-something year-old parents use Airbnb. So no.

<comment><USER37> Same thing here from the seller side.

Got a friend running some Bed and Breakfast hosting in the French countryside. The typical 50 year old that I'd hardly imagine selling on AirBnB (can he even use a computer ?).

It turns out that he puts his listing on AirBnb and it's actually bringing in customers.

<comment><USER38> The thing is that people have been running small inns/B&B's (and renting vacation homes) forever as something between a formal business and some money on the side. There were online listing services before AirBnB and paper listings in various tourist catalogs before that.

AirBnB is just another listing service in that context. Today, if you run any sort of bed and breakfast and can't deal with computer listings, online reservations, etc. you're at an enormous disadvantage compared to your competition. I know that if I can't immediately check availability online and have to email--or heaven forbid call--I'm much less likely to book your property.

What's mostly different about AirBnB is a lot of the quasi-legal rental of properties that aren't really B&Bs or vacation properties.

<comment><USER37> It's not just yet another listing. Nor it is about quasi-legal rental.

For the user, it allows to find room by location, enter in contact, book and prepay in a convenient way that is unprecedented.

For the hosting, it allows to easily rent, accept the money and reply to people.

There were simply no service that allowed to neither buy nor sell that easily before.

It had the side effect of attracting a lot of "black market" operations onto it but that doesn't make it about black market (even though it did play a role in the growth). AirBnB is about providing a great service to both buyer and seller.

(Anyway, there's always been a HUGE black market for property rental. The incentive to declare are not worth it. AirBnB barely make the issue more visible.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So AirBnB is worth 4x WYN?

That doesn't make sense to me

<comment><USER40> Larger than Hilton [https://www.nyse.com/quote/XNYS:HLT](https://www.nyse.com/quote/XNYS:HLT)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Maybe they can use some of this money to find the negative review I just posted. After many successful airbnb experiences my wife and I recently had a bad one. I wondered why the host had all great reviews. Then I found out why. Although my negative review shows up on my personal page it does not show up on the host's page or the house's. Even after waiting several days. Maybe this was a fluke but it appears Airbnb is suppressing negative reviews. Anyone else experience this?

<comment><USER42> Are you sure the host wrote a review of you? If not, your review will not appear.

Airbnb has really good customer service, in my experience. You could contact them. Airbnb doesn't want crappy hosts either!

[https://www.guesty.com/blog/host-guide-to-airbnb-review- syst...](https://www.guesty.com/blog/host-guide-to-airbnb-review-system/)

<comment><USER41> Yes they did. I even got an email from Airbnb saying that both our reviews were now public.

<comment><USER42> Bizarre. You should definitely contact Airbnb.

I am concerned that the popularity of Airbnb can damage the service. Craigslist was safe and trustworthy for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why do they need 1.6B + 850M?! Its literally just an app.

<comment><USER42> No. There is a lot going on behind the scenes.

I didn't know that they have their own photographers until one came to my house.</comment></comment>


There are no acceptable ads - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fivefilters.org/post/140558352082/there-are-no-acceptable-ads <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11233016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11233016)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait, I'm really confused. They took this quote: "A big part of the web is paid by ads. Lots of websites rely on (non-invasive) ads to sustain themselves and provide content to anyone for free." and literally only addressed the "non-invasive" part.

1\. Obviously other people out there don't agree that all advertising is "invasive", and their assertion otherwise is nothing but semantics.

2\. More importantly, the core part of the statement is that "A big part of the web is paid by ads." and they seem to have _completely_ ignored this fundamental issue. But instead they just transition from painting advertising as some malicious evil into various ad blockers.

So what is the solution they are proposing? Most of the internet is paid for by ads. Are people going to switch to a paid version of Facebook? Twitter? Is everyone expected to get Youtube Red? And are we only supposed to look at the few news sources that we can justify the subscription cost for?

All they are advocating is to just piggy-back off of the people that are willing (or unaware of the alternatives) to deal with ads while blocking it for yourself. This is not a solution, this is just taking advantage of a technical loophole in advertising in order to make your own experience better. How exactly do they envision an Internet without advertising?

<comment><USER4> Isn't non-invasive advertising just non-functional advertising? As soon as advertising is noticed it has distracted from the content.

The solution they seem to propose is: block ads and see what happens. I don't think one must propose a specific solution in order to advocate ad-blocking.

Regarding piggy-backing they seem to be trying to spread the word to everyone to do the same as they do. I think they want to see advertising go away, and piggy-backing off people who are unaware of ad-blocking is not going to lead to that end result.

Personally I block ads and have no solution or alternative for them. I even dislike billboards and physical ads in my town. They make the place ugly.

<comment><USER3> >Regarding piggy-backing they seem to be trying to spread the word to everyone to do the same as they do. I think they want to see advertising go away, and piggy-backing off people who are unaware of ad-blocking is not going to lead to that end result.

So how do they expect the Internet to exist afterwards?

<comment><USER4> They don't know. They just don't want ads to exist on whatever the Internet looks like in the future.

I believe that if you eliminated ads the Internet would be better for it. Advertising is just so backwards and nonsensical. It is analogous to screaming for attention in an overcrowded market. To think that our future Internet is stuck _with this_ is a depressing thought.

Personally I'm okay with the following forms of advertising and would like to see them more widely adopted:

Podcast-style ads: getting the narrators and writers of a podcast to promote your product in an amusing way _consistent with the theme of their show_ and in a way the user can skip if desired. (Same applies to YouTube video creators advertising within their show.)

Affiliate links: sites like The Wirecutter doing all the research and leg-work on a product category to find the best. Then making money through affiliate links to those products.

Small ads that have been vetted by the writer of the article / website are okay too. If I enjoy reading an author's content, and that author has personally approved a product ad on their site because they like it or think it would be good for their readers, then I'm okay with that.

Basically, any advertising that is explicitly acknowledged and approved of by the content creators is okay with me. It means they know what their readers will see, they know whether the products are good, and if they start recommending shitty products then they are putting their own reputation on the line.

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically what you say is that online advertising networks are ruining user experience and you should not rely on a third party to provide ads to your website.

There's a couple guy who thought along these lines when time came when costs of running their website grew and investors required ROI and that's how google got into the advertising business. They kinda invented the acceptable online ads and transitioned from being a search engine to being an advertising company specialized into acceptable ads then came the tracking invisibly turning acceptable into unacceptable.

What I'm trying to say is that explicitly acknowledging and approving do not scale well. As operation scales up it becomes a time-consuming and tedious process which wears you rather quickly. To be viable long term, the website has to keep a low resources consumption and not draw too much traffic, If your website suddenly gets hugely popular it will cost you money, possibly a lot. Maybe we need to changer how those who owns the internet infrastructure charge for using it so as to avoid this.

<comment><USER4> > What I'm trying to say is that explicitly acknowledging and approving do not > scale well.

Why do we need to scale? Many authors are self-hosting and self-publishing. I love reading, but I don't wan't my favourite content to be aggregated by some huge service which sells ads on-top of it indiscriminately.

I'm sure there are hosting services which will handle traffic spikes and charge accordingly.

I'm not advocating for no large services on the web. Obviously infrastructure- heavy services will be large (AWS, Google Search, Netflix, and so on). But two of those examples charge directly, and Google Search ads aren't particularly bad because they show up during a search and not on top of content that I want to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate this shit. Between adblocking and piracy, people are just going to push publishers into a new form of advertising where they don't even know they are being advertised to. This is going to mean more "sponsored posts" on sites you love and less authentic content. Its going to mean your favorite movies crammed with product placement ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4) ). Its going to mean a distrust of anything you see on the web much greater than exists today. Its going to mean every product review you read about will be 90% about the affiliate payment they get and 10% because of the product itself.

Ads suck, I agree. I think the major complaint is malware- But that doesnt explain blocking google adsense, which doesnt allow offsite javascript, or facebook ads, or other 'trusted' ad networks. People just remove those ads because "Fuck ads" \- Well, thats fine. But those decisions will obviously not just be candidly ignored- Publishers and content producers will react and find new ways to generate revenue where they lost it.

<comment><USER6> > I hate this shit. Between adblocking and piracy, people are just going to > push publishers into a new form of advertising where they don't even know > they are being advertised to. This is going to mean more "sponsored posts" > on sites you love and less authentic content. Its going to mean your > favorite movies crammed with product placement ( > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4) > ). Its going to mean a distrust of anything you see on the web much greater > than exists today. Its going to mean every product review you read about > will be 90% about the affiliate payment they get and 10% because of the > product itself.

If this'd happen en masse this allows competition in the market of reviewers, news sites, and social network sites. It also allows for fact checking (which perhaps even gets automated). The model which works is akin to seed fund, or open source development by contract. There'd be say a review in the make of a product X. In order for it to be made, Y USD is required. This is then gathered via crowd funding. Then those who paid get early access, week later its in the public domain. The model isn't even new. LWN uses it, to name an example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And yet this company's blog post has two ads blocked by AdBlock and runs Disqus as its comment section which is a web-wide data collector and ad service.

<comment><USER8> Which probably means are they are being pretty brutally honest as they are attacking their very own business model.

<comment><USER9> There is a spectrum, for people with a certain belief, between 'hypocrisy' and 'principled', which describes how much their actions are in conflict with that belief.

There is a conservation of expected probability thing happening here, so if 'hypocrisy' is more trustworthy than not knowing how someone acts, then 'principled' must be less trustworthy.

But if you said someone was obviously being dishonest because their actions match their words, you'd make no sense.

I am almost completely certain your statement is similarly absurd.

<comment><USER10> Sure, maybe they're untrustworthy, but we don't need to trust them to believe what they say in this case. We can evaluate what they say independently of their trustworthiness, using logic and experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > 'Non-invasive advertising' is an oxymoron. Truly non-invasive advertising > would be no advertising at all.

You can't be taken seriously if your argument is to loudly change all the definitions to fit your worldview. Show me a better world that _actually works_.

<comment><USER10> But that's not what he's doing. The entire purpose of advertising is to put ideas in your head--that's invasive. That's not changing the definitions of words, that's what those words mean in common parlance.

<comment><USER12> That's also the purpose of an editorial.

<comment><USER13> The purpose of all communication really.

<comment><USER10> But I seek out communication with people whose ideas I care about. That's very different from having someone shove their self-serving ideas in front of me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What happened with the idea that ads were a means you had to get to know useful products?

If all ads were banned forever from existence, how would anyone discover anything new?

<comment><USER15> When I have a need, I go looking for it, and I find it. I want that part of my life to be strictly pull, no push. Advertising is one of the things I hate most about the commercial world.

<comment><USER16> What do you pull on?

<comment><USER10> People with expertise in the area, ideally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The elephant in the room: a large majority of sites just don't have good enough content to support themselves through reasonable advertising.

Too many have it 180 degrees reversed: instead of trying to support their content with advertising income they are trying to supporting their advertising income with content.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Some people commented that they don't mind ads, but object to the spying, > malware, intrusive stuff that is often hard to control when the site > publishing the ads isn't in control of who produces and serves the ads. > That's a very good argument in itself for blocking ads. But even if that > were dealt with tomorrow—if we got ads that didn't spy on us, didn't > introduce malware into our machines, weren't 'obnoxious'—we'd still be > blocking them. Why? Because we're not interested in being advertised to. > It's that simple.

> We have a visceral dislike of advertising. We don't think there's such a > thing as a 'good' or even 'acceptable' ad.

Yes. This cannot be repeated enough.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why don't ad based agencies allow users to opt out at 2x whatever they would have earned from the ads?

Seems to benefit all involved, the content providers get the money, the users who are willing to pay a few $0.01 don't see ads, and the ad agency makes more money. Doubly so because the remaining ads will be worth more.

</comment><comment><USER20> A slightly naive message. Until more than half of the users become willing to pay for information, this will never be viable.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure what you mean by "this will never be viable". If you mean that many content providers' businesses will never be viable without ads, good. Content providers that serve advertisers rather than their users _should_ go out of business. That would be a great benefit to humanity if content was geared toward the needs of humans rather than companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really, really wish that uBlock origin had a Safari version.

<comment><USER22> It does

[http://imgur.com/a/pJ0TY](http://imgur.com/a/pJ0TY)

Available under "Installation" [https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock](https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/ublock)

<comment><USER21> No, it doesn't. That's "ublock" and not "uBlock Origin." They are not the same, and uBlock is not even being developed anymore.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/4bbuf3/whats_the_bes...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/4bbuf3/whats_the_best_osx_safari_adblocking_option_now/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I use uBlock origin, the problem is I don't like tone of your article. Advertising is site owner's decision. If you don't like it than don't visit that site. So go and fuck yourself :)

<comment><USER10> Everything anyone does is their decision. That doesn't put them above criticism. Lots of people make shitty decisions.

<comment><USER23> Advertising is regular part of site content owner decided to show you. What comes next? Blockin unwanted article content on someone's blog? It's not criticism it's fascism. Do you like ads on the street? Are you destroying them? Not? Why? Aha you can't you don't have balls to do it :)

<comment><USER24> The ads on the street haven't teleported into my private property, so I can't do much about them.

The web content that my browser fetches and displays is a different matter, obviously.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I Don't Use a Static Site Generator - <AUTHOR> https://kevq.uk/why-i-dont-use-a-static-site-generator/ <comment><USER2> Kinda surprised that the only options mentioned are "Wordpress" or "ssh into server and use vim".

Surely there are more options? For example both github and gitlab allow file editing right from the browser. Set up your server once so it polls github for changes every 10 minutes and you don't need terminal anymore.

There are also self hodted online editors. And auto-export from things like evernote/simplenote.

I am sure there lots of ways to solve this, and still have all the nice things statics sites have like git history and easy backups.</comment>


Is Magento Worth Revisiting? - <AUTHOR> https://content.nanobox.io/is-magento-worth-revisiting/ <comment><USER2> I don't mean to be controversial here, but I really don't think so. If you're a quality engineer, you should stay away from Magento at all cost. I recently tried to download M2 and take it for a spin. It's very apparent they haven't learned. As an example, Magento still requires flock as a form of application- level locking (ie: the locking semantics of the application depend on a file- system behavior that is often unavailable on network filesystems). The filesystem must be writable for Magento to work at all. The engineering team completely ignores the realities of running Magento on a multi-node setup, or in a cloud environment. Not that a 12-factor app is the end-all specification, but it seems like the engineering team doesn't even understand the challenges of running in a cloud environment at all. This is very discouraging to me. In the beginning, I had very high hopes for Magento and I devoted thousands of hours and dozens of modules back to the community. Sad.

<comment><USER3> It seems like making your platform easy to run in the cloud is kind of important these days.

I used Magento for a store several years ago, but dropped it after running into problem after problem. Looks like it's still not time to come back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What are some good alternatives?</comment>


Facebook raises minimum pay for contractors to $15 per hour - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/14/us-facebook-wages-contractors-idUSKBN0NZ00C20150514

<comment><USER2> If you work four jobs like that you might be able to live in Fresno and commute on the back of a pick up truck to San Jose.

<comment><USER3> Your comment was initially amusing, but then I did the math and realized how little $15/hour actually is. If someone were able to work the equivalent of full-time, they'd make what? 15 * 40 * 52 = 31,200? Where could you live anywhere near a Facebook office on that? Seattle? Definitely nowhere convenient to their bay area HQ.

<comment><USER4> Definitely not Seattle.

<comment><USER5> Definitely yes in Seattle. 33% of 31k is 10.3k, divided by 12 is $861 month for what you should pay for rent. (I can't remember if this number should include utilities, but yeah.)

Just padmap 850/month. You can even get within walking distance. [http://www.padmapper.com/#](http://www.padmapper.com/#) A lot of these listings include rooms within an apartment/house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real issue isn't wages - it's cost of living. If we really want to make people's lives better, we need to address whatever causes prices to increase (limited housing supply is probably the biggest culprit).

<comment><USER7> I was under the impression is was foreign demand for high yield real estate investment vehicles?

I don't know a lot about real estate though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those wondering what this means, it means that a Facebook contractor would still be in the lowest quarter of income earners in Santa Clara County [1]. As such, one would qualify for rental assistance, etc from the county, as the going rate for a /studio/ is $1200/month [2]. The inflated wages of the tech industry have placed an unbearable burden on the average person.

[1] [http://www.hacsc.org/section-8-housing-programs/waiting- list...](http://www.hacsc.org/section-8-housing-programs/waiting-lists- applicants/income-limits/)

[2] [http://www.hacsc.org/section-8-housing-programs/housing- choi...](http://www.hacsc.org/section-8-housing-programs/housing-choice- voucher-current-participants/voucher-payment-standard-fmr-utility-allowance/)

<comment><USER9> 'Lowest quarter' is a huge range. I don't think it's scandalous that Facebook pays it's lowest skilled workers in the lowest quarter of wages.

If I looked at actual pay and actual expenses I might agree, but lowest quarter isn't a good argument to make.

<comment><USER8> The links have the pay and average expenses in them. Average pay for a studio is $1200/month, way out of the range a facebook contractor could afford.

<comment><USER9> Yeah but your headline was 'lowest quarter' as if that said it all.

It's like those people who say it's a scandal that half the population earn below the average wage.

Why would you expect someone who earns below average to be able to afford an average apartment? Do you know what average means and how averages work?

<comment><USER8> I expect them to be able to afford /an/ apartment, which they cannot. Do a search on craigslist for apartments under $833, which is a third of their monthly income, and tell me how many apartments you see. Facebook's wage means their contractors are still essentially in poverty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Key point here... It would be interesting to see if they have anyone making less than that currently.

<comment><USER11> >>>Contractors will also receive...a $4,000 new child benefit for parents who do not receive parental leave

Contractors definitely did not receive that before...So that's another key point

<comment><USER10> I like that one :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow. It boggles my mind that any contractor working for Facebook would be making anything near that low.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good for them! I like it.

</comment><comment><USER14> A really bold and fair move would be to pay them comparable to their developers and other staff. Of course not going to happen anytime soon.

<comment><USER9> Why is that fair? They don't have the same education (in general), they aren't doing the same job, they don't contribute the same value, etc etc etc.

<comment><USER14> Why should a developer working 40 hours a week earn more than say someone cleaning toilets 40 hours a week? Both are investing 40 hours of their time, both add value worth 40 hours of work. Actually cleaning toilets seems a way less pleasant job and should be paid better. On the other hand the developer spend more time in education not getting paid and has to recapture this investment. They would probably not end up with the exact same wages but I see no justification for enormous differences.

The supply and demand situation is of course very different allowing developers to ask for high wages and on the other hand allows forcing the toilet cleaner to work for a low wage but this does by no means make this fair.

<comment><USER15> Because one skill takes vastly more investment to perform and it also is able to be performed by far fewer individuals (meaning competition for those that do exist).

<comment><USER14> As I said it is of course totally okay to get back the investment you made with your longer education. But the difference over the lifetime between being a developer and a toilet cleaner is way larger than that. Your second points is just exploiting the supply and demand situation - you can ask for a higher wage if your skill is rare but it does not mean you deserve it.

<comment><USER15> Why do you deserve to get back the investment made on the education? Is 'deserving' an oracle, where you stick in some action and it arbitrarily assigns the conclusion of 'does' or 'doesn't'?

<comment><USER14> Let's ignore supply and demand for the moment. What would be a fair wage? I argue it would be fair to get paid as much as you invest, an hour of work is an hour of work, in first approximation no matter what you do. Pretending to work obviously doesn't count, you really have to work as good as you can. If you do a hard job, say risking your health in a mine, you should get paid better because of that. There should also be some gradient to account for skill and experience compared with others doing the same or similar work. And if you spend several years at university to obtain the skills required for the job this is an upfront investment that has to be paid back by the wage or their might be a lack of incentives to go down this road.

In essence it really boils down to you invest an hour of your lifetime - working or upfront to get prepared for the job - and you get paid for that hour, what exactly you do does not matter much modulo some adjustments for especially risky or unpleasant jobs.

<comment><USER15> That is like saying that the gold watch should cost the same as the gold plated watch, which shouldn't depend upon the supply and demand of the materials it is made out of. Also, considering most digital goods can be copied in mere seconds, it would appear that they should be priced at $0.01. As for food, beef that is 30% fat should cost just as much as beef that is 3% fat.

And heaven forbid we apply this to relationships. If you are looking for a one night stand and spend the required hours, then you must get a one night stand. The supply and demand of your particular looks/social skills aren't factored in, only the time you invested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe min. pay is supposed to be an entry level work. Duration will probably get you either directly hired or later laid off.

If that is the situation, why would you pay more than $15/hr.

Also, I wish there was a context of this "minimum pay" policy.

</comment><comment><USER17> One would be forgiven to think a company like Facebook, with a market cap of 224.82B, would pay a little more?

<comment><USER18> Why would market cap have anything to do with it? Walmart has a larger market cap than Facebook ($239B) and pays $9 / hour to its workers [1].

[1]: [http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/19/news/companies/walmart- wages...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/19/news/companies/walmart-wages/)

<comment><USER19> Walmart also makes significantly less per worker than Facebook.

<comment><USER20> Thus proving the point about market cap...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Indonesian minister calls on rich to marry poor to cut country's poverty rate - <AUTHOR> https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-rich-should-marry-poor-reduce-poverty-minister-12453842 <comment><USER2> The obvious problem is that there are a lot more poor people than there are rich people.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sweet idea. The government could provide a tax relief for the rich who do so.

</comment><comment><USER4> An interesting idea. Perhaps one for Western countries to consider.

<comment><USER5> This used to be more common. With the rise of (or rise of awareness of) divorces where the guy gets fleeced, it's becoming less common.

It used to be, it didn't matter so much if she made 1/4 of what he did. Now, many guys won't do that because they know if they divorced, he'll have to support her at the new higher standard of living.

Income opportunities have equalized a lot in the last few decades. Divorce laws still usually treat women as helpless victims, especially if there are children involved.

Either party can be a victim. When a true look at the behavior of the participants becomes the norm, this may change again.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Rachel – virtual assistant who can remind anything you tell her - <AUTHOR> http://telegram.me/rachel_bot

<comment><USER2> It's a handy tool. I'm surprised by how smart the bot is to parse my command.</comment>


GoDaddy shared servers compromised – .htaccess redirection to sokoloperkovuskeci - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/09/godaddy-shared-servers-compromised-htaccess-redirection-to-sokoloperkovuskeci-com.html

<comment><USER2> I've been getting a ton of people signing up for my GoDaddy hosted WordPress blog the last couple of days. All the email addresses were things like email@example.com.

Usually I get 2 or 3 signups a month. The last 2 days I've gotten 10 to 15 a day.

I've kept my WordPress install up to date though and I don't appear to be compromised. I wonder if that was part of the attack.

<comment><USER3> This was probably not part of the attack. The attack simply redirects incoming requests to another site. If your site was affected, you wouldn't have had any sign ups because your site would have been redirecting to the bogus site before it even reaches your page.

<comment><USER2> I was thinking more of something like someone was attempting to exploit a vulnerability in the signup form.

<comment><USER4> I just saw this exact conversation a month ago.

Serious Deja Vu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone commented on the posted article that the compromise seems to be from Godaddy itself. What I'm thinking is someone used a vulnerable 3rd party script hosted on a shared server, then somehow got root or escalated privileges and compromised all or most of the sites hosted on the shared server. If the issue was Godaddy itself being hacked, I would assume it would affect all servers, not just the shared one(s).

<comment><USER6> If somebody managed to compromise other customer's accounts via one shared hosting account, even if it is limited to a single server, then I would consider this as Godaddy being hacked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does GoDaddy use Fantastico? I know we recently patched our servers for <http://www.1337day.com/exploits/16512>

Not sure if GoDaddy did (or needs to) do the same.

<comment><USER8> I don't think so, they use their own system branded the "hosting connection." It could just be fantastico with their own skin thrown on, I suppose, but it looks like their own thing to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good thing we have these stories once a week to remind us not to use GoDaddy. Maybe people will start listening.

<comment><USER10> I thought GoDaddy commercials were enough to make people not want to use GoDaddy.</comment></comment>


Samsung Now Charging Apple 20% More for iPhone Processors - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailytech.com/Report+Samsung+Now+Charging+Apple+20+More+for+iPhone+Processors/article29166.htm <comment><USER2> already debunked</comment>