How developers and tech founders can turn their ideas into UI design - <AUTHOR> https://www.simonmccade.com/blog/how-developers-and-tech-founders-can-turn-their-ideas-into-ui-design <comment><USER2> This is a surprisingly good article. As a product designer of 10+ years (having worked at Facebook, Atlassian, and now Lyft), I would recommend anyone outside of the design field to read this.

It provides a much crisper picture of what modern designers workflow looks like than other resources.

Typically when these types of guidance are shared they're littered with more harmful advice than good. For example: "Look at what other apps are doing and copy it!" Except what another product is doing may not work for your product. The design of a final product isn't just the result of visual decisions, it's also driven by things like: business objectives, budgets, team size, time constraints, tech capabilities, target market size and demographics, etc.

So to have the article call attention to things like Dribbble being home to designs that are primarily "conceptual as opposed to the finished product when it comes to real applications" was refreshing.

Great read!

<comment><USER3> "Look at what other apps are doing and copy it!" doesn't work but "Look at what other apps are doing, understand it and see what you can copy or adapt" works really well.

<comment><USER2> Yes!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a creative Director at UI/UX design firm [http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro) \- I'd like to highly recommend founders to build their first version on intuition. The best way to design a solid UI & UX is not from scratch, rather from a foundational prototype or v1 that's being used by actual users. We found that the best products we helped design (where the design significantly helped the business move forward) was where the founders had a working prototype and user data to form the basis of crafting a simpler and more user friendly product.

<comment><USER5> thanks, this was a very helpful comment.

As an engineer-founder trying to build a first prototype app, i've been conscious about not diving into building too fast, trying to get some of the design right upfront. This has meant doing user-interviews to understand people's problems in the area i'm working on, and doing some paper prototypes.

I was debating what is the best form to get the next round of feedback: wireframe the whole flow in balsamiq, or a bare-bones working prototype with ReactNative. For the former, i'd have to learn the tool. The latter i somewhat know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nowhere in this article does he actually mention:

-Talking to users

-Interviewing users

-Doing user testing

-Making sacrificial prototypes

This is a great way to develop a product that people don't need, with no way of knowing how good the UX actually is. I've worked like this before, and it really does produce suboptimal results. You really shouldn't even be making wireframes before validating assumptions and needs first.

NNgroup has a lot of writing on trying to shortcut UX:

[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-without-user- research/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-without-user-research/)

<comment><USER7> The author mentions it in the first paragraph, just chooses to focus the article on the design part: "At this stage, I'm going to assume you've conducted some user research or at the very least, spoken to potential customers to test your assumptions. That way you'll be much better positioned to turn your ideas into actual design."

<comment><USER6> He added it after I made my comment on HN (I'm fairly sure it's in response to my original post):

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190329103120/https://www.simon...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190329103120/https://www.simonmccade.com/blog/how- developers-and-tech-founders-can-turn-their-ideas-into-ui-design)

Anyways, it still doesn't make sense to talk to users once and then just go crazy with UI design. A lot of user research requires having prototypes (digital ones too). It's a back and forth, rather than a waterfall of talk to users, think, whip up some design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article doesn't mention that as a startup it makes sense to minimize novel, homegrown UI as much as possible. Unless, of course, that's central to your product or is the product. In Pony [0]—an email service that delivers once a day—for example, I tried making the UI as familiar as possible, perhaps at risk of not making it exciting enough.

I forget who said it—maybe it was the Eameses, maybe it was the Modernist movement in general—but the best UI is invisible and stays out of the users' way while enabling them to accomplish what they want. I believe this to be true. The best way to do this usually is to provide a familiar, non novel UI.

So yeah, you need to make sure your flows make sense, etc, but if you're having "eureka" moments when developing UI, maybe your users will have to do the same thing just to use it.

[0]: [https://www.pony.gg](https://www.pony.gg)

<comment><USER9> > it makes sense to minimize novel, homegrown UI as much as possible

I believe this is true in most cases. Don't reimplement controls, unless you _really_ know what you are doing, because you're probably going to do it wrong and break usability or accessibility or generally annoy people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems like the most upvoted comments are coming from designers -- which feels problematic. It seems like the author has done a great job to capture a UX/UI designer's flow, but that doesn't mean it translates well for developers.

As a developer who has done this for many years, this is marginally helpful. I'm glad to know it, but I'll tell you that on my side projects I will not be nearly this extensive until later on, and likely pay for a designer for a few hundred before doing all this myself.

</comment><comment><USER11> I liked their link to PageFlows, but I was wondering if an enterprise version exists. Is there something that focuses more heavily on the data side? The creation, the updating, the displaying, the analysis, the graphs, etc...

I would whip out my credit card so fast for that.

</comment><comment><USER12> Good article, hits home my experience. But I'd rather have a seasoned UX designer to lead and sketch the flows rather than some one new to come up with a Frankenstein type of app.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would encourage developers to first build out their applications as a CLI. Then add just enough UI for the masses.

But still release your CLI version. Ordering food or managing stocks on the command line is fantastic!

<comment><USER9> Or, as an extension of this, implement your core logic as a library that you can call from your {iOS, Android, etc.} app. If you're only targeting one platform, this makes it easy for you to add another one in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article is a surprisingly useful collection of tools.</comment>


Hacker Monthly #2 is out - <AUTHOR> http://hackermonthly.com/?=issue_2_hn <comment><USER2> Please add a way for me to subscribe rather than buy these one by one. I don't want to "buy" monthly, I want to _receive_ monthly. ;)

Editing to add: Even if Magcloud doesn't have a way to do this, it might be worth your while (especially for cash flow!) to use something else like Paypal, buy them in bulk from Magcloud at a discount and send them out yourself. You could require a 1-year subscription to make it more worth your effort (and the bulk purchasing might mean you make more money on the sale of the magazine itself)

2nd edit: Thinking about this some more, the magazine is 40 pages long (yay!) but at $.20/page you're making only $1/sale in gross margins (boo!). If you were able to accept yearly subscriptions and fulfill from the US (I know you're in Malaysia) you could boost gross margins to $3/sale, in addition to the cash flow benefits. You would be adding fulfillment costs, but it might be worthwhile...

AND you could ship internationally if you wanted! :)

<comment><USER3> Sounds like you bought issue #1, so I'll ask:

How's the print quality?

<comment><USER2> Pretty fantastic. The paper is thick and the ink doesn't come off on your hands. It feels a little bit like a collectors item, at least for geeks like me.

His simple design aesthetic is so good that my other magazines feel jarring and cluttered. It feels like how a magazine should be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to see:

* a few recurring columns (eg: get ceo of startup to write half a page about "day in life of startup" each month for 3 months

* spotlight on a "review my startup" submission to HN each month.

* a page of curated pithy/insightful/fun comments from hacker news.

* oh, most importantly, links to the most recent "who is hiring/who is looking for a job"

also, iPad/iPhone app.

<comment><USER4> The iApp would be nice because you wouldn't have to download them and sync manually. But in the mean time, you can get the PDFs and sync them to iBooks, or go right to the PDF in your iOS browser and open them in iBooks. It looks fantastic on the iPad.

<comment><USER5> How do you open the PDF in ibooks from safari?

<comment><USER4> In iOS4, just browse to it. A button will pop up that says "Open in iBooks" assuming iBooks 1.1 is installed.

<comment><USER5> After you did this on an iPhone or iPod touch, did it then sync over to your iPad? Obviously, you can't do this on an iPad directly.

<comment><USER4> Nope sadly. It's only for that session.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Curator's Note has an apostrophe that horsekicks sensible typographers in the face. The note itself also uses improper quotes (primes). The magazine seems to have some inconsistent use of quotes in general, which seems odd when it's been made in InDesign which should enforce a consistent rule.

Another typographical pet peeve are the widows and orphans going. I'm sure they can be avoided.

Other than that, the magazine looks even more interesting than the last one, and I can't wait to read it. It's a shame that MagCloud don't ship to Europe. I'm also hoping you'll check out the perfect bound binding for the magazine which MagCloud is testing out in beta at the moment.

<comment><USER7> My bad for letting that slipped thru. I'll fix it (and hopefully avoid it in the upcoming issue).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is cool: Thinkcode's ad has a puzzle/code. First person to solve it gets their full catalog.

<http://skitch.com/jackowayed/dk1ws/thinkcode-puzzle>

<comment><USER9> As plain text:

      # The fastest person to solve this will win our entire catalog
      bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtn
      ZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5q
      cz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==

I added whitespace as in the picture, you probably want to remove it. (I transcribed this by hand, let me know if I messed anything up)

<comment><USER10> In case the rows play a role, I have it (OCR'd and manually corrected) as :

bThvW3JKYz16bXpUWDIufkl2OllseC4maV1gMjtVYXNtb2RyZ3czbkQzQDtn ZnRdMVZuZkIqVTJpIGlxa2xubkAoaTRueGdQaGN0YyRjTGN1WGlUbzF5VU5q cz50KmRwZXlncGN0dA==

The == at the end make it look suspiciously like some kind of base64, but no luck.

Edit: updated for s/0/O/

Edit 2: it isn't a simple rotation of a base64 string either. Maybe the == is a red herring.

<comment><USER11> base64 decoding of the text results in:

      m8o[rJc=zmzTX2.~Iv:Ylx.&i]`2;Uasmodrgw3nD3@;gft]1VnfB*U2i iqklnn@(i4nxgPhctc$cLcuXiTo1yUNjs>t*dpeygpctt

That's all printable ASCII, which I don't suspect is a coincidence.

<comment><USER10> Hah, of course!

Well, ROTing that doesn't yield anything either, and it's too small to analyse character frequency if it's a cipher. I tried using 'thinkcode' as a substitution key, and the end looks a bit like 'thinkcode' itself!

<comment><USER12> Have you considered that it is probably valid perl? ;)

<comment><USER10> Is it? I can't get it to work, it complains about the backtick in column 27.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> direct link to pdf: <http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly-issue2.pdf>

<comment><USER14> [http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://hackermonthly.com/ha...](http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://hackermonthly.com/hackermonthly- issue2.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice. I like the new comments section. I that printing the comments adds to their impact, even without the other comments or original article. It also enhances the sarcastic value -- although I didn't read Dave Winer's entry about how online advertising is dead, I immediately knew what he had to say when I read tptacek's "summary".

Anyway, pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER16> I love reading these in print: can't wait 'till the next one comes.

I wish someone would publish a magazine on programming like this. I'd buy that as well…

Keep up the good work! Can't wait to see number three.

One thing I'd like; to be able to subscribe to a year of it.

<comment><USER2> Do you think there'd be a market for a "general entrepreneurship" one? More like Inc or Fast Company, but using the "unpaid content with permission and accreditation" model that Hacker Monthly is doing? I've been thinking of doing that.

<comment><USER17> I think Business 2.0 was pretty close to that. Personally I enjoyed it very much, but sadly it was shuttered several years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> May I ask what tools you are using to create the eBook ?

<comment><USER7> Indesign CS4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does this have original content or is this all select content from Hacker News and reformatted for the magazine format?

Do you have to get permission from each author since you're charging for hard copies?

<comment><AUTHOR> bearwithclaws (the curator) reaches out to the authors [1]

1: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261522>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I downloaded the PDF, also the First Edition and I thought it is time to donate. It was my first PayPal donation and I spent it for something I am passionate about (startups).

Keep up the good work, and check out Monocle - maybe you can get some inspiration how you can build and extend this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Monocle is the only dead tree content worth reading :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The site is down for me. Anybody have a mirror?

<comment> bjelkeman-again I have the same issue. Last time I had to wait for a couple of days to be able to download the PDF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Never received #1 in the mail.

<comment><USER23> Hmm, yeh good reminder mine never came either (must chase that up...)

<comment><USER22> I just found my receipt. Replied to the email saying I didn't get mine and the auto-reply email opened up a case number and it said they'd look into it.

<comment><USER22> MagCloud said it was in fact shipped, but they are sending me a new one anyway --expedited shipping, at their expense. So assuming I do receive the mag soon, it was a well-handled issue.

<comment><USER23> Just to say; yes I had the same response.

They confirmed my address as well (which was right). Fingers crossed :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How much do the ads in the magazine cost?

<comment><USER7> <http://hackermonthly.com/ratecard>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> No Kindle version?

<comment><USER7> Coming up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love the idea because I don't always have time to check HN daily and am sure to miss out on some great stories. This is the opportunity to do some catch up.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is there no comparable service which does ship everywhere? I know people have offered to repost it but just wondering why a company like magcloud would only want to ship to such a limited set of countries if the user is paying shipping?

</comment><comment><USER28> Outstanding issue. I've really enjoyed this zine of yours, it's really well put together. I agree that maybe you should charge more and add a subscription model, we want you to get something out of it as well :)

</comment><comment><USER29> For those of us who want to support this, but live in countries other than the US, UK or Canada, is there any alternative to MagCloud?

I know there's a _donate_ but I want a dead tree edition too.

<comment><USER30> I'll be happy remail copies (of both issues if you want) to anyone who wants to PayPal me the money for the mag plus shipping to their country (from the UK). Email is in profile.

Just ordered my copy, last month's was great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I really enjoyed the first edition, even the stuff that I'd already read on HN. I think you may have found your niche, bearwithclaws. I've just bought the second - hopefully many more will do the same.

</comment><comment><USER32> Version like Wired magazine on the iPad? Yes, it's a bit of form over function but it was enjoyable, and more importantly, that's what I would gladly pay for. A one year subscription would be ideal.

</comment><comment><USER33> Now including comments!

</comment><comment><USER34> I just wanted to express my gratitude for putting this together. Hopefully I can get my product out the door and buy some space in this sooner rather than later!

</comment><comment><USER25> Such a good design...

</comment><comment><USER35> Minor quibble: I subscribed using the box at the top of the page but have not received any notice in my inbox about the new issue.

<comment><USER36> Only got mine a few minutes ago, could be slightly delayed.

<comment><USER35> Yep, it was the usual GMail delay. Thanks guys!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I love this, thanks! I do miss the epub version that was available with issue #1. I'm happy to even pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Congrats on being the #1 (in terms of visibility) featured magazine on MagCloud. Keep it up bearswithclaws!

</comment><comment><USER38> I have to admit, I was really down on this before #1 came out, now I love it. Keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER39> only shipping to the us, ca and uk? arrr :(

<comment><USER30> See my reply to heresy :)

<comment><USER39> thx. i'll keep you in mind. ordered the issues to a friend in .ca :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I read the cover and thought, wow, maybe some new methods of bootstraping I haven't heard of yet. Then I am as always let down because it is stalking about business.

</comment><comment><USER41> one question, in the last page it says printed:

"Hacker Monthly is an independent project by Netizens Media and not affiliated with Y Combinator in any way."

Why do you feel its necessary to be so explicit about your non-affiliation to YC?

May it be perhaps that you have chosen to "borrow" HN's color scheme?</comment>


The Ripe NCC Has Run Out of IPv4 Addresses - <AUTHOR> https://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ripe-list/2019-November/001712.html <comment><USER2> I'm in the ARIN region. Two things:

1\. My home has Verizon fiber. No native IPv6. I have a tunnel for this, but such solutions aren't going to work for the masses. The other in-region residential provider, Comcast, has great native IPv6 service, but had layer 2 performance issues versus price.

2\. At $dayjob I just ordered a circuit from Level3/Centurylink for a branch site. No IP justification form was required if I needed only IPv4 /30\. But for dual IPv4 /30 + IPv6 /126, I was required to provide written justification. Shouldn't this be the other way around? Unencumbered IPv6 for all, with paperwork for IPv4?

EDIT: these are not site allocations, just point-to-point link addresses, hence the /126\. Still, I'm being asked to justify IPv6 but not IPv4.

<comment><USER3> > IPv6 /126

Uh, unless you're running BGP over this or getting a larger subnet statically routed to you, get a larger prefix. A /48 or /56 is the current recommendation [1] for business end site allocations.

[1] - [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6177](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6177)

<comment><USER2> Of course, this is just a "point-to-point Ethernet" not an allocation.

That said, I think the original intent was that such "point-to-point Ethernets" should have been issued /64, but seems /126 is common practice.

<comment><USER4> Comcast gives out /64s at least. I got my router to successfully ask for 2 on different interfaces.

<comment><USER5> Same story on Spectrum. On their residential plans they will give out a /64 by default. However w/ DHCPv6-PD I was able to successfully request a /56\. What I found mildly interesting was they wouldn't allocate a /60\. (My guess was: whatever silicon they've got pushing IPv6 packets around probably likes segmenting the routing table on a clean byte boundary.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are five regional internet registries (RIRs), and Ripe NCC is one of them. Here's a map of which services what region[0]

Does this mean we've finally run out of new allocatable IPv4 addresses with the RIRs?

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry#/me...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry#/media/File:Regional_Internet_Registries_world_map.svg)

<comment><USER7> ARIN (North America) and APNIC (Asia-Pacific) ran out of addresses some time ago (2015 I guess).

Game over IPv4.

<comment><USER8> All it means is the free lunch is over and people have to start buying their IPs off of an informal market.

Theoretically we could have transitioned to IPv6 instead and avoided this hassle, but too many incumbents are dragging their feet on the whole IPv6 issue.

<comment><USER9> Do any of these incumbents stand to gain financially from IPv4 scarcity?

<comment><USER10> Yes, Residential ISP's can sell or lease their space to AWS, etc. for example and just start moving their customers over to CGNAT. Why bother upgrading your entire network, planning allocations, etc when you can just NAT everyone for cheap?

<comment><USER11> Can confirm this is happening. If you're lucky enough to have a choice in ISP, there are a few that won't CGNAT you. I pay a little extra for this ($10 a month) but it's worth it for me. Ask your ISP if that sounds interesting.

<comment><USER12> Is that really a feasible long term solution though? I require port forwarding and also work from home so require my service not get blocked due to some spammer on my block.

<comment><USER13> I'm sure your ISP would love to sell you a business connection for 3x the price

<comment><USER14> This honestly sounds like a perfect case for a business connection. Not only does it give you a static IP without NAT, possibly in an address block with other high paying (==reputable) people, it also bumps you up a lot in terms of customer service and service availability. Usually the first two questions in an outage are "how many customers are offline, and are any business connections impacted".

<comment><USER15> That assumes the ISP is willing to run a business connection to a residential address. Not every ISP will, especially if you're just a home user with special requirements and not an actual business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And yet my ISP still doesn't support IPv6...

Until something forces the transition nothing is going to change.

<comment><USER17> Why are you, as a consumer, interested in switching to IPv6?

<comment><USER18> Because adoption of ipv6 allows everyone to be an equal on the internet again. Right now half of the computers hooked up to the 'net aren't even given a routable IP address. They're behind carrier NAT unable to participate like a real computer. They can't use protocols, they can only consume third party services over HTTP/S for the most part.

If everyone is routable it cuts the gordian knot in the "What kind of content should be allowed on our platform?" question by allowing everyone to simply be their own platform. If ipv6 gets adopted fast enough it might just save the 'net from being just a more privacy invasive form of television.

<comment><USER19> NAT is a poor person's firewall, and even if everybody were to switch to IPV6 I believe that NAT'ing would be here to stay. There are lots of disadvantages to sitting behind a NAT but the positive part of it is that it actually does have some security benefits. I used to absolutely hate NAT but over the years I've come around a bit, and UPnP made it bearable from a tech point of view.

<comment><USER20> This is completly incorrect. While NAT is almost always combined with a stateful firewall, the NAT itself does not provide any security.

Home devices are always going to be deployed with an allow outgoing, deny incoming firewall, regardless if they have IPv6 or not. They are identical in terms of security.

<comment><USER21> > NAT itself does not provide any security

This is just arguing semantics. It's not "NAT itself", but a side effect of using it is that it requires deliberate effort to allow inbound connections to get to devices behind the router. This has many of the same _effective_ security benefits as a firewall blocking inbound connections does.

Another way of saying this: the companies that make cheap, crappy routers can do the absolute bare minimum and not end up exposing internal devices to inbound internet traffic. So NAT provides security against the cheap, crappy router manufacturers.

With IPv6, the opposite is true: The router manufacturer has to do deliberate extra effort to block inbound connections, beyond just making the router "work". Will most router manufacturers do this extra effort and include a properly-configured firewall? Probably yes, especially if they don't want to get a terrible reputation for being insecure, which would (hopefully) eventually drive them out of business.

Will absolutely 100% of them always do this properly and never make a mistake? I wouldn't bet on it.

<comment><USER15> > It's not "NAT itself", but a side effect of using it is that it requires > deliberate effort to allow inbound connections to get to devices behind the > router.

Unless your router has UPnP port forwarding enabled—as most home routers do by default, since popular apps require it—in which case any device can open a hole in the firewall for whatever incoming traffic it wants. In this scenario NAT provides no additional protection beyond what the client device could provide for itself by simply not accepting incoming connections. To get security from a NAT setup you need to disable UPnP and manually configure any required port forwarding, which is at least as much effort as properly configuring an IPv6 firewall.

The right solution IMHO is to have a separate LAN/WLAN/VLAN for the untrusted IoT devices which rejects _all_ inbound connections from the WAN (no UPnP support) as well as all _outbound_ connections to the main LAN. Outbound connections to the WAN for updates or cloud-base control are permitted but logged; inbound connections from the main LAN are also permitted, to control the IoT devices locally. For the main LAN the router should only perform basic filtering for malformed or misrouted packets—ones with an external or multicast destination address or an internal source address, for example. Apart from that, devices on the main LAN are expected to handle their own security. Laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices are already required to handle this since they are routinely connected directly to untrusted networks.

<comment><USER22> In my experience upnp is no longer enabled by default (because: not secure). UDP hole punching usually works though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks)

Honestly stupid that USDoD controls at least 13/256 of all IPv4 addresses.

It seems some entities, e.g. IBM and MIT, have returned (sold?) their /8s to their RIRs though.

<comment><USER24> It is their network.

<comment><USER25> It's the public's network, funded by tax payer money. The fact that they KNOW that they are global targets for cyber attacks and maintain so SO much publicly routable area is beyond irresponsible. Even more irresponsible is I'm positive they IP addresses are hard coded in some of those old systems.

<comment><USER24> The DoD has it's own private internet. Anything truly important isn't exposed to the public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Unbelievably, github.com and reddit.com _still_ don't have ipv6 addresses.

<comment><USER27> We (reddit) were blocked by AWS on this until 2017 or so. Since then it's mostly been an issue of reworking internal tooling and storage. There are a huge number of places we'd need to futz with to support IPv6, and to be honest we've had basically zero pressure to do so.

When pressure is zero and effort is high, things will go unchanged. I'm sure once pressure exists then some movement will occur. It seems most of the industry is doing everything they can to put off incurring pressure, though.

<comment><USER28> Thanks to CGNAT we have shifted from a 32-bit to a 48-bit address space (since the port is now part of the address).

Ipv6 really only serves to shed load off CGNAT since we rely on the continued use of v4 addresses since v6 is not interoperable with v4.

But why should Reddit support v6? For the greater good of v4 by reducing pressure of CGNAT for dual homed users. But wait, who are the dual homed users you may ask? Mobile users. And it will only be mobile users since autoconfiguring residental networks to dual home is not going to happen. But Mobile carriers have full control of addressing and TCP/IP configuration of handsets, and so they can easily deploy usable v6.

So the smaller sites shouldn't bother with v6 because they're not an essential part of the Internet with large traffic. But a site like Reddit can reduce enormous pressure for mobile carriers to deliver use of the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We ran out of IPv4 addresses again. How many times has this happened this past decade?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2174992](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2174992) 9y

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4480532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4480532) 7y

Looking forward to the next time we run out of IPv4 addresses.

<comment><USER30> Your first link was when IANA allocated five final /8s to the RIRs, including RIPE. Your second link was when RIPE reached their final /8, and switched to a "one /22 per company" rationing policy. Today, the rations ran out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ripe NCC has run out of address it will give for almost nothing.

I checked, and IPv4 address price is somewhere between $20 and $30[0]. It's not so bad given it's a one-time buy - and using cloud services de facto creates a situation where the buying is in bulk.

The real shortage will start be when prices reach $170 I guess? Should take a few years...

[0] [https://ipv4marketgroup.com/broker- services/buy/](https://ipv4marketgroup.com/broker-services/buy/)

<comment><USER32> No, as prices increase, the economic justification of switching to IPv6 increases. Businesses will watch the inflation and when their IPv4 bill gets high enough, they'll pay someone to fix their systems.

Not only will no shortage occur, but the upgrades will be performed for the least cost possible. This is the kind of resource allocation problem that markets solve optimally.

<comment><USER31> I was referring to 'shortage' as 'sufficient scarcity so as to make people switch to IPv6'. However, you're completely correct given the literal meaning of 'shortage' (hence upvote).

There won't be a situation where a business will not put up a site due to lack of IPs, they'll switch if/when they have to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> My ISP-provided router supports IPv6, but I've disabled it because I don't feel like setting up a firewall for all those poor devices on my network.

Are there any guides for how to properly secure a home network so that I can re-enable IPv6 with a clear conscience?

<comment><USER3> > Are there any guides for how to properly secure a home network so that I can > re-enable IPv6 with a clear conscience?

        ip6tables -P FORWARD REJECT
        ip6tables -F FORWARD
        ip6tables -A FORWARD -o wan -s 2a42:.../64 -j ACCEPT
        ip6tables -A FORWARD -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

Literally the same as for IPv4.

<comment><USER34> Why do I get the feeling that some home routers won't NAT or have the established/related rule by default for ipv6.

<comment><USER3> I don't know. I've never misconfigured/insecure v6 CPEs in Europe. But if you're bringing your own device, all bets are off of course.

This makes sense, considering ISPs might not want to deal with a ton of pwned devices that are now part of botnets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> [https://ipv4.potaroo.net/](https://ipv4.potaroo.net/)

</comment><comment><USER36> I hope all home provision moves to CGNAT IPv4; IPV6 are too easy to track, and every ISP that I've seen ties the prefix to the customer.

Who cares about cookies, 1st party or 3rd party, when you have a unique ~60 bit per customer identifier?

My ISP gives un-natted IPv4, but I get a different one each time I reboot the modem, which I do every now and then.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wished IPv6 could be memorized. I can rattle the addresses of all the devices in my home network off with ease, but have trouble remembering a single IPv6. The "just use DNS" answer isn't a good one; stuff sometimes breaks, and it's much harder to fix when I've got to look everything up.

<comment><USER38> Think of it as memorizing 4 IPv4 addresses.

<comment><USER39> In many cases big parts of the address are zeros, so it might be only one "IPv4" address one has to remember.

<comment><USER40> And common prefixes like 2a00:: or 2001::, not that many are in use (yet). And I prefer typing ::1 over 127.0.0.1 any day (though most software accepts 127.1 as well).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm in Slovakia. The IPv6 adoption is below 1% and the ISPs don't plan IPv6 rollout because "We have enough IPv4 addresses.". Nowhere I ever had native IPv6 available on home connection, it is option only to business clients.

<comment><USER42> Out of the tree biggest ISPs in Slovakia, only T-Com doesn't support IPv6, unlike it's German parent. UPC (Liberty Global) switched all their residential customers with new enough CPE to DS-Lite years ago, and Orange also had a flag day, since then all new customers are also on DS-Lite (they allow getting public IPv4 for nice 99 EUR one-time fee, static one is additional 8 EUR/month).

<comment><USER41> Thanks. However, "years ago" means 2017 afaik :)

<comment><USER42> Yeah, two, plural :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Using SRV records would eliminate a huge number of IPv4 problems.

<comment><USER44> Not really. You'd have to update a ton of software to actually support SRV records.

<comment><USER43> Yes, unfortunately. I feel like that's marginally better than updating millions of pieces of hardware for ipv6 support :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is it even possible to have a webserver that is IPv6 only? How many people wouldn't be able to use it?

<comment><USER46> There's a problem that just having an IPv6 address is indistinguishable (for such users) from a server that's not configured or is down. We need a good solution to indicate to end users that the server is working just fine, but just you don't have IPv6 support and can't reach it because of that.

But I can't send anything to such a user directly if they don't support IPv6 and I don't have an IPv4 address.

Perhaps we need some community-run webservice with an explanatory page saying "Website [something.com] requires IPv6, here's lots of documentation on how to try and fix this" and everyone could point their domain name IPv4 address to that webservice, and the IPv6 address to the real server.

<comment><USER47> Why would anyone set up such a site? Fewer than 30% of people have IPv6 today.

<comment><USER46> Well, because they (and their entire organization) may be unable to get a publicly routable IPv4 address, because NCC can't and won't assign any more. You can work around it for now, but in the future this will be a more and more common situation.

<comment><USER47> It means they can't get one for free, not that they can't get one at all. IPv4 addresses are trading for around 20/each when bought in blocks of 256. They won't be prohibitively expensive for any serious hosting provider for the foreseeable future.

For hobby projects hosted on a Raspberry Pi in someone's bedroom, I can imagine a static IPv4 being prohibitively expensive, but that's about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This will lead to ipv6-only services pretty soon. As the cost of ipv4 space gets higher and higher you'll see things like VPSes and cloud hosting stop offering a free IP with their services, and eventually businesses will stop using it too.

<comment><USER49> Very unlikely to lead to ipv6 only services any time in the distant future, unless of course your service requires thousands of ip4 addresses.

Eventually maybe a premium for an ipv4 static IP on some cloud provider but that's about it. The big players have plenty of CIDR.

They already have high-performance domain-aware routers, so you can still basically run a million websites via a single ipv4 address.

<comment><USER50> I can see CDNs colocated inside ISP's internal networks shifting to be IPv6-exclusive at first because there will be guarantees of IPv6 connectivity to the ISP's customers.

...if not residential ISPs then certainly mobile-phone/wireless providers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Carrier-grade NAT has a much bigger impact than IPv6 will.

<comment><USER52> Good God, I hope not. Having lived behind CGN for a little bit while I was scrambling for another provider, it was a horrible experience with lots of broken services. CGN is a technical dead end.

<comment><USER53> My ISP (Orange) actually backed out and started giving IPv4 addresses to those of us who complained in their forums about their terrible CGN.

<comment><USER52> Outstanding. That's the only way I could see it being remotely tolerable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Why have successors to IPv4 been designed with variable-length addresses as in earlier versions?

<comment><USER35> Routing hardware would prefer you just pick a very large address size and stick to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> How many ipv4 are in poss2of the US Gov and military? Do they really need all of those?

With all these elastic search instances running open to the public I have the feeling that with IPv6 this will get worse as NAT no longer protects you.

<comment><USER56> You don't need to run NAT to have a firewall. Even a stateful one.

<comment><USER57> You don't need to, but it's a nice side effect for people who don't know what a firewall is.

I'd wager most home networks are protected only by the fact that they use NAT. ISPs are getting better about shipping routers with firewalls on by default, but it's still not there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Typical of humanity's poor prioritization algorithm, I submitted on this 88 days ago … and got zero comments <whomp_whaa>.

But, now that _it 's happened_ … it shoots to the top story.

For anyone interested, the blog post from RIPE that I submitted is still up, here: [https://www.ripe.net/publications/news/about-ripe-ncc-and- ri...](https://www.ripe.net/publications/news/about-ripe-ncc-and-ripe/getting- ready-for-ipv4-run-out)

</comment><comment><USER59> Time to shut down the Internet and go outside.

So why are IPv4 addresses so valuable? Mostly because IPv6 is overly- complicated and a pain to work with. We should have first added a new range where 5 of the 8 hextets were 0000. And found a simple way to write it without ::

Why wasn't that done?

<comment><USER60> IPv6 is not "overly-complicated." It requires some new knowledge on IP address notations and new concepts when talking about DHCP and such, but it is functionally not more difficult than IPv4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Technical arguments aside; IPv6 is just "advanced" enough to allow corporations to fuck over the last bastions of free internet and turn it into nothing but tightly controlled broadcast TV 2.0.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions so I guess I will see you all in hell.

</comment><comment><USER62> Is IPv4 shortage really going to be a problem?

For client use, carrier-grade NATs allows to have 1000 IPs per customer, giving 6 million addresses.

For server use, TLS SNI allows to have one IP per datacenter, which are estimated to be around 10 million in the world.

Non-TLS inbound usage is probably relatively rare, so overall around 100 million addresses should be fundamentally enough even accounting growth.

Of course there's a lot of inefficiencies, but the fundamentals seem to say that the IPv4 address space is enough.

<comment><USER52> Carrier-grade NAT is a non-starter. It's fundamentally broken from an end user perspective and destined for the junk heap of forgotten bad ideas.

TLS SNI is awesome, but no plausible implementation is going to let you put an entire datacenter worth of addresses behind a single address. That's not going to happen.

IPv4's time is soon to be past. Google is nearly hitting 30% IPv6 usage already, and it's still growing. This is the way forward, not junk tech like CGN or millions of hosts on a single TLS SNI address.

<comment><USER63> CGNAT (or comparable tech like DSlite) will happen anyways even when majority of traffic is IPv6. The long tail of IPv4 is long; people will be wanting some form of IPv4 connectivity long after all the major things have switched to IPv6 and ISPs are not going to go back to handing out public IPv4 addresses. The timeline just doesn't work anymore to make a clean transition. Of course how much do you care if it is CGNAT if you are not using IPv4 is another matter.

<comment><USER35> I'd be willing to get there are more clients running through NAT64 than CGNAT currently thanks to mobile networks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Redfin: Vacation real-estate 'toast' as Airbnb owners rush to offload homes - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/vacation-real-estate-markets-are-toast-because-of-the-pandemic-as-airbnb-owners-rush-to-offload-their-homes-redfin-ceo-says-2020-05-11?mod=home-page <comment><USER3> I'm really not expecting to see a significant drop in home prices at least until close to the end of the year. While some vacation rentals owners might have listed their properties for sale they are doing it pricing those close to the current market value based on other properties for sale in their respective area. We're looking for a vacation home and i'm monitoring the prices in a few areas pretty close, but i don't think we'll do anything until the start of 2021.

Remember you need surplus to drive price down. Also keep in mind that the foreclosure process is currently on hold, once this opens again we'll be able to get a closer look at the impact all the closures had/have on the RE market.

<comment><USER4> I'm seeing 50 homes under $1M in San Francisco listed in last 30 days. That's much more in that price range than I recall seeing in a very long time

<comment><USER5> Listing prices can be a bit deceiving. Usually real estate agents play with listing prices - to get a bidding war going, they'll price well below market price. It's not unusual to see overbids of 20-30%.

<comment><USER6> That's what my agent claimed when setting our asking price. We sure didn't see a bidding war. The benefits to the agent for a lower price is in conflict with what the homeowner wants. For example, a $10K diff in sale price is $350 for the listing agent, and $9650 for the homeowner. So of course agents will push for low prices to get a quick sale.

Of course, there are many times that a seller wants a quick sale (moving etc). But often it's in the seller's best interest to be a bit more patient and price it at market.

<comment><USER7> Yup. Sold our house in January using Redfin. Best realtor we've dealt with and saved 2%.

Also watch out for realtors saying you need upgrades and recommending contractors. They likely are getting a kickback, and by boosting the listing price their commission goes up. You end up with the same proceeds, IF it sells as fast, and you had to front the upgrades.

The incentive structure for realtors is whack. At a minimum, the commissions could be tiered instead of continuous.

<comment><USER8> I don't know your location, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, YMMV, but: In most locales, a kickback like you are describing is illegal and can be reported to your state's real estate commission. If you believe that your agent is acting in bad faith, you should at least find a different agent if not report them.

In many cases, smart upgrades can yield significant returns. Not all agents who recommend upgrades are trying to con you, many are providing market-aware prudent advise to help you maximize your return.

As an agent, I think it is good that tech and other competitive forces are entering the field. That said, commissions often get pointed to as a "problem." Here's the deal: If you believe your house will sell within a range of say, +/\- $20K, then the agent's job is to try to get you to the top of that range. 2% in my market, for an average house works out to about $6K. If I can get you an extra $10K+ that you wouldn't have gotten by FSBO or similar, that's where I'm adding value as an agent and that's why commissions exist.

<comment><USER7> Commissions are a major reason why the market lacks liquidity. When someone buys a house, they're immediately 6% below market value, just from commissions.

To each their own.

Redfin was a fantastic experience for us. The advice was rational and unbiased (they get paid off of reviews, not commissions, if I recall my research correctly).

And the house sold, which is wonderful.

Also, kickbacks may be illegal, but that doesn't mean they're uncommon or that the laws would be enforced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I live in an area with a large number of AirBnBs, specifically a beach town near Los Angeles. Me and a few friends were hoping to see a significant drop in home prices due to AirBnB landlords being forced the liquidate under financial duress.

Obviously we didn't think this would undo decades of disastrous housing policy, but the hope is that some units would cross into striking range for those of us with good jobs. Alas, the price barely moved in my area, much to my surprise and frustration.

<comment><USER10> Just want to offer perspective from the investor side: I own just one Airbnb in a hot market (downtown, hip neighborhood) and even though bookings were cancelled in April, they're building back up for May and summer months. It was scary for sure for a span of several weeks, but there were always other contingencies before liquidating (like converting it to a long term rental).

Even if I went along with the panic, it would take probably three months to go through with any transaction that would throw a desirable property onto the market. The demand is still so strong that the low price would likely chum the waters and competitive bidding would drive the price up.

I think these Airbnb liquidation sale headlines are being sensational and end up wasting buyers time.

<comment><USER11> you're almost certainly not in a vacation hotspot. in FL, many of the coastal counties have banned short term airbnb style renting indefinitely. miami dade and broward counties in FL are still uber locked down and won't even be considered for partial reopening until May 18.

<comment><USER12> Short term rentals/vacation rentals are banned at the state level by the Governor in FL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article buries the lede:

> Employers that were really stuck on whether to let people work from home > have gotten completely unstuck. And if you can work for Goldman Sachs, but > not in New York, if you can work for Amazon, but not in Seattle, well, why > would you pay the premium?

Vacation rentals impact prices, but are a mere slice of the total market. If tastes and preferences shift away from expensive cities due to remote-work friendly policies, that will have a profound shift on not only housing, but automobiles, gas, etc. People certainly enjoy living in cities, but how many people live in cities exclusively for the physically proximate job access they provide? Time will tell.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if this concept really sticks...

I worked for a company that was acquired that was based in Minnesota. The acquiring company absolutely could not find warm bodies in the bay area to do ... tech support. So they finally asked if the bumpkins in Minnesota could help out.

I traveled out there and everyone was very nice but I had things explained to me like I hadn't used a computer before, or couldn't follow a simple process. One of the directors asked me "What do people in Minnesota do for work?" I told him "Same as around here.", he found that hard to believe and told me about how is team were all high performers in college with fancy degrees and such.

Anyway a month later my team is out performing the valley team with higher customer service scores (funny that if you actually call your customers they like it, you can solve problems faster...) and so on. All with a smaller team and at ~2/3rds the price (possibly less).

I mean it was just tech support, on some fairly high end equipment. But still it was not rocket science.

A few years later to save costs ... they skip Minnesota try disastrously to offshore to India.

Then after the company is acquired again they take the opportunity to axe everyone in MN, and again ... can't find anyone to work in the bay...

I just don't know, these choices seem sort of institutionalized / culture oriented.

<comment><USER15> > A few years later to save costs ... they skip Minnesota try disastrously to > offshore to India.

That's funny, because I was following along thinking your point was geographic region doesn't predict performance. Do _you_ find it hard to believe it's possible to have an Indian team with who were high performers in college with fancy degrees and such?

<comment><USER14> Generally, I don't see any insurmountable impediment to outsourcing to India. I don't know of any reason they couldn't have outsourced successfully.

The experience I had there was a disaster... because of the company they chose to use to outsource just couldn't keep capable people on staff for more than a month or two. The folks who stayed, were just terrible / couldn't troubleshoot their way out of a box and IMO had some perverse incentives. I suspect there was an incentive revolving around "closed cases" and like all metrics that got abused and it was costly for everyone.

My email was filled with "please assign this case to duxup" cases that were in the hands of our outsource partners (and sometimes the bay area..) because folks recognized the case wasn't going anywhere fast.

The company even tried hiring folks locally at an office they had but again they couldn't keep anyone (probably again paying poorly) who was good very long.

I don't know the job market in India (then or now) but I suspect they simply weren't paying well / had a very poor partner outsourcing company.

I've had some visibility to various outsourcing efforts and every time it seems that the companies they partner with just don't provide much in the way of stable talent. I would assume it is possible to find a company who does, but I just haven't had that experience. I suspect that is more random chance than anything else.

Personally I suspect that most companies just decide, "We're outsourcing and we're going to save X amount!" and without knowing or caring they priced their way into poorly done outsourcing ... and only that. Interesting enough, I heard we hadn't saved much of any money long term with the outsourcing effort. Largely hiring just didn't keep up with sales and any savings in support costs there were attributed to outsourced support.

It was somewhat amusing as many of the Bay area staff were from India (they weren't H1Bs, they were citizens), and man nobody hated the the outsourced support more than those guys ;)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for clarifying. I was taken aback since your terse summary of the failure gave me the impression that the failure was _because_ they outsourced to India, which runs counter to what I believed was your narrative core on the subject of geographic exceptionalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >...the bifurcation of the American dream. It used to be that working-class folks could reasonably aspire to buy a house. ...So unemployment is going to be bad for one part of America...

Housing as institutional investment and institutional land speculation is a condensed example of why stocks can rise during an economic catastrophe, why housing will become yet more unaffordable and what drives increasing inequality between wage earners and asset owners.

Redfin's stock has been part of the record breaking rally during the pandemic because the drop in housing prices that would have kept them somewhat in sync with a drop in income will instead be at least partially absorbed by Redfin and other speculators and so make housing even more unaffordable. As we know, the model is to offer a desperate seller a low price then keep the unit empty until a new higher price is met. So a unit stays empty longer than necessary, prices are kept high by a seller that can afford to do so (ie Redfin) and profit is made from widespread economic hardship.

In particular the housing crisis is not due to bifurcation between wage earners, it's a simple perpetual shift upward in housing prices that affects everyone who works for a living. Portraying it as bifurcation obfuscates the cause of the problem by creating a conflict between wage earners with different incomes while portraying the speculator's actions a inevitable, natural and harmless. But housing is not expensive because some people earn what they are worth, it is expensive because housing is used as investment.

<comment><USER17> > Redfin's stock has been part of the record breaking rally during the > pandemic and is doing well because of widespread economic hardship.

Their stock has been rising due to the Fed buying up a ton of assets like these. Their stock price does not reflect "reality".

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In my city (Denver) where a lot of the Airbnb usage is event based (sports, conventions, concerts) I've noticed a rash of fully furnished rentals come on the market at just under market rates. These are clearly all former AirBnbs.

People are definitely having cashflow issues and I'm guessing many got their units through a ton of leverage and are now in a very bad spot.

<comment><USER19> Completely anecdotally, we were staying in an Airbnb for a week before shifting to a longer term rental. This was right when things were shutting down. Our Airbnb host told us that all their renters were cancelling for all their properties. They offered for us to stay essentially as long as we wanted for something like 50% of our rate. We unfortunately couldn't take advantage of that because of the aforementioned prior plans, but it was an interesting data point and would have saved a bunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anecdotal, but I've been monitoring homes on Zillow for a while now hoping to find my first purchase. There's usually 2-3 dozen news ones within 5 miles of my current location that were listed in the last 14 days. I checked this morning and there are 200+, and that was after filtering out new constructions, apartments, and condos which I normally I don't do. I was a little shocked at how many there were. No change in prices, though. I'm assuming this is a bunch of owners wanting to sell before the market falls and their home is worth less.

<comment><USER21> In my region (Northeast US), nobody even thinks of selling until May, and summer is when the vast majority of homes hit the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The human v. algorithm power dynamic here is pretty uneven. The prospect of getting an instant offer from these companies is probably a net-positive for folks who are facing serious financial hardship (e.g. from lost rental income that was paying their mortgage), but the same system that enables it also really encourages unethical algorithmic low-balling.

Will a Redfin/Zillow data scientist use new coronavirus cases / county in their pricing model? Should they?

<comment><USER23> People who rent out Airbnbs which aren't their primary residence, especially if they took out a bunch of debt for it, are squeezing the housing supply and driving up costs, so I'm not gonna shed too many tears if they get screwed by the algorithm. Let them eat a huge loss as a warning to others so they're wary to try it again.

<comment><USER24> We need minimum owner-occupancy rules for vacation rentals.

<comment><USER25> Many locales already have them, including my city. Airbnbs are only legal if the owner lives on the property. This ensures Mom and Pop only, not over- leveraged speculators.

<comment><USER26> Does it ensure that in practice, or only in theory?

<comment><USER9> Also, AirBnB has put a lot of effort into dodging local regulations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What is iBuying? It's not really explained in the article. I'm guessing it's where redfin acts as the agent and facilitates the sales online, but I'm not sure.

<comment><USER28> Redfin buys and flips houses themselves.

<comment><USER29> Interesting, competing with their own customers.

<comment><USER30> Not too different from what Amazon does: use their own customers' data to crush them in competition.

<comment><USER31> This is exactly similar to what all retailers do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's too early for prices to reflect economic realities yet, especially since foreclosures are on hold and car auctions are on hold too.

Car prices and house prices haven't moved yet. House prices usually lag a bit behind because people have to miss a few payments and get over the emotional hurdles of losing their house before they start selling.

But it will come, unless we see a V shaped recovery, which is still possible with the money the Fed is printing.

</comment><comment><USER33> Many real estate investments are highly leveraged—-you need people renting your property to pay back the loan you used to buy the property.

If a family owns a vacation property outright and they're going to miss out on some extra income then things are annoying but not terrible.

Those that bought in a leveraged scenario (and worse did so on multiple properties) are heading into a really bad situation and thus it's understandable they'll want to offload the property ASAP.

</comment><comment><USER28> Given that my company is sort of waving in the direction of allowing permanent full time remote, buying a beach house at a discount sounds pretty appealing.

<comment><USER34> Make sure you can get good, stable internet. I've WFH for over five years, and good internet really helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Hoarding shelter should be outlawed anyway. Or hotel licenses should be required with massive fines for evasion. Get a real job "hosts" (a disturbing doublespeak term for parasite).

The original evolution of couch surfing that Airbnb started with was still cool and I like to be able to let my apartment when out of town. It's the rent seeking behaviour that distorts the housing market.

<comment><USER36> I'm not downvoting, but you do realize that subletting while out of town is both rent-seeking and distorting the _hotel_ market, right?

<comment><USER35> If it's your primary residence that you live in for e.g. 80% of the year and you swap with other primary residences or actually stay in normal hotels when travelling, I can't see any distortion there.

Not trying to apologize for hosts or hotels in particular, I just feel like primary residence swapping is pretty harmless. Also, if hotel licenses are required, how is adding more hotels distorting the hotel market other than adding a tiny amount of fair and regulated competition?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't know about vacation towns but given expensive urban cites I expect to see large drops in prices. Given covid-19 and its mindset it no longer makes sense to live in densely crowded expensive metro areas anymore. With large tech companies finally waking up to the fact that remote work actually works expect to see a huge exodus of people from these expensive regions. With all the restaurants and museums closed and really no outside space they don't have much to offer except high taxes and crowds. Also if a engineer can get roughly the same pay but work where they can buy a house instead of have 3 roommates in a 5k a month apt. which would they choose?

<comment><USER38> From my experience, UberEats and Instacart are two pandemic essentials that most city dwellers aren't ready for in a rural environment.

<comment><USER39> >pandemic essentials

Not really. Yes, if someone isn't in a dense urban environment, they're going to need to cook a lot of their meals. But, unless you're in a _really_ rural location, there are supermarkets and at least some restaurants. In a lot of cases you can pickup orders at the door even if you can't get delivery.

A lot of people seem to think you're either in Manhattan or in the wilds of Idaho somewhere. There are plenty of places that are in orbit of a major city that aren't actually all that congested.

<comment><USER38> I've spent much of my stay at home where the nearest grocery store that had order ahead was 27 miles away and had a 5 day order ahead time (which was more or less expected).

Yes, a handful of restaurants have pickup orders but there are ~4 within a ~5 mile range, and they have the best food without going that 27 miles.

It's my perception (in part from the long order ahead times) that grocery and food delivery have gone up in areas that offer them and that modern urbanists that regularly cook at home (or even go to the grocery store only once a week) are a minority.

<comment><USER39> Oh, yes, I think delivery has gone up. Personally, I haven't used it (for food). I don't have decent restaurant delivery options--for my tastes. And the stock situation with supermarkets is sufficiently bad that I'd rather go myself and wing substitutions.

I have a couple nearby grocery pickup options (an hour outside a major city) but going into a store early on a weekday doesn't feel like a big problem where I live. Opinions may differ of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you'll excuse me, I'll be purchasing some tiny violins.

</comment><comment><USER41> Vacation rentals still have demand. Many people would rather spend the lockdown in a nice house in nature somewhere than in their urban place. The problem is that at least in the US many states issues a ban on non-essential rentals, so they are illegal currently in many places. Once that's lifted many of these places would be fully booked. The rental places in urban areas that rely on tourists visiting cities are a different story.

<comment><USER39> I can easily see a scenario where, say, extended rentals on beach houses on Cape Cod are especially popular this summer given:

\- A lot of the usual urban concerts etc. will probably be canceled and even casual eating/drinking/walking/shopping will be more awkward.

\- International travel will be mostly a no-go.

\- Flying in general will be more awkward

\- Even a driving vacation won't be as low friction as usual

So maybe better to rent a house somewhere nice and hang out with the family.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > Despite the coronavirus outbreak causing a downturn in home sales and > listing activity through March and April, Redfin managed to beat > expectations with its first quarter earnings as the company posted a net > loss of $60 million. A year ago, Redfin had reported a larger net loss of > $67 million, for comparison.

That's a weird way of "beating expectations"

</comment><comment><USER43> The article appears to have been pulled. In any case it seems unlikely that vacation rentals are "toast". The drivers of their expansion, mainly our lack of ability to build anything in sufficient quantities nearly everywhere, aren't going away.

</comment><comment><USER44> As someone looking for such a home, I definitely haven't seen the market soften nearly close to what the doomsayers are predicting. Speaking with some owners, I think many of them are instead turning it into a long term rental for a year or more.

</comment><comment><USER45> As someone in a STR coastal hotspot, I generally agree with the sentiment here that it's too early for the average observer to ascertain a market correction...for vacation/STR areas, it's the rental market change that will precede the housing. (for example, many properties tyically churning $5-$20k/mo during peak season via STR are now renting M2M @75%ish off - <USER2> this is good for local communities IMO).

Online enablers like Redfin have perch from which to observe the market like no-other, hence the reason they can buy and sell in house with competitive technological advantage.

That said, I didn't see any data from the article to suggest what the CEO is purporting "home-buying demand is almost back to pre-pandemic levels." \- so going to call BS on that full stop; he has every reason to say this esp. without a "reporter" who will challenge the statement or followup...read between the lines.

Also, these players restarting their own in-house buying programs are simply able to tweak their algorithms to low-ball and who can blame them? Does not indicate a healthy/positive market ahead either...just that they are going be hunting for deals via automated offers...again who can blame them? (Just don't interpret that move as meaning much of anything at this time).

TLDR; this is a marketing piece - give me evidence to support a claim or GTFO.

<comment><USER46> > "home-buying demand is almost back to pre-pandemic levels."

yeah that's clearly fraudulent marketing.

> Online enablers like Redfin have perch from which to observe the market like > no-other

eh? Not at all. What data do they have that any MLS subscriber doesn't have?

<comment><USER36> > What data do they have that any MLS subscriber doesn't have?

Wouldn't they have some insight into what people _want_ to buy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> although i'm a home owner as of fairly recently, this feels like a bit of a necessary correction. people owning multiple homes drives up prices for everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'd think with new lower mortgage rates vacation real estate will rise in value.

Sure, some people get squeezed in the short term, but in a year or two this will probably be all over and people will be desperate for their vacation.

Plus baby boomers are still retiring and more people are escaping big cities.

</comment><comment><USER49> deeperpockets about to be shallowerpockets...</comment>