Why Japan didn't create the iPod - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod <comment><USER2> Yes, Japan didn't create the iPod but it doesn't mean they are behind.

I remember showing my black and white iPod to some people in Japan in 2005 and they had never seen one before. However, if you looked in the shops you could find 100s of better spec'ed MP3 players, much better than the ones in the U.K. at the time and much cheaper. I guess the iPod just looked like a over priced fashion accessory to them.

Then looking at some of the phones people had in 2005 when I was there, people were able to do all sorts of things, like look up train times with complete ease. At the time was very difficult on European phones.

The author of the article seems to think that it's progress to plug your MP3 player or phone into a computer, but it's not. For example look at iTunes, I can only put music on from one machine and can't get it off again (using iTunes at least), it's needlessly tied to a single machine, when I don't want it tied to any machine. Also people don't want to plug their digital camera into a computer to upload pictures, they just want to send them straight to the internet from their phone, the Japanese were doing this long before the iPhone+Twitpic.

I think not requiring a computer as the digital hub is the future, not the past.

<comment><USER3> Your friends in Japan had never seen an iPod in 2005? Apple claimed the iPod had 60 percent of Japanese market share as early as November of that year.

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/nov/16japan.html>

It kept the lead until September of 2009, when Sony crowed that the Walkman had outsold the iPod the previous week... because the iPod's share had been cannibalized by the iPhone. Nice work, Sony!

[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ansrP2IonbRA)

"Better spec'ed" devices that didn't involve a computer necessarily cram more user interface onto a limited surface, which is why almost by definition, those devices were harder to use.

The iPod won not just because its interface was better, but because there was so much less of it. Offloading complex functionality to a general-purpose computing device made the iPod a better music device. There's really no getting around this point, even if the iPod's successors are becoming general- purpose computing devices themselves.

<comment><USER2> Well they weren't my friends as such just normal non-tech Japanese that I met in various hostels around March 2005. It seemed like it was just getting established at that time, whilst a few had heard of them, the people I had met had never used one. I note that even in the U.K. 2003 very few of my non-tech friends were aware of the iPod still.

The big things at the time in Japan in March 2005 seemed to be the PSP (just released), High Definition TVs (there was one in a shop but were impossible to find in the U.K. at the time) and 100Mbs broadband. Oh yeah and I saw 3D cinema in the World EXPO whilst I was there. Mostly these things are being touted still as new in 2010.

I'd agree that the iPod won because they made a nice device, but I think that's because that is what the American/European markets demand. However there are lots of markets in the world where functionality and price are lot more important than usability, like the massive emerging ones in India and China.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I spent some time living in Japan, and I recognize a lot in this article. When I came to Japan I was surprised by how people are really not computer savvy in general. Most families have a computer, but only one, it's in the kitchen and nobody is very good at using it. This is strange, because people are quite tech-savvy in general and not at all techno-phobic like many non-geeks in the west. Japanese mobile phones have been awesome for years and there are plenty or really cool mobile web services. Non-mobile websites on the other hand frequently look like a mid-90s abdomination, only with more colors and animated gifs. Perhaps that is just a different preference in layout style though.

Computer gaming really doesn't exist in Japan. It's all on consoles, handhelds and phones. Few Japanese have even heard of World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Quake, Counterstrike or Civilization. I think there are some erotic games for PC because the console makers will not give them licenses. So the few who know about computer gaming think it's for perverts.

The authors explanation seems reasonable to me. Japan simply took a different direction towards appliances rather than general-purpose computers, and has continued on that path. Appliances are easy to use, but are far less suitable for hacking.

This means you really don't find many "hackers" in Japan. There are plenty of nerds, but few of them are into programming. Similar to my impression of China, software is seen as a branch of engineering like any other. Software companies will actually hire developers with no programming experience, as long as they have a good engineering degree and seem like a person that would fit into the company. They didn't lie on the CV either, the company fully expect to put them in front of computers with "Perl for beginners".

On a side note, I really don't like the western HR buzzword bingo either, where having exactly the right acronyms on your CV means more than your aptitude and actual ability to program. Is there any country in the world that strikes the right balance in general?

<comment><USER5> I am here on HN to contribute a different view about this allegedly exotic country, again.

> Computer gaming really doesn't exist in Japan. It's all on consoles, > handhelds and phones. Few Japanese have even heard of World of Warcraft, > Starcraft, Quake, Counterstrike or Civilization.

Computer gaming does exist. They aren't aware of the titles you mentioned just because they aren't localized. Many Japanese have difficulty with English despite of the amount of education throw in, but that's another story.

> This means you really don't find many "hackers" in Japan.

Hackers do exist. Again just because... well they don't speak English and often not visible to the hacker community at large. However I admit English is lingua franca of programming, and often I have to bridge them.

Re CV, it's not the same CV as in the western, in fact it's almost wrong call it CV. On the contrary, many Japanese job applicants assume the CV same as their counterparts and fail miserably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a nitpick, this isn't actually true: "Before the advent of computers, katakana was never used to write entire sentences." There were quite a few books written entirely in katakana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, since it was seen as more accessible to the uneducated poor. Japanese socialists in particular tended to use katakana as an anti-elitist gesture. For a while there was even an active reform movement aiming to abolish kanji entirely, similar to the one in Korea that successfully abolished Chinese characters there in favor of the phonetic Hangul (the Korean switch happened in the 1890s, a time when the Japanese debate was also particularly heated).

<comment><USER7> _the one in Korea that successfully abolished Chinese characters there in favor of the phonetic Hangul_

That's actually not true. Hanja (the Korean name for Chinese characters) are still used extensively by newspapers, in academia, and in legal professions. As in Japanese, it provides a method of distinguishing between homonyms, which can be particularly important when writing contracts and the like, where precision of meaning is essential.

Just like with Japanese, Korean has a large number of homonyms in its Sino- Korean vocabulary because while Chinese is tonal, Korean is not. Moreover, the more formal Sino-Korean vocabulary is in prominent usage in the aforementioned situations.

While hanja use has certainly declined over the years, and many Korean youth these days are incapable of recognizing even the most basic of hanja (largely because of fluctuating education policy that has at times entirely eliminated hanja education), that was certainly not the case prior to the last 40 or so years.

Ironically, the place where hanja would be the easiest to read/write - on the computer - is the place where it is almost entirely absent. Take a look at the Korean language Wikipedia for an example of this; Hanja are almost always used merely for the purpose of disambiguating a word written in hangul.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the correction! For some reason I had thought the change to Hangul was earlier and more complete than it actually appears to be. The fact that I mostly encounter Korean online, where as you note it's almost exclusively Hangul, might be part of the reason for that perception.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought conventional wisdom on this subject was that Japanese culture prizes conformity, so their equivalents of Jobs, Woz, Gates, et al would have been strongly discouraged from doing their own thing. The other side of that coin was that they are better at commoditizing technologies first invented in the U.S., like industrial robots, and RAM production.

Does this article mean that my assumptions are out of date?

<comment><USER9> My sense is that the conditions at small and mid-sized Japanese companies are reminiscent of the early 20th century, and are not compatible with producing innovation at a level necessary to sustain the economy.

Some things that I feel contribute (take them for what they are worth)

a) I haven't met a single female Japanese employee who hasn't been the victim of power harassment or other forms of emotional abuse. I can honestly say that 80% of women I have met at 5 different companies have been on some kind of psychological medication to cope with the stress at work. (Goodbye many useful innovations from female employees.)

b) I have met people who work 15 hour days; albeit where work consists of 6 hours of doing nothing, 4 hours of work, and then another 5 hours of waiting for the boss to leave. (Reasons include saving face - and poor housing conditions.)

c) The best university graduates tend to go directly to big companies; they don't create their own companies, because of the number of practical difficulties. (being accepted for & paying for rental properties, getting loans, etc..)

d) Everything has a big city perspective, since practically everyone has to come to Tokyo to do something important.

I can go through a hundred reasons; but the idea that there is some simple cultural issue that could be chopped away like a Gordian knot to solve the problem is a bit too simplistic.

<comment><USER10> We should talk about hacking Japan some time. Everything insane about large Japanese corporations just spells market opportunity. (In addition to the issues in the above post -- which I partially agree with -- you could pick "Engineers are grossly underpaid relative to skill", "No socially productive work is expected by anyone below the age of about 35", "Some of the best educations in the world are wasted on undifferentiated 'office work'", etc etc.)

<comment><USER9> Dude, you're seriously welcome to stop by sometime and eat with me. I'm sure we'd have a million ideas. Mail me sometime (jawaad.mahmood at!_? i do.t softbank d.ot j.p)

What gets to me is how there is absolutely no respect for younger workers; the idea is that they need to get calloused or be "hungry" before they have a shot. As if a clean-cut young man has never had a good idea in his life.

As for engineers being underpaid; there was an article in Asahi about how engineers being paid 5 million yen in Japan go to Silicon Valley and make about 10 mil. It's nonsensical.

(I'm not sure how up I am on the education system of Japan, but that probably belongs in another conversation)

<comment><USER10> You Tokyo engineers and your insanely high wages! Five million yen ($55k), hah. In Nagoya, the Employer Who Must Not Be Named exercises essentially monopsony on engineering labor, and they pay roughly according to the traditional yardstick: 2.X million yen for 20-somethings, 3.X million yen for 30-somethings, etc.

<comment><USER9> If you are in Nagoya, you have my sincere pity.

I have a friend who went from Montreal to Nagoya with Ubisoft; he was telling me about the terrible conditions and the utter inability of companies to re- invest into the company itself. They wouldn't even pay for a proper screen; they were using CRTs or something like that.

It's truly bullshit because you can take 100% of any money you spend on the company off your taxable income (as long as you have proper receipts). It makes no sense for a company NOT to upgrade its faculties in Japan.

<comment><USER10> Your friend may be finding a company- or industry-specific issue there. My company has occasional frugality attacks but Nagoya is _cough_ no stranger to capital-intensive industry _cough_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have always felt English works as a language to interact with computers pretty well, perhaps one of the best or the best. It could be argued this is just because I speak it as a primary language, but this article illuminates exactly why I believe it is a good candidate. Our character set is very small and very simple, which is important. There are sets with fewer (the indigenous Hawaiian language IIRC has 13 letters), but English is also very widespread, and words don't wind up crazy long (like in Hawaiian).

Other European languages with the Latin alphabet could be fair contenders as well because of this, although the ones with accents are a bit more complex, and none of them are as widespread that I am aware of.

So actually really what I'm getting at is not 'go English!' but 'go Latin alphabet!'

<comment><USER12> I believe Hebrew would work pretty well too. There are 22 letters, it's also phonetically very similar to Latin characters. Most words are also shorter in Hebrew, but are phonetically equivalent to an English sounding word. For example, "Comment" could be "כמנת", thus 4 characters instead of 6, and are phonetically equivalent.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure it passes the 8x8 pixel font test, though.

<comment><USER11> Suddenly another interesting thing springs to mind. Punctuation has become all kinds of useful for computers in the shell, in programming, etc. Things like / for folders is intuitive and easy to see. Do many other languages, particularly the better candidates w/ lower letter counts such as Hebrew, have punctuation beyond the period?

Edit: good for them, Hebrew does have punctuation.

<comment><USER6> Hebrew does, but only really because it imported it from modern European languages recently. Classical Hebrew and the religious Hebrew of the middle ages didn't have much in the way of punctuation, but when it was revived in the 19th century as a living language by European Zionists, it borrowed (adapted versions of) the punctuation common to European languages of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There should be companion pieces: "Why China didn't create the iPod" and "Why Europe (Germany, Finland, Sweden, etc.) didn't create the iPod". Japan and these places are all very tech-savy but their cultures are very different than that in the US, you can almost think of it as different solutions to the same equation.

Simplifying and summing up, I think the arguments go like this: * In Japan, the conformity culture, bureaucracy in big companies, and lack of foreign brain power and venture capital is the problem (The Economist was saying that Japan has the lowest foreign technical investment in developed countries). * In China, the lack of entrenched copyright culture is the problem, in fact, taking a product and hacking to add new features is prized. Also, good product design design and customer feedback is unknown. * Europe does have excellent designers; however, it lacks a start-up worshiping culture, in fact they're given the cold shoulder in government-heavy countries like France. Their modus operandi is to proceed by government-funded huge projects, e.g. Galileo, Airbus. And the foreign brain power is there, too.

So, you see, it's not Japan's fault: US has a unique combination of cultural and other factors that produces things like the iPod. I don't think this is unrepeatable, though.

<comment><USER15> I agree with points in general, but for one detail:

> Europe does have excellent designers; however, it lacks a start-up > worshipping culture...

So? The iPod wasn't made by a start-up. The technology wasn't built from an acquisition of a start-up. I dare say it had absolutely nothing to do with start-up. Yes, Apple came from a start-up. But to my mind, the distance between Apple the start-up from a garage and Apple that envisioned the iPod and DRMed iTunes is sufficient to stop assuming only a start-up could've made the iPod.

Big companies make things too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fascinating. Makes one wonder about how many changes in ttrends in technology were motivated by seamingly insignificant details about of our cultures. imagine if people had four fingers on each hand, would floating point arithmetic binary be more intuitive?

<comment><USER11> Before you dream of 4 fingered hands, stop and consider with fewer fingers counting would have been more difficult in the old, old days, and things would probably have progressed a bit slower! :)

<comment><USER17> Not necessarily ... we use base 10 because we have 10 fingers, but that's not the only choice humans could've made.

Geometry could've played a role ... angle degrees aren't base 10, which makes measurements of angles / time awkward.

Mayas used base 20. Babylonians used base 60, which is very convenient for angles since it's also divisible with 3 and 4.

Of course, I don't think there were number systems that had a base not divisible by 5 (except those that were baseless), and this probably does have something to do with the number of our fingers.

But I think we would've been just fine with 4 fingers ... we would probably count our feet too ... and base 16 would've had been the norm.

<comment><USER18> I couldn't imagine what a baseless numbering system could be. A quick google showed that Roman numerals are baseless. I always assumed they were a form of base10 and crazy shorthand.

<comment><USER17> I can't imagine what would be like to live with such a baseless numbering system ... life had to be much simpler for it to work. Like you didn't pay your taxes this month? Your possessions are confiscated or it's off with your head because calculating interest is too much work :)

They probably used counting boards, and specific units for measurement ... like they knew the size of a legion in their army and said "we have 3 legions, with 2 other joining, that's 5 legions" instead of ~ "we have 12600 men, 8400 more are joining, that's 21000 men".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm kind of surprised hardware and software interface wasn't really addressed in the discussion about the iPod. It compares very favorably with the engineer-designed UIs that many local manufacturers release for consumer electronics in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia, and I think has helped drive its success there, as well as the success of the iPhone/iTouch.

</comment><comment><USER20> This reminds me of the recent article talking about one of the major obstacles to China spreading its culture is the complexity of its written language.

Many people think that this fact alone will stop Chinese culture from dominating and spreading in the same way Western/English culture has spread.

<comment><USER11> Good point. I know tons of nissei (well, the Chinese word for nissei, whatever it is) who can speak Chinese but completely gave up on writing it, and it looks to me sorta like the language is going to die in the US as the generations go on partly because of that. (unless immigration from china stays high)

<comment><USER21> In a few years we get mobile phone cameras with OCR and reading/translation. (There might be apps for that on the iPhone already?)

Better living through technology. :-)

<comment><USER22> Oh god, that would be horribly slow.

But I dunno maybe we'll have a future where most people will speak Chinese and English....

<comment><USER21> Not slow with a server solution and next generation upload speed. (Most of the OCR could be implemented on a hardware chip, so not a full image has to be sent.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Another question - why did the industrial revolution happen in Europe, not Asia? My guess - movable type works better with latin characters than thousands of kanji. Cheap (and more varied) books = cheap knowledge for the masses.

<comment><USER24> See: [http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates- Societies/dp/03...](http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates- Societies/dp/0393317552)

<comment><USER23> I've read it. GGandS claims Africa and the USA were slowed down by their geography (vertically oriented continents makes sharing crops and hunting technology difficult) and native flora (Eurasian wheat and rice is good, African crops aren't so great, and corn is poor) and fauna (African animals are too dangerous to domesticate, and the good American animals were wiped out roughly the time that humans arrived).

He may mention that the Arab world was delayed by climate change (deforestation, desertification and other reasons?), but I think he says assumes that Europe only beat Asia to the industrial revolution through dumb luck.

Thus my suggestion that latin scrip was far superior from 1400 to about now (when laser printers and LCD screens are replacing green screens, movable type and dot matrix printers.

<comment><USER25> Woodprint was probably "good enough" to enable widespread book distribution, especially since it enabled (from the author's point of view) a superior financing model: [http://www.froginawell.net/china/2009/12/china-where-the- fut...](http://www.froginawell.net/china/2009/12/china-where-the-future-is- already-the-past/)

I think the real problem is that the necessary books weren't being written in the first place (or were suppressed more ruthlessly), not that the cost of printing them was too high. The massive character set meant that becoming literate required a huge investment of time/money. And so, at least in China, all the literati went into civil service jobs, and had little incentive to publish books which would shake up the status quo.

You may be interested in the book _Asia's Orthographic Dilemma_ by William Hannas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The simpler answer is "Steve Jobs isn't Japanese". Any one else remember about the single button mouse on the Mac?

Aside from the snark remark, my perception of the Japanese is that they are willing to put up with difficult equipment.

<comment><USER9> The single button mouse is not just Steve Jobs; Jef Raskin makes a very strong case for it as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not a Japanese speaker, but couldn't romanji be used in replacement?

<comment><USER28> No. Japanese has a LOT of homonyms. Kanji are necessary to tell the difference between all the possible meanings of a given set of sounds^. IANAL^^ but from my experience it seems Japanese is much better for speaking and reading than it is for writing. In speech the homonyms are more useful because it's easier to tell what something means from context. I find that I'm often much terser in Japanese than in English in speaking and vice-versa in writing.

^The number of kanji in use is actually INCREASING because of auto-completion software.

^^(I Am Not A Linguist), actually readability of Japanese could go either way, I'm not sure. On the one hand, the characters are more complex, requiring more space and processing; on the other, they stand for larger chunks of meaning. Has anybody here seen any studies on the reading-comprehension speed of Japanese vs. English?

^^^Also, on readability: Kanji help show the grammatical structure of a sentence somewhat. The same way you read English words by recognizing their shape, you can recognize the structure of a Japanese sentence by it's shape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Good article on a fascinating and complex subject. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER30> They don't focus on UIs? That's what makes the iPod special. Japanese cell phones are know for their terrible UIs (yet awesome features).

<comment><USER31> a click wheel scrolling through all 20gb of your music is the king of UI now?</comment></comment>


Software Engineers Solve Problems - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/17/Engineers-solve-problems.html <comment><USER2> I know it's a throwaway five-paragraph blog post that's hardly worth picking a bone with, but it's almost never your job as a software engineer to boil the ocean.

      >  1. Actually, the bug ultimately comes from a third-party program
      >  2. Hm, it uses a programming language I don't know
      >  3. Oh, the bug is in that programming language's compiler
      >  4. This subsystem of the compiler would have to be overhauled
      >  5. And the problem is overlooked by the language specification

(1) happens ubiquitously. If you're working at your own leisure, or you have no other options, or, possibly, your project manager is asleep at the wheel, you might try to fix the bug at the source. But in business settings, the best solution is to write a bandaid fix and move on. Broken code sells better than no code because you were too busy volunteering to shave the proverbial yak.

(2) is a non-issue, at least for a hazily defined set of popular languages. And it's usually not ignorance of the language that stops you, it's ignorance of its tool chain.

(3) + (4) + (5) It's never a bug in the compiler.[1] And if it is, you're not being paid to fix compiler bugs. And if you are, you don't need this pep talk blog post to tell you that it's your job.

[1] [http://blog.xcski.com/2012/10/08/how-to- debug](http://blog.xcski.com/2012/10/08/how-to-debug)

<comment><USER3> This is a classic example of how meeting corporate expectations of a software developer isn't the same thing as being a good software developer.

You aren't paid to make good software; you're being paid to make an ROI. That being said, I've heard that the two sometimes overlap.</comment></comment>


Oregon expected to enact first state-wide rent control law - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/us/oregon-rent-control-bill.html <comment><USER2> Bizarre to not mention the long-standing, broad consensus among economists that rent controls do more harm than good.

Courtesy Wikipedia, here's Paul Krugman in 2000:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a- rent...](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent- affair.html)

Surely if economists were so widely in support of such policies, the _Times_ would have highlighted that fact.

<comment><USER3> And yet the market seems not to have magically provided a supply of housing that is adequate for the market to reach an affordable equilibrium. I agree the article should have mentioned it and am also skeptical about the efficacy of rent control, but other approaches don't seem to be working out as hoped.

<comment><USER4> Is there local regulation or NIMBY-ism that prevents the market from providing new housing?

<comment><USER5> In San Francisco rent control only applies to pre-1979 buildings. Ceteris paribus, this _incentivizes_ new construction to replace rent-controlled buildings. So why isn't there more supply? Because of zoning, approval, and the NIMBY activism that has captured those processes.

Removing or abstaining from rent control wouldn't address the fundamental problems. Indeed, I'd argue that _expanded_ rent control could be used as a stick to pull the renters lobby away from NIMBY activists who have convinced renters that any new construction is against their interests.

Rent control can be viewed as a type of wealth transfer (social welfare) that all economists implicitly _presume_ will be used to ameliorate distribution and dislocation inequities. Because "tax" is a four letter word in our society and cash transfers both stigmatized and disfavored, we rely on regulatory machinations like rent control or trade tariffs to implement the kind of wealth transfers that economists all presume would be done with taxes and cash payments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is more consensus on Rent Control being harmful than there is on global warming. Its absolutely insane that it would be enacted.

The solutions to expensive housing is complicated, obviously. Its about zoning, cancelling out NIMBYism, incentivizing affordable housing and basically matching supply with demand.

Rent control simply doesn't work. For any person it helps, it will disadvantage 10x more in the process.

I wonder if they are putting in vacancy controls as well. That would have the 1-2 punch of not only reducing rental stock but also significantly lowering property values (and property taxes in the process)

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by vacancy controls leading to reduced rental stock and lowering property values?

If high rent is the issue, vacant units should be pushed to the market instead of artificially limiting supply. Cities and residents would mutually benefit from a vacancy tax like Vancouver or similar, where international speculators are not using the units for anything useful to anyone in the city.

<comment><USER6> I can easily explain this.

Two buildings are for sale. They are identical in rental income, quality, etc.. and cost the same.

The only difference between the two buildings is that one has enormous restrictions on how you own and operate the building. You as a landlord will have a cap on your potential upside in rent, but NO cap in the downside.

Which building will you buy, all other facts equal? Unless you are insane, it will be the non rent-controlled building. As such, the price of the rent- controlled building will have to be lowered to compete for a sale. Hence lower prices.

<comment><USER7> What value does the expensive building offer the city if it's exactly the same?

You've actually just convinced me rent control might do a city good by pushing capital investors into more useful pursuits, rather than simply "investing in land" which effectively does nothing of value for people.

I do think it's silly to treat the symptom without fixing the main problem which is zoning law and permit restrictions on building more housing stock. But why not both?

Might as well add the Land Value Tax while we're at it

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

<comment><USER8> That might work if you want to live in a tent in the forest, but if you want to live in a city with buildings and infrastructure, then you want investors in invest in land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a great paper about how rent control is counterproductive: [https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/DMQ.pdf](https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/DMQ.pdf).

> Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the > assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study its impacts on tenants > and landlords. Leveraging new data tracking individuals' migration, we find > rent control limits renters' mobility by 20% and lowers displacement from > San Francisco. Landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing > supplies by 15% by selling to owner-occupants and redeveloping buildings. > Thus, while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the > short run, the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in > the long run, ultimately undermining the goals of the law.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why do governments go this direction when it causes so many problems?

In a market economy, which includes both housing construction and home rentals, price is the signal by which demand is measured. Rent control either eliminates or severely distorts that signal.

I'm going to predict that:1) fewer new homes will be constructed and 2) rents will sky rocket where it's possible (tenant turnover).

<comment><USER3> Market economies work great in textbooks under idealized conditions of perfect competition, where all participants in the market are fully informed and have the option to enter or exit the market freely. In reality demand for housing is highly inelastic, significant informational asymmetries exist, the market is fundamentally constrained by the supply of land and the varying demands resulting from demographic change, and other factors.

Economic analysis that does not take these factors into account is not worth very much. It also fails to offer any useful solution for the underlying problem of rents rising faster than incomes.

<comment><USER11> > the market is fundamentally constrained by the supply of land

And constrained by how the government allows that land to be used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In Québec we've had province-wide rent control since at least the early 70's. Landlords are allowed to raise rent annually up to a certain percentage determined by inflation (last year, up to 2.5%). Rent raises can also be appealed to the housing board if they seem unfair, or if the landlord has not been keeping up with maintenance. Prices can go up if significant renovations occur (which they almost never do), but even then costs must be split across all units in the building. In 10 years, across 9 apartments, I have not once had a landlord bother to raise my rent.

It's not a perfect system, but still today in Montréal you can get a $400USD 1 bedroom apartment in a good part of town, thanks to this system. It ensures that the working class can live near their occupation, and they don't have to commute from a slum neighbourhood outside the city. In many quartiers, you have the very poor and the very wealthy living side by side.

I believe absolutely rent-control (in tandem with a few other policies) has enabled Montréal to situate itself as a hotbed of creativity. We have one of the most dynamic and diverse art scenes in all of North America, and with a population on the island of Montréal still less than 2 million.

I definitely support this kind of legislation.

<comment><USER13> > in Montréal you can get a $400USD 1 bedroom apartment in a good part of town

I find that extremely hard to believe

<comment><USER12> I pay $500 Canadian + electricity/heating ($80) / month for an apartment (half of top floor in duplex) in a good part of town, 20 minute walk from the very best part. That's 439.43USD including all utilities for a one bedroom, or '3.5' as it is called here (kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom).

& I know many dozens of people in the same scenario, or who pay less. There is definitely more expensive stuff out there, and you do need to hunt a little bit for this price (usually craigslist etc. is pricey), but I regularly see even bigger apartments go for the price I'm paying.

In fact I shit you not, my neighbour who has kept their place since the early 90s, pays 246.22 USD + electric for the same apartment as me. . .

<comment><USER13> Do you have a link to an example?

>In fact I shit you not, my neighbour who has kept their place since the early 90s, pays 246.22 USD + electric for the same apartment as me. . .

Undoubtedly those that have rent controlled apartments do well. But that does not mean one can go and get an apartment and pay a rate similar to the one that they have.

<comment><USER12> >Do you have a link to an example?

Like I said, on Craigslist/Kijiji/etc it is difficult to find such a price, or when it goes online, it disappears very quickly. A price like this can be found by walking around and finding "à louer" signs and calling the number.

But here is one for $650CAD (492.47USD): [https://www.kijiji.ca/v-appartement- condo/ville-de-montreal/...](https://www.kijiji.ca/v-appartement-condo/ville- de-montreal/3-1-2-nord-villeray-beau-brillant-locataire-de- choix/1417313879?enableSearchNavigationFlag=true)

>But that does not mean one can go and get an apartment and pay a rate similar to the one that they have.

But when she dies (probably not far away), the place legally must be rented at the same price (+ inflation of one year), assuming no major renovations are undertaken. And if it get's renovated, the price can only rise to a certain point unless the whole building get's demoed. So someone will get it at about that price, eventually, unless the landlord illegally raises the price (which happens).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Rent control is nativism just like prop 13. Provides special economic benefits unavailable to newcomers.

<comment><USER15> For arguments sake - is nativism inherently immoral?

<comment><USER16> It depends on what kind of world you want to live in, I suppose. It certainly isn't egalitarian or inclusive, and I would argue it's not very far removed from racism. The real debate would be around what amount of "us versus them," favoring your chosen social group over all outsiders, is acceptable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Everyone loves to regulate and restrict housing to try and keep anything from changing. If they would ban job creation then they'd get what they say they want.

But if you suggest that, it reveals the NIMBY hypocracy. "We want the economy to keep growing just no more people moving here..." ie the existing residents want to get rich by extracting wealth from the job creators in their region via restriction of housing supply.

</comment><comment><USER17> There are some great pictures in this PDF, entitled "Bomb Damage or Rent Control?". You really can't tell!

[http://www.walterblock.com/wp- content/uploads/publications/R...](http://www.walterblock.com/wp- content/uploads/publications/RentControlMythsRealities.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER18> Rent control is a bandaid that tries to fix fundamental systemic flaws and lack of planning by society.

Problems:

They do mention Oregon's land use laws. I didn't see it while skimming but (for west coast states) the land that is actually "state" instead of federal is also an issue (#1).

However the biggest issue is that the Supply vs Demand curves for housing are simply insane.

Demand is mostly dictated by jobs, and only slightly moderated by the quality of public transit and transportation infrastructure (mass transit AND freeways/parking included).

As a nation the US has been housing constrained for at least 20 years, probably longer.

Worse for a generation or two housing has been used as an investment rather than the cost center that it is; so all sorts of market incentives are massively messed up.

Finally "career" jobs, which allow someone to live in the same house for their entire adult life more or less began a long slow death in the 1980s, which is the true beginning of the destruction of communities.

Solutions to consider:

Tax, based on land use opportunity cost/value. This should have a built in history consideration that gradually introduces rising land use potential over a number of years. (E.G. sliding window over 10 or 20 years)

Tax, transparently, to fund infrastructure, and provide a place (website?) where someone can go to see what their tax dollars are actually being spent on. How they are getting value for services.

Zone and re-zone and do urban development more like Japan (#2) and Europe (? speculation) do; based on nuisance level.

Encourage, via help with red-tape, ignoring local opposition when exceeding code requirements, and co-coordinating funding and insurance bids for projects, that there is ample supply on the market to reach the desired rental price for an area. If builders don't want to service an area help local benefit corporations get started to fulfill this need.

Raise the building codes and promote buildings that are designed to last, be safe and comfortable to live in, and which encourage privacy at home while being responsible to the community around them.

Design transportation in city cores more like the Caves of Steel, and provide civic infrastructure (monitored parking garages/etc) at the edges to interface with the exterior world.

#1 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LruaD7XhQ50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LruaD7XhQ50) "CGP Grey - what is (US) Federal Land"

#2 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845) \----- [http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese- zoning.html](http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html)

Edits - I can never remember what variant of markdown this site uses... please don't convert my text to italics.

<comment> jim-jim-jim Another far less wonky solution to consider: public housing.

<comment><USER19> I've never met anyone in the US who has enjoyed their experience in public housing or low rent apartments.

<comment><USER20> Here are some examples from outside of the US of luxury public housing. [https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/beautiful-public-housing- red-...](https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/beautiful-public-housing-red-vienna- social-housing)

<comment><USER19> I don't think it's an engineering challenge, I think it's a cultural challenge.

When traveling abroad, it's amazing how clean everything is. The amount of trash on US highways, city sidewalks, public parks, etc. is pretty noticeable when you return.

I'm sure we could build beautiful housing pretty affordably, but I'm not sure we could keep it beautiful unless we treat affordable housing as an ongoing investment and not just build it and forget about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oregon actually has pretty nice rental laws, strongly favoring tenants. This shows that continuing.

Also 8/10 pictures from Oregon are going to have that hazy white color cool. It's always cloudy there.

<comment><USER22> Boy do I ever love the rent control of San Fran and West LA! So affordable!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It'll work this time

</comment><comment><USER24> Great news! (Oregonian here) We were kinda pushed into buying our first home because our rent went up $100/month in 2017 and then $200/month in 2018.. I saw where that was headed and we made home buying happen way sooner than we wanted too.

Glad to see this is being addressed because some just can't make that happen.

<comment><USER24> I see a lot of comments referring to a study that says it does more harm than good and I haven't read into them yet but my first question is: Does it measure the impact it has on community? As in does it take into account the fact that a community needs residents to stick around, not just live in boxes and not interact with each other. Because my experience with a $100 then $200/month rent increase showed me that it is going to destroy the community of long time renters in the neighborhood. Hopefully it addresses that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Unconstitutional. It's a regulatory taking under the Fifth Amendment.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is not going to work. Price controls will generate shortages.

</comment><comment><USER27> Rent control causes urban blight</comment>


Show HN: WebGL Sprites Benchmark - eduardo-costa http://www.haxor.xyz/demos/bunny-mark

<comment><AUTHOR> On my Mint Desktop:

        Firefox 40.0: 1000 Bunnies at 12 FPS
        Firefox 40.0: 10000 Bunnies at 12 FPS
        Firefox 40.0: 20000 Bunnies at 12 FPS
        Firefox 40.0: 30000 Bunnies at 12 FPS

        Chrome 44.0: 1000 Bunnies at 60 FPS
        Chrome 44.0: 10000 Bunnies at 60 FPS
        Chrome 44.0: 30000 Bunnies at 30 FPS

Why this extreme difference between Chrome and Firefox?

about:config in Firefox says "GPU Accelerated Windows: 0/3" so I guess it is somehow not using the GPU. Although then Im surprised it can render 30k bunnies at 12 FPS. On the other hand, it says "WebGL Renderer: NVIDIA Corporation -- GeForce GT 630/PCIe/SSE2". So I guess it's using the GPU. Also I would expect this WebGL demo to not even run without FF using the GPU. Strange. Any ideas?

<comment><USER2> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751082](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751082) -> [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=594876) & [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=942302](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=942302)

The issue seems to be in some kind of limbo, with many users reporting that the compositing mode doesn't even make a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 300 000 sprites, i5 2500, R9 270, Windows 8

\- Chrome 44: 60 FPS constant

\- Firefox 39: 49 FPS

\- Firefox 40: 59-60 FPS

\- IE 11: 10-12 FPS, very poor.

The FPS counter doesn't appear on my smartphone (falcon, CM12.1 Browser), but i would estimate the performance is at about 10-15FPS at the _default_ number of sprites, let alone the full 300 000.

<comment><USER4> For me, (nVidia GTX 980) Chrome beats Firefox on Windows 8.1 by a lot when rendering 300,000 bunnies.

\- Chrome 44: 100 FPS

\- Firefox 40: 60 FPS

\- IE 11: 10 FPS

I don't think that FF is limiting itself to 60 FPS as I have a 144Hz monitor and other WebGL demos can render at frame rates well in excess of 60 FPS in firefox.

<comment><USER5> Firefox's rAF implementation is currently hardcoded at 60 FPS.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=707884](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=707884)

<comment><USER4> That is odd because the three.js demos i run report well in excess of 60 fps in FF when my monitor refresh rate is set 144Hz. The stats.js component only measures up to 100FPS and the simple demos often exceed that.

edit: I also have G-SYNC enabled and I noticed that the bug thread says the FF syncs to vsync on Windows. nVidia's G-SYNC might be messing with vsync to achieve higher than 60FPS on supported monitors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just a black screen on both Firefox Android and Chrome Android.

<comment><USER7> Wfm nightly z3c and its fluid but cant see fps counter

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> FF 126.96.36.199 22-23fps 23fps

FF nightly 2015-08-31 24fps

chrome 44.0.2403.157 (64bit) 26fps

MS Edge 20.10240.16384.0 30-33fps

(i7-4770k igfx)

The differences weren't visually very apparent. None of the browsers seemed to have periodic GC lag, which in the past certainly was an issue.

I'm curious: which browser did you develop this with/optimize on?

<comment> eduardo-costa Chrome 44. The trick is to create 1 Mesh with 300.000 or more planes and render all stuff once. I pass the x,y data to a texture and sample it in the shader.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 300000 sprites, i7-4712HQ, Linux

      - Chrome 44: between 10 and 20 fps.
      - Firefox 40: *very long load time* constant 14 fps

<comment><USER10> This demo is very impressive !

300000 sprites

fps: 59-60

os: Linux

browser: Chrome 44

cpu: i7-3930k

gpu: GTX 970

driver: Nvidia 346.47

</comment></comment><comment> eduardo-costa OP Here! Thank you for the data!

The hash worked here! [http://haxor.xyz/demos/bunny- mark/#500000](http://haxor.xyz/demos/bunny-mark/#500000)

For mobile, only touching and adding bunnies (with possible bugs for iOS)

Some extra info. I'm updating the [x,y] on JS and the rest is 1 drawcall in the WebGL side.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> IPad here: 1000 bunnies fall down. Apart from that, nothing happens. No FPS, no controls, nothing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems that screen/window resolution is an important factor.

<comment><USER12> I think it's meant to be a stress test of their particular way of rendering Haxe sprites, not a measure of WebGL or browser performance.

It also seems ripe for tuning; it appears to leak a dom object every frame and churn through memory at a pretty epic rate :) (at least per chrome dev tools)

<comment> eduardo-costa Sometime ago I profiled the FPS Stats tool and it generated some DOM garbage!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, 100,000 sprites running at a constant 60 FPS in Chrome on a Mid-2014 MBP. Very cool.

<comment><USER14> Interesting: I've got a Mid-2014 MBP and was only getting chunky 33fps at 40k

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> how do you increase to more than 300K he says to modify the hash but this does not work on my comp

<comment> eduardo-costa [http://haxor.xyz/demos/bunny-mark/#500000](http://haxor.xyz/demos/bunny- mark/#500000)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Europe Covid-19 cases, densities, and trends at a glance - <AUTHOR> https://europecorona.com/ <comment><USER2> Density is much more informative, it should be the default sorting order.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I also think that density is more important information. The thing is that it tends to show low populated countries on top when it orders by density and I thought it'd be better to show more populated countries on top to begin with since there'll be more people who are interested in those countries. I'll reconsider about it.</comment></comment>


Control Panel Of IBM 360 Mainframe - <AUTHOR> http://ookaboo.com/o/pictures/picture.large/26078124/Incredible_Control_Panel_Of_IBM_System36

<comment><USER2> This is actually showing the register values and other status in the System/360; those are lights not buttons. At one time, of course, it was common to have this type of display showing the inner workings on the computer.

When I was working on the Research Machines 480Z (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINK_480Z>) there was a software component that allowed you to get at register values, examine memory, etc. It was nostalgically called the "Front Panel". The picture of the System/360 shows an actual front panel.

Here's the 480Z front panel as described in its manual: <http://i.imgur.com/CMRih.png>

Of course, when I finish building Babbage's Analytical Engine it won't need a front panel since the entire memory and all registers will be visible at all times.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this clarification. I was wondering why I was looking at a picture labeled "control panel" that didn't have any actual controls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Years ago, I managed a VAX Cluster that was housed in the corner of an IBM mainframe-dominated computer room. The console consisted of a vt220 and an la36 print/terminal.

It used to crack me up to see the mainframe's console. Big iron always had a big presence.

Terminals for the tape drives, terminals for the printers, terminals for the batch jobs, terminals for everything.

Parked at the end of "terminal row," where the operators gathered and spent most of their time, was a "special" console terminal -- the one running Adventure. I'd walk in, they'd look up, then go back to "work."

Amid the drone of the fans, chillers and band printers you'd hear, "I think you have to put down the lantern before you pick up the keys." Tucked away somewhere behind the manuals was a hand drawn map on green-bar paper.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights>

</comment><comment><USER6> When I was in college, Assembler was taught in IBM 360 Assembly on an IBM 370 using CMS as the OS. It was quite a bit different from programming a 6502 in HS. I still have the banana book somewhere. These were very interesting machines, but you could really suck up the shared time with a tight loop.

<comment><USER7> I recall long ago (~1987) seeing a virtual IBM 360 program in two pages of APL. I was delighted; alas, I don't have a copy - anyone recall that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> But can it play Crysis?

<comment><USER9> Very, very slowly.</comment></comment>


Crowdfunding Pinto - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.perl.org/users/brian_d_foy/2013/04/crowd-funding-pinto.html

<comment><USER2> Most open source projects do not require $100K to get completed nor hundreds of developers working on it at the same time.

This is a great example of small scale open source initiative.

<comment><USER3> Great example, indeed. We've been seeing a few pop up recently, and with a lot of our team coming from Rackspace/OpenStack, it's been fun to see the application used like this :)

Although YC advocates talking to users, few founders use HN to talk to users/potential users - so I'd love to use this opportunity to get feedback on the viability of crowdfunding for smaller open source projects on a platform like Crowdtilt... Is it worth exploring features for (a 'tilt'or bounty once the community feels it's been completed sufficiently, etc)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Using Perl to crowdfund Perl, I love it. Crowdtilt is built with Perl, as is stated on their site's footer, "Powered by Perl Dancer" - [https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/specify-module- version-r...](https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/specify-module-version- ranges-in-pint)

</comment><comment><USER5> Fun fact and off topic: "pinto" in portuguese means something like "cock" (in reference to the male sex organ) but is also a very common surname in Brazil, which may cause funny situations (or not).

</comment><comment><USER6> Perl seems to have gotten left behind as a language. The entire lost decade of Perl 6 is crazy. Sure, Perl can say that it has more modules and it might be a little better as a glue language, but for me I think it's time to adopt Ruby or Python. Except, of course, for when perl -ane '...' is needed in a pinch. :-)

Seriously, developers are dividing their efforts three different ways with three different scripting languages. It's probably better for everyone to learn Ruby and Python rather than have a third.

<comment><USER7> While all three are scripting languages, and they do have some similarities, there are absolutely huge differences between their respective communities. It's critical not to ignore these differences.

Python developers are generally more focused on building maintainable, robust, and reliable software. Being somewhat conservative, they usually don't buy into the latest fads or unnecessary hype. This leads to pragmatic software, without hype and without drama.

Ruby developers are often more willing to experiment, even if this means trading away quality and the long-term maintainability of their code. They tend to be more community-oriented, and far more emotional than other developers. While this leads to a vibrant community, it is often rife with harmful drama and some fixation on certain idolized individuals.

Perl developers often care more about short-term efficiency. Many of them aren't really interested in developing software itself; they just need custom software to ease some system administration task, or to process some data. While the community is vibrant, it tends to be more mature than the Ruby community, yet somewhat more conservative than even the Python community.

While these don't hold true for every individual programmer of each of those languages, they are true in general. As a whole, understanding these communal traits makes it more obvious why each of those scripting languages is how it is, and what they can best be used for.

<comment><USER8> I love this. I would like to hear your synopsis of the JavaScript/nodejs community as one of these characters.</comment></comment></comment>


Gnome 3.22 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnome.org/news/2016/09/gnome-3-22-released-the-future-is-now/ <comment><USER3> Without a Dash / Dock built into Gnome (No Extension) I will always use Classic Mode.

<comment><USER4> This is a very popular view, but do you think it is merely due to familiarity? I've been using gnome3 for many years now, and will never go back (although I always change the default Adwaits theme as it is a little too space filling for my tastes). If you ask me, a dock shouldn't take up a lot of screenspace by default- you don't need to constantly be aware of what windows you have open, and in gnome3 the dock and its information are merely a key press away. (Either super to see the dock or hold alt-tab). This seems like an inherently superior design paradigm compared to a window list that's always shown. Also, a window list is an inefficient and slow way of switching between windows compared to alt-tab.

I actually think the gnome3 interface is objectively the best designed desktop experience in existence. It conserves screenspace and promotes keyboard based habits of switching and launching programs that are far superior to using a mouse to browse through and click a menu or list. It's also remarkably well designed for laptop touch interfaces.

I guess at the end of the day it's just an opinion, but I feel like more people should admit that the widespread backlash is about sacrificing time and space efficiently for the sake of familiarity.

<comment><USER5> I almost agree.

I dislike the full screen overlay you get with the start button. I'm all for animation, but the fade and slide of all the windows is objectively bad. The full screen nature of the menu is also full screen metro levels of bad - <USER2> even MS ditched that.

I personally get "dash to doc", "activities configurer" (remove activities button), "pixel saver" \+ Albert - binding it to the start button.

This is the minimum I need to make it a functionally intuitive experience.

<comment><USER3> I mean for the shortcut's its just dump that I need to open "Activities". It's fine to open a full screen overlay (like it's done on Ubuntu and Mac), but I mean for things like a browser or my ide, which I open like every day a lot of the time it's dump to click Activities -> All -> Search -> Click Browser.

With a Dock I can just All -> Search -> Click and for my favs it's just "Click". Most people (like non Developers open at most 3-4 programs, all of them fit into a dash.

When I'm developing on my day to day job I barly need anything from the "All" panel. Neither in Linux nor in Mac. I mostly open IntelliJ, Chrome, and the Terminal and an Email program. Editor like sublime will be openend via a Terminal, Music program will run in background and could be started via my "Play" Button (on both systems), so basically Gnome lacks that. Basically I prefer Fedora but somehow I still use Ubuntu, since it's just install and it works like I like it and Fedora takes a few step to make it usable, so mostly a "foolness" issue. Ah and before 22 when connecting external monitors with different screen sizes the experience just sucked (not a problem anymore tough). Ah and also the Menubar on Gnome3 is way too thick. I mean some programs don't need that. like firefox. it's unnecessary since the X button could be added to the tab menu and the name of the application is displayed between "activities", so why do I need a 22pixel height menu bar ? Just to display an X?

Edit: Don't say that extensions can do that, since they are broken after every .2 release. Extensions are an excuse for not shipping useful features.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A New Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://nickmudge.info/?post=91

<comment><USER2> Why would you post a link to your blog promoting the fact that you're thinking about writing an OS? That's like me posting a link to my blog promoting a startup I haven't thought of the idea for yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm beyond thinking of writing an OS. It's currently what I'm working on in my spare time. I'm interested in people's ideas and comments.

<comment><USER2> We'll have more constructive comments when you show us you've made some progress in terms of development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-priori I've been tinkering with operating system programming for a few years now (yikes, has it really been 5?) in my spare time. It's an interesting hobby, and I actually got a job partly because of it. :)

I'm interested in hearing more about this project of yours, and possibly contributing to it.

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone interested in OSes, I recommend the EROS, Sun Spring, Singularity, and Synthesis papers; they are signposts outside the well-explored Unix/VMS territory.

</comment><comment><USER4> How about an exokernel?

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I've been thinking about that too.

<comment><USER5> "Yea, I've been thinking about that too"

perhaps a separate post for that? seeing as __this __post seems to be essentially a content free "I am thinking about ... " ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey man, a lot of code comes from thinking about things for awhile.

<comment><USER5> the problem is not with thinking about stuff. But if I were to write blog posts about "I am thinking about X" and then submit those posts to news.YC.. well.

Let me not discourage you though. if you think your cogitations deserve the attention of the folks at news.YC, please, go ahead and submit one link per thought. News.YC is an essentially self correcting system, in my experience, and can probably handle such content free links just fine.

<comment><USER6> The problem is whoever voted it up. Would that we could unmask the bozos;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's the basic problem: you're writing an operating system. Stop doing that. It's 2008.

<comment><USER8> Hey, it can be a good learning experience and just darn good hacker fun!

<comment><USER9> I agree -- but this is a pretty content-free YC news story. This would be notable if the guy actually gets anywhere -- writing "I'm going to write a new OS" on your blog is the trivial part.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I agree.

<comment><USER10> If you do agree, why did you post?

<comment><USER4> Because he felt like submitting. This is not a big deal. Consider it a discussion thread with an incidental link.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you help me help a friend in need? - <AUTHOR>

my job in technology gave me the opportunity to travel to Peru as part of a State Department program to assist small business owners in developing nations.
One person I met was Paulina, who is now a victim of the recent severe flooding in Cusco, Peru.
I'm reaching out to my communities to help, and would appreciate anything the HN community can do.
You can donate here: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8425
or feel free to tweet/share the link.
Thank you so much for helping me make a difference for one person and her family. <comment><USER2> Why do you need exactly $1000 ?

<comment><AUTHOR> the $1000 is really an arbitrary goal to shoot for, I'll send whatever we collect within the next week whether it's more or less. But if you're wondering what the money will be used for, here is a list:

\- rebuilding what's left (if anything) of her home when the waters recede \- new clothes for her, her husband, and there 2 small children \- ensuring they have funds for food, water, and shelter over the next view weeks \- helping restart her business when the time comes

Thanks for the question and I hope you can help, even if it's just by voting this up.

\- Bradley

<comment><USER2> > even if it's just by voting this up.

Voting is cheap :)

As a rule I don't like these 'help my friend in need' posts, on HN there are relatively few of them but they're there all the same.

It's happened 3 times or so over the last two months, one was a guy that couldn't get his money out of the Apple app store (but it wasn't really Apples fault, the other a direct plea for money. I can't find the links right now but if you've been here for this long then I'm sure you recall the threads.

I'm going to try to explain why I don't like these threads without coming across as a cold-hearted bastard (which I probably am anyway).

Over the last two decades I've been in a position to help people plenty of times, and for the most part I've done what I could when I could, with a few exceptions because I thought that the parties involved were creating their own misery.

But I've never even thought of asking others to pitch in as well.

My friends are _my_ problem first.

Using the six degrees of freedom principle anybody would have a great reason to pitch their friends troubles on HN.

So kudos to you for trying to help, but why involve HN?

Do you think I should ask you to pitch in to help my friends too?

We _all_ probably know of at least one person that could use some help. For instance, my friends X and Y from Ontario, living in a house where it's -40 outside and _barely_ able to pay their taxes and their heating bill.

I wouldn't dream of asking you to help them, not because I think that that would be wrong, but simply because you are too far removed from them, both physically and on a more human level.

I'd encourage everybody to help those in their circle of friends to the maximum of their abilities, rather than to start petitions like these to help people on the other end of the planet.

If you can do both, then of course more power to you.

I hope that makes sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> I generally agree with you, but then where would the world be if people didn't go out of their way in both asking for, and providing help.

This is a new experience for me, being the first time I've felt compelled to take my assistance to the level of asking others to help if they can and it's certainly changed my perspective a bit on the whole topic.

If you felt your friends were in a situation where they really needed the help, I hope you would reach out to as many people as you could to get them the help they need.

Why involve HN? Why involve anyone in anything? It's a community of generally good people that I'm involved in that may have the means of offering a little assistance to someone in need.

Maybe someday you'll find yourself in a position of wanting to help someone, but not being able to do it all yourself.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Removing the 140-character limit from Direct Messages - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/2015/removing-the-140-character-limit-from-direct-messages <comment><USER2> This tiny change could completely transform Twitter. My most-maintained professional relationships exist on Twitter, yet my non-public conversations (and the attention I pay to them) have nearly always been forced to other venues due to the DM character limit. In my mind, Twitter is now an equally- good alternative to SMS, FB Messenger, etc. You can bet I'll be DM-ing more and SMS-ing less because of it. Thank you Twitter.

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting perspective. I don't use Twitter for DMing, but for the services I do use to DM (mostly SMS/iMessage and Facebook) I find that I rarely (if ever) get close to 140 characters. Yet I do find the 140 character limit for public tweets annoying on a regular basis. I realize that's supposedly a fundamental part of Twitter's brand or niche, but I'd much rather see them remove the character limit for public tweets.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! That's interesting too - lifting the public tweet limit would also fundamentally change Twitter. As an author of tweets, I think I'd like it. I think @byuu mentioned it would promote intelligent discourse on important subjects - I agree.

As a reader though, I don't want to lose the high-bandwidth nature of Twitter. The headline thought/status/caption in your stream, with a link to the details hits an information consumption optimum for me.

It's really that first DM in a conversation where I think 140 characters causes me to leave Twitter. Maybe I'm doing it wrong - often trying to stuff salutation + context + question into the first DM. If the convo gets past that, then yeah, 140 is fine.

<comment><USER4> I guess I just don't "get" twitter, but despite the character limit, I still feel like a high-res screenful of tweets still contains almost no content. The webpage limits tweets to a very narrow column in the middle of the browser window, and there's a ton of fluff at the top and bottom of every tweet. I've never been successful at curating my twitter feed; I follow way fewer people than I'd like to, and still see way too much junk.

Facebook is getting worse about "junk" too, but somehow I see far more content per pixel on Facebook than I do on Twitter.

I'd like to think limiting content to 140 characters would make twitter more information-dense, but it doesn't feel that way in my anecdote.

<comment><USER5> You can try to use TilePad ([http://tilepad.co](http://tilepad.co)). It is a Chrome extension that arranges twitter timeline in columns, allows to configure a tweet design, and much more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my opinion this is a bad precedent. Call it a non sequitur but what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit from tweets?

I mean, the thing I liked the most of Twitter was how simple it was, but they have started adding so many things to it (especially GIFs, Twitter Cards and videos that auto-play) that it will eventually be Facebook!

And yes I am very concerned of something like that because Twitter is my social network of choice since 2008 for a reason!

<comment><USER7> > what if they eventually decide they want to remove the 140-character limit > from tweets?

I get that the charm of Twitter to many is brevity.

But it might do wonders for intelligent discourse. Twitter has popularized spelling abortions (u, r, 4, etc), dumbed-down vocabulary and hashtags over substance. It may have been fine when it was just your friends chatting about what was going on during the weekend; but it's especially egregious when it's politicians or scientists trying to condense important subjects into 140-characters, which then get regurgitated on the nightly news. Like we're all a bunch of 14-year olds texting each other. Even worse is when this extreme brevity leads to entirely avoidable misunderstandings.

I think it'd really help if Twitter were based on word count instead of character count (and didn't count articles), so people could at least write like adults. And if you really need more than a sentence or two, then allow for a long-form text box that'd turn into a clickable "More ..." link after the summary message. Those that don't want to read much can simply ignore such links, and unfollow repeat offenders.

Another fun side effect of this character rule: you can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of eight.)

<comment><USER8> > You can say 3-4x as much in a single tweet in Japanese or Chinese as you can > in English (example: 象 = elephant, yet is only one character instead of > eight.)

Can you really? I thought the "140 character" restriction was due to the "160 bytes in an SMS" restriction, and therefore using multibyte unicode characters consumed multiple "characters."

<comment><USER9> They got rid of the SMS-related limitations ages ago, but kept the 140 limit because it was "part of what makes Twitter - Twitter".

It's also why Twitter is really popular in Japan. 140 characters is more than enough to hold actual conversations (even if most statements/responses are typically 12-20 characters and the rest of the space is used for emoji)

<comment><USER7> I think Twitter's popularity in Japan, despite the fact that 140 characters there can convey a message that's 3-4x larger than in English, is indicative that increasing the English character count to somewhere between 280-560 (or much better, moving to word counts instead) would not be the death sentence for the service that many make it out to be.

<comment><USER5> Youalsoneedtointroducemaxwordlengthinthatcase.

<comment><USER9> How would that work for non-spaced languages?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am a "little bit" sad this trivial thing is wasting our neurons and general attention. I would love to see the commit that made this possible.

It reminds me when Apple revolutionized the world adding copy&paste to iOS.

<comment><USER11> I'm quite sure that this, what you call trivial thing, requires more than a single commit.. Might need some non-trivial data changes in the backend before actually removing the frontend limit.

<comment><USER10> \- limit = 140

\+ limit = 16384

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Finally, so many companies do customer support via Twitter and ask folks to DM them the details and you're limited to describing what help you need in 140-characters.

<comment><USER13> But the enforced brevity (in the form of a 140-character limit) is probably precisely why this works. Otherwise the same companies would be doing support over email.

<comment><USER12> Actually, people go onto Twitter to complain because it's a very public forum. It's a terrible shame that in order to get some service now-a-days you have to basically publicly shame them or find some way of getting their CEO's private email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is anyone else bothered by the name DM or "direct message"? For the rest of the internet the standard name has been PM for private message or personal message.

<comment><USER15> DM means dungeon master.

Now get off my lawn.

<comment><USER16> Really should let us roll to see if we have to get off your lawn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Last winter I built an application called Subtweet that built on top of Twitter's Direct Message service, using Twitter's API as much as I could to reduce overhead. It is bittersweet that Twitter is improving DM as it makes Subtweet more and more unnecessary to users, but I am so happy to have all of these features built right in. I saw this shift coming when Twitter added multi-user DMing so I had already written the post mortem if anyone is interested.

[http://subtweet.co/](http://subtweet.co/) [http://chrisandrejewski.com/2015/02/07/subtweet- postmortem.h...](http://chrisandrejewski.com/2015/02/07/subtweet- postmortem.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Five or six years ago, I was surprised (and a little annoyed) when someone asked me to shoot him a DM because he never checks his email. So I guess this will make conversation via DM more productive? Or will DMs just become the new email, in terms of the same cognitive burden?

<comment><USER19> I don't know if this matters to you personally, but the thing about Twitter DMs (and about FB messages, I suppose) is that there is whitelisting by default:

If you aren't following me, I can't spam your inbox.

That is a very substantial difference for many people, and why they will use FB messenger, Twitter, or other services in lieu of mail.

<comment><USER18> This is true...and on Twitter, I've "whitelisted" a lot of people I am not close enough at all to have them in my phonebook. And with Twitter, you have at least some assurance (in the same way that Airbnb gives you a bit more assurance than Craigslist) that you're contacting your intended person...whereas with email, a search can reveal several emails for a person, nevermind several similarly named people, each with several addresses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yesterday I was trying to schedule an AMA for a subreddit I'm a part of.. I needed to keep sending pieces of my message over multiple DM's since this limit still existed at the time. Painful.

<comment><USER21> At the risk of sounding out of touch, was there some reason an email couldn't have been sent? I regularly use DMs on twitter, though when I know a message will be longer I just take it to a medium made for a conversation or longer messages.

<comment><USER20> Oh, I definitely would've preferred email. I probably could have asked but I didn't think about it. I figured we were already having a brief conversation over DM, we could just continue with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's wrong with email?

<comment><USER23> it doesn't have a monetization strategy and it doesn't rely on a modern single-page web interface. also, it has a low barrier to entry so any old chump can run an email server. these are all bad things now

<comment><USER24> Those aren't bad things. Those are great things. If you feel that this kind of functionality needs to be added to email, then you're probably making a completely redundant product. Reinventing a shittier, proprietary wheel.

<comment><USER23> I was being sarcastic :)

<comment><USER24> Oh, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yay! I do not spend much time on twitter, but my DM discussions almost always involve breaking up a communique into several short messages to get past the character limit. I have a friend who chooses to only contact me via twitter, usually privately, and the limit has been a real nuisance. I am so happy to see this.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Today's change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun."

Calling the ability to send arbitrary long messages "powerful", when virtually every other internet messaging service has allowed this for ages, requires some serious marketing reality distortion.

</comment><comment><USER27> Comically, as soon as the animated GIF showed the person's response, I closed the tab because I didn't want to read all of it.

That was the whole point of the short messaging service of Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER28> As long as they are changing stuff I'd like to see Twitter move from counting the total number of characters in a @username to having them count instead as only a small fixed number (say 2 characters) in a similar fashion to how URLs no matter how long or short count as 22 characters. This would put all users on an equal footing and could potentially decrease the number of hacking attempts on those accounts with the shortest usernames (which is apparently a problem).

</comment><comment><USER29> This is what innovation looks like.

</comment><comment><USER30> So we'll be able to use Twitter DMs as data storage?

</comment><comment><USER31> Are they going to add end-to-end encryption back in, though?

[http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5523656/twitter-gives- up-o...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/19/5523656/twitter-gives-up-on- encrypting-direct-messages-at-least-for-now)

</comment><comment><USER32> I've always assumed that maintaining the 140 character limit is a marketing decision, and they've long since removed any technical limitations that keeps tweets to 140 characters. Does anyone know if I am correct?

<comment><USER33> You are not correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Nice. I haven't heard of Twitter product changes since ages. I don't use DM's that much, but it looks like a logical choice.

</comment><comment><USER35> I can see this occasionally being useful for not wanting to switch context. I'd rather have the ability to edit tweets, though.

</comment><comment><USER36> Finally some changes for the better! The charm and success of Twitter is probably partly because it is a dead simple concept. But I still wish they add more new features: [http://piks.nl/wordpress/if-i-were-the-ceo-of- twitter/](http://piks.nl/wordpress/if-i-were-the-ceo-of-twitter/)

</comment><comment><USER37> This could be great for some king of things but maybe annoying because of spammers

</comment><comment><USER38> Now people will have to live with n+1 independent, closed messaging platforms for private messaging. Thank you, Twitter.

<comment><USER39> Reminded me of MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ...in 20 years from today I guess we'll have yet another string of service names dominating our signatures and about-me's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Never before has an ALTER TABLE CHANGE COLUMN generated so much hysteria.

<comment><USER41> What a tense x minutes that would have been...

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If I only knew how to direct message this would apply to me.</comment>


10 top talks of PyCon 2017 reviewed [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/116/10-top-talks-of-pycon-2017-reviewed <comment><USER2> The urls.

Jake Vanderplas - Keynote: [http://youtu.be/ZyjCqQEUa8o](http://youtu.be/ZyjCqQEUa8o)

Static Types for Python: [http://youtu.be/7ZbwZgrXnwY](http://youtu.be/7ZbwZgrXnwY)

The Gilectomy How's It Going: [http://youtu.be/pLqv11ScGsQ](http://youtu.be/pLqv11ScGsQ)

Optimizing Pandas Code: [http://youtu.be/HN5d490_KKk](http://youtu.be/HN5d490_KKk)

Debugging in Python 3 6 Better, Faster, Stronger: [http://youtu.be/NdObDUbLjdg](http://youtu.be/NdObDUbLjdg)

Instagram Keynote: [http://youtu.be/66XoCk79kjM](http://youtu.be/66XoCk79kjM)

Python from Space: [http://youtu.be/rUUgLsspTZA](http://youtu.be/rUUgLsspTZA)

Factory Automation with Python: [http://youtu.be/cEyVfiix1Lw](http://youtu.be/cEyVfiix1Lw)

Dial M For Mentor: [http://youtu.be/Wc1krFb5ifQ](http://youtu.be/Wc1krFb5ifQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> Michael Kennedy has a fantastic personality for tech podcasts, I have always found his explanations light hearted enough to be entertaining, but with enough detail that it's interesting and worth listening to in order to learn. In my experience that's a rare combination in tech podcasts.

<comment><USER4> I agree. He's got a great ability to drive conversations on Talk Python With Me that may be floundering due to a guest with little podcast experience. He also does a great job on Python Bytes with Brian Okken who is a less strong host in my opinion.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Playground for JS, ES-6, Polymer-0.8 - <AUTHOR> http://howjs.com/#v2

<comment><USER2> I can't go to a newline, both my enter keys are not doing anything. Is this intentional?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you using Chrome/Safari? It has an issue with line breaks in Firefox.</comment></comment>


Theneeds is more than 'yet another personalized news feed' - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/19/theneeds-launches-yet-another-personalized-news-feed-but-wait-theres-more/

<comment><AUTHOR> Or the recursive link, if you want to give it a try ;)

[http://www.theneeds.com/read/n3359400/Theneeds-is-more- than-...](http://www.theneeds.com/read/n3359400/Theneeds-is-more-than-yet- another-personalized-VentureBeat)</comment>


Downloading and Installing Database – Oracle - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@app_38528/downloading-and-installing-database-oracle-211fdbde5f0 <comment><AUTHOR> If you want to install Oracle, Follow this url.</comment>


The Miserable Economy Airline Seat Got a Major Redesign - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90169957/the-miserable-economy-airplane-seat-just-got-a-major-redesign <comment><USER2> Why do airline seat headrests seem designed to crank your head forward? That's the single most uncomfortable thing about them for me, and these new designs look like they do the same thing.</comment>


Microsoft slams US government on the 'ransomware' cyberattack - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/15/australia-new-zealand-largely-escape-global-cyber-attack/ <comment><USER2> Microsoft should be slamming themselves for embedding a JavaScript interpreter inside their OS kernel.

And subsequently donate a sizable amount to Google's Project Zero for revealing this malpractice before attackers had a chance to exploit it in secret.

<comment><USER3> You can't blame Microsoft for this one.

More than 15 years ago Chairman Bill laid down the law at Microsoft. Trustworthy Computing from then on: [https://www.wired.com/2002/01/bill-gates- trustworthy-computi...](https://www.wired.com/2002/01/bill-gates-trustworthy- computing/)

So we can't possibly still be dealing with problems in the shit software that made Gates one of the wealthiest people in the world.

/s</comment></comment>


The Pats are suspicuoisly good at not fumbling - <AUTHOR> https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.sharpfootballanalysis.com/blog/?p=2932

<comment><USER2> Hmmm, I wonder about those super sticky gloves, jerseys, and forearms.

A little science and resourcefulness goes a long way in some sports.</comment>


Video Game League Announces Random Drug Tests for Competitors - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/13/432073720/video-game-league-announces-random-drug-tests-for-competitors

<comment><USER2> What next a doping scandal in the arena of programming contests?</comment>


Air – Record and store unlimited Ultra HD video with your phone - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/air-6 <comment><USER2> No Android?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, but it's built in React Native and we're working on the bridge methods for our Android port.</comment></comment>


Show HN: The web development course I wish I had - <AUTHOR> https://codermanual.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Dear Hacker News readers,

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you'd like a discount code to try the course.

Also, please leave any comments or questions here. I'll be happy to address them.

Thanks!

Rob

</comment><comment><USER2> Really hope this does not become a pattern of ever decreasing time expectations between learning to code and becoming employable. I attended an actual bootcamp and really still struggle to keep up with everything almost a year later (employed in infosec so somewhat development related). However a 30 day full time course load to go from almost no code background to employable, honestly sounds ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> I am also concerned that "learn web dev" is quickly becoming the new "Get MSFT/CSCO/A+ certified in just 3 weeks and make 100K!". While this could be a great way to learn basic skills, its probably not more in-depth than what codeacademy or code.org makes available for free.

More specifically, promising employability and calling this a "tuition" carries implied promises and expectations for prospective "students" \- expectations that are likely to get shattered the moment any interviewer worth half their salt asks a basic comp sci 101 question.

Sorry to be so negative, but the message i see is rather spammy. From the design and overall content perspective, its a really well made site though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi drglitch!

I appreciate your feedback and complement on the site design/content perspective.

I totally understand your concerns, and we want to do everything we can to avoid sending the message that this is no more in-depth than codecademy or code.org free tutorials. I urge you to take a look at the curriculum (you can contact us from the footer of the site if you'd like a first hand look) and see for yourself. The time it takes a student to complete the course is up to them, but it is much tougher than material you'll find on sites like those aforementioned. Our course covers HTTP, e-commerce, patterns, and many more intermediate to advanced topics. And, you're not just coding partial pieces of code in the browser like other sites - you're actually building real, production-grade applications on your own servers. I won't crowd this post with all the details as they're all viewable here: [https://codermanual.com/track-select/12-week-rails- track/](https://codermanual.com/track-select/12-week-rails-track/)

There's a downloadable e-book at the bottom of that page that describes how to handle both technical interviews and non-technical interviews as well (re: your point about comp sci 101 questions).

Thanks!

Rob

<comment><USER2> The site does not make it clear that " this is no more in-depth than codecademy or code.org free tutorials." On the contrary the site pulls in data regarding salaries and time commitments that are completely unrealistic from the standpoint of someone who has "experience" These are all classical signs of a scam. Product x does amazing things for only the price of y trust me I know I needed product x that is why I made it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi sprkyco, I appreciate the feedback. Since launching over 80 students have signed up, and the things they're saying are great. I'm happy to list some testimonials. I'm also happy to offer you access to the course to see for yourself. Personally, I'd really like to do that for you. I think the product speaks for itself and I'm living proof that the numbers are realistic. I'm curious as to why you're seeing it differently. Also, if you have copy suggestions that I could improve upon, I'd like to know alternatives so that people don't share the same perspective as what you've listed here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't signed up but from what I can see the website looks really well designed. Nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Appreciate the web dev course. Is this helpful if you wanto learn mobile first dev?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi pskittle!

This course is not optimized for mobile development. We may add a mobile development course down the line. That said, our course does cover responsive web development - which will ensure that the applications you develop are optimized for mobile browsers.

Please reach out if you have more questions!

Rob</comment></comment>