Epic Games makes Unreal Engine even cheaper for indies - <AUTHOR> http://www.geek.com/articles/games/epic-games-makes-unreal-engine-even-cheaper-for-indies-20110223/

<comment><USER2> Sure, it's cheaper and the technology is top notch. But dear god do the tools have a learning curve.

As a dabbling artist who just wants to make something reasonably good-looking, the toolkit looks very intimidating. With Shiva and Unity, the end quality may well be lower, but I'll probably finish the game in the time it would take me to get to know the UDK.

<comment><USER3> The tools "do have a learning curve," but then you say they "look intimidating?" Have you not evaluated both?

Perhaps they might have a learning curve as a dabbler, but if you wanted to use your skills on projects for industry employers, or find an artist or developer to hire, you'd probably pick Unreal.

Unity probably directly supports users like you better than Epic does, but the size and age of the Unreal engine community tends to make up for that.

Disclaimer: I also built Epic's support system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone on HN used the Unreal Engine for a game? Are there any successful indie games released using this engine?

<comment><USER3> I used it for an architectural visualization startup. I built the entire prototype myself, including a virtual tour guide that used the gameplay AI to find its way around a building, and contracted out the content production to a few artists.

Dungeon Defenders is the most recent "small" title I know of using UE3. Infinity Blade was produced by an Epic Games subsidiary, but they'd be an indie title otherwise.

Most major cross-platform game titles are built on UE3, so it wouldn't be a technology reason that an indie game couldn't be successful using it.</comment></comment>


The Freshest Coffee is the Best and the Science behind it - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@SevaCoffee/the-quest-for-the-ultimate-cup-of-coffee-part-ii-44ef9f1e203a <comment><USER2> This is very exciting.

I agree that fresher is better. But starting from green beans and ROASTING, grinding, brewing them per cup while-you-wait??

Roasting is usually done in large batches over a period of hours and is very bean-dependent. If you're drastically shortening this process, that means a much higher temperature, right? How does the process avoid breaking down the bean (and all its aromatics) at high temp?

The only thing I can think of something like a pressure cooker which allows fast cooking of legumes using steam heat without breaking down the structure of the legume itself.

Anyone have details on how this works?</comment>


FAA OKs first commercial drone flights over land - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/faa-oks-commercial-drone-flights-over-land-125928627--finance.html

<comment><USER2> I hope that drones end up going through the same channels as traditional aviation - you get a pilot certificate with a drone rating (Drone Quadengine Land?). That would be very cool because it would get the drone operators in the same system as everyone else, ensure they know the FARs and are sufficiently skilled to be safe, and create a pathway that everyone could feel good about being legitimate. Aviation is a really complex thing, and while I wouldn't expect the complexity of a small drone license to be anywhere near even a Recreational Pilot certificate, there's at least a weekend of stuff to know here and it should result in a license.

The bar for CFIs would be different, too, and I imagine you'd end up seeing tons of little Part 141-style drone schools pop up for $100 - $300 for a Saturday or so. It would be like adding a motorcycle rating to a driver's license. I don't think it would meaningfully hinder progress.

I feel like this is important even if they're exclusively limited to class G airspace near the ground (and the reality is that in a lot of the congested areas where drones are being flown, it isn't traditional class G airspace).

Add it onto the new light sport aircraft pathways and you make it easy for people get into drones safely while also introducing them to the wider world of aviation.

<comment><USER3> I think there need to be different classes of drones. A kid who wants to film his friends at a skate park with a 1 pound AR.Drone shouldn't have to get a drone pilots license, while someone flying FPV 5 miles out probably should.

<comment><USER4> Right now you don't need a license for a 1 pound quad-copter that is flown within line of sight (for non-commercial uses).

The problem is that even for line-of-sight users, the FAA won't let you use them for commercial purposes. So, your hypothetical kid would be okay filming their friends, so long as they didn't make any money from it.

There are two issues with drones that the FAA needs to figure out: 1) commercial use and 2) autonomous (out of sight) flight. The latter is much trickier than the former. I'm all for autonomous drones having to get certified (including FPV, since those would need some kind of fail-safe). But even here, there might need to be a "hobbyist" class and a commercial class with different requirements.

<comment><USER2> The reason the FAA is so nervous about commercial operations in general is because in aviation there's nothing more dangerous than saying, "we'll be there by 2:30." It's why the rules for Part 135 (charter) operators are much stricter than for Part 91 (personal) operators, and go through the roof for Part 121 (scheduled airline) operators. The commercial aspect adds a potentially major consideration other than safety and so the FAA has a whole separate way of thinking about it. The spirit of these concerns is probably as true for drones as it is for manned aircraft, though the concrete instantiations of it will obviously be different.

<comment><USER4> You seem to be coming at this from a traditional aviation viewpoint (which is valid). I'm coming at it from a modeling viewpoint. And I think that's where a large part of the disconnect comes into play. From the traditional point of view, you'd like to bring these drones into the normal aviation regulatory framework. From the model point of view, large regulations are overkill and are severely limiting the development of this industry.

I think that there are a couple of obvious rules that could be applied to speed things along: 1) limit location and altitude of flying, 2) require hands-on control (or take over), 3) require line of sight, 4) enforce some reasonable weight restrictions (for cameras). If you could meet those four things, then I don't see why you'd need to have a commercial restriction. You might have other issues to deal with for insurance, but I don't see why the FAA should care about commercial/non-commercial with such small craft.

Now, when you get into autonomous flight and real payloads, then that's a whole other ballgame, where I think the FAA will have some real work to do. In particular though, I'd hate to see them limit the hobbyist segment too much. I think it would be a lot of fun to build a small, autonomous drone that could fly using GPS waypoints with a camera. I just don't want to have to go through 2 years of certification to be able to fly it!

<comment><USER5> You are missing important part: find a way to punish violators of these (and other) rules. This is critical for safety.

<comment><USER6> Typically, if you violate FARs, you'll lose a huge pilot's license investment (private, ifr, commercial can total in the tens of thousands of dollars).

It doesn't hurt to lose a $300-$1000 quadrotor pilot license.

<comment><USER5> Correct. The question is - how to identify the drone pilot? With planes you have N-number, transponders, FBOs, etc.

<comment><USER6> Require user registration by serial number on the drone possible? Or perhaps require commercial drones use ADS-B?

<comment><USER7> Registering individual airframes doesn't make much sense - it's not unusual for a single quadcopter to go through many design iterations over the course of a few months.

It might start out as a 10" wide quadcopter, until the first major crash. Instead of ordering a new arm, it can be reconfigured as a tricopter with the addition of a servo. After a while, the tricopter might become a V-Tail if the user likes the flight characteristics.

Then FPV kit might get added, or a GPS reciever. Now it's flying semi- autonomously and the user wants better quality video, so it's transplanted onto a 18" frame, fitted with a gimbal and nicer camera.

At what point does the multicopter need to change registration numbers?

A simple "You must have your name and contact info on it" rule would be more than sufficient - and in fact is already the case for 90% of the aircraft out there. I even have my contact info taped to the body of my little 4" Hubsan quadcopter; I'll probably never need it, but why throw away expensive hardware if you don't have to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a misleading headline. It approved BP to use a drone for pipeline surveillance over land in Alaska—that's it. It's not a blanket approval for all commercial uses.

</comment><comment><USER9> Cargo drones have interesting implications. When the requirement of a human pilot or crew/passengers of any kind at all disappears, the possible form factors increase greatly. So, just a wild first-draft brainstorm here: How about quadcopter drones that take off and rendezvous with an overhead aircraft? Perhaps they deploy a drogue chute or streamer drogue in front of the craft, which is equipped with something like the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to- air_recovery_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to- air_recovery_system)

(Similar devices have already been used to retrieve satellites that have reentered the atmosphere.) Once the mother aircraft retrieves its assigned drones, it stores them away, climbs to 50,000 feet, orients itself, then fires rockets to put it on a suborbital trajectory. On such a trajectory, the mother aircraft could reach any point on the globe in under 2 hours.

After the mother craft has reentered, it returns to a normal aircraft flight regime, then releases the quadcopter drones to fly directly to their delivery coordinates. Voila: same day point to point (city to city) small parcel delivery anywhere in the world. (Perhaps even same morning or same afternoon.)

Obviously, there are a lot of potential problems. Lots more organizations besides the FAA would have to get involved. The system described above doesn't take into account international customs and the spread of invasive species. There is the potential that people would try to use the system to deliver bombs. Also, suborbital craft of such capabilities are basically ICBMs. Such concerns would mean that the mother craft would have to land at an airport and the cargo drones inspected before they are sent to their destinations. It might be better to have the mother aircraft remove a cargo pack then drop the drones, which would float away on the streamer drogue, re-furl the drogue and resume powered flight back to base. This would save the weight of the drone for the suborbital flight. Then customs could proceed at the destination country mostly as usual, then the small parcels could be re-dispatched on a different set of drones, or proceed by conventional delivery. (Which, by then, could be a self driving vehicle.)

</comment><comment><USER10> First, -1 to Yahoo for disabling zoom on mobile devices.

On drones - I have yet to see the FAA (or anyone else) address separation between manned VFR traffic and drones. VFR traffic maintains separation by "see and be seen". In other words, you look out the window for nearby traffic. Will drones have image recognition to detect nearby traffic?, I highly doubt it. Another way of separation is using the aircraft's transponder. But this won't necessarily work as not all aircraft have transponders. Many older GA aircraft do not even have an electrical system (other than the magneto spark plug system). A transponder is not required in class D, E, G airspace below 10,000 feet and 30 NM from a primary class B airport. The majority of the US is class E airspace. I'm also curious if all these drones will have a transponder (heavy given the battery usage).

The other way around is for the manned aircraft visually see a drone. Given the size of the drones, it will be very hard. Also, will drones have anti- collision lights?

Just like any new industry, safety regulations are enacted in response to incidents. I predict we'll have a few mid-air drone to airplane collisions in the 10-15 years. Once that happens we'll see better regulation.

<comment><USER7> > I predict we'll have a few mid-air drone to airplane collisions in the 10-15 > years. Once that happens we'll see better regulation.

I think it depends on the drones.

Consider that the DJI Phantom 2 Vision weighs 1.2kg, and an adult male Canadian Goose weight up to 6.5kg. Barring the exception case of getting ingested into a jet engine, bird strikes don't seem to be a huge problem.

Of course, geese don't have sense enough to stay the hell away from airports - presumably, _most_ drone operators do. Even if we assume that all drone operators will operate their drones wherever they'd like, whenever they'd like - will there likely be more drones in the air than Canada Geese?

I really think the threat to manned aircraft (while real) is extremely overstated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I fully support drones, but this definitely is going to make life interesting for light aircraft pilots flying around already busy airspace like SoCal at relatively low altitude. Hit a 55 pound drone and you'll feel it.

<comment><USER4> This is far more restricted than that. They approved the use of drones by BP to survey their operations / pipelines in Alaska.

I think the restrictions in SoCal will be much more stringent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Last time I checked Court said to FAA they have zero jurisdiction over drones, so they cant approve dick.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you guys had any other type of government I'd be so excited for you right now. I'm obsessed with RC stuff, this tech is just amazing!

However, seriously now - guys, come on... It's not going to end well for you. You must know that. I dont _think_ I'm being what you call a 'tin-foil-hat guy'.

It's a fair assumption that massive-scale general abuse will overshadow the wonder of this technological achievement. Or maybe this has to be the straw that breaks the camel's back?

<comment><USER14> I'm guessing that if they had _dis_ approved it you'd have written another message about excess government control designed to curtail natural freedoms.

<comment><USER13> No - I would not have posted that - you can go through my history if you like to get an idea of who I am. If they had disapproved it I would have 'mildly' curious as to why.

That's an 'Ad hominem' argument, you're making assumptions about who I am and then attacking my personality.

Anyway, good luck to you all. I hope I'm wrong about this, probably am.

<comment><USER15> Give it time, 'you all' will include yourself, and me and everyone. It's hard to understand how someone might say your prediction isn't possible or likely.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


President of Detroit School Board Suffers from "Communications Issues" - <AUTHOR> http://www.detnews.com/article/20100304/OPINION03/3040437/

<comment><AUTHOR> This may not seem like Hacker News. But it's of interest to anyone who cares about the intellectual future. Here's an excerpt from an email written by the President of the Detroit School Board:

 _Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row's, and who is the watch dog?_

Detroit's teachers report to the person who reports to the person who reports to him, more or less, so the average teacher's writing skills could well be _worse_.</comment>


Bookbookgoose: browse books, randomly - <AUTHOR> http://www.bookbookgoose.com/ <comment><USER2> I can say with confidence that I've never browsed into a bodice ripper.

I browse books systematically. Always have. I walk in the door and head to a section. I might start in the middle, but then I work one way, or the other.

Even in an unfamiliar bookstore, I use signs for orientation. In the library, when I browse an unfamiliar section of the stacks it is only due to choosing an unfamiliar section of the stacks. I might be surprised that I found an interesting cookbook on British cuisine, but I was not surprised to see a cookbook.

Browsing is intentional not passive. No algorithm can replicate my experience of doing it. An algorithm can only present choices which facilitate it. Amazon already does that to some degree.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this a random walk through the store? Might be more engaging if it was weighted towards highly recommended books.

As it is, it seems to be a walk through the long tail of amazon's catalog. Interesting for a moment, but nothing I'm likely to read.

<comment><USER4> Agreed it needs to be weighted - out of the ten or so books I browsed I got 3 self-published erotic novels with stock photo covers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure whether epi0Bauqu is going to appreciate it, but I love the name.</comment>


For Vim Users: swap Caps Lock and Esc - <AUTHOR>

If vim is your choice of editor, you may feel that you need access ESC a lot of times, but it's far top left to reach, induced heavy inconveniences. So I thought mapping ESC to Caps Lock would be great, but I found a greater solution swapping Caps Lock and ESC at http://superuser.com/questions/16070/vim-command-to-map-capslock-to-escape/19518#19518
Check the link to get real. And it works at least for Ubuntu 9.04, I've no idea of others, though I think there must be an working around for them. Try, and enjoy! <comment><USER2> I prefer swapping Caps and Ctrl. I use Ctrl-[ instead of hitting Esc. It's an extra button press, but Ctrl is a more generally useful key (screen, C-c, etc.) in that location.</comment>


April Fools: migrate Apache Subversion project over to the git repo - <AUTHOR> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-7524?aprilfools <comment><USER2> _" gone wrong"_?

Considering the lameness[1] of april fools jokes on the interwebz in the past few years, this was refreshingly amazing.

I can't remember the last time I was actually tricked by an internet april fools joke; this one totally got me. I believed it until I saw this HN post.

A+ for fantastic execution.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507297)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, the reason it worked was (as someone who uses both svn and git professionally) it was entirely plausible that the subversion devs would want to use git.

<comment><USER4> SVN Devs thought: haha, no one will really believe we would not prefer SVN

rest of the world thought: man, is SVN really so bad that even the devs won't use it? That's sad, but hey, they're responsible developers choosing the best tool for the job.

now that we know it was a joke, are we more convinced that SVN _is_ great?

<comment><USER5> If any SVN dev truly believes that svn is better than git in any technical sense then I wouldn't trust the engineering judgment of that developer. However, it's also clear that svn is a hugely important project, not just for legacy reasons but also to provide certain benefits (mostly around simplicity and control) that many organizations need. But SVN itself has none of those needs, it's an open source project of the nature for which git was specifically designed. So I'd think any rational developer would say it's perfectly reasonable for SVN development to use git. All else being equal, of course dogfooding is ideal, but in this case all else is clearly not equal.

<comment><USER6>
        If any SVN dev truly believes that svn is better than Git in any technical sense then
        I wouldn't trust the engineering judgment of that developer.

Hi. Small-time Mercurial contributor and Kiln founder. I use both Git and Mercurial in my daily workflow, and only on very rare occasions touch Subversion.

Subversion is better than Git and Mercurial in at least several key areas:

      1. Access controls.  While this is not necessary for individual products, or even many
         companies, only Subversion offers the kinds of access controls that some large companies
         require.  While you can *work around* that by sharding your code into tons of repositories,
         not all companies want to do that, and I don't honestly blame them.
      2. Very large repositories.  Facebook's work on Mercurial finally allows Mercurial to
         scale to those sizes (with significant trade-offs), but Git still cannot.
      3. Very large files.  Game companies in particular need to do asset management.  Subversion
         can work with large files directly, Mercurial can kind of "fake out" working with them
         directly through largefiles, and Git forces you to use a third-party tool like Git annex
         with a custom workflow.
      4. Interop with legacy tools.  Subversion repositories can be accessed trivially with WebDAV,
         which, while I honestly think is mostly a antifeature, does allow random people in your
         office to trivially access things in Subversion directly via Finder/Gnome/Windows WebDAV
         support (and even commit, with proper settings, simply by saving).

Just because Subversion doesn't use Git's branching system and isn't distributed doesn't mean it's totally without merit, and someone so wrapped up in Git's ecosystem that they can find no merit left in Subversion is a developer who likely has an irrational approach to evaluating systems.

<comment><USER7> also, you can sync to a subdirectory in SVN - not git.

1) yeah, although I question the sanity of doing this. 2) is this related to #3? 3) yes, but IMO VCS should be used for source files (mostly). large assets should go in an artifact repo. But you are right - putting giant files in git is a terrible idea, especially if you change them often.

<comment><USER8> > yeah, although I question the sanity of doing this.

the sanity of access control?

> is this related to #3?

Not necessarily.

> yes, but IMO VCS should be used for source files (mostly). large assets > should go in an artifact repo

Great, so now the code and the assets going with the code, both being used to build the product, are completely out of sync and essentially unsyncable?

<comment><USER7> >the sanity of access control? only at a directory level, git has it at a repo level.

>Great, so now the code and the assets going with the code, both being used to build the product, are completely out of sync and essentially unsyncable?

no. read up on artifact repositories. you declare the asset version that you depend on in your a build script. the assets are fetched from the artifact repo.

there pros and cons of course...

<comment><USER8> > no. read up on artifact repositories. you declare the asset version that you > depend on in your a build script.

Yes, that's "essentially unsyncable" when you have thousands of assets and have to keep them synchronised by hand. It has the same sanity as considering tarballs to be a good version-control scheme.

> there pros and cons of course...

I see no pros compared to a VCS which can handle code and other assets in the same repository and keep them naturally synchronised by virtue of them being naturally synchronised.

<comment><USER7> you don't sync them by hand. ever heard of ruby gems, maven, gradle, npm? these assets are all versioned and available via http.

these assets can be referenced by many other systems, not just your source repo.

<comment><USER8> > you don't sync them by hand.

Don't you now? How else is your tool going to know which version of an asset it's supposed to fetch from the asset store without you telling it?

> ever heard of ruby gems, maven, gradle, npm? these assets are all versioned > and available via http.

> these assets can be referenced by many other systems, not just your source > repo.

Wow, great, now game developers can do something they have absolutely no desire to do, at the small cost of not being able to do what they need. I'm sure they'll be _thrilled_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Where does it say anywhere on that page that it went wrong? How did you come up with this headline? As far as I can see, it went perfect in every way.

<comment><USER10> You kidding me? Is this how April Fool's are supposed to go!? If it is, I am quitting the internet on April Fool's.

<comment><USER11> What's the problem? Did you read the last post? Most parties "complaining" about the move to git in the ticket were actually aware it was a joke:

> And plenty of thanks to all of my co-conspirators on this issue. Yes.. even > my antagonist [~jimjag] was in on the ruse :-) … the Infra team handled this > with perfect aplomb. And the Directors and Exec Officers came in with a > perfect level of wrath. Our Subversion teammates showed a great sense of > community and circling the wagons… Thank you all for making this work!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The headline here is misleading. It didn't go wrong. That was the intended effect. I thought it was brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how many people were like me and completely missed the point of the HN post yesterday.

I thought Apache was saying they were moving all their projects to git from svn. I didn't realize svn itself was an Apache project.

<comment><USER6> Projects are allowed to use Git instead of Subversion, and there's a workflow in place, as noted in the ticket. Many projects have moved, and many haven't. They seem fairly undogmatic in that aspect.

<comment><USER14> still i think you would expect the svn project would use svn :D otherwise it's a pretty treacherous admission of a codebase being legacy only

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is the first april 1st gag I've respected in years. Bringing Jaglieski (ASF co-founder) in as an evil PHB was inspired.

<comment><USER16> No doubt, this was the #1 joke for April Fools 2014 as far as I'm concerned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> To be honest it would make perfectly sense to host a VCS on another VCS, it's not about religion wars, pride and protecting your offspring. VCS have different features and some teams might be better off by using SVN, while the team developing SVN might be better off by using git to develop in a distributed manner.

I understand the need of self-hosting/dogfooding/whatever, so it wouldn't probably be a good idea, but it's not something to flatly dismiss just out of principle.

<comment><USER18> The other thing I would fear is if there's a bug that somehow prevents people from committing, if the SVN team is using SVN, the bug may get in the way of it's own fix. Pretty unlikely, but still - if my software was the platform for it's own bug fixes, I'd be looking for some more diversity in my stack.

<comment><USER19> You're assuming that the svn running on the source control server is always the top of tree. I would assume that they use the latest stable release, not the latest checkin. And even if they did run into a problem like this, they could always downgrade the version of svn on the server, so long as it doesn't include a breaking repository format change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From the InfoQ article yesterday: "Although posted on April 1, the switch is not an April fool." ([http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/svn-migrates-to- git](http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/svn-migrates-to-git))

The whole thing was clever, but I'm not sure it counts as as being "fooled" when the gag specifically denies being a gag. I'm not sure I like this precedent (and I love April Fools jokes in general).

But maybe the article from yesterday was a third-party source who had fallen for it? If that's the case, then well-played. :)

</comment><comment><USER21> I wondered for a second "Is CVS still hosted using CVS?" only to discover that the answer is yes and that all is still right in the universe.

<comment><USER22> Imagine if nobody had it installed, it would be lost forever. Or until someone rebuilt it from the spec.

<comment><USER23> Couldn't you just find any old package and install that?

<comment><USER24> I think the point is that the old packages will fail to install on future computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Adding to the collection of people supporting this as - finally - an awesome April Fools joke. I give them a 10/10 on conception and execution! Remember the reaction to the initial radio broadcast of War of the Worlds (yes, not a 4/1 event, but as close of a parallel situation that I can recall).

Bravo, Apache, nicely done.

</comment><comment><USER26> The sad thing is that this _would_ be a welcome move, especially the idea of making svn a transparent UI on top of git as a repository backend. Given that github already supports using svn to check out its repositories, generalizing that seems quite sensible.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm a little bit confused as to what is going on here. There was a vote to migrate the svn project to git. Did it pass legitimately or as a joke? Is it actually going to happen now? Why is it gone wrong? Why does everybody say it's actually gone right? Why does everybody say that this is a rare example of a good April Fools joke?

<comment><USER27> They spent the whole day (12+ hours) viciously debating the move from svn to git, but in the end it was all a joke. That's dedication.

There was no vote, and it's not going to happen.

<comment><USER22> Ok, so "vote passed" is part of the joke, and just the beginning of the argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wait, so as a joke, they put it up to a vote to migrate SVN over to Git, and it passed? Now, they have to actually do the migration now?

<comment><USER29> No, they never voted but a few people said they did in a private meeting as a joke. The entire thing was a joke and they'll stay on SVN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This was the only April Fools gag that I even chuckled at this year. Good stuff :)

</comment><comment><USER31> It did not go wrong which just made this link confusing and not funny.

</comment><comment><USER32> It was funny to see the bureaucracy get into the act. I had a good laugh.

</comment><comment><USER33> I almost fell for this one:

Sublime Text 3 Stable is approaching [http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15741](http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=15741)

</comment><comment><USER34> OK damn. I totally fell for this yesterday. Mentioned it to a few colleagues... The thing is, it makes such good sense! :-)

</comment><comment><USER35> Actually, I thought it made a lot of sense for the project. Subversion still has a place for large-file/binary repos

</comment><comment><USER36> Well it was a good idea/Bad joke.

</comment><comment><USER37> Gone wrong? It was perfect!

</comment><comment><USER38> Headline should read: "Apache SVN project to migrate to git after April fools joke gone wrong". This removes the way I read the headline; that the Apache web server was moving from SVN to git. Which doesn't seem funny at all :-D

<comment> vertex-four No, the Apache SVN project is not to migrate to git. The prank was that the Apache SVN project was to migrate to git; it is now not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm still confused, are the hosting it on git or not?

</comment><comment><USER40> Give em an excuse to really switch to git and they'll GLADLY do it! :)

</comment><comment><USER41> It is probably a bad sign for the project's culture that people acting like assholes towards each other gave it an air of legitimacy.

</comment><comment><USER42> Risky to make jokes with plausible things and especially without a hint.

Stackoverflow did it better in my opinion (lots of hints): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507830)

<comment><USER2> Completely disagree.

The best April Fools jokes are ones that are actually plausible. Bonus points for being controversial as well.

<comment><USER43> True, this is the most amazing one I can remember.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> These April Fools need to stop. It was funny and unique a few years ago.

Now it is just used as a vapid, contrived marketing exercise.

<comment><USER45> Most are marketing exercises, this one is pretty clearly just people having fun.

<comment><USER10> not funny!

<comment><USER45> Humour is subjective.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free Techcrunch Disrupt Ticket - <AUTHOR>

I'm the founder of a consumer web startup called Bridge that is trying to help people form meaningful connections with each other (check us out at http://Brid.ge).<p>I'm demoing my product at the Startup Alley pit September 12th, and have an extra ticket to give away to someone willing to help me set up the demo table, and lend their laptop+monitor to help with the demo for the day. In exchange, the volunteer will receive full-access tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt on the 12th and 13th in SF (http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/SF2011). The only obligation the volunteer will have is to help me set up my table and help me walk users through how the product works on the 12th. If interested, please reach me directly at firstname.lastname@example.com, or call at 646-318-4011 <comment><USER2> Ok, seriously, this has got to be a marketing ploy for Roger and brid.ge

Reasons: -I spoke to him last night and said the ticket was not taken. Great! He told me to email him and he'd get back to me by the end of the night. -I emailed him. Offered my laptop and monitor. -No reply -Morning: still no reply -Afternoon: still no reply -called him: google voice number is off. left a message. -saw that he posted that the ticket is still up for grabs (see below). -replied to his comment -no response -followed him on twitter: tweeted him -followed brid.ge on twitter -preregistered for brid.ge -tweeted that i preregistered

basically i did everything i could do (besides giving up a kidney) to show him i'm the man for the volunteer job and deserving of the disrupt ticket.

still no reply. ugh

</comment><comment><USER3> Done!

</comment><comment><USER4> sweeet. too bad it's taken

<comment><AUTHOR> Not taken yet

<comment><USER2> Hey Roger,

Spoke to you lastnight n sent you an email. Would love to help you out. Get back at me: firstname.lastname@example.com

-deep</comment></comment></comment>


Explaining the Example in "The Secret Life of Objects" of Eloquent JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fhdhsni/The-Secret-Life-of-Objects <comment><AUTHOR> A newbie explains for newbies. The example in chapter 6 of Eloquent JavaScript, The Secret Life of Objects</comment>


Millennials Flee Vancouver for More Affordable Cities - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-14/millennials-flee-vancouver-for-cities-with-more-affordable-homes <comment><USER2> As someone who's lived in Vancouver for more than 10 years, then went to Waterloo for school (and lived in Toronto for most of my co-ops/internships), I think we Canadians should be more worried about highly educated millennials fleeing Canada entirely. Everybody I know from school who were offered the option to work in the US have picked up their Canadian degrees and left.

To the Canadian tech industry: How are you ever going to become competitive with the US if you keep offering these humiliatingly low salaries and letting the best and brightest of our own talent get leeched away?

<comment><USER3> We have a similar problem in Scotland, I know a lot of people would love to have continued living in Scotland but can make >2 times the salary as a developer by making the move down to London. The cost of living in London is higher, but the increase in pay more than makes up for this. Granted, this is a move within the UK so it's not really a drain on the UK's economy but it leads to a more London-centric economy and, with an increasingly devolved Scottish parliament, is not good for Scotland.

<comment><USER4> What's really crazy is that salaries in London aren't that high (unless you are in the financial sector). I am constantly astonished by the low salaries (for qualified programmers) offered in most parts of Britain. I suspect that you could actually get away with building a consulting firm in the country side and getting companies to offshore work from the US.

<comment><USER5> In the UK you get ahead by going into management. Tech (or sales, or accounting, or whatever) is just a short term thing you do for a few years until you get promoted into management. We don't like to reward people for being clever; we like to reward people who tell others what to do.

<comment><USER6> It's really difficult to generalize the situation in the US due to the size and diversity, in terms of industry and business scales, of the country. In general, I would say that you hit a ceiling in career development within 10 years on a technical track. (Of course, there are exceptions in industry sectors and a small number of geographic locations. But, I'm looking at the aggregate.)

However, management is no panacea. The pay is higher, but you can easily be stuck in mid-level management limbo with no say on budget or technical direction. Of course, you are "empowered" (read the remainder of the sentence with an abundance of sarcasm) to do reviews, deal with resource allocation issues for projects, operations, support work, and not to mention the coveted verification that your team does mandatory training on sexual harassment and the like. My manager is a prime example. He sits in many meetings. Ostensibly, he has a voice at the table with the "big wigs". In reality, he controls nothing and has the boring administrivia to handle. Mid-level management is also the first layer to be cut in a down-sizing.

If you stay on the technical track past 10 years, it really has to be because you love the ability to create something and see it used. I've been on the technical side for 25 years. Much of my job I find boring and intellectually vacuous. But, the times when I can actually create something still thrill me like the first time I wrote a program and saw it run.

<comment><USER7> Also IMHO management is risky because you become specialised to your companies systems.

One downsizing later you find yourself with 10 years of experience in working around limitations in the stationary ordering system at NowBustCompany. Welcome to the scrap heap.

By contrast in IT you can stay fresh more easily and be in demand should you need to move on.

<comment><USER8> The same thing can certainly happen in IT. How many IBM folks specializing in lotus notes are being laid off as we speak? Its one of the bigger problems working at BigCo's - you can end up only knowing internal people and internal systems. The only place you can conceivably jump to is companies nearby founded by other ex-BigCo people (in many cases nowadays, the primary competitors are overseas - capital has free trade to move freely but humans do not).

If you don't maintain some semblance of connection with the outside world you can get stuck. The scariest thing in the world to me is a job that is only internal facing.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. I think this is easier to do in middle management but agree with your general fear!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see this as a problem all over the world. - San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Vancouver, London, Oslo... Really the list could go on for quite a while.

So many of these cities feel like they have to retain their "identity" or the "feel" of the town, so they set restrictions that make it very hard to develop properties that can hold more people. The result is always the same: continually increasing prices in the center of the city whether you want to rent or buy, so you have to go further and further out to find something affordable, especially if you are young or if your parents can't help you finance a purchase.

This is going to continue until planning commissions start allowing the construction of higher density housing.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure if a fix would be so easy. Housing prices have been rising everywhere, even in small cities like my home town, where a decent amount of construction is going on.

I think that the biggest reason for growing housing prices are the currently low interest rates.

There are two factors that cause rising prices (due to low interest rates):

1) It's more affordable than ever to borrow money, so people are willing to pay higher prices, and even people with little savings can afford to buy a home. At 8% interest rates nobody would be able to afford current prices. This means that sellers can ask much higher prices.

2) Since interest rates are so low, people are increasingly looking at the housing market as an investment opportunity. Aspiring homeowners now have to compete with deep-pocketed investors leading to a further increase in prices.

So I think that housing prices would naturally fall if interest rates went up. (Of course, for young people without savings this makes little difference; they would likely end up paying just as much due to higher financing costs.)

<comment><USER11> _So I think that housing prices would naturally fall if interest rates went up._

The problem is that falling house prices put people "underwater", and rising interest rates put people on variable rate mortgages in arrears. This inflicts a huge amount of pain on middle class floating voters.

<comment><USER10> Yes, I think this is a huge problem -- if interest rates rise again, a lot of people will suffer. Therefore policy makers have a big incentive to keep interest rates low.

I don't know how this will end, but I don't think that the current low interest situation, which incentivises credit and discourages saving, can be stable in the long run.

<comment><USER11> _incentivises credit and discourages saving_

Both of those things encourage economic growth, though. Until we come up with some better way of meeting our demand-side needs, rates are going to stay low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems to be a direct result of capital flight from China. Wealthy chinese who are able to get their money out (through corruption, money laundering, or otherwise) are looking for somewhere safe to park their money for the inevitable decline in value of the yuan. China can only artificially peg their money to the dollar for so long, until they run out of dollars, and they are drawing down their reserves at a record pace due to the appreciation of the dollar.

Wealthy chinese know this, and use real estate in markets such as Vancouver, SF, and NYC, because it's fairly low risk and likely to appreciate. See [http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/01/13/462994857/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/01/13/462994857/u-s-treasury-cracks-down-on-luxury-home-money- laundering) and [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/us/us-will-track-secret- bu...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/us/us-will-track-secret-buyers-of- luxury-real-estate.html)

<comment><USER13> I'm standing at my desk in my apartment that I pay $1589/month for. An equivalent apartment in SF or NYC would be $3500 or higher.

The problems are two-fold.

1) Vancouver hasn't created a single-family detached home lot since the 1970s. There is an ocean to the west, the US border to the south, Burrard Inlet and mountains to the north. There just isn't any land. The only way to expand is east into the Fraser Valley.

The single-family detached home is dead. Live in a condo. Everyone gets a view. Everyone gets sunshine. Everyone gets services. Everyone gets a park a block away. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouverism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouverism)

2) Vancouver companies pay dick-all for salaries because Vancouver companies make dick-all for revenue. Everyone that lives here and can afford works or consults for a company that is not from Vancouver. A tech company that can't afford to pay an employee to rent a $1589/month apartment is not a tech company.

<comment><USER12> If property values were tied directly to incomes, as they are in any normal market, and what you are saying is true about salaries being low, the Vancouver market would not be as hot as it is right now.

The market is being artificially inflated by foreign buyers. Don't forget that Vancouver is a very attractive destination for wealthy Chinese multi- nationals. This is the same phenomenon that has wealthy Chinese buying $5 million luxury apartments in Manhattan through shell companies to hide their identity.

<comment><USER14> I saw an answer on _Jeopardy!_ recently that described Vancouver for one of the daily doubles. Oglethorpe math professor Philip Tiu apparently had a long enough brain fart before responding correctly that I had time to yell at the television, "How do you not know Vancouver?! You're Chinese!"

My spouse immediately informed me, "That's racist."

We then had a short discussion about the ways in which the Chinese nouveaux riches expatriate their assets.

<comment><USER15> It's not racist, but it is prejudiced. Racism is basically "prejudice + power". You don't have any power over the person on the screen, so your comment is just prejudiced. If, on the other hand, you were using your hypothetical sway on social media to besmirch him in some way, that would be racism.

I'm American but I've never read "To Kill a Mocking Bird". "How could you have never read an iconic piece of American literature that literally every public school child between the 70s and 90s was forced to read in highschool?!" Easy: I didn't go to public school, and I wasn't in highschool until the new millennium.

<comment><USER14> It was a stereotypes-based joke. It's like pushing a boulder rolling downhill as it passes by. You're not so much using your own power as adding just a little to the destructive power that is already there. In this case, the stereotype is "all Chinese people own a house/condo in Vancouver", which is an abuse of the conditional probability that a property is owned by a Chinese person given that it is in Vancouver (and also clearly impossible, due to there being somewhat fewer than a billion residences in Vancouver). Imputed property ownership is not a derogatory stereotype, so I don't feel particularly bad about perpetuating it.

I was forced to read __To Kill a Mockingbird__. As a result of the forced consumption and interminable in-class literary dissection, I don't have a very high opinion of it, and only a vague recollection of the plot. Nothing could make me hate a book quite like English class.

But that's actual fact of having a national literary canon shoved down our throats, and we're looking at non-factual stereotypes here. As an American, you would have had no chance at all at answering the question, because Americans don't know where _anything_ is outside the borders of the U.S., unless there is a war happening there, and then we can correctly identify the continent it is on about 80% of the time. To the stereotypical American, Vancouver might be barely recognizable as a city somewhere in Washington state, just as Montreal is in Vermont, Toronto is in Ohio, Windsor is a suburb of Detroit, and Ottawa is an illusion maintained by the Canadian military to distract its enemies from the real capital in Toronto.

The movie _Canadian Bacon_ is based almost entirely on this national stereotype, and the Canadian national stereotype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Chinese are parking their money there, that's what's happening

Hence people paying millions of dollars for a house that's falling apart

But I'm glad to hear about Victoria.

<comment><USER17> That's been a common theme among people talking about the rising house prices in Australia as well. That Chinese people just buy property to park their money overseas.

But when someone looked at the numbers the number of houses that were bought by Chinese people were in the low single digit percentages.

While this could create some upward pressure on prices it cannot be the only factor. For instance in Australia most of the blame lies of negative gearing (where any money paid in interest on a property can be claimed against all income).

<comment><USER18> Prices are set at the margin.

A single digit percentage of actors in the market with the objective of not losing 100% of their capital by turning it into a hard asset in another country is sufficient to move the market.

In Australia it is the combination of negative gearing AND the 50% capital gains tax concession on investment properties. Average rental losses per negative gearer were reasonably constant and small up until 2001 when the 'sound economic manager' Costello introduced the CGT discount, intially for a limited time only to make up for the introduction of the GST. From 2001 onwards, claimed net rental losses have blown out significantly, such that the annual forgone tax is greater than what the federal government spends on universities. This is because the gains permitted with such generous CGT concessions more than make up for year-on-year rental losses. This strategy only makes sense when house prices are rising, which has been the case for ~20 years in Australia. Given that Australians are at, or close to the limit of their ability to take on more credit, real standards of living (real net disposable income per capita) have been falling for the last five years, it seems that the bubble may not be sustainable. Unless you internationalise the housing market and make it a place for turning cash into hard assests, like London.

<comment><USER19> > Prices are set at the margin.

Do you happen to know if there is any well written economics paper on this topic?

<comment><USER20> You could start with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism) and follow leads from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In the past year, I've had 3 colleagues quit their jobs at a Vancouver startup to work remotely for a US company (to get paid in USD). Tech salaries in Vancouver are too low for the cost of living.

Its especially discouraging to see an employer with offices in Seattle and Vancouver offer their Canadian employees salaries that are >30% lower than their American counterparts. I won't be surprised if Canadians working remotely becomes commonplace.

<comment><USER22> I'd agree 100% on this. As a Canadian, looking at our future career prospects it is in our best interest to learn how to work well as remote employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The USD median house price in Vancouver is misleading too, because it wasn't long ago that the dollar was at parity, and incomes certainly haven't changed much as the dollar has dropped by a third.

Anyway, so far the effect on Victoria seems to be our own mini (compared to Vancouver; still nuts for most of the world) housing boom. I have three couples of close friends all house-hunting right now, and it's not a fun time to be doing so. I can't imagine committing to pay the better part of a million dollars for something with less than a day's deliberation, no time for an inspection, and a need to offer over asking price to even have a hope of "winning".

<comment><USER24> Honest question here - why not just rent and wait it out?

edit/from the article; Rentals are hard to come by, and just as unaffordable. The vacancy rate of 0.8 percent is one of the lowest in the country, and the average monthly rent of C$937 for a bachelor suite is tied at highest with the cost in Toronto, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. Rents for newly built units and renovated basement suites are pricier.

<comment><USER23> You've pretty much got it. Still, while expensive, renting is still much more affordable than buying. The other problem is, decent SFH rentals are very difficult to come by. Here in Victoria, my friends who are looking for houses are all starting families and would like more space than most apartments offer. Many of them would be fine with renting as long as prices are unbalanced, but the rental market selection if you want something larger than a 2-bedroom apartment is really sparse. Plus, many of the places you _can_ find are only there until the owners manage to sell them, which obviously isn't ideal if you're looking to settle down.

<comment><USER7> > renting is still much more affordable than buying

Because rent is constrained by wages. Land prices are constrained by fiat issuance. Fiat issuance is constrained by credibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a millennial immigrant to Vancouver (came with my family when I was 10).

I'm a software developer by trade.

The problems are real, but the outcome is greatly exaggerated.

The fact is MOST millennials outside the most lucrative STEM/Law/Finance fields are in no position to be buying real estate anywhere in North America.

And the Vancouver rental market is actually not half bad. You can get a basement suite for under $1000 in the city proper. You can get a 2 bedroom downtown for $2000. Or at least you could a year ago, the Canadian dollar has plummeted.

Meanwhile people are weighing in with terrible salary stories. It's also not exactly true. Yes, I could make more in Seattle, and even MORE in Silicon Valley. But there are lifestyle costs to both. I value the Vancouver lifestyle quite highly. Now, full disclosure, I moved to Europe for a 2-3 year transfer with my company last year. But this was also a lifestyle based decision to allow me to travel more - I took a paycut.

The truth about salaries is Amazon pays very well (though not as well as in the States). Microsoft pays very well. So does Facebook, and Apple, and Salesforce pays the best (supposedly they are competitive with US salaries). These big players are forcing the rest of the market to kick up. And all these players are also relatively new to the scene (most growth in the last 5 years). As a result, I foresee in the next few years a lot of ex-employees from these places going out on their own and doing great things in the startup community, or commanding similar salaries from local shops that want to get experienced engineers with big scale experience.

The problem with Vancouver is it's hard to find a city to compare it to. Yes, the economy isn't the strongest it can be, but the proximity to nature is unbelievable and very difficult to match. That intangible IS worth something despite people not taking advantage of it complaining that "that's all there is". If you don't care about world-class ocean and mountain sports in close proximity to outstanding international food options, this city is not for you. There are places with more vibrant art and culture and nightlife scenes, no doubt. But if you make the most of Vancouver's strengths, it is unbeatable.

<comment><USER26> >buying real estate anywhere in North America

Maybe major major cities, but it's not unreasonable to get a 3-4k sq ft house for less than $1400-1500 a month all in in "B" cities or outlying areas of major cities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'll be honest. It's hard for me to hate on Vancouver too much as I truly think Urban planning is difficult.

I think people should move to lower costs cities if the situation makes sense for them. Vancouver might be at a disadvantage due to Brain Drain at this specific moment in time, but I believe there's an argument to be made that Vancouver has significantly been a beneficiary of Brain Drain from other countries in the past.

As the USA and Canada continues to transition to a knowledge based economy, our cities should emulate what made Vancouver a economic powerhouse, which is a world class research university, great public transportation, and effective immigration programs. Now, there are things you can't emulate like great weather or prestige, but we can make more cities like San Francisco or Vancouver.

</comment><comment><USER28> I really like Victoria and I hope the town does well out of this. I'm sad that I may not be able to afford to live in Vancouver anytime soon, though.

<comment><USER29> Victoria is nice, but it is a small city and being on the island it's pretty isolated.

While you do have direct access to the said island, there's a limit to how much "nature" activities one can do. Diversity Nanaimo (another city) is utterly unremarkable. Tofino is very nice, but it's 4-hour drive away. Everything else is even farther _and_ unremarkable. Getting to anywhere outside of the island is a major hassle. Victoria International Airport provides fine selection of international flights, though to Seattle only. Ferries are slow and expensive. Floating plane taxis tend to crash now and then, so that's not very good either. So, yes, in theory you can get off the island on a whim, in practice though it's so much hassle that more often than not you simply won't bother. Hence the "isolated" remark.

YMMV, but my experience was that outside of work things get very boring very quickly.

<comment><USER30> Strathcona Park has some of the most remarkable backcountry skiing and ice climbing in the world, I'd say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I lived in Vancouver for 5 years. Beautiful spot. Met a lot of interesting people from all over the world. But, even by Canadian standards (which are much lower than the US) the salaries in Vancouver are notoriously low. A much better (2X) offer brought me to Toronto.

Staring to feel the same about Toronto too expense and hassle wise. Want to try remote work from the States and live in the country in Canada. Only interia prevents me.

</comment><comment><USER32> While we're moving south... Portland is next. Are we all trying to catch of up with SF cost of living?

</comment><comment><USER33> I find it interesting that due to high rent prices the article hypothesizes that people are moving away from Vancouver and the next upcoming city is a peninsula on an island? What do you think is going to happen in the real- estate market there?

</comment><comment><USER34> Yep, Canadian tech salaries can't compete with Silicon Valley

<comment><USER35> I'm curious -- can it compete with the PNW at all (i.e., tech jobs in Seattle)?

<comment><USER36> Even Microsoft internship in Vancouver was about 3.5k per month vs over 7 in Seattle

Hell I've received serious offers for ~70k salary here when that's lower than lots of Bay area internships before the exchange rate

It's absolutely ridiculous

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> If millennial are fleeing Vancouver for London because they can't afford housing, as this article suggests, they're going to be very disappointed with our housing prices!

<comment><USER38> Ha. That's true but as a Londoner living in Vancouver I can tell you that for young people here moving to London would be exciting and educational compared to staying at home for the same money, so many would leave for that reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think it's likely that tech in Vancouver is having trouble hiring and retaining as millenials flee to SF, where they can get paid dramatically more, but in general Vancouver is seeing net gains in millenials.

I have no idea how Bloomberg made their chart but using census and BC stats data no one has been able to reproduce it.

This UBC sociology prof crunched BCStats numbers and found that there is net positive millenial migration into Vancouver.

[https://homefreesociology.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/ch-ch- ch-...](https://homefreesociology.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/ch-ch-ch-changes- in-vancouvers-net-migration-profile-by-age/)

This doesn't change the fact that the unaffordability situation in Vancouver is deeply problematic and is probably accelerating a brain drain to the USA.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is a major issue everywhere. Take stagnant wage growth and stack that up against high housing costs and you have a double pinch. Prospects are extremely bleak.

</comment><comment><USER41> Get ready Seattleites, we're next. The housing market is already going a bit bonkers with no sign of slowing down.

<comment><USER42> Their salaries are much higher than Vancouver, they might be ok....especially in tech.

<comment><USER43> Canadian tech salaries are a pittance compared to US ones. In the Bay area, 150K to 250K are standard for people with 5 years of experience. This is not the case in any Canadian city. This neglects the lower exchange rate.

<comment><USER44> You're way off. 150k for 5yrs experience is pretty typical in big tech & unicorn companies, but not anywhere else. 250k base salaries are highly atypical anywhere (except for very senior engineers). Total comp will be more than that, but if that's what you meant you shouldn't have said salaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> When the forced reload timeout of the page (to gather more fake views) is less than the video duration of your article you know your site is broken.

</comment><comment><USER46> What is currently the best way for a Canadian tech worker to get into the US? Still the same situation as usual?

<comment><USER47> Have a degree? Get a TN status (non-immigrant work permit). All you need is a job offer from an American company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> There is a diaspora of Vancouverites in their late 20s, early 30s here in Toronto. They left home for better employment and housing opportunities. I think we all would love to move back but it's just not worth it. Vancouver is a better city than Toronto but not THAT much better.

</comment><comment><USER49> Believe it or not, I have a number of coworkers come from Canada. I am not sure if they have all converted to US citizenship or not, but most of them have family or have a stable life here, and they blend in extremely well. And then there are a number of British coworkers too...

</comment><comment><USER50> How the hell is autoplaying video still a thing in 2016?

<comment><USER51> spend some time on that page and it gets worse, in the middle of reading the article it just refreshes the page losing your place for no apparent reason and then starts autoplaying the video again.

Maybe they do it to fake more views for more ad$?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> "The vacancy rate of 0.8 percent is one of the lowest in the country, and the average monthly rent of C$937 for a bachelor suite is tied at highest with the cost in Toronto, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp."

Montreal? Calgary? Edmonton? Halifax? St. John's?

<comment><USER53> > Montreal? Calgary? Edmonton? Halifax? St. John's?

Winter.

<comment><USER7> Montreal is great. I recommend it. Yeah it's a bit cold but it's dry so not damp cold. Would you rather be a bit cold or working like a dog for some US company where your healthcare could vanish overnight because your boss was in a bad mood?

<comment><USER54> Montreal is great in some ways. In other ways you run into the regular overt hatred of non francophones.

[http://www.cjad.com/cjad-news- community/2016/03/16/elderly-p...](http://www.cjad.com/cjad-news- community/2016/03/16/elderly-patient-denied-service-in-english-at-verdun- hospital---again)

""My mom was laying in her bed, she turned over and I noticed she was crying," says Martin. "That's when she told me a nurse had just yelled at her for speaking in English.""

Thats the kind of mean spirited people that work in the "civil service".

Anyone who denies it, hasn't lived in Montreal long enough and needs to get out to Sherbrooke or Drummonville a little more often to see that natives in their full hatred.

Fight Anglophobia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Real-estate has been fucked up here since 2000, and no one has ever done anything about it. Our condo market was a money market for years. People would pay other people to camp out for pre-sales a week in advance in tents and a new development would be sold out opening day. It would be flipped 5 times before it was even built.

The "affordable housing" initiatives here mostly seem to be for homeless people or those on fixed incomes. There is a big resentment from middle class or the "working poor" here now. But young people don't vote or they vote on social issues that seem nice when they are 20 but not on something that is going to effect them when they are 28-40. People who own houses love it but know it is fucked up. My mom is an example basically, and just banked her retirement selling her downtown condo. Lots of you are talking about tech wages because that effects you, but I have lots of friends that grew up that are in the 40k-50k range that would at least like a shitty condo in east van. I wish we could go back to 10 years ago about DINKWAD jokes, but the Double Income No Kids With a Dogs can't even afford detached houses here anymore. It's $2-million for a tear down crack shack. It is fucking crazy. $2-million is a lot of money. $2-million used to be a beautiful water view mansion, and not that long ago.

Everyone should read this article as well: [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/the- real-...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/investigations/the-real-estate- technique-fuelling-vancouvers-housing-market/article28634868/)

This is just one shady fucked up thing they know about. There is so much more to it. I really wish the Frontline about shady money laundering didn't get canned. [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/06/why-did- fro...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/06/why-did-frontline- kill-lowell-bergman-s-gambling-documentary.html)

At the same time we keep saying the "Chinese money laundering!" yea it is illegal to them. But we also don't live under laws that only allow us to move $50k a year out of the country. We have to imagine living under that ourselves I guess.

</comment><comment> cat-dev-null Assuming one has a really good heater and sleeping bag, it legal/possible/affordable to live in a VW bus in say south Vancouver? Renting in places like NYC, SF these days seems most people are lemmingly throwing money away in an unaffordable attempt to buy faux status while going into debt and gaining no balance sheet because "everyone else is doing it." Unless you've sold a series to HBO, living below one's means is smarter because hope isn't a strategy.

<comment><USER16> Sorry to be blunt, but why the f should anyone do that, especially if they have a job in tech (but even if they are not)

NYC and SF might be crammed, but there is a lot of space in the surroundings. In the topic we're talking about Canada, 2nd largest country in the world

And yes, working on nice companies is important, but quality of life is also important

<comment> cat-dev-null Then you're a minority of one. Most people living in cities these days are irrationally pouring typically between 50% to sometimes as much as 75% of their income into rent, paying for the privilege of holding onto expensive real-estate they will never be able to afford rather than _save money_... they'll never be able to retire or have anything else more permanent.

You're making some very broad, self-centered assumptions about quality of life and perception of other people. Not everyone needs lattés or 3500 sq ft / 325 m^2.

No one cares to live in the Saskatchewan boondocks apart to get away from the city, so why did you bring that up irrelevant strawman?

Some people also value independence more than being perpetually-indebted to a company (non-single-payer health insurance / rent).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> With online collaboration tools really taking off, especially with WebRTC currently on billions of devices, I have this unfounded belief that city centers will become less important over the next decade. There will always be work which is better suited to in-person setups.

Maybe it is more of a hope than a belief - but having a decentralized workforce has implications for cost of living and quality of life that are exciting. With (relatively) low-cost mortgages, home purchasing power increases at a non-linear rate, the more money you make. That is one reason why housing demand in cities can grow faster than wages.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Unfounded all right. Cyclical, more like it. People's tastes change over time. Grandparents liked cities, parents like suburbs, I like cities, and I can't imagine how my kids will feel. Maybe high housing costs will inspire people to live rurally or in exquisite mobile homes driven by computers. Or it will result in a global densification the likes of which we have never truly seen.

In Neuromancer, the Sprawl spanned the entire eastern seaboard and yet the only place with real distinction was Zion - the Rastafarian space station far away from the regular bustle. Things are always in flux.</comment></comment>


The World is Digital - <AUTHOR> http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/the-world-is-digital

<comment><USER2> This is a bunch of rambling gibberish. I sort of checked out when he said that the universe could be represented digitally. Theoretically true, but that doesn't mean it is the basis of things. The problem is like with PI, and trying to determine the circumference of a circle... the precision is asymptotic, and so it is with a digital sample of the world. Simply, the amount of which that can be represented digitally is limited by your digital sample, which has to be continually improved. It is much simpler to think that the world is analog, with the equations that represent the analog pattern, or C = PI * d .......

<comment><USER3> It sure is. And not only that but he had Bill Wulf and Alan Kay try to tell him it is gibberish but the light bulb never went on.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Shanhu.io, a programming playground powered by e8vm - <AUTHOR> https://shanhu.io <comment><AUTHOR> shanhu.io is a programming playground powered by e8vm:

[https://github.com/e8vm/e8vm](https://github.com/e8vm/e8vm)

e8vm is an open-source self-contained simulated virtual machine that has its own simple mips-like instruction set, and its own system programming language (G language). G is a language that has a golang-like syntax but with a c-like runtime -- no runtime.

shanhu.io provides an online playground where you can develop G language programs and run it in a simulated e8vm virtual machine right in your browser. The website requires a github account to login to save the workspaces.

The entire project is written in Go language, with no circular dependencies among files and packages, with each file no more than 300 lines (maximum 80 chars each). As a result, the project can be visualized in a hierarchy of DAG's:

[https://e8vm.io/e8vm](https://e8vm.io/e8vm)

The G language compiler enforces the same dependency rules, so a small operating system in G (still in development) can also be visualized:

[https://shanhu.io/~os8](https://shanhu.io/~os8)

It is a hobby project of mine. Questions and feedbacks are welcomed. :)</comment>


Facebook to Pay $40M Under Proposed Settlement in Video Metrics Suit - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/facebook-pay-40-million-under-proposed-settlement-video-metrics-suit-1245807 <comment><USER2> Watching acquaintances raise funding around metrics like "viewership", "engagement", "reach", and "accounts" has made me especially weary of companies espousing some kind of Golden Metric (big red flag if they don't mention earnings/money) as a means to justify they are an awesome business.

It's just too easy to "fudge the numbers" and give the very-best-case estimates that don't incorporate uncertainty or sensitivity (or reflect reality). It just takes some non-half-assed due diligence to do a sanity check.

> _"We had 100k new users signup in January"_

> "How many were still active a month later?"

> _"... 17k"_

...

> _"Our users read an average of 12 stories per day"_

> "What counts as a 'read'?"

> _"Spending at least 3 seconds on a page"_

It never gets old the stretches people will make to try to pitch something that is in desperate need of legs to stand on, so whatever metric that looks the best is the one pulled out of the hat.

<comment><USER3> Ideally you want to correlate the metric with the dollar ROI. I have yet to see extensive reports on that about google & FB. It's crazy to think the amount of money being thrown at them willy-nilly

<comment><USER4> John Wanamaker (1838-1922) was a very successful United States merchant, religious leader and political figure, considered by some to be a "pioneer in marketing". He opened one of the first and most successful department stores in the United States, which grew to 16 stores and eventually became part of Macy's.

He is credited with coining the phrase "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half".

src : [https://www.b2bmarketing.net/en-gb/resources/blog/half- money...](https://www.b2bmarketing.net/en-gb/resources/blog/half-money-i- spend-advertising-wasted-trouble-i-dont-know-which-half)

my 2 cts : there was never a culture of performance in marketing. Its very hard, especially in a phygital scenario (digital ad, real world spending)

<comment><USER3> That's a great excuse for 1830 but today i would expect to see tens of precise , large scale studies from an industry that spends billions every year. The fact that I don't, makes me suspicious

<comment><USER5> These studies exist, but tend not to be published. Essentially there's little to no commercial benefit from publishing, so people tend not to.

Like, I would argue that 80-90% of Goog/FB revenue is correlated with sales. This may be done badly (often), but it is done.

<comment><USER3> So how do advertisers find out who has the most effective ad system if they re not getting published? They choose in the dark?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My business partner and I did our best to avoid getting caught up in this race to the bottom with our product. He was convinced we needed more followers on FB and Insta and wanted to target our effort there. We did. We tried and the figures just do not support it.

From all the figures we had available (sample size of 1 here!) we worked out that for every 8 sales we needed 10,000 likes of our product.

10,000 likes to get approximately 8 sales.

Not sure what the ratio of views:likes is but I bet it's 100:1 or something.

It's a full time job to manage people on social media but it's a total con: it takes masses of "engagement" (or whatever their bullshit is called) in order to get a sale.

I suppose it's the myth of the long tail marketplace: There's not enough business from it to sustain me but when you scale up to 100 Million business like me (none of which make much money) it becomes profitable for the marketplace owner.

</comment><comment><USER7> We changed the url from [https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1183207739675291654](https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1183207739675291654) to the article it points to. If there's a better article on this, we can change it again.

Submitted title was "Facebook's viewership metrics were inflated by 150 to 900%".

<comment><USER8> should be pinned-at-top comment

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Impression fraud is going to be a huge scandal. So many view counts are inflated for profit - either by platforms themselves or by third-party bots interacting with content.

<comment><USER10> Once upon a time we have launched a rich media banner with three videos in it. What was interesting that all three videos generated around the same viewability stats. What was event more interesting that one video in banner was hidden with display:none.

I wonder if anybody does test like this - e.g. checks if hidden video generates views, button with visibility: hidden generates clicks and etc. and in this way evaluates traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is incredibly serious, as this kind of fraud might have lured billions in advertising money to go to facebook instead of other platforms. It's a pity it was settled and we ll not know the extent of the fraud.

</comment><comment><USER11> Settlement is a joke.

It's definitely worth it for Facebook to cheat and break laws when the fine you'll get is just peanuts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Hm? Who pays for "views"? I thought ad buyers insisted on paying only for click-through, as a minimum.

<comment><USER13> It really depends on platform. Adwords/FB are PPC. But many of the smaller alternate display networks charge by CPM (1000 views) or similar.

As a rule of thumb paying for views means lower value. Often networks try and justify it and say we are as 'premium network'. I treat those words as a red flag more than CPM as I'm yet to test a 'premium network' that has better ROI or customers than others. All that said, sometimes CPM can strike gold if you know what/where/who to buy, but if your taking sales pitches from reps its more often not good.

But sometimes your company is pushing for growth, you've maxed out the performing channels and you have to go for the low or negative ROI sources to reach total targets and when all things are merged metrics work out for the business.

<comment><USER5> Public Service Announcement: Most FB ads are charged on a CPM basis. Note that they are _optimised_ and often _measured_ on a PPC basis, but they are not charged that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Strange, nowhere in the article does it say how did they know that the views where inflated by 150 to 900%. How did they even know, without Facebook admitting it?

I don't think they did, because even if they settled for 40M they say the process is without merit. Where does that information come from?

<comment><USER15> > Strange, nowhere in the article does it say how did they know that the views > where inflated by 150 to 900%. How did they even know, without Facebook > admitting it?

> I don't think they did

From the complaint at [https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5004295/d5cb8373-...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5004295/d5cb8373-8cbb-4e81-9710-f2ccf4481b74.pdf):

 _In September 2016, the Wall Street Journal revealed that, for the past two years, Facebook had been overstating the average time its users spent watching paid video advertisements. Based on information from advertising agencies who had spoken with Facebook, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook's metrics had been overstated by between 60 and 80%. In response to the media attention, Facebook admitted it made a mistake, but emphasized that it had only discovered the mistake "about a month ago," … Internal records recently produced in this litigation suggest, … Facebook did not discover its mistake one month before its public announcement. Facebook engineers knew for over a year, and multiple advertisers had reported aberrant results caused by the miscalculation (such as 100% average watch times for their video ads)._

It seems that advertisers saw things that were obviously incorrect (e.g., 100% average watch times). Some kind of weirdness eventually led to a lawsuit. During the suit, the plaintiffs found evidence in internal documents that indicated that at least some engineers in Facebook knew there was a problem and maybe knew the magnitude of the problem. I wouldn't call that "Facebook admitting it". It sounds more like Facebook handed over some documents that they were legally obligated to hand over and then some lawyers read the documents.

If you're curious about the evidence, most of the court documents are public and available online, although the smoking gun on the percentage appears to be sealed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm really starting to wonder about other possible _shady_ things that go on at Facebook, but are swept under the rug or go unreported.

Just in case you were not already aware, Facebook is not to be trusted under any circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER17> So many companies sunk investment with no returns, so many people lost their jobs trying to figure out what went wrong...

</comment><comment><USER18> When the fine is that low it's not punishment, but the fee to get away with fraud

</comment><comment><USER19> "The average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%," stated an amended complaint."

I'm curious to understand how they proved it

</comment><comment><USER20> How is that even a problem? I ran facebook ads for a few month and I didn't event care about the number of views. All I stared at was the ROI. Ads are profitable ? => I keep the ad runing. Not profitable ? => I stop them.

If some user are stupid enough to run unprofitable ads, it's their problem.

<comment><USER21> Wait, do you really think people who don't fit your narrow advertising use cases are stupid?

How do you stare at the ROI for a CPG brand looking to build awareness for their campaign or product?

Media companies that pivoted to Facebook videos looked at user engagement in the form of video views and would market their size to advertisers.</comment></comment>


Zoom admits user data 'mistakenly' routed through China - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/2fc518e0-26cd-4d5f-8419-fe71f5c55c98 <comment><USER2> At some point when a company keeps saying oops you have to hold them accountable. I support the idea that companies should seek to improve their product incrementally, so it's ok to err. But they have to improve.

Customers are jumping ship:

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/05/zoom-new-york-city- schools...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/05/zoom-new-york-city-schools/)

[https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/04/03/elon-musk-bans- use...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/04/03/elon-musk-bans-use-of-zoom- video-at-spacex.aspx)

My group banned zoom about a year back for poorly handling a security vulnerability. I'm not surprised that there are continued security issues.</comment>


Summer - The HTML5 Library for Java - <AUTHOR> http://www.asual.com/summer/

<comment><USER2> What actually makes it an HTML5 Library vs just another framework? I saw there are some libraries included for websockets, anything else?

<comment><USER3> The template language uses and promotes the new HTML5 doctype and semantic tags. It also makes a heavy use of the data-* attributes which allow features previously available only in declarative XML formats. WebSockets are optional but there is support available out of the box. And this is just the beginning...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there docs?

<comment><AUTHOR> As of now, there aren't (m)any docs. They have provided a quickstart guide on the site though.</comment></comment>


Corporations Don't Want Employees - <AUTHOR> https://danielmiessler.com/blog/corporations-dont-want-employees/?fb_ref=mU3EyvOazW-Hackernews <comment><USER2> This gives far too too much credit to AGI.

1 #

The biggest losers with AGI is going to be corporations, corporations and capitalism rests on a very simple idea - private property.

Humans are employed to create stuff that can be patented or owned and essentially converted into crystallized wealth ( house, factory, software )

However the interesting thing about software - ( something that paul graham pointed out ) - is its almost no-cost to copy it. Its the great equalizer - what would take a factory and a lot of workers to build - will just take a piece of software to create.

So software (a.k.a maths), the ultimate product of efficiency and capitalism is what is going to make capitalism not work.

2 #

The reason for so much unemployment is due to bad policies by govt. lack of growth in developed countries ( money moves from there to developing countries - if a dollar buys me more goods in china of'course my dollar is going to go to china ). Trade deals that do not take into account factors such as those.

3 #

I think there is a strong incentive of 'not dying' in all of us. If you pushed people far enuf they would innovate. You can build a robot from sticks and stones if the alternative is to starve.

<comment><USER3> The king divides his land up amongst his lords and promises them that they might become kings themselves if they produce enough wealth and capture enough lands for the crown. Then the lords take that land and make the same promise to the serfs: if you farm it well enough and produce enough strong warrior children, maybe you'll end up as a favorite of your lord.

This is feudalism, and it's not hard to see how the steady-state result of this system is everyone running to endless war, as there is ruthless competition at every level of the hierarchy. This is also how most corporations are run, and the promises of glory and wealth are largely as empty now as they were when feudalism was common.

Unemployment is not a _problem_. It is the _goal_.

>However the interesting thing about software - ( something that paul graham pointed out ) - is its almost no-cost to copy it. Its the great equalizer - what would take a factory and a lot of workers to build - will just take a piece of software to create.

My employment contract states that any patents I file are to be held by my employer, and that I may not participate in open-source software without their approval, and a good deal of other terms that protect me from economic freedom. Software hasn't equalized much in that regard.

>I think there is a strong incentive of 'not dying' in all of us. If you pushed people far [enough] they would innovate. You can build a robot from sticks and stones if the alternative is to starve.

They would die. You can't not die just because you want to. If the alternative is to starve, _many many people will starve._ It is callous to suggest otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Corporations exist mostly because of consumerism, though. Once those "humans" are not able to work and in turn, spend their money buying crap from corporations, then...?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a great point, but I think corporations have shown they're willing to sacrifice long-term benefit for next quarter's numbers.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash Not just the corporation, but the owners. It's not as if employees and executives are blind to long-term thinking, but the higher up you are, the more dependent your salary and bonus is on your earnings report, and if the numbers don't satisfy the Street, they can kick you out.

The problem is that self-interested thinking doesn't often benefit the whole. Every corporation is in the right for cutting costs, reducing tax burden, and getting as much profit as possible (and keeping it!). Without a strong government to form and enforce public policy, the private sector creatively destroys itself and society every few decades, while the rich keep their cash.

Some on HN the other day speculated that the fiercely autocratic Asian governments are the only way to reign in the power of major corporations. I think there is a point to that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Problem is with capitalism and it's founders that told us all that you can't live without work. In next decades we will need to change the system diametrical because robots will take all not creative jobs out there. If we want basic pay we will need to tax corporations that use robots at around 70-90%, money from tax will go for basic pay, money from people that receive basic pay will go to corporations etc. Thing that needs to be controlled is capital, it can't be taken out of the market like it's done now, companies are gathering billions of dollars which are taken out of the market. Capital taken from the market can not be redistributed again. One thing is for sure, current system need to be changed and adapted to robots revolution.

</comment><comment><USER6> If it comes to it, I think a prorated minimum guaranteed income is more likely. Given some of the payday crap, I would hope its paid out every weekday morning.

I doubt robots and AI can do every in the next 50 years, so someone is going to be doing something even its art or crafts.

[edit] who exactly owns these companies? Aren't people making money off the company?

</comment><comment><USER7> I think it's a bit funny to anthropomorphize corporations. If this is restated as "Shareholders of Corporations Don't Want Employees", it may still be true, but it shows that there is a choice.

</comment><comment><USER8> also the opposite: people want to do anything else but work; here work means fulfilling some other's ideas for a task based, stead revenue`profit`leverage based, compensation

there is a great line in iron man iii where the character happy says: The human element of human resources is our greatest point of vulnerability. We should start phasing it out immediately.

once people are given capitol simply for being alive robotics will develop exponentially

and companies and individuals will be the better for it

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think it's going to be basic income. I think it will be something more like we'll all be drafted.

<comment><USER10> How do you envision this working?

Corporations, while they don't need/want employees, still want customers and people to buy their stuff. How would people get buying power if they are "drafted"?

<comment><USER11> Yeah one of the dangers of AI and robots taking jobs is that they don't have any customers left as in B2C business model. They will have to do a B2B model but then all of the people out of work will damage the economy.

What about the people who got old and or sick? With all the people going poor without jobs some might resort to crimes to make a living.

The draft can only take so much of the population. But our military uses drones a lot and might use robot soldiers that share memories and kill the enemy more than humans can and don't need any training. Is it murder if a robot kills a civilian?

<comment><USER12> _What about the people who got old and or sick? With all the people going poor without jobs some might resort to crimes to make a living._

You're absolutely right and things specifically like identity theft already work this way.

 _The draft can only take so much of the population. But our military uses drones a lot and might use robot soldiers that share memories and kill the enemy more than humans can and don 't need any training. Is it murder if a robot kills a civilian?_

Much like tragic losses of soldiers that occur during special ops missions are categorized as a soldier dying in a "training accident" one might assert that if a robot kills a civilian it would be chalked up to an "industrial accident."

<comment><USER13> Industrial "accidents" already have a long history, especially in modern Asian manufacturing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Local man rediscovers the profit motive

</comment><comment><USER15> Basic income is the path to humanities demise. If people are only given enough to survive they won't have children. No one wants to support welfare babies.

Capitalism doesn't work as well if your less intelligent. As computer's get smarter they will just siphon the money away from the dim witted meat bags(even the smartest of us).

</comment><comment><USER16> Imagine you alone can control robots and grow animals(including humans) in a lab. You could use robots for specific tasks and use humans as sexual slaves or worker slaves. This could happen if there are 'designer babies', where you could create very beautiful women and have them as your slaves. Or you could create a race of slave super-humans(merge humans with mechanoids), which would fulfill certain tasks you gave them. Do you think in that case you would need some consumers buying from your companies? Of course not.

Now imagine few thousand people like you. Lets say those on Forbes list. Now, instead of one guy being in control, you have few thousand of them each specializing in certain area. One could make sexual slaves. Another one could have an army working to make video games. Third one would have slaves making clothing, houses or vehicles and so on... Those few thousand people could create a B2B economy with few thousand oligarchs trading among themselves. What about the rest? They could be eliminated very easily by certain viruses or through some other means. Humans could still exist, but they would be 'designed' or genetically modified to fit specific purposes.

Just remember genocides, slavery, nukes, wars etc. Nothing is off the table. The stakes are very high. Those few oligarchs would live like trillionaires, so they would probably be ready to do anything. I mean people today kill each other for $1k, imagine what could be done when stakes are this high. Contrary to popular belief, history doesn't follow the direction of progress of any animal species. It's fun until it's not (dinosaurs and many other extinct species). This situation could trigger wars and genocides we haven't seen before. I don't think it's going to be cupcakes and rainbows. People in 19th century were very optimistic about the future, imagining all kinds of utopias, but what was 20th century? Huge wars, mass genocides, diseases etc. I am not optimistic and don't think there is some kind of an ark of human progress where people will reach utopia. It will be change, but no progress/regress.

<comment><USER17> Who will create the lab? Won't he be the most powerful ? Can't these people genetically modify themself to not care about sex slaves (or even consumption, so no worker-slaves needed) ? Maybe scientists-slaves?

The truth(by my simple/short unscientific observation) is that most people don't give a fuck at all about anything other than themself so why should the lab-designer care about them (and share his tech)?

What happens when you build you lab/fix-diseases and don't want to share them with the masses (you don't want their $$)(you just want to share with other lab-designers/scientists/doctors etc). They WILL try kill you. How to escape this ? Kill them first? Don't share at all (you supposedly want to share with other lab-builders)?

I think, the lab creator WILL have to also build crazy weapons to protect himself from "the others"? They just won't accept no for an answer.

So you have to create your weapons first, then build the lab (or enslave others by using weapons to build the lab for you).

Makes sense ?

<comment><USER16>
      Who will create the lab? Won't he be the most powerful ?

Every oligarch(if there are many of them, like there were many kings in medieval Europe) would need to have a lab. It will be specialized. Just like factories today are specialized. Today, one company might use factory to make phones, another one to make clothing etc. They all use different devices for different products.

      Can't these people genetically modify themself to not care about sex slaves (or even consumption, so no worker-slaves needed) ? Maybe scientists-slaves?

That's equivalent to suicide. You could do something similar today to eliminate sexual or other desires, but people aren't doing it.

      The truth(by my simple/short unscientific observation) is that most people don't give a fuck at all about anything other than themself so why should the lab-designer care about them (and share his tech)?

Care about who? Other oligarchs? If there are other oligarchs(which is not necessary, since it could be one king and few thousand people below him), then he would receive benefits from them and vice versa.

      What happens when you build you lab/fix-diseases and don't want to share them with the masses (you don't want their $$)(you just want to share with other lab-designers/scientists/doctors etc). They WILL try kill you. How to escape this ? Kill them first? Don't share at all (you supposedly want to share with other lab-builders)?

Who will try to kill them? Masses or other oligarchs?

      I think, the lab creator WILL have to also build crazy weapons to protect himself from "the others"? They just won't accept no for an answer.

What others? Other oligarchs with different labs?

      So you have to create your weapons first, then build the lab (or enslave others by using weapons to build the lab for you).

This is true. It could be a hierarchy where the top dog (king) shares some wealth with the lower ranked. Kinda like in medieval Europe. Most robots and lab-grown humans would be like serfs and those closest to the king would get all the benefits and practically unlimited wealth.

<comment><USER17>
       That's equivalent to suicide. You could do something similar today to eliminate sexual or other desires, but people aren't doing it.

I assumed they can replicate at the lab.

       Care about who? Other oligarchs? If there are other oligarchs(which is not necessary, since it could be one king and few thousand people below him), then he would receive benefits from them and vice versa.

Most people don't care about pushing human(ity) further, just want the current entertainment flavor of the generation. Why should the lab-creator care about them ? Just because someone pays for your job, doesn't mean it should exist, ex: gossip magazines. And when you have no work/purpose, why should you exist ? To consume finite resources? He may think the same thing for other oligarchs.

       Who will try to kill them? Masses or other oligarchs?

If you build a life-extension (or a human backup+restore) lab you'll be at war with whoever you don't want to share.

       What others? Other oligarchs with different labs?

2 main ways to change the world would be: Kill those who oppose you, or build better tech and don't save them (but those will better weapons will kill you first).

The more you automate and advance, the easier it would be to not need(and pursuing of not needing) other oligarch/normal sheeple.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I hate focus grabbing... any UI quirks that annoy you? - <AUTHOR> http://xichekolas.blogspot.com/2007/03/ui.html <comment><USER2> I assume the reason apps (or actually I think it's the windowing system) do this is because they assume that your grandmother will open an app and then patiently wait for it to appear, and if it accidentally appears behind another application, they'll think something is broken. I agree, it's not the best assumption. I happen to be using gnome a lot for my window manager and it actually very rarely gives a newly opened task the focus- I don't know if that's default though or some setting I set at some point.</comment>